Russian! Books! Stanford!

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

This book has a whole bunch of things I love:

• A regular New Yorker contributor as author
• Lots of talk about my alma mater and professors I knew
• Russian books and Russian history
• A good sense of humor

Once upon a time (sometime late 2000 through 2001), Roz Chast did a cartoon for the New Yorker that was a series of "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader for playing spoiler to Al Gore. I remember this well because my ex-boyfriend was apoplectic about this. As a result, I never see her work without thinking of that. And here she is, with the cover design, this of lots of wild-eyed readers and one manic, dancing book. But all of this is besides the point because...

Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.

I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."

"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.

Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:

...one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."
"Right," I finally said. "A s a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."

Older Russian women have a great perspective on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.

Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.

A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.

I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley (Riverhead Books, 2008)

Sloane Crosley has a new book out. Thus it seemed like an appropriate time to actually get around to reading the first collection of essays, which has been on my To Do list for awhile. (It also helped that I was at the library, weeding books just 2 aisles away from this one.)

I'm not feeling very review-y right now, but in short: very funny, slightly neurotic essays from a highly educated young woman, covering terrible jobs, bridezillas, sex and love, moving, friends, oh and that Oregon Trail game that we played computer-free in our fifth-grade classroom while everyone else in the world my age apparently played at home on ancient Apples.

I was utterly enchanted with Crosley's search for a legitimate one-night stand, as documented in the essay "One-Night Bounce." While waiting at the vet, I actually read most of the first several pages aloud to my mother, who was amused, but not nearly as much as I was. I kind of want to block quote the first three pages. I won't. But here's a peek:

The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand. [...] I wanted to do it immediately. Largely because I had no idea what it entailed. I figured a one-night stand happened when two people, one of whom was a woman, went to a man's apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the whole time, trying not to spill them.

And it goes on from there.

People who are about my age who are more fabulous than me can be depressing, and I wasn't completely immune to this with Crosley, but she's awfully disarming. So thumbs up.

Growing Up Groovy and Clueless

...such is the subtitle of Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, a book swap find. Gilman is ridiculously quotable, and I came to the end of the book wondering why I hadn't marked some of my favorite quotes to share with you.

She embraces the big personality that so many of us have when we aren't too scared to show it. Or at least, she does enough of the time. And her experiences - so like what we've all been through (except the big breasts, I never had to deal with that) are poignant and ridiculous and very very real.

All of which is preface to the line that comes at the tail end of the book, where she writes of her first days sticking out like a sore thumb in Geneva: "No matter what I did, everything about me was quintessentially American. On the streets of Geneva, I was an enormous, star-spangled, overzealous puppy." And who hasn't felt like that?

Also of note is the blurb by Frank McCourt. Mainly b/c you eventually find that Gilman went to Stuyvesant. And if I remember correctly, McCourt taught there. Was she one of his students? Are any of my teachers off becoming famous? (If so, let me know.)

I'm pretty sure most women can relate to some part of Gilman's book. For me, it was mostly her childhood, growing up the daughter of hippies and also a drama queen. But one who also tried to escape the notice of her Mean Girl fellow students. For others, it may be the rock OBSESSIONS of her teenage years and the gossiping about every "romantic" encounter. College seemed pretty familiar to me. And I'm still young enough that I'm working on my 20s and early 30s. I hope it turns out well for me too... :)

Vote! (or else I'll footnote you to death)

Among other things in recent days, I've been reading Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's collection of essays about random cultural phenomena that he has been contracted by some magazine or another to write about. He's an interesting guy - I'd like to know a little more about him. (Probably googling or wiki-ing him would work. If only I weren't too lazy to do that before writing this...)

Anyway, DFW has a reputation for being ridiculously smart and for loving the footnotes. As a tangential, full-of-asides thinker, I like this. But I still think it's a gimmick. Plus, it sometimes works better than others. In "Big Red Son," the footnotes are hilariously juxtaposed against the topic, which is porn. In "Host," the footnotes are actually placed within boxes within the body of the text, with arrows from the referring point (and sometimes more arrows to fn's about fn's, etc.) Visually kinda cool. The Dostoyevsky article, on the other hand, is too academic for footnotes, even if it seems ironic to write that. And "Up, Simba," a 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain, would completely flounder if it had footnotes at all.

Which reminds me, "Up, Simba" is perhaps the most interesting article of the bunch. (Speaking as a historian.) It's an amazing reminder of how quickly political history can move. McCain's primary opponent is "the Shrub" and the journalists are in thrall to their cell phones (with pull-out antennae) and the occasional Palm Pilot. Imagine political wonks now without their Blackberries. And DFW's commentary on voter apathy and politician sincerity and the staged artifice of the whole campaign trail is like crack for this post-West Wing viewer. And since political engagement is near and dear to my heart, I was particularly impressed by this passage:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary [replacable with Election - ed.] day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

And this is backed up by all sorts of anecdotal evidence, btw. Anyway, I'm planning to use this argument whenever I can. It's the kind of thing that you know on some level, but sometimes need spelled out for you. At least I think so.

I'm going to put Infinite Jest, DFW's novel, on my reading list. I need the extra information to determine what exactly I think of this hyper-erudite writer.