Bwog daily editor Mariela Quintana peers into the insular, feminine world of insular, feminine authors on a Thursday night at Barnard.

Yesterday evening, I crossed over to the other side of Broadway and made my way to across the Barnard quad to attend a reading hosted by Great Writers at Barnard Series featuring authors Myla Goldberg and Elizabeth Benedict. With the help of some emphatic arrows, I was guided to the event in Milbank's Ella Weed Hall. Given the abundant signage, I expected to find a crowd at the reading. But when I arrived in Ella Weed, the audience was small and seemed to be predominately comprised friends and colleagues of the authors. Ella Weed's den-like atmosphere, complete with a fireplace, warmly painted walls and soft lighting, however, made a lovely setting for this intimate reading.

Astute tipster Helam Gebremariam, C '07, said Yale's class day speaker, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, was a "total Matt Fox knock off." She writes:

"He made all of the same jokes that Fox did about how Harvard got Gates and Yale got him. He ALSO called someone out (a la Julia Kite) for writing something in the school paper about how he is a nobody in the world of class day speakers. Say what you will about Matt Fox, but 1) hes hot 2) he's funny and 3) he's original."

And he's not even a writer...!

Bwog editor emerita Sara Vogel bumped into Jon Scieszka, one of her childhood heroes, on 112th street and Broadway a few weeks ago. When she found out that the author of The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales, Math Curse, and the Time Warp Trio series got his Master's at Columbia in the late 70's, she took down his number, and followed up. He's planning a new series about trucks and books about a cowboy and an octopus, and he's on the board of 826NYC — for all of you non-McSweeneyites, the tutoring center disguised as the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. Here Scieszka muses about kindergarteners, coming up with Borat way before Sasha Cohen, and why he's second best to Roald Dahl.

So sorry I accosted you on the street the other day.

No, I thought that was kind of funny.

Does that happen to you a lot, where you get people recognizing you and stopping you on the street?

Not so much. But I was out in Arizona on a book tour and one little guy asked me if I had security. Like he was wondering if I had a body guard or something. I said, "No, most people don't even know what I look like." Except there's this whole little crew of kindergarteners that I was working with last year that will wave to me on the street and go, "Hi Jon Scieszka." And their parents will go, "Who was that guy? Who are you talking to?"

Why were you working with kindergarteners?

I'm actually working on this pre-school project where I've thought up this whole world called 'Trucktown' where all the characters are trucks. I definitely needed to get into the classroom to see what four-year-olds are like.

What'd you learn?

Mostly that kindergarteners are like little guys with Alzheimer's on acid. They are nuts, man. It's like the world is completely reinvented for them every fifteen minutes. Any kind of parody or satire, which is what I really enjoy writing, just is way beyond them. Since the world is so brand new every fifteen minutes, you can't really make fun of it. They don't even know what the rules are for the regular world. We were in there for Saint Patrick's Day and the teacher was telling them, "Oh, well if you don't wear green, the Leprechaun is going to come around and pinch you" and immediately half the kids looked really worried. They thought "oh no, I don't have green on, I'm going to get pinched!"

Gary Shteyngart wrote his first successful novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, during his senior year at Oberlin, and again embraced his Russian immigrant status with a second, Absurdistan. Only in his thirties, he's now an adjunct professor in the MFA Writing Program. Dena Yago tracked him down to chat.

So how has your class been this semester?

Its great, I mean...I've never seen such a wonderful range of stories. One's written from the perspective of a mental patient, another is tracing back the history of his family for several generations, there are stories about a woman obsessed with Indian religion...the kind of things you'll find only at Columbia. These guys are very committed and already have very grand schemes for themselves. When I started writing I thought "man, [I'm] 23, what do I have to say", my students seem to have a very good grasp of what they have to say despite being very young.

Russian Debutante's Handbook came out when you were very young though, and you seemed to have something to say then...

When I was in college, I was in Oberlin in Ohio, and I started writing in, I guess during my senior year, and I wrote a great deal then and thought "oh man this really is not good." I started to realize there weren't many novels written by Russian immigrants — Russian Jewish or Soviet Jewish immigrants. There were a lot of novels written by Korean, Chinese, Indian, Dominican, all down the line, but nobody from my generation had written anything by that point. And so when I was writing Russian Debutante's Handbook, I wrote it in my early twenties and then I put it away for five years did some revisions. Chang-Rae Lee, a Korean American writer, friend and mentor, really saw the potential for this, told me that it could get published — and it did.

Bwog isn't one to make fun of typos -- we thing we dont have the rite -- (just search "Carmen," as in, the way we've chosen to spell our most beloved first-year dorm, to the left). But these guys should be held to a higher standard. This typographical oopsie-daisy appears on the FAQ website of the Undergraduate Writing Project and on each handout distributed to Lit Hum students, says Alex Symonds, C'10:

These session reports are meant to help your teacher help you become a better writing.

Come on. That's just pitiful.

And yes, it has been a slow morning.

As you may or may not be aware, Orhan Pamuk, a visiting prof at our fair institution, just netted ol' Alma another Nobel, this time for literature.

Though there is some speculation as to what exactly Pamuk does around here, (this says he will have a MEALAC position, which is news to those who spend way too much time in Kent) Bwog correspondent Chris Szabla offers this contextualization/legitimization:

"He also spent time here for a number of years in the 80s while his ex-wife was getting her doctorate; he actually wrote one of his books, Kara kitap ("The Black Book") in Butler. Tenuous connections maybe, but he does have a longstanding relationship with the university.

"Pamuk attended the Iowa writing school and taught a Turkish language class, but mostly he occupied a small room above the Columbia library where he began work on The Black Book, the contemporary story of a lawyer searching Istanbul for his lost wife. 'My cubicle was above three million books and I was very happy there,' he says. 'There was a good collection of Turkish books going back to the 1930s and many of them had not even had the pages cut. No one had ever looked at them before me.' "
[From here]

And offers a global perspective:

"Second, nationalists in Turkey who have not quite been fans of Pamuk since his Armenian genocide comments are convinced the prize was awarded to him as a snub to them. On top of that, France just became anti-Turkey when its National Assembly passed a law this morning making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide.
Ironically, the bill only passed because most delegates left the chamber in protest over what they said were attempts to pander to ethnic Armenian voters in France
More here.

Finally, a choice quote from the New York Times:

"Pamuk, currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he was overjoyed by the award, adding that remarks he made earlier this year referring to the Nobel literature prize as ''nonsense'' were a mistranslation."