My Life and Thoughts

Dear readers!  A month has gone by since the appearance of the story of the bells, and I have been running around like a demented person.  For much of May, I was in Florence researching an article about Dante mania.  I think it will be a longish article so I’m not going to go into it all here.  But probably the highlight was on May 16, when I and my dear friend Marilena Ruscica (who is just finishing a dissertation in Stanford Slavic about Dante and Mandelstam) participated in a Dante marathon.  That afternoon, the entire Divine Comedy is read in public spaces: Inferno on the outskirts of the city, Purgatorio closer to the historic center, and Paradiso on a straightaway ending at the Duomo.  Marilena and I were lucky enough to get Inferno XXXIII, in which Count Ugolino may or may not eat his own children.  We also got to say horrible things about people from the nearby cities of Pisa and Genoa:

Here you can see Marilena and me in our Inferno 33 jerseys, just before the reading, in the Chiostro dello Scalzo:

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Caroline Kennedy tried her hardest, but she was not able to suppress the story of the Russian bells, which appears in the April 27 issue of the New Yorker, on newsstands today.   There is also a podcast on the New Yorker website where you can listen not only to the bells themselves, but also to me trying to remember some facts about bells, which you could probably find faster using Google.  Actually the nice thing about a phone interview, I learned, is that you can pause mid-answer to look things up on Wikipedia, and later the pause/ typing sounds will be edited out.

For some reason, they didn’t link to any images of the destruction of bells in Soviet times, so I will do it here instead.  There are some great images here, and especially here. 

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I won’t say it happens every day, but once in a while I get emails from literarily-oriented young men asking whether I really look like the photo on my blog.  Well guys, I’m going to be honest with you. That is exactly what I look like, when I’ve spent a beautiful afternoon in the park reading detective novels and eating salted caramel ice cream. 

Other times, however, I look different. 

Last week, for example, FSG hired the amazing photographer Mikhail Lemkhin, author of an amazing book on Joseph Brodsky and Leningrad, to take my picture.  Mr. Lemkhin said he preferred to take authors’ photographs in their homes, where they feel more comfortable.  I was like, "OK."  Then I forgot completely about this conversation. Only at 11PM on the night before the shoot (I was working really hard on the introduction) did I suddenly realize, "Wah, Joseph Brodsky’s photographer is coming to my house in like 10 hours."  Obviously I had to clean up (my mom brought me up right).  This took some time, as well as some quantities  of an incredible bargain South African cabernet that I had bought at Trader Joe’s. In the morning I woke up with an incredible bargain headache, didn’t have time to eat breakfast, and also it was raining.  Although the light is very beautiful, somehow, to me, in these troubled economic times, the resulting picture doesn’t really say: "I just wrote a really entertaining book that you might like to pay $14 for."

D-list writer	C-list writer

So enjoy that picture now, dear readers, because I’m pretty sure it’s not the one we’re going to end up using.

Dear readers!  I’ve been really delinquent with My Life and Thoughts.  You must all have thought I was either dead, or not thinking anything. In fact, I’m writing a book!  The working title is The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and it’s coming out as an FSG “paperback original,” so my thrifty readers don’t have to wait for the hardcovers to get remaindered!  And, I mean, which among us is in this game for the money, right? 

When I mentioned the subject of advances to my fellow blogger Grisha Freidin, he kindly shared with me the following anecdote, from the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings (ed. Gregory Freidin): 

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As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

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