The A. P. Chekhov Towel Museum
On September 28, I and the other 2007 Rona Jaffe winners were invited to read from our work, for 10 minutes each, at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.
Inconveniently, my total written output in the previous 18 months consisted of (1) my important scholarly work on graphomania and double-entry bookkeeping; and (2) the first draft of an important article on the California institution of “comedy traffic school,” forthcoming in the New Yorker (you know, when the world is ready for it), and addressing such audience-stimulating topics as traffic law, road safety, and Swedenborgianism.
I decided to write something new for the NYU reading. I initially planned on producing an “excerpt” from a still-unwritten piece about my experiences at an international conference on Tolstoy and World Literature in Russia. (This piece combines deep reflections upon Tolstoy’s writing with the mystery of whether he died of natural causes or from… murder.)
However, as I soon discovered, writing a ready-made “excerpt” is an incredibly depressing activity. After getting incredibly depressed, and entertaining the possibility of devoting my 10 minutes to an interpretation of “Free Bird,” I finally decided to write a short story—a genre which I once described as moribund, in a piece which won me many friends throughout the blogosphere—based on the true story of how the participants at the Tolstoy conference were taken on an excursion from Tolstoy’s house, to Chekhov’s house. The excursion was pervaded for me by a sense of melancholy and futility, and it was all in the name of Chekhov, so I thought it would be a good subject for the limited but often extremely effective genre of the short story.
I finished writing “The Chekhov Museum” two hours before the reading, in the Millburn Hotel, completely surrounded by towels. These towels were brought to my door in installments by a kindly Polish housekeeper, I think as a gesture of goodwill because of how I asked her not to clean the room for two days.
At the Creative Writers House, I learned that my five colleagues had spent these two days immersing themselves in the cultural riches of New York. One emerging woman novelist had eaten a $7 salad at the Museum of Natural History; an emerging woman poet had spent hours in a taxi near 42nd Street, surrounded by the cars of high-ranking leaders from all over the world. The world leaders were on their way to the UN General Assembly, in order to discuss global climate change and the nuclear capacity of Iran.
You can read an excerpt from my story here; you can also listen to the entire reading as an mp3. This a great value for your time and money, since you hear six different writers in just over an hour, and it’s free.
Otherwise, here is my recap: Alma García read a novel excerpt, narrated by a Mexican man in El Paso, whose wife wants to buy an electric fence after her Chihuahua is eaten by a coyote; Sara Braunstein read a novel excerpt consisting of three monologues by a rapper kind of guy called “Q,” addressed to a teenaged girl at three different stages in their relationship; Holly Goddard-Jones read part of a short story about a Kentucky high-school girls’ basketball coach who gets one of his players pregnant; Robin Ekiss read a poem about Hitler’s bathtub and another about genealogy; Jennifer Grotz read about some construction workers who find some object in the ground and carry it away in a sack, and also about some lonely and dignified ponies. Kudos to you all, ladies!
Tags: events, publications, Russian literature, Tolstoy