MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

I was totally on time for the reading at Stanford! I knew just where to park my car, and how to get to the Terrace Room. (Seven years of graduate study, my friends.)

Our event was held in the Terrace Room, where the Center for the Study of the Novel always had its panels, so that is where you had to go to hear international scholars talk about, say, shipwrecks and the contemporary Catalan novel.

I was really touched to see in the audience every single graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures (спасибо, ребята!), including the new first-year, Rujuta Parikh, and also including Natalie Rouland, who appears in “Babel in California” as the person who tells the late Nathalie Babel about the black squirrels. In response to Mark Greif’s “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” Natalie raised an interesting question about celebrity babies.

Also in attendance was my dear friend Emily Colette Wilkinson who, when not working on her dissertation on eighteenth-century miscellanies, contributes to a literary blog called The Millions. Check out their section on “The Year in Reading: 2007,” where you get to find out what were the books that most impressed “notable readers” in 2007. I’m the third
most notable reader of December 14!! w00t!! Keep scrolling, I’m right after Sara Ivry and Richard Lange. But why didn’t they include an image of the Autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola?

While you’re at The Millions, you could also visit their response to n+1’s anti-blog article (see my earlier post), especially the “comments,” where Marco Roth and Keith Gessen turn up to tell the bloggers just where they get off. The follow-up post isn’t bad, either.

The Stanford reading was attended by one faculty member: Eavan Boland, director of the Creative Writing Program. Sadly, all the other faculty members who might otherwise have come—including the ones who generously invited us to Stanford in the first place (OK, with just a tiny bit of prompting)—were at a Town Hall meeting, voicing their concerns about Stanford’s plans to raze the East Asian library, which edifice would otherwise stand in need of a $45-million seismic retrofitting.

People are really worried because some of the East Asian and maybe Slavic books are going to be moved off-campus and will have to be paged using a system which may or may not recognize non-Roman alphabets.

* * *

That was going to be today’s cliff-hanger ending; but I feel compelled to add, as a kind of coda, that even now my house is full of East Asian library catalog cards, which used to be (still are?) left as scratch paper at the computer terminals in Green Library.

My former classmate Jakov, who also appears in “Babel in California,” conducted an extensive personal correspondence exclusively on these inexpensive and readily available cards. Here is one he addressed to me, inside a used copy of Houellebecq’s Particules Élémentaires:

Front (about Jên-pao Chu’s classic work on Glands and their Diseases)	Back (about Michel Houellebecq’s classic work on the rendering obsolete of sexual reproduction)

Onwards, onwards, flying troika! The days rush past, blending with the mileposts… can it be true I’ll be thirty soon?

Tags: academic life, events, glands—diseases, Keith Gessen, n+1, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Stanford, w00t!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.