My Life and Thoughts

In spring 2007, shortly after the publication of n+1’s “Symposium on New American Writing,” I received an email with the youthful subject-line, “hello!,” from a young person called Ezra Koenig, a recent Columbia graduate and a former student of Caleb Crain (who was next to me in the n+1 symposium, because of the magic of alphabetical order).

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OK OK, so I may be really excited about old historical novels and octogenarian translators and restorers of 18th-century clocks (see earlier entry)… but I have not forgotten my interest in today’s youth. In fact, last week marked the first meeting of Humanities 199A, my undergraduate thesis-writing workshop. This hour was full of delightful surprises. One delightful surprise came when I informed the class how much I had enjoyed reading their thesis proposals, and it emerged that the class already knew how much I had enjoyed reading their proposals, because, as one student explained: “They actually sent us your blog. I’m the one writing about St. Jerome.”

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Yesterday was Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the Historical Novel with the Stanford Working Group on the Novel. It was so great! I learned a lot about minor characters. The Working Group is co-organized by Alex Woloch, director of the Center for the Study of the Novel and author of an interesting book on minor characters, which my former classmate Na’ama Rokem gave me for my birthday in 2005.

Alex Woloch The One vs. the Many	Ilya Bernstein Self-Portrait entelechy: mind & culture

I recently realized that Alex Woloch and I are further connected, like two minor characters in the Bildung of some romantic monster, through the central life-problem of the magazine n+1.

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Thank you for your kind message about Platonov. I will be happy to answer your questions, but you didn’t leave an email address!

I was just preparing some questions for Luba Golburt’s upcoming presentation on Pushkin and the historical novel, when I made an interesting discovery. If you go to Google Books and look up The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, the book whose cover is displayed is not The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, but, rather, Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known, by Major General O. O. Howard.

Seriously: check it out.

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