My Life and Thoughts

Last Friday I was really happy to participate in the second issue of Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” consisting of twenty writers, filmmakers, photographers, artists, etc. sharing their work (all unpublished/ unheard/ unseen) for < 5 min. each, at San Francisco’s Brava Theater.  I was on between a demonstration of Braille maps for blind people, and a documentary about the Bay Area’s most famous female bodysurfer (a geophysicist who took up bodysurfing at age 37).

I was unfortunately unable to notify any of my dear readers of this event, because tickets sold out literally 90 minutes after they went on sale, i.e. before I managed to send out an email.  Next time I will write before the tickets go on sale—not a precaution one usually has to take on the D-list, but apparently that’s what happens when one ends up on the same billing with 8 different writers for Wired magazine.

For future reference, the live magazine format turns out to be great—it really takes the “painful” out of “painful literary events.”  Well, and it also takes the “literary” out, since there was so much other stuff—e.g., on Friday, a live interview with artist Wayne White; a demonstration of some inspiringly powerful LED-lit sneakers (unfortunately not these, which I believe can only be worn by taxidermic specimens); a really evocative sound recording of children splashing in a lake in Angkor Wat; some incredibly beautiful/ sinister pictures of racehorses; and, as Solzhenitsyn’s publicists say, much more.

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If there’s one thing about the writing life that recommends itself to young people, it’s the limited capital outlay.  You don’t need to pay salaries, rent a recording studio, or make weekly trips to Denver… but does that mean it’s all about sitting back and watching the money roll in?   Alas.  Today I bring you a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wind up with between $817–$1,067 work-related expenses.

It started one day in August, when I received a notice for a missed UPS delivery.  The only package I was expecting at that time was the first uncensored translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, which the publishers had been trying to mail me for some weeks, as part of a campaign to get people to write Solzhenitsyn profiles:

Although Solzhenitsyn died last August, the following individuals are available for interviews: Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia (who made headlines last month when she rebuked Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him); the author’s son, pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is musical director for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the noted Solzhenitsyn scholar. They can discuss:

· Where Solzhenitsyn fits in to the great Russian literary realist tradition bequeathed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky;

· The two decades he spent as an exile in Vermont, stripped of his Russian citizenship.  How he lived in such fear of the KGB that he built a barb wire fence around his home;

· The differences between Stalin’s regime and the Russian leadership of today—and what might happen if Solzhenitsyn were writing today;

· How he damaged his reputation in the West by championing Christianity and railing against American pop culture in a rambling commencement speech at Harvard;

· The “censored” portions of IN THE FIRST CIRCLE, which included suggestions that Stalin had been a double agent, and that the Soviet Union should not possess the atomic bomb;

· And much more.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Being overdue on three deadlines, I am obliged to leave the Solzhenitsyn-profiling to other and better C-list writers, whom I certainly wish a pleasant phone chat with the musical director of the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra on the subject of AS’s famous “rambling speech” of 1978.

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Last night I saw Carol Reed’s The Thin Third Man again.  It’s one of those masterpieces where you find something different in it on each viewing.  The last time I saw it, as a literature graduate student, I was particularly struck by the scene in which Holly Martins, fearing for his life, is picked up by an unknown taxi driver, spirited through noir Vienna, and deposited with screeching brakes at the British Cultural Reeducation Service, where he is forced to answer questions like “Do you believe in the stream of consciousness?” and “Where would you place James Joyce?” before an audience of literary expatriates who keep walking out in disgust.  “How like life,” I remember thinking.

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Dear readers, thanks for all the kind comments on “Safe Laughs,” as well as for notifying me that I-14, a bit like the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy, is at this point only a beautiful dream of the future, and the road one was actually driving down in 2007 was California State Route 14.  I have just posted those outtakes here—they include Dostoevsky’s prophetic analysis of the psychology of road rage.

In other beautiful fictions, the FSG winter 2010 catalog is now available online, and if waiting for enormous pdf files to load is one of your special hobbies, I warmly encourage you to check it out.  All others will have to content themselves with this excerpt:

In The Possessed we watch [Batuman] investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Although “Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg” certainly has a nice ring, there is this interesting circumstance that I have never, to the best of my knowledge, actually been to Switzerland.  Yet. I figure the Macmillan group can see into the future, and that must be the subject of my next book.  Avanti!

This clock tells the time of the future.