My Life and Thoughts

For those who might be wondering what is new with Roz Chast, the amazing artist who did the cover of The Possessed:

While we are looking at beautiful images, I would like to mention another talented reader, Abraham Kelso, who actually gave me some original prints at my reading last month in Brookline.  On the train back to New York the next morning, I had the foresight to place these beautifully rolled-up prints in the overhead luggage compartment, so they wouldn’t get smooshed.  At that point, with the satisfaction of a job well done, I fell into a deep sleep.

Now here is the thing with the New York – Boston train: you can fall asleep going to Boston and it’s all fun and games, but if you fall asleep going to New York, you end up in our nation’s capital.  Luckily, I woke up just as we were pulling into Penn Station, whence I rushed directly to the Times building in order to record a podcast.  Unluckily, in my alacrity to disburden myself of some more thoughts and feelings about Russian literature, I forgot the beautiful rolled-up prints in the overhead compartment.

Well, I hope and trust the originals are hard at work right now representing our interests in DC.  In the meantime, you can enjoy some simulacra here:

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As a C-list writer, one has to wear many hats, including, it turns out, the hat of someone who knows something about movies.  In February, for example, I was really happy to be asked to write something for The Believer, because I had never written for them before.  In fact this was my first time writing for any publication in San Francisco, a city apparently famous for having such a friendly literary scene that guests at a roast for Amy Tan were literally unable to think of anything insulting to say about her, even as a joke.  “This is San Francisco literary life in a nutshell,” reported the New York Times:

a willingness to honor and an unwillingness to undermine. You could probably find mean-spirited, competitive writers here, the kind who make literature a blood sport and the literary life a conniving enterprise and a purely mercenary pursuit. But not without a serious hunt.

Hey guys!  Yoo-hoo!  I might be up here on a mountain, living on oatmeal and pretending that my cat can talk, but I do exist! (more…)

Since the publication of The Possessed, I have occasionally received emails from readers in exotic locations, offering to send me things.  To such readers I have been replying that what I would really like is a picture of my book in said exotic location(s)—much as George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air asks wedding guests to take pictures of a cardboard cutout of herself and her fiancé, as a substitute for the honeymoon they can’t afford.  It’s like double-entry bookkeeping: I have to stay here at my desk, but at least my book can have some fun, right?

Well, dear readers, today I am really happy to share with you the first such pictures I received, from Israel via Avi Steinberg, author of the forthcoming Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.  I’m reading Running the Books now, with great enjoyment, and also with increasing amazement at how simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different it is from The Possessed.  In both books, an unemployed Harvard graduate, having attempted unsuccessfully to write a novel, is driven by lack of health insurance to seek a semi-permanent position in a hermetic community where books are taken very seriously, leading to seriocomic adventures.  In Steinberg’s case, the hermetic community was, not graduate school, but a prison library.

At the St. Louis Airport	At Gadara, Israel

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Dear readers!  I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.

In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:

The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”

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