My Life and Thoughts

As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

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Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I will mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the "classic" Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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This Thanksgiving, I am especially thankful to all the erudite readers of My Life and Thoughts: to SW Fosca, for the edifying gloss on müteferrika (sounds to me like İbrahim was the Ottoman chief of morphology!); to Webreader7, for sending me a second-century-BC Chinese poem called Rhyme-Prose on the Owl (written by Chia-yi, a scholar-bureaucrat-poet who had been exiled “to the south” and was in this sense a second-century-BC Chinese müteferrika); to LK, RMcC, and Tara, for their kind and witty comments; and to Tom Hansen, for identifying the previously unidentified bearded guy as… Rodin photographed by Nadar! Vous êtes tous chouettes!

I leave you with my favorite couplets from “Rhyme-Prose on the Owl”:

Profound, subtle, illimitable
Who can finish describing it?

Kia ora, dear readers! Many thanks for the kind and interesting responses to “On Complaining” (now universally accessible for £0). These responses have come from locations as diverse as New Zealand—“Kia ora” is not only a citrusy soft-drink, but also a Maori greeting!—and Norway. (Here is the message I received from a reader in Norway: “Interesting article, but I will not read the book.”)

My personal correspondents will forgive me for being a bit slow with my personal correspondence, since I just got back from L.A., where I was interviewing an internationally renowned film director. This was my first time interviewing an internationally renowned film director. That said, the last time I was in L.A., I did interview a nationally renowned comedy-traffic expert, for the New Yorker, which proceeded not to publish the story for the next 15 months (and counting). They also have yet to publish the story I wrote for them in June, about some Russian church bells… even though those bells weighed 26 tons!  I guess they are waiting for a story about some bigger bells. 

Anyway… I’m going to postpone revealing the identity of the extremely interesting movie director, who I am writing about for an exciting new magazine called Snob, or should I say: Сноб.  But in the meantime, I will share with you my impressions of L.A. 

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Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?

Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years.  What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”? 

No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!  

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