My Life and Thoughts

Forsaken readers!  Please excuse the long silence of a C-list writer who has spent the past few weeks in a dark, dark place. Not only was I immersed to an Orwellian degree in the life and work of you-know-which master of the Kafkaesque (hint), but there was literally an enormous cloud sitting on top of my house.  Honestly it’s a mystery to me why I still live on this godforsaken mountain.  At least it was a mystery until I realized it was probably so I could convert Friday to Christianity.  Now I can say, with the immortal Crusoe:

when I reflect that, in this solitary life which I have been confined to, I… am now… made an instrument, under Providence, to save the life, and, for aught I know, the soul of a poor savage, and bring him to the true knowledge of religion and of the Christian doctrine, that he might know Christ Jesus, in whom is life eternal… a secret joy runs through every part of My soul, and I frequently rejoice that ever I was brought to this place, which I so often thought the most dreadful of all afflictions that could possibly have befallen me.

Friday, as you can see, was able to find great comfort in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior:

I too am slowly returning to normal life and, as a first step, I am happy and honored to report that I will be a guest tomorrow (Friday) on “Common Threads,” an open-mic show hosted by esteemed reader and San Francisco beat poet sensation Diamond Dave Whitaker.  Those who are in the neighborhood and not gainfully employed should please come at 3pm to the Pirate Cat Radio Cafe, 2781 21st Street (between Florida and Bryant); others are warmly encouraged to stream Pirate Cat Radio live or download the podcast.

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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…)

Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

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I recently received some back copies of Vice magazine, kindly sent to me by Vice magazine, because I might write something for them. I had never previously read Vice magazine, and although I had heard of it, I had somehow imagined it to be called Vise magazine (as in, “we really know how to grip our public”).

Youthful readers! As you apparently know already, Vice magazine is actually full of pictures of naked girls doing some crazy stuff.  Naked girls in the 2008 fiction issue alone included, but were not limited to: a naked girl running through a supermarket aisle; a naked girl doing cartwheels around a bonfire; and an otherwise-naked girl wearing pasties and a thong made out of pizza. (Apparently it was the model’s own pizza.)

To learn more about Vice magazine, I consulted the Internet, which is famous for its sober and balanced treatment of controversial subjects. There I found the recent Vice magazine interview with Brazilian sculptor Zé Carlos Garcia, who reconstructs pig heads to resemble human faces:

Q. And then you started to turn pigs’ heads into human heads. Do you have any experiences in plastic surgery? It’s completely different to work with flesh, isn’t it?

A. Yes, but as I said, I did sculptures all my life. Also I just love animals, so that wasn’t a big problem.

Sculpture by Zé Carlos Garcia	Photo by Jamie Taete

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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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