My Life and Thoughts

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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Dear readers!  It has been a long time since I was able to update you on my life as a D-list writer.  But I’ve really had my hands full with the arduous transition to the C-list.   There are just all kinds of unexpected things you have to think about.  No sooner than you have finished wrestling with the ontological problem of the author photograph, and are looking forward to a well-earned respite from self-consciousness, than you are liable to find yourself involved in email exchanges like the following, which took place between me and my my much-admired editor at FSG:

Much-Admired Editor. “Dear Elif!!! Would you send me a photo of yourself? Let me explain!! I was talking to our head of paperback design about possible covers for your book. One idea that occurred to me was–I’d like to see a funny drawing of you, of an Elif-ish person, making her way through the words. Of course, if you think this is a bad idea, I’ll forget all about it. And if you have some idea for how the cover should look, tell me!!! My boss wants to see an Elif-ish person peering up—possessedly—from a big book. Or maybe head-down behind a big mise-en-abyme of a cover of THE POSSESSED…”

Elif (thinking to herself: “The next time I write a book it is so not going to be about my idiosyncratic and charming vision of anything). “Dear Lorin!!!  To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about a cartoonish representation of me on the cover. Aren’t I kind of a parody of myself already ?  I think the idea I had for the cover in the back of my mind was a battalion of possessed-looking matryoshki… have you ever seen a whole army of them on a table, staring at you, like something out of Hoffman?”

Editor. “…As it happens, the designer and I had already discussed matryoshka dolls. We both really liked your creepy-armies-of-matryoshkas as a visual joke; the trouble is, it doesn’t say READING. It doesn’t connote books and their pleasures, or wonderful-Elif-in-the-universe.”

Elif. “…Well, OK I guess, as long as it isn’t like one of those pages they do in the New Yorker with the author’s enormous head surrounded by weird floating apparitions…”

Editor. “…No, we weren’t thinking of that guy. More like Roz Chast!”

I thought that was a pretty good joke.  But… it wasn’t a joke!  They really got Roz Chast to do this incredibly beautiful cover!  I observe merely in passing, ain’t no Elif-ish people peering out of nowhere.

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Caroline Kennedy tried her hardest, but she was not able to suppress the story of the Russian bells, which appears in the April 27 issue of the New Yorker, on newsstands today.   There is also a podcast on the New Yorker website where you can listen not only to the bells themselves, but also to me trying to remember some facts about bells, which you could probably find faster using Google.  Actually the nice thing about a phone interview, I learned, is that you can pause mid-answer to look things up on Wikipedia, and later the pause/ typing sounds will be edited out.

For some reason, they didn’t link to any images of the destruction of bells in Soviet times, so I will do it here instead.  There are some great images here, and especially here. 

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