My Life and Thoughts

Today I will tell you the story of my bittersweet first experiences on MySpace.  Sometime last fall I got an email with the subject line “Secret MySpace Project,” from Sam Frank: former n+1 copyeditor and current editor of Triple Canopy.   Sam sent out a number of  photographs of “defaced faces” by the multimedia artist Jon Kessler.  The faces were exhibited in a Drawing Center show called: You Have 43 Friends.  Sam, who had copyedited the catalogue of Kessler’s The Palace at 4 A.M. (the text of which includes ”a fictionalized interview between Jon, a four-star general, and the general’s youngest son, a Bard curatorial student“), decided it would be cool if he could get 33 of his friends to make MySpace profiles for 33 of the defaced faces. 

You Have 43 Friends	dissidentguy15

By disposition I am naturally quite sympathetic to secret art projects, and I was particularly happy to be assigned my ”first-choice” defaced face, for whom I set up a profile under the name of dissidentguy15. 

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Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

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Sometimes in the course of my day-to-day activities, I just have to pause and think: how does my lived experience differ from that of my colleague, Ian McEwan? Like me, Ian McEwan probably eats breakfast every morning, and wears shoes. Like me, McEwan also has a website: http://ianmcewan.com. The existence of this website proves that someone must be maintaining it (the “first cause” proof); which, in turn, raises the question of what McEwan’s webmaster is like. How do his character, appearance, and biography differ from those of my webmaster? Does he bartend?

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In concluding the story of the n+1 Bay Area tour, mention should also be made of the events at USF and Stanford.

We were actually invited to USF, which made it a unique venue for us. I got there 10 minutes late because I had somehow parked in Cole Valley and then had to walk like half a mile uphill. Would Philip Roth walk half a mile uphill to get to his own literary reading? I don’t know; that’s just the kind of devotion I have to my craft.

We were reading in the law school, directly across from a church devoted to one of my favorite saints: Ignatius of Loyola. When I got to our room it was completely deserted, except by a bearded intellectual who was standing behind a huge coffee dispenser. The sight of an intellectual, partially obscured by a samovar-shaped object, produced a charming Chekhovian effect.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church, San Francisco (across from the USF Law Building)	K.S. Stanislavsky as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899); note samovar in background.

Because the other readers were nowhere to be seen, I concluded that I was in the wrong room. I then realized that I had lost the piece of paper on which I had written the room number, as well as the name of the guy who had invited us, and also Mark Greif’s phone number. Fortunately, I did have the number of Keith Gessen, whose fans have by now brought My Life and Thoughts a total of 79 viewers. Gessen’s closest rival, with 44 hits from Google, is the word-phrase combination: “venerability ‘Joan Silber.”

“Keith Gessen” and “venerability ‘Joan Silber’”: we do two things here, but we do them right.

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All three of the readings were really fun, but the highlight, for me, was probably Berkeley. First of all, I got to take the BART, which is always a pleasure. This time, for example, the train stopped in the Powell St. station for twenty minutes. What a treat! All too often, commuter trains are in such a hurry to get from one station to another, that the individuality of these stations just dissolves into a kind of blur. Now, for once, I was able to give the Powell St. station the attention it so richly deserves, drinking in that easily overlooked je-ne-sais-quoi which differentiates it from stations like Montgomery St. or Embarcadero.

Powell St. BART	Embarcadero BART

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