MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Remember my 6-month-old, still-not-published piece on large Russian bells? So it’s actually about the once-recent (now several months old) restitution of some historic and very large Russian church bells, for many years in the possession of a famous American university, back to the seat of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate—conditional upon the aforementioned university’s receipt of an equivalent set of bells, and by equivalent I mean not only did they have to be fully as large as the originals, but also they had to be personally blessed by Patriarch Alexiy II, the colorful personality who drew international media attention last year for his characterization of homosexuality as a "distortion of the human personality like kleptomania."

A few days ago I got an email from my editor, notifying me of the recent death of Alexiy II, with the following comment:"Good news for gays, maybe; hard to gauge its significance for bells other than the insertion of the word ‘late’ before his first appearance in your piece." Well, I’ve been thinking about this statement and, while I concur that the death of one Russian patriarch doesn’t have any immediately calculable significance in terms of the content of anything I wrote about large Russian bells, I still do hope that they publish the piece before too many more of the involved parties have time to die—because if there’s one thing that’s really distracting in a sexy, super-topical piece about large church bells, it’s having to slog through a bunch of five-syllable Russian names with "late" before them.

I leave you, dear readers, with these amazing photographs of the late Alexei "enjoying close relations with the Kremlin," which look like they might have been taken by AFP / AP photographers who were working overtime as private detectives in the service of Mrs. Putin.

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?

In my capacity as a relatively obscure writer, people come to me with all kinds of questions. “Will I enjoy Infinite Jest?” they ask me. Or: “Does Turkey belong in the EU?” Sometimes, they send me pictures of bearded men to identify—for example, this one, from the cover of a Korean book about IQ:

I have no idea who he is.

The other day I received another bearded man image, from n+1 web editor Charles Petersen who, when not web-editing n+1, also works at the New York Review of Books. This bearded man was made of bronze, and was located in Sahaflar Çarşısı (the book market near the Istanbul Grand Bazaar), and the NYRB had chosen his likeness to illustrate an essay by Orhan Pamuk, titled “My Turkish Library.”

Pamuk’s essay appears in the December 18 holiday issue… which I already received by FedEx, in recognition of how I successfully identified the bronze man as İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745), who ran the first Ottoman Turkish printing press using movable Arabic type! Based on Müteferrika’s achievements, Bob Silver even instructed the editors to “make room for an extra large caption”:

But even though the caption was extra large, it still couldn’t fit all the interesting information about İbrahim Müteferrika, so it’s a good thing I have a blog.
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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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