MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

This one goes out to contemporary Canadian nonfiction writer Tom Jokinen, from whom I recently received the following word-picture of The Possessed in an exotic location:

In Grange Park, Toronto. Arctic snap over. Trees pushing green. Labradoodle to small dog ratio about even. Old Chinese couple with styrofoam cooler in a bundle buggy because they bought fish. Young Indian gentleman carrying a tuba. Hipsters with oversized headphones. Didn’t know this was a thing. Man in tweed reading The Possessed. Thought you should know.

I was so happy to hear this, although not as happy as I will be the day the Labradoodle-to-Possessed ratio finally reaches parity.  Still, big thanks to the man in tweed, for doing his part!

Jokinen, whom I had the privilege of meeting in an elevator in Melbourne, is the author of the fascinating and creepy Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, which I am currently reading as part of an intensive program of Gothic research. I think it is a great public service for a super-smart, funny, and talented writer to spend a year examining what actually happens to dead people in our culture, what befalls their mustaches and teeth, how and under whose stewardship they get in and out of their clothes.

Frequently, while reading Curtains, I am brought to mind of a conversation between Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, regarding Babel’s persistent socializing with members of the Soviet secret police:

Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? “No,” Babel replied. “I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just want to have a sniff and see what it smells like.” (From Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope)

I may add that Curtains looked really great the other day against the view from my bedroom window (the forest near the Black Sea), back when it was actually sunny and people thought spring had finally reached Istanbul.

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Today the skies are again Kindle-gray…

Let’s say you’re writing a book.  Every day you get up and think about it and work on it and change it. Then, at some more-or-less arbitrary point (I didn’t realize before I published a book how arbitrary this point is), it’s taken away from you and sent to copy-editors, printers, buyers, and the world at large.

Meanwhile, time passes. Birds fly south for the winter.  Your shoes wear out and you buy new ones. Eventually, if you’re lucky, reviews start coming out.  I.e., reviewers are now evaluating and discussing in detail things that you wrote at least a year ago.  (I wrote The Possessed between 2005 and 2009… and the first UK edition just came out in 2011.) Reviews treat the finished book as a stable representation of who and what you are as a writer. That’s the critic’s job: taking a literary work as some kind of unity that it’s possible to talk about and interpret.  It’s important and difficult work.

For a writer, however, seeing your work and yourself talked about in that way can be very agitating.  I for example am already prone to thinking and rethinking the past to an unhelpful degree, so reviews send me into an endless loop of unproductive thoughts.  Although I am always delighted to learn that I received a good review (or that any non-reviewer enjoyed anything I wrote), I still prefer not to read even what I know to be very positive reviews.  When you sit down to write, the first huge hurdle you have to get over is self-consciousness. It’s distracting to have a voice in your head—even the world’s most judicious, loving voice—telling you, “Try to wear the green scarf like you did last Thursday—it really brought out your eyes.”

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The other day I got an email from my agent linking to the top 10 fiction and nonfiction lists from the Boston Globe, and was delighted to observe, just a few lines apart, my name and that of Nadifa Mohamed, author of a novel—Black Mamba Boy—based on her father’s childhood peregrinations throughout East Africa and Europe in the 1930s and 40s.

This was a magical reunion, because I had the pleasure of spending a morning with Ms. Mohamed at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary this September, while we were both guests of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival.  We had a wonderful time visiting the koalas:

and the kangaroos:

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World-weary readers!  I was unable to write for a while because I was too busy doing stuff like this:

Marilyn Manson with koala	Elif with koala

People to whom I am related may enjoy listening to some of the 11 interviews I completed, in between desperately trying to koala-hug my way to the B-list.  They have been posted here by the epic Dave Lull (thank you, Dave!).

Since my return from the Antipodes I have been drowning in deadlines, including one for a review of Mark McGurl’s super-smart and thought-provoking The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which I now learn went to press with the incredibly sensitive, thoughtful title, “Get a Real Degree.” Sorry, guys—I didn’t think of that one myself, for real.

I’m still dealing with a huge backlog, but I promise I will catch up with emails, and also announce a Kafka contest, absolutely as soon as I can. Those wishing to learn my life and thoughts in the meantime may view an approximation of how I live and think via this live platypus webcam.

Under and out… e

Cosmopolitan readers!  I am delighted to report that The Possessed hits bookstores in Australia today, or rather tomorrow, because it is already the future in Australia.  A big thanks to Text Publishing and all the koalas and kangaroos for their hard work!  (The Australian edition, like the third US print run, corrects some errata and includes some missing information from first two printings, viz. a reading list and a shout-out to all the heroic English translators, including Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky, who have done so much to bring Russian books to the people who read them.)  I’m also thrilled to be on board with the Melbourne Writers Festival this summer.  I have never been to Australia, but am told that Australian people call it Oz.

Speaking of Oz, I had a great time in Southern California last weekend.  More shout-outs are due to my dear former classmate Amelia Glaser of UCSD, as well as to the upstanding non-dentist Dennis Wills of D. G. Wills, for setting everything up in La Jolla.  Thanks also to David Scheinker, a strong Russian-speaking male graduate student, who not only carried a heavy box of books all around the UCSD campus, but also drove me to CVS for toothpaste while Amelia was stranded in London by the volcano.

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