MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Frugal readers! Are you looking for a classy graduation gift that won’t break the bank?  Great news!  At the time of writing, The Possessed has become an Amazon bargain book and will set you back scarcely the price of a Venti Mocha Coconut Frappuccino!

In other Amazon news, it was recently been brought to my attention that the Possessed reader rating has dropped to 3-point-something stars. Looking over the stats, I saw that, although 5-star ratings has a large plurality (thank you, friends!), there are also quite a few 1-stars, which can’t all be from Orlando Figes.

I found myself wondering why the Amazon reader reviews were, on average, less positive than the reviews in the press.  My guess is that satisfied readers of a well-reviewed book are less likely than unsatisfied readers to post on Amazon.  One group thinks to itself, “Why should I write a good review when the Times already did,” while the other thinks, “Aha, a venue to express my outrage at the Times for hyping this book.”  I found support for this hypothesis in the fact that many particularly well-reviewed books tended to have relatively low reader ratings.  So… it’s the old dialectic of hype vs. backlash.

I remember when “hype” used to be a pre-publication phenomenon.  Hype was inherently unreliable, because it came out before anyone had actually read the book. Today, pretty much any good review counts as “hype,” which has thus become a codeword for any positive opinion that you don’t share – a way of disguising a difference of opinion as a conspiracy theory.

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A response to a comment from Chad (to my post about not reading reviews):

How do critical responses to your articles come into play? I’m mostly just curious about whether or not you’ve read Mark McGurl’s response to “Get a Real Degree” in the LA Review of Books.

Dear Chad!  You’re right – it’s a very similar situation. On the one hand, it seems solipsistic to be sitting at a desk writing things and ignoring the responses… especially when what you’re writing is criticism… and especially when that criticism is couched as some kind of polemical gauntlet, e.g. by means of a title like “Get a Real Degree” (which I did not come up with myself).¹

On the other hand… these dialogues invariably involve such a time-lag! Someone writes a book; you take the time to read it and articulate what you think the deal is; the writer takes the time to read your opinion and articulate what he thinks the deal is, and by then years have passed. (I wrote the LRB piece in 2009, six months before it was published.) It’s a real investment to get back into the state of mind you were in before. You lose time and tranquility.

Is it selfish of me to value my time and tranquility over the exigencies of public debate regarding American creative writing programs? I don’t know. (For real, I don’t know.) All I can say is that right now I’m getting started on a new project, totally unrelated to creative writing programs, and full of totally new challenges, and it needs all my energy.  There’s just one of me, and, if I don’t keep the momentum going, who is going to do it for me?  (Pushkin?  My intern?)  For the time being, that means no adrenalinizing detours down memory lane. Although there is no doubt in my mind that McGurl’s response is super-smart and thought-provoking (as was his book), and although I fully intend to read and think about it when my own work permits, now is not that time.

As always, a big thanks to everyone who doesn’t think that whatever I just said makes me some kind of jerk. (Am thinking of appending this disclaimer to everything I write.)

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Autonomous readers!  If you love democracy, now is your chance to prove it by voting on your favorite Google/ Gogol pun by Friday the 9th.

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Many many thanks to everyone who participated!  Honorable mention goes regretfully to Lev Blumenfeld for pointing out that the real winner was, as usual, Google, because on April 1, 2009 (Gogol’s 200th birthday), they replaced the Google logo with a Gogol logo.  (The same BBC article includes a poll in which readers voted on whether Gogol is Russian, Ukrainian, or belongs to the whole world.  Read it and weep, nationalists.)  I’m not considering them eligible for prizes, though, because they already have too many books for their own good.

A belated shout-out is also due to all the San Franciscans who tore themselves away from the Dyke March long enough to attend the Believer All-Acoustic Summer Festival of Language and Thinking last Saturday. I had a great time representing the world’s non-Jewish peoples, in a fantastic billing with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Justin Taylor, Damion Searls (whose wife brought a vuvuzela), and a wonderful musical group identified as “the Jews of Citay” (a subset of the musical group Citay).

I leave you now with some amazing images, courtesy of esteemed reader/ contest finalist Kate Romatowski, depicting “The Possessed bravely tracking some of Yellowstone Park’s more fearsome wildlife, as well as touring Strasbourg’s monuments to those great French literary heroes, Goethe and Gutenberg.”

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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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Since the publication of The Possessed, I have occasionally received emails from readers in exotic locations, offering to send me things.  To such readers I have been replying that what I would really like is a picture of my book in said exotic location(s)—much as George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air asks wedding guests to take pictures of a cardboard cutout of herself and her fiancé, as a substitute for the honeymoon they can’t afford.  It’s like double-entry bookkeeping: I have to stay here at my desk, but at least my book can have some fun, right?

Well, dear readers, today I am really happy to share with you the first such pictures I received, from Israel via Avi Steinberg, author of the forthcoming Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.  I’m reading Running the Books now, with great enjoyment, and also with increasing amazement at how simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different it is from The Possessed.  In both books, an unemployed Harvard graduate, having attempted unsuccessfully to write a novel, is driven by lack of health insurance to seek a semi-permanent position in a hermetic community where books are taken very seriously, leading to seriocomic adventures.  In Steinberg’s case, the hermetic community was, not graduate school, but a prison library.

At the St. Louis Airport	At Gadara, Israel

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