My Life and Thoughts

Last Friday I was really happy to participate in the second issue of Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” consisting of twenty writers, filmmakers, photographers, artists, etc. sharing their work (all unpublished/ unheard/ unseen) for < 5 min. each, at San Francisco’s Brava Theater.  I was on between a demonstration of Braille maps for blind people, and a documentary about the Bay Area’s most famous female bodysurfer (a geophysicist who took up bodysurfing at age 37).

I was unfortunately unable to notify any of my dear readers of this event, because tickets sold out literally 90 minutes after they went on sale, i.e. before I managed to send out an email.  Next time I will write before the tickets go on sale—not a precaution one usually has to take on the D-list, but apparently that’s what happens when one ends up on the same billing with 8 different writers for Wired magazine.

For future reference, the live magazine format turns out to be great—it really takes the “painful” out of “painful literary events.”  Well, and it also takes the “literary” out, since there was so much other stuff—e.g., on Friday, a live interview with artist Wayne White; a demonstration of some inspiringly powerful LED-lit sneakers (unfortunately not these, which I believe can only be worn by taxidermic specimens); a really evocative sound recording of children splashing in a lake in Angkor Wat; some incredibly beautiful/ sinister pictures of racehorses; and, as Solzhenitsyn’s publicists say, much more.

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Dear readers!  A month has gone by since the appearance of the story of the bells, and I have been running around like a demented person.  For much of May, I was in Florence researching an article about Dante mania.  I think it will be a longish article so I’m not going to go into it all here.  But probably the highlight was on May 16, when I and my dear friend Marilena Ruscica (who is just finishing a dissertation in Stanford Slavic about Dante and Mandelstam) participated in a Dante marathon.  That afternoon, the entire Divine Comedy is read in public spaces: Inferno on the outskirts of the city, Purgatorio closer to the historic center, and Paradiso on a straightaway ending at the Duomo.  Marilena and I were lucky enough to get Inferno XXXIII, in which Count Ugolino may or may not eat his own children.  We also got to say horrible things about people from the nearby cities of Pisa and Genoa:

Here you can see Marilena and me in our Inferno 33 jerseys, just before the reading, in the Chiostro dello Scalzo:

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Уважаемые читатели!  I’m really happy to say that my profile of director Timur Bekmambetov came out in the January issue of Snob (a magazine targeted at moderately but not excessively rich Russian people), in a beautiful Russian translation, with beautiful photography.  Unfortunately it isn’t available online, and I don’t even have a hard copy.  But there is a preview on their website—here is a screen shot, or part of one anyway:

You can’t tell from that picture but he was actually a really nice guy, and not accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol (or at least not always accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol). 

For English-reading readers, I’m putting up the first 1000 words.  For Russian-reading readers, that picture was worth 1000 words!  Спасибо, что пришли!

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Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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This story begins last Friday, when I went to the Stanford library to check out some books about the Musin-Pushkin family.  (I think I might write a novel about someone who is obsessed with the Musin-Pushkins.)  And let me tell you, it took a long time to round up all those books.  My webmaster can confirm this since he was waiting for me outside, drinking espressos and getting really bored. 

Then when I finally got to the check-out desk, I got stuck behind a crazy old lady in a bright red Chanel suit and matching lipstick, who not only checked out like a million books but also prolonged the transaction with a 10-minute commentary about how she will only read books whose call numbers start with PR, because they “come from the Commonwealth.”  “Forbearance,” I counseled myself: “Someday you, too, may be a crazy old lady who is obsessed with call numbers.”

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