My Life and Thoughts

Dear readers!  I am just back from Tel Aviv, where I went to interview some important world literary-historical cats.  They are literally sitting on some invaluable manuscripts!  Neither they nor their caretakers (the daughters of Max Brod’s late secretary) have been especially forthcoming to the press.  But that didn’t stop me and my colleague Avi Steinberg from creepily lurking around their front yard for like an hour.

Because I am a professional and think of everything, I had an artificial mouse in my pocket, with which I was able to attract the attention of one of the archival interns:

Although this “opening gambit” of the mouse enjoyed a certain self-contained success, it failed to spark the lively debate I had been anticipating about the legal and cultural battle surrounding Kafka’s legacy. Rather, the intern seemed somehow unable to move beyond what one might call the pourparlers, so that really all I learned from our encounter was his position on artificial mice.  (pro)

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As a C-list writer, one has to wear many hats, including, it turns out, the hat of someone who knows something about movies.  In February, for example, I was really happy to be asked to write something for The Believer, because I had never written for them before.  In fact this was my first time writing for any publication in San Francisco, a city apparently famous for having such a friendly literary scene that guests at a roast for Amy Tan were literally unable to think of anything insulting to say about her, even as a joke.  “This is San Francisco literary life in a nutshell,” reported the New York Times:

a willingness to honor and an unwillingness to undermine. You could probably find mean-spirited, competitive writers here, the kind who make literature a blood sport and the literary life a conniving enterprise and a purely mercenary pursuit. But not without a serious hunt.

Hey guys!  Yoo-hoo!  I might be up here on a mountain, living on oatmeal and pretending that my cat can talk, but I do exist! (more…)

Dear readers!  I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.

In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:

The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”

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By guest-blogger Peli Grietzer

Just give it to us straight, Ezra Koenig. Are you saying rich girls deserve their money, or are you saying rich girls are dumb whores? Do you taunt the 57% of America that can’t take real summer vacations, or do you mock the 43% that go on holidays? Was “Mansard Roof” an endorsement of roofs or an anti-roof satire?

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Many thanks to all who ordered The Possessed,which has, at the time of writing, edged ahead of the greatest novel ever written to #1 on the Amazon Russian bestsellers list! After a long, hard week, my interns are finally enjoying some R&R.

Enjoy, guys—you deserve it!

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