My Life and Thoughts

Last night I saw Carol Reed’s The Thin Third Man again.  It’s one of those masterpieces where you find something different in it on each viewing.  The last time I saw it, as a literature graduate student, I was particularly struck by the scene in which Holly Martins, fearing for his life, is picked up by an unknown taxi driver, spirited through noir Vienna, and deposited with screeching brakes at the British Cultural Reeducation Service, where he is forced to answer questions like “Do you believe in the stream of consciousness?” and “Where would you place James Joyce?” before an audience of literary expatriates who keep walking out in disgust.  “How like life,” I remember thinking.

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An ordinary guy, ordinary in every way, except one… he is susceptible to catnip.  Is it a blessing or a curse?  Did God make him that way, or was he conditioned by his time?  Who is in the right—him or society? Dear readers, I really have a feeling about this one.  It might just be my foothold to the B-minus list…

more soon…

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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As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

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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?