MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

I won’t say it happens every day, but once in a while I get emails from literarily-oriented young men asking whether I really look like the photo on my blog.  Well guys, I’m going to be honest with you. That is exactly what I look like, when I’ve spent a beautiful afternoon in the park reading detective novels and eating salted caramel ice cream. 

Other times, however, I look different. 

Last week, for example, FSG hired the amazing photographer Mikhail Lemkhin, author of an amazing book on Joseph Brodsky and Leningrad, to take my picture.  Mr. Lemkhin said he preferred to take authors’ photographs in their homes, where they feel more comfortable.  I was like, "OK."  Then I forgot completely about this conversation. Only at 11PM on the night before the shoot (I was working really hard on the introduction) did I suddenly realize, "Wah, Joseph Brodsky’s photographer is coming to my house in like 10 hours."  Obviously I had to clean up (my mom brought me up right).  This took some time, as well as some quantities  of an incredible bargain South African cabernet that I had bought at Trader Joe’s. In the morning I woke up with an incredible bargain headache, didn’t have time to eat breakfast, and also it was raining.  Although the light is very beautiful, somehow, to me, in these troubled economic times, the resulting picture doesn’t really say: "I just wrote a really entertaining book that you might like to pay $14 for."

D-list writer	C-list writer

So enjoy that picture now, dear readers, because I’m pretty sure it’s not the one we’re going to end up using.

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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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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Kia ora, dear readers! Many thanks for the kind and interesting responses to “On Complaining” (now universally accessible for £0). These responses have come from locations as diverse as New Zealand—“Kia ora” is not only a citrusy soft-drink, but also a Maori greeting!—and Norway. (Here is the message I received from a reader in Norway: “Interesting article, but I will not read the book.”)

My personal correspondents will forgive me for being a bit slow with my personal correspondence, since I just got back from L.A., where I was interviewing an internationally renowned film director. This was my first time interviewing an internationally renowned film director. That said, the last time I was in L.A., I did interview a nationally renowned comedy-traffic expert, for the New Yorker, which proceeded not to publish the story for the next 15 months (and counting). They also have yet to publish the story I wrote for them in June, about some Russian church bells… even though those bells weighed 26 tons!  I guess they are waiting for a story about some bigger bells. 

Anyway… I’m going to postpone revealing the identity of the extremely interesting movie director, who I am writing about for an exciting new magazine called Snob, or should I say: Сноб.  But in the meantime, I will share with you my impressions of L.A. 

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I am just back from my polling location at the garage of 238 Glenview, where I was able to express my opinion on such important matters as Proposition R, which would change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant:

Just as France presented the Statue of Liberty as its gift to the nation, the citizens of San Francisco may now bestow their own special gift to the country by renaming our award winning waste water treatment plant in honor of outgoing President George W Bush. We think this is a fitting memorial for a truly outstanding Commander-in-Chief. On matters ranging from diplomacy to fiscal and environmental stewardship, no other President has had such a dramatic impact on the country and the Constitution in such a short time…

Critics of this measure point out that the initiative… memorializes an administration best forgotten. To this we simply say that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. President Bush has left us with a gigantic mess, and this facility symbolizes the city’s deft ability to clean up its share of the financial and diplomatic mess left in this administration’s wake. It will also become the world’s first presidential sewage plant, a potential tourist attraction, and therefore an opportunity for the dedicated plant workers to educate visitors about this essential and heretofore unknown public works.

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