MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Patient readers! Since I got back to San Francisco last week I have been going about my business, waiting for the moment when a beautiful beaming woman would come up to me and exclaim: “Du hast einen Blog geschrieben!” But, contrary to cultural stereotype, this beautiful German woman is not very punctual.

My recent travels began in New York where I was delighted to see all the sad young literary men. On March 7, I visited Keith Gessen and Marco Roth at n+1’s new offices in Dumbo. Gessen, whose new book, All the Sad Young Literary Men, comes out in two weeks (it is really good!) was engaged in: spackling.

Marco and I headed out into some torrential rain and made our way to our reading in the “Krautgarden Loft,” which had the most amazing bathtub:

I would like to thank all the friends and readers who attended the New York Krautgarden event, which featured no fewer than 13 unheard-of German and American authors. I especially salute Hayley, Vadim, my mom, and Tara from Columbia, who stayed all the way to the end. (I was scheduled for 11PM but, contrary to cultural stereotype, didn’t actually read until after midnight.)

The situation was made kind of more piquant and interesting by the fact that there was absolutely nothing there to eat in the Krautgarden Loft. There was a kitchenette, where some German girls were selling $3 drinks, and it was eventually brought to my attention that if you stood to one side and looked into the kitchenette, you could kind of see a plate of bananas. Around 11PM, I made my way over and asked how much a banana cost. The girls stared at me as if I had landed from the moon.

“Are the bananas for sale?” I asked.

“No, no,” they said. “It’s a private kitchen!” I explained that I had been at this reading for over 3 hours, there were still 5 authors scheduled before me, etc.; but, they insisted that they couldn’t give me a banana unless I got explicit permission from the owner of the loft. By this time a small group of onlookers had gathered at the counter. Some onlookers appeared to think that I should be given a banana; others disagreed. A petite woman elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. “Wass does she want?” she demanded.

“She wants a banana,” one of the girls replied.

“Well, for heaven’s sake give her a banana! And give me one too!” said the apartment’s owner, for it was she, and I would like to thank her here for her generosity. Probably if you are Philip Roth or someone, people are always giving you all kinds of fruits and vegetables all the time; but, as a D-list writer, it is all too often that people are like: “No, go get your own banana.” Apropos of which, thanks are also due to one German guy who not only stayed to the end of the reading and complimented my story, but even offered me a German chocolate! I am quite fond of German chocolates.

Stay tuned for the next installment of My Life and Thoughts, when I will write about my trip to Germany, which is where German chocolates come from.

Truly New York is the city of constant drama.   I had been in this magical city for scarcely 12 hours (8 of which I had spent asleep), when my mother’s iPhone was stolen while she was on the elliptical trainer; then we somehow both ended up getting haircuts. 

So, this will not be a long post—but I did want to share with you a piece of wonderful news for Bach impersonators (brought to my attention by the promising young Germanist, Na’ama Rokem).  Finally, twenty-first-century computer modeling techniques have been put to the task of producing a historically accurate three-dimensional reconstruction of the head of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Not a moment too soon, gentlemen!

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I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,

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This September, I was honored to receive a writing award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. I had never previously heard of Rona Jaffe (1931–2005) and was interested to learn that, unlike many philanthropists, she was a bestselling novelist. In the 1960s–70s, Jaffe’s popularity extended all the way to Ankara, where her readers included my own mother. My mother particularly remembered The Best of Everything, a novel about four single girls in New York, for its “humane” treatment of one of the girls going through her ex-boyfriend’s garbage: “not as if she’s a huge loser, but as if something very unfortunate happened to her.”

On reading The Best of Everything, I discovered that the abovementioned girl actually develops a single-minded obsession with this garbage, to the extent that she sits on the back stairs of his apartment every night, waiting for his maid to take out the trash and then scavenging it for traditional garbage-type items. From these items, she deduces the complexion, hair color, menstrual cycle, and name of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. (more…)