My Life and Thoughts

Forsaken readers!  Please excuse the long silence of a C-list writer who has spent the past few weeks in a dark, dark place. Not only was I immersed to an Orwellian degree in the life and work of you-know-which master of the Kafkaesque (hint), but there was literally an enormous cloud sitting on top of my house.  Honestly it’s a mystery to me why I still live on this godforsaken mountain.  At least it was a mystery until I realized it was probably so I could convert Friday to Christianity.  Now I can say, with the immortal Crusoe:

when I reflect that, in this solitary life which I have been confined to, I… am now… made an instrument, under Providence, to save the life, and, for aught I know, the soul of a poor savage, and bring him to the true knowledge of religion and of the Christian doctrine, that he might know Christ Jesus, in whom is life eternal… a secret joy runs through every part of My soul, and I frequently rejoice that ever I was brought to this place, which I so often thought the most dreadful of all afflictions that could possibly have befallen me.

Friday, as you can see, was able to find great comfort in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior:

I too am slowly returning to normal life and, as a first step, I am happy and honored to report that I will be a guest tomorrow (Friday) on “Common Threads,” an open-mic show hosted by esteemed reader and San Francisco beat poet sensation Diamond Dave Whitaker.  Those who are in the neighborhood and not gainfully employed should please come at 3pm to the Pirate Cat Radio Cafe, 2781 21st Street (between Florida and Bryant); others are warmly encouraged to stream Pirate Cat Radio live or download the podcast.

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Autonomous readers!  If you love democracy, now is your chance to prove it by voting on your favorite Google/ Gogol pun by Friday the 9th.

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Many many thanks to everyone who participated!  Honorable mention goes regretfully to Lev Blumenfeld for pointing out that the real winner was, as usual, Google, because on April 1, 2009 (Gogol’s 200th birthday), they replaced the Google logo with a Gogol logo.  (The same BBC article includes a poll in which readers voted on whether Gogol is Russian, Ukrainian, or belongs to the whole world.  Read it and weep, nationalists.)  I’m not considering them eligible for prizes, though, because they already have too many books for their own good.

A belated shout-out is also due to all the San Franciscans who tore themselves away from the Dyke March long enough to attend the Believer All-Acoustic Summer Festival of Language and Thinking last Saturday. I had a great time representing the world’s non-Jewish peoples, in a fantastic billing with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Justin Taylor, Damion Searls (whose wife brought a vuvuzela), and a wonderful musical group identified as “the Jews of Citay” (a subset of the musical group Citay).

I leave you now with some amazing images, courtesy of esteemed reader/ contest finalist Kate Romatowski, depicting “The Possessed bravely tracking some of Yellowstone Park’s more fearsome wildlife, as well as touring Strasbourg’s monuments to those great French literary heroes, Goethe and Gutenberg.”

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Ingenious readers!  I am delighted to announce to you the first ever My Life and Thoughts contest/ book giveaway.  I was inspired by the following devastating critique of The Possessed (sent via Twitter by a valued reader):

Come to think of it, considering Palo Alto’s proximity to Mountain View, Elif really missed the boat on the Google/Gogol puns.

Well, I’m not going to stand here and tell you people that bluefugate isn’t absolutely right, because she is.  In my defense, however, thinking of a good Google/ Gogol pun is not easy.  Either that, or I’m just exceptionally bad at it. I recently devoted a two-hour plane ride to this challenge (big thanks to all the Seattleites who made it out to the University Bookstore on Monday!), and you will get an idea of my success when I tell you that the most promising avenue, by far, involved the factorability of the googol by 0000, Gogol’s early penname.  Subsequently I fell asleep and dreamed that I was searching Petersburg for a nose and got 4.8 million hits.

Can you do better?  I think you can.  Please submit your Google/ Gogol puns by 11:59PM July 2, either in the comments section below, or by writing here.  Don’t forget to include your email.  The winner gets a choice of one of two wonderful prizes:

• A signed Australian edition of The Possessed

OR

• An unsigned (unless you want it signed by me or my intern) edition of Alexandra Popoff’s biography of Sophia Tolstoy, of which I somehow have 3 copies.  It looks great!

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Dear readers!  I am just back from New Orleans where I had a completely fabulous time at Faulkner House Books—big thanks to the terrific staff and all the attendees!  I got to sit behind a huge, incredibly important-looking desk, pictured below.  The format was meet-and-greet, an interesting challenge since I was sitting behind this amazing desk.  At some point I tried firing one of my readers, as a joke (”You’re fired!”), but he didn’t seem to think it was funny.

Later I started fantasizing about getting such a desk in my apartment: I could fire my intern, and he would be so sad and wonder what he had done wrong; then I would realize it had all been a big mistake and rehire him, with tearful embraces on both sides.  This initially struck me as a really fun game that we could play over and over again on the long winter evenings.  Then I got a hold of myself and realized the desk had made me drunk with power.  By then, everyone looked so confused that I just ended up reading from the book and answering questions, same as always.

Resignation of the soul	Loyal readers

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Proliferating readers! It was a joy and an honor to meet so many of you last week in New York and Boston. Over 100 people turned up at McNally Jackson where I had a long conversation with my first editor, Keith Gessen, during which my oldest childhood friend, the prominent novelist Dara Horn, was so carried away by the emotion of the moment that she threw a small plastic dinosaur at my head.

Wednesday’s reading at Brookline Booksmith was also attended by numerous valued readers of My Life and Thoughts, including my aunt Deniz and her oldest childhood friend, who doesn’t believe in pasteurization, and who had commemorated the occasion by baking a wonderful chocolate cake made with nonpasteurized buttermilk.  We were joined for cake by super-guest-blogger Peli Grietzer, who attended the Manhattan event and the Brookline event, and asked questions on subjects ranging from Shklovsky’s Third Factory to a paragraph from my dissertation which it turned out I had sent him in like 2007, so you just tell me if he deserved some cake.

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