My Life and Thoughts

In the continuing story of my beautiful friendship with German literary culture, I am happy and honored to report my participation in the 2008 Krautgarden literary series, comprising two sets of readings by young German and American writers, on March 7 at the “Krautgarden Loft” in Chinatown (New York), and on March 14 at Leipzig’s Baumwollspinnerei, former site of the Continent’s largest cotton mill.

Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei

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It seems like just yesterday that I was at Stanford’s Building 460, reading with n+1 magazine; but already the time has come for me to make another appearance in this fine edifice. On January 23 at 5pm in Building 460, Room 429, I will be a respondent for Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the historical romance, sponsored by the Working Group on the Novel.

The idea of the Working Group is that everyone reads a paper and a designated novel in advance; then, at the appointed time and place, they all confront the author of the paper, who sits at a long table with a respondent (me), who “kicks things off” with some hard-hitting questions that cut through the rhetoric and get to what really matters to you and me. Dinner will be provided. Think you can handle it? Here are the readings: Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; and Luba Golburt’s “Seeing History: The Russian Historical Novel between Sir Walter Scott and Les Jeunes-France.”

You don’t actually need a very firm idea of who the Jeunes-France were, in order to appreciate Luba’s paper; nonetheless, I share with you the definition from the Tresor de la Langue Française Informatisé:

A group of eccentric young writers and artists, wearing long hair, forked beards, velvet doublets, and soft fedoras, who, from 1830 on, exaggerated the theories of the Romantic school, drawing notice with their behavior and with their literary and artistic opinions, which tended to alarm the “bourgeoisie”… The most flattering thing for a Jeune-France at that time was to persuade his parents to let him wear a sky-blue habit and the yellow breeches of a young Werther (SAINTE-BEUVE, Literary Portraits).

Alphonse Daudet	Young Werther

Members included Alphonse Daudet (above), who was possibly wearing yellow breeches when that picture was taken… unless the yellow breeches were part of a different look from the forked beard and floppy hat…? I’ll be asking Prof. Golburt when we’re playing “hardball” next Wednesday. (more…)

Sometimes in the course of my day-to-day activities, I just have to pause and think: how does my lived experience differ from that of my colleague, Ian McEwan? Like me, Ian McEwan probably eats breakfast every morning, and wears shoes. Like me, McEwan also has a website: http://ianmcewan.com. The existence of this website proves that someone must be maintaining it (the “first cause” proof); which, in turn, raises the question of what McEwan’s webmaster is like. How do his character, appearance, and biography differ from those of my webmaster? Does he bartend?

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I was totally on time for the reading at Stanford! I knew just where to park my car, and how to get to the Terrace Room. (Seven years of graduate study, my friends.)

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In concluding the story of the n+1 Bay Area tour, mention should also be made of the events at USF and Stanford.

We were actually invited to USF, which made it a unique venue for us. I got there 10 minutes late because I had somehow parked in Cole Valley and then had to walk like half a mile uphill. Would Philip Roth walk half a mile uphill to get to his own literary reading? I don’t know; that’s just the kind of devotion I have to my craft.

We were reading in the law school, directly across from a church devoted to one of my favorite saints: Ignatius of Loyola. When I got to our room it was completely deserted, except by a bearded intellectual who was standing behind a huge coffee dispenser. The sight of an intellectual, partially obscured by a samovar-shaped object, produced a charming Chekhovian effect.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church, San Francisco (across from the USF Law Building)	K.S. Stanislavsky as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899); note samovar in background.

Because the other readers were nowhere to be seen, I concluded that I was in the wrong room. I then realized that I had lost the piece of paper on which I had written the room number, as well as the name of the guy who had invited us, and also Mark Greif’s phone number. Fortunately, I did have the number of Keith Gessen, whose fans have by now brought My Life and Thoughts a total of 79 viewers. Gessen’s closest rival, with 44 hits from Google, is the word-phrase combination: “venerability ‘Joan Silber.”

“Keith Gessen” and “venerability ‘Joan Silber’”: we do two things here, but we do them right.

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