MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

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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Inexorable readers!  I write to you with wonderful news!  It looks like FSG finally caved under the pressure of all those 3-star reviews… because The Possessed is now available on Kindle!  My one regret is that there is now pretty much no incentive to develop the S W Foska’s brilliant idea about making the paperback edition convertible into a Brita filter.  I guess it’s proof that great minds think alike, because my my smartest intern, Friday, who is also in charge of R&D here at My Life and Thoughts, actually explored this idea a few months ago by spilling a large glass of water onto my copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which promptly expanded to approximately 250% of its original, already non-negligible, size.  Notwithstanding these spectacular results, there are still a few bugs that have to be ironed out before we can go commercial—e.g., the water that actually made it through the “filter” looked sort of gray and unpalatable (I guess these are the visible traces of literary knowledge).

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Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

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THE UNKNOWABLE FUTURE

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THE IRRETRIEVABLE PAST

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2/24/10 – San Francisco, CA
City Lights Books

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3/3/10 – Los Angeles, CA
ALOUD at the LAPL
In conversation with David Ulin

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3/10/10 – Corte Madera, CA
Book Passage

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3/11/10 – Menlo Park, CA
Kepler’s Books

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3/15/10 – New York, NY
McNally Jackson
In conversation with Keith Gessen

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3/17/10 – Boston, MA
Brookline Booksmith

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3/19/10 – Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn Book Court

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4/6/10 – Chicago, IL
Seminary Co-op (57th St. Books)

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4/22/10 – La Jolla, CA
D.G. Wills Books

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4/25/10 – Los Angeles, CA
LA Times Festival of Books

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5/5/10 – Berkeley, CA
Moe’s Books

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5/30/10 – New Orleans, LA
Faulkner House Books, 3:30PM

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6/8/10 – New York, NY
Strand Bookstore, 7PM
Book launch for Android Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy and Ben Winters

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6/10/10 – New York, NY
Housing Works Bookstore, 7PM
Death: A Literary Celebration of the Bitter End (with Joseph O’Neill and Dianne Williams)

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6/21/10 – Seattle, WA
Washington University Bookstore, 7PM

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6/26/10 – San Francisco, CA
The Believer All-Acoustic Summer Festival of Language and Thinking
Amnesia (853 Valencia), 6–8pm

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8/28/10 – Melbourne, Australia
How Russia Changed My Life, 11:30AM
Melbourne Writers Festival

8/29/10 – Melbourne, Australia
Critical Writing Masterclass, 10AM–4PM
Melbourne Writers Festival

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8/29/10 – Melbourne, Australia
Dog’s Tales
The Toff in Town, 7PM

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8/30/10 – Sydney, Australia
Gleebooks, 6pm (with Jane Gleeson-White)

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9/2/10 – Brisbane, Australia
Strange Encounters with Russian Writers, 2:30
Brisbane Writers Festival

9/3/10 – Brisbane, Australia
Queensland University of Technology, 11am-1pm
Brisbane Writers Festival

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9/4/10 – Brisbane, Australia
Obsession, 1:30pm
Brisbane Writers Festival

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9/23/10 – San Francisco, CA
Voices of the World Series, 6PM
World Affairs Council of Northern California (312 Sutter Street, Suite 200)

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9/25/10 – Santa Rosa, CA
Sonoma County Book Festival, 11:30AM

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10/7/10 – San Francisco, CA
Litquake 2010
Feminine Wiles, 7PM

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10/11/10 – Yale University
St. Anthony Hall, 483 College St.
4:30PM

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10/13/10 – Boston College
Lowell Humanities Lecture Series
7PM

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10/14/10 – Wellesley College
Pendleton Atrium, 21 Wellesley College Rd.
4:15PM

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10/15/10 – Harvard University
Davis Center (3rd Floor), 1730 Cambridge St.
4PM

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12/16/10,  Istanbul, Turkey
Koç University Founders Hall, 6:30PM

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1/20/11 – 1/23/11, The Hague, Netherlands
Winternachten Literary Festival

2/16/11 – London, UK
Event with Molly Parkin, hosted by Damian Barr
Aubin & Wills, 7PM

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2/21/11 – London, UK
“Cervantes, Balzac, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping”
London Review of Books Winter Lectures series
The British Museum – BP Theatre, 6:30PM

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2/24/11,  Istanbul, Turkey
Talk on Literary Journalism
Koç University, 6:30PM

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3/9/11,  New York, NY
NBCC Finalists’ Reading
The New School, 6PM

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4/10/11,  Oxford, UK
Oxford Literary Festival talk
Christ Church, Festival Room 2, 10AM

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4/11/11,  London, UK
The Russian Classics (with Pavel Basinsky)
Southbank Centre, Level 5 Function Room, 7:45PM

4/13/11,  London, UK
Literary Death Match
Concrete, 56 Shoreditch High Street, 8:15PM (Doors at 7)

4/15/11 – Galway, Ireland
Cúirt International Festival of Literature
Event with Geoff Dyer, 3PM

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4/30/11 – Beyoğlu, Istanbul
ANAMED (Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi), 4PM
“Blogging: Genre and Practice,” with Kaya Genç

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9/14/11 – Istanbul, Turkey
SALT Gallery, 6:30PM
How does sports obsession shape a city?

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10/16/11 – Zurich, Switzerland
Salongespräche, Theatre Neumarkt, 6:30PM

Last Friday I was really happy to participate in the second issue of Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” consisting of twenty writers, filmmakers, photographers, artists, etc. sharing their work (all unpublished/ unheard/ unseen) for < 5 min. each, at San Francisco’s Brava Theater.  I was on between a demonstration of Braille maps for blind people, and a documentary about the Bay Area’s most famous female bodysurfer (a geophysicist who took up bodysurfing at age 37).

Tactile map	Judith Sheridan

I was unfortunately unable to notify any of my dear readers of this event, because tickets sold out literally 90 minutes after they went on sale, i.e. before I managed to send out an email.  Next time I will write before the tickets go on sale—not a precaution one usually has to take on the D-list, but apparently that’s what happens when one ends up on the same billing with 8 different writers for Wired magazine.

For future reference, the live magazine format turns out to be great—it really takes the “painful” out of “painful literary events.”  Well, and it also takes the “literary” out, since there was so much other stuff—e.g., on Friday, a live interview with artist Wayne White; a demonstration of some inspiringly powerful LED-lit sneakers (unfortunately not these, which I believe can only be worn by taxidermic specimens); a really evocative sound recording of children splashing in a lake in Angkor Wat; some incredibly beautiful/ sinister pictures of racehorses; and, as Solzhenitsyn’s publicists say, much more.

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