Many thanks to all who ordered The Possessed,which has, at the time of writing, edged ahead of the greatest novel ever written to #1 on the Amazon Russian bestsellers list! After a long, hard week, my interns are finally enjoying some R&R.
Enjoy, guys—you deserve it!
I recently received some back copies of Vice magazine, kindly sent to me by Vice magazine, because I might write something for them. I had never previously read Vice magazine, and although I had heard of it, I had somehow imagined it to be called Vise magazine (as in, “we really know how to grip our public”).
Youthful readers! As you apparently know already, Vice magazine is actually full of pictures of naked girls doing some crazy stuff. Naked girls in the 2008 fiction issue alone included, but were not limited to: a naked girl running through a supermarket aisle; a naked girl doing cartwheels around a bonfire; and an otherwise-naked girl wearing pasties and a thong made out of pizza. (Apparently it was the model’s own pizza.)
To learn more about Vice magazine, I consulted the Internet, which is famous for its sober and balanced treatment of controversial subjects. There I found the recent Vice magazine interview with Brazilian sculptor Zé Carlos Garcia, who reconstructs pig heads to resemble human faces:
Q. And then you started to turn pigs’ heads into human heads. Do you have any experiences in plastic surgery? It’s completely different to work with flesh, isn’t it?
A. Yes, but as I said, I did sculptures all my life. Also I just love animals, so that wasn’t a big problem.
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| Sculpture by Zé Carlos Garcia | Photo by Jamie Taete |
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).
OK dear readers, I don’t want you to think I’m evading the difficult subject of literary production in our times, but you’re going to have to sit through one more post about cats. Not counting this post, which is a response to the comments about the last post about cats. After that I promise, no more cats.
Dear Burcu! Yes, Friday is exactly what I named my cat. Thank you very much for the reference to Gürcan Yurt, whom I did not know. It’s funny, I reread Robinson Crusoe a couple of years ago, when I was working on sidekicks, and was so disappointed to realize how little there was about Friday! In my mind I had turned Friday into another Dr. Watson… but really he was in what, like three chapters? In short you can imagine how delighted I was to discover that, in the comic books of my ancestral homeland, Friday has been elevated to a title character.
Although the only excerpts I found online were all illegibly small, I am already encouraged by what appears to be a remarkably equitable distribution of lines between Crusoe and Friday:
The last time I was in New York, I went to a movie about sad young literary men, in the company of some sad young literary men, including the Danish novelist Christian Jungersen, with whom I was not previously acquainted. At drinks afterwards, someone mentioned that I have a blog, and Jungersen’s first question was whether I wrote about my cat: “Today my cat ate this, yesterday my cat did that,” he helpfully supplied.
I had to disappoint these generic expectations, because at that time I didn’t have a cat, and had no plans of acquiring any cats. I didn’t especially like cats. People who were really into cats freaked me out. I always wanted a dog. But who can predict the twistings of human fate? I can’t keep a dog in my apartment, so I recently adopted a kitten. Now I am really, really into cats. So sit back and enjoy, Jungersen: this post is gonna be about how I tried to teach my cat to dance.
One day I noticed that if you wave a feather duster at my cat, he will run around and leap in the air. My first natural thought was: “I have to teach this cat how to dance.” Luckily I happen to own a copy of Dancing With Cats, which caught my eye some years ago at the discount table in the Stanford bookstore, because even if you don’t particularly care for cats, how can you fail to be impressed by pictures like this?:
Ralph and his cat Petipa, photo by Heather Busch
Petipa’s favorite kinds of music are cha-cha and “Handel’s oratorios.”
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