My Life and Thoughts

Last night I saw Carol Reed’s The Thin Third Man again.  It’s one of those masterpieces where you find something different in it on each viewing.  The last time I saw it, as a literature graduate student, I was particularly struck by the scene in which Holly Martins, fearing for his life, is picked up by an unknown taxi driver, spirited through noir Vienna, and deposited with screeching brakes at the British Cultural Reeducation Service, where he is forced to answer questions like “Do you believe in the stream of consciousness?” and “Where would you place James Joyce?” before an audience of literary expatriates who keep walking out in disgust.  “How like life,” I remember thinking.

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Dear readers!  I’ve been really delinquent with My Life and Thoughts.  You must all have thought I was either dead, or not thinking anything. In fact, I’m writing a book!  The working title is The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and it’s coming out as an FSG “paperback original,” so my thrifty readers don’t have to wait for the hardcovers to get remaindered!  And, I mean, which among us is in this game for the money, right?

When I mentioned the subject of advances to my fellow blogger Grisha Freidin, he kindly shared with me the following anecdote, from the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings (ed. Gregory Freidin):

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