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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The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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There was only one disappointment for me in Leipzig, which is that I didn’t see any Bach impersonators at all! Not even one!  After my Continental travels, however, I spent a few days in London, where I unexpectedly got my fix of weird impersonators in powdered wigs, at Dr. Johnson’s House, whose exhibits include a continuously running DVD documentary in which a Samuel Johnson impersonator talks about his furniture, and also soliloquizes before a painting of his beloved black servant, Francis (”Frank”) Barber.

So that is already great… but here is another great thing about London: their Review of Books, which has just published an essay I wrote about “graphic novels” (issue of April 10).

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Leipzig was so great! Marco and I were really happy to meet the novelist Kevin Vennemann (our German translator), to whom I had mentioned an abbreviated version of the Krautgarden Loft banana incident, and who subsequently suggested that we meet for a pre-reading dinner in Auerbachs Keller, the basement tavern where Mephistopheles took Faust, and where the sixteenth-century prototypical Dr. Faustus supposedly once transported himself from the basement up to street level, by riding on a diabolically possessed wine barrel. “Terrible place,” Vennemann wrote, “but very… hearty food [original ellipses] made for tourists and probably the best way to keep you from starving once again. They might be serving a lot of kraut as well.”

To be totally honest, my caloric intake isn’t actually anything out of the ordinary, but I was of course delighted to have acquired the reputation of an insatiable devourer of hearty tourist food. Verily my friends, it is better to be feared than loved!

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Patient readers! Since I got back to San Francisco last week I have been going about my business, waiting for the moment when a beautiful beaming woman would come up to me and exclaim: “Du hast einen Blog geschrieben!” But, contrary to cultural stereotype, she is not very punctual, this beautiful German woman, so today I take matters into my own hands.

My recent travels began in New York where I was, as always, delighted to see all the sad young literary men. On March 7, I visited Keith Gessen and Marco Roth at n+1’s new offices in Dumbo. Gessen, whose new book, All the Sad Young Literary Men, comes out in two weeks (it is really good!)…

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