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, this beautiful German woman is not very punctual.

My recent travels began in New York where I was 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!) was engaged in: spackling.

Marco and I headed out into some torrential rain and made our way to our reading in the “Krautgarden Loft,” which had the most amazing bathtub:

I would like to thank all the friends and readers who attended the New York Krautgarden event, which featured no fewer than 13 unheard-of German and American authors. I especially salute Hayley, Vadim, my mom, and Tara from Columbia, who stayed all the way to the end. (I was scheduled for 11PM but, contrary to cultural stereotype, didn’t actually read until after midnight.)

The situation was made kind of more piquant and interesting by the fact that there was absolutely nothing there to eat in the Krautgarden Loft. There was a kitchenette, where some German girls were selling $3 drinks, and it was eventually brought to my attention that if you stood to one side and looked into the kitchenette, you could kind of see a plate of bananas. Around 11PM, I made my way over and asked how much a banana cost. The girls stared at me as if I had landed from the moon.

“Are the bananas for sale?” I asked.

“No, no,” they said. “It’s a private kitchen!” I explained that I had been at this reading for over 3 hours, there were still 5 authors scheduled before me, etc.; but, they insisted that they couldn’t give me a banana unless I got explicit permission from the owner of the loft. By this time a small group of onlookers had gathered at the counter. Some onlookers appeared to think that I should be given a banana; others disagreed. A petite woman elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. “Wass does she want?” she demanded.

“She wants a banana,” one of the girls replied.

“Well, for heaven’s sake give her a banana! And give me one too!” said the apartment’s owner, for it was she, and I would like to thank her here for her generosity. Probably if you are Philip Roth or someone, people are always giving you all kinds of fruits and vegetables all the time; but, as a D-list writer, it is all too often that people are like: “No, go get your own banana.” Apropos of which, thanks are also due to one German guy who not only stayed to the end of the reading and complimented my story, but even offered me a German chocolate! I am quite fond of German chocolates.

Stay tuned for the next installment of My Life and Thoughts, when I will write about my trip to Germany, which is where German chocolates come from.