My Life and Thoughts

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!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

(more…)

Dear readers, thanks for all the kind comments on “Safe Laughs,” as well as for notifying me that I-14, a bit like the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy, is at this point only a beautiful dream of the future, and the road one was actually driving down in 2007 was California State Route 14.  I have just posted those outtakes here—they include Dostoevsky’s prophetic analysis of the psychology of road rage.

In other beautiful fictions, the FSG winter 2010 catalog is now available online, and if waiting for enormous pdf files to load is one of your special hobbies, I warmly encourage you to check it out.  All others will have to content themselves with this excerpt:

In The Possessed we watch [Batuman] investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Although “Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg” certainly has a nice ring, there is this interesting circumstance that I have never, to the best of my knowledge, actually been to Switzerland.  Yet. I figure the Macmillan group can see into the future, and that must be the subject of my next book.  Avanti!

This clock tells the time of the future.

Well guys, it looks like all that hope finally paid off: “Safe Laughs,” my two-year-old article about comedy traffic school, runs in the August 31 issue of the New Yorker!  On newsstands tomorrow!  I still can’t believe it—I really thought I would go to the grave with the story of Mr. Traffic on my chest, like Dr. Watson with the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

As soon as I have a bit more time I will post some of the editorial outtakes (they cut out a whole character—Mr. Traffic’s Swedenborgian foil, Dr. Driving). In the meantime, I leave you with two brand new get-rich schemes:

1. Elegy Traffic School, conducted in odes
2. Comedy Psychoanalysis, specializing in hysterical cases

How is it that I’m not a millionaire yet??

Caroline Kennedy vs. Giant Russian Bell: similar, but not quite the same.

(more…)

Remember my 6-month-old, still-not-published piece on large Russian bells? So it’s actually about the once-recent (now several months old) restitution of some historic and very large Russian church bells, for many years in the possession of a famous American university, back to the seat of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate—conditional upon the aforementioned university’s receipt of an equivalent set of bells, and by equivalent I mean not only did they have to be fully as large as the originals, but also they had to be personally blessed by Patriarch Alexiy II, the colorful personality who drew international media attention last year for his characterization of homosexuality as a "distortion of the human personality like kleptomania."

A few days ago I got an email from my editor, notifying me of the recent death of Alexiy II, with the following comment:"Good news for gays, maybe; hard to gauge its significance for bells other than the insertion of the word ‘late’ before his first appearance in your piece." Well, I’ve been thinking about this statement and, while I concur that the death of one Russian patriarch doesn’t have any immediately calculable significance in terms of the content of anything I wrote about large Russian bells, I still do hope that they publish the piece before too many more of the involved parties have time to die—because if there’s one thing that’s really distracting in a sexy, super-topical piece about large church bells, it’s having to slog through a bunch of five-syllable Russian names with "late" before them.

I leave you, dear readers, with these amazing photographs of the late Alexei "enjoying close relations with the Kremlin," which look like they might have been taken by AFP / AP photographers who were working overtime as private detectives in the service of Mrs. Putin.