My Life and Thoughts

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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Dear readers!  I am happy to relate that my piece called "The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation" is in the February issue of Harper’s magazine, which subscribers can already read online—it has a really amazing piece of original artwork by Steven Dana which I will post here, if it turns out not to violate any copyright.  In the meantime, tiny, law-abiding people, like the ones who live in Lech Walesa’s mustache, might enjoy looking at a tiny, legal reproduction.  And also at a picture of home and its environs, back in the day.

"The Murder of Leo Tolstoy" is about how I went to an International Tolstoy Conference at Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana, and tried to determine whether Tolstoy died of natural causes or was… MURDERED.  It has some interesting generic features, e.g. I originally wrote it in the form of a short story.  Then my editor was like, "But it all really happened, right?", and I was like, “Well, pretty much,” and, to make a long story short, it was put in the Miscellany section, as a literary memoir, and was even assigned a fact-checker—you know, to fact-check my memoir.

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Let me begin by thanking Ryan for the link to the Roudinesco conference, which does indeed include such promising titles as: "‘In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind?’ The Deployment of Psychoanalysis in the Struggle against Fascism." I am also curious about who decides the ad placement in the LRB print edition. The last piece I wrote for them, on graphic novels, ran with an ad for Turkey: The Space of the Mind(d)Field, a special issue of the art journal Third Text, including articles like "Parrhesiastic Games in the Turkish Art Scene" (by Süreyyya Evren, who really spells it with 3 y’s, possibly to convey the eternal question of contemporary academic discourse: "Why? Why? Why?"), and: "Dear Europe, Dear Turkey: Why are You Making Us So Depressed [Why why why]?" (by Kevin Robins).

I remember when that LRB came out, a certain prominent YA author wrote to me that she was puzzled "by the decision to advertise Turkish language lessons (or was it Genghis Khan garden gnomes?) at the bottom of your first page."  and, although I initially thought "Genghis Khan garden gnomes" was really funny, I soon I realized it’s no laughing matter, because guess who introduced garden gnomes—in fact, "models of Central Asian dwarves that were kept as house pets by wealthy families during China’s glorious Tang Dynasty"—to the ignorant West?  That’s right… the Mongols!

This important discovery into the genealogy of garden gnomes (viz., they too are related to Genghis Khan) was made by Bu Congming, professor of archeology and finance at the Urumqi Institute of Desert Exploration and Real Estate Development, and his colleague Xuan Zhang, on the basis of "a letter written in Sogdian, an extinct Central Asia language, [discovered] in a garbage pit at Dunhuang":

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