My Life and Thoughts

Valued readers!  I am just back from a visit to our nation’s publishing capital, where I had a fabulous time representing Tolstoy at the Strand.  In one week I managed to see three rats, and also to purchase and lose two umbrellas.  Satisfying as these canonical New York experiences were, I’m still really happy to be back in San Francisco and reunited with my loyal intern, who has spent the past month crashing with my webmaster—I believe, mostly eating cold pizza and occasionally helping out with some coding.

I will be making a brief trip to Seattle next week.  If you happen to be in Seattle, or perhaps embedded in the floor of the Puget Sound, living the long, slow, decadent life with my new role model, the geoduck clam, I warmly encourage you and your friends to stop by the University Bookstore, where I will be reading this upcoming Monday.

I’m also happy to report that, as my poor body shuttles between SF and Seattle, my book is apparently having a great time in Sydney and Stockholm.  Thanks to Mike Wong for these beautiful pictures of The Possessed enjoying a view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge (left), and then unwinding at high tea with Wong’s mother and great-aunt (right; the tea pictured is Russian Caravan blend).

A shout-out is also due to Nancy Miller who sent the following beautiful images from Stockholm, which show The Possessed teetering perilously between a municipal garbage can (left) and what looks like the Stockholm City Hall, where they hold the Nobel Prize banquets (right)… a poignant metaphor for the uncertain destiny of all literary production.

Since the publication of The Possessed, I have occasionally received emails from readers in exotic locations, offering to send me things.  To such readers I have been replying that what I would really like is a picture of my book in said exotic location(s)—much as George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air asks wedding guests to take pictures of a cardboard cutout of herself and her fiancé, as a substitute for the honeymoon they can’t afford.  It’s like double-entry bookkeeping: I have to stay here at my desk, but at least my book can have some fun, right?

Well, dear readers, today I am really happy to share with you the first such pictures I received, from Israel via Avi Steinberg, author of the forthcoming Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.  I’m reading Running the Books now, with great enjoyment, and also with increasing amazement at how simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different it is from The Possessed.  In both books, an unemployed Harvard graduate, having attempted unsuccessfully to write a novel, is driven by lack of health insurance to seek a semi-permanent position in a hermetic community where books are taken very seriously, leading to seriocomic adventures.  In Steinberg’s case, the hermetic community was, not graduate school, but a prison library.

At the St. Louis Airport	At Gadara, Israel

(more…)

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":

(more…)

I am just back from my polling location at the garage of 238 Glenview, where I was able to express my opinion on such important matters as Proposition R, which would change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant:

Just as France presented the Statue of Liberty as its gift to the nation, the citizens of San Francisco may now bestow their own special gift to the country by renaming our award winning waste water treatment plant in honor of outgoing President George W Bush. We think this is a fitting memorial for a truly outstanding Commander-in-Chief. On matters ranging from diplomacy to fiscal and environmental stewardship, no other President has had such a dramatic impact on the country and the Constitution in such a short time…

Critics of this measure point out that the initiative… memorializes an administration best forgotten. To this we simply say that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. President Bush has left us with a gigantic mess, and this facility symbolizes the city’s deft ability to clean up its share of the financial and diplomatic mess left in this administration’s wake. It will also become the world’s first presidential sewage plant, a potential tourist attraction, and therefore an opportunity for the dedicated plant workers to educate visitors about this essential and heretofore unknown public works.

(more…)

Today I will tell you the story of my bittersweet first experiences on MySpace.  Sometime last fall I got an email with the subject line “Secret MySpace Project,” from Sam Frank: former n+1 copyeditor and current editor of Triple Canopy.   Sam sent out a number of  photographs of “defaced faces” by the multimedia artist Jon Kessler.  The faces were exhibited in a Drawing Center show called: You Have 43 Friends.  Sam, who had copyedited the catalogue of Kessler’s The Palace at 4 A.M. (the text of which includes ”a fictionalized interview between Jon, a four-star general, and the general’s youngest son, a Bard curatorial student“), decided it would be cool if he could get 33 of his friends to make MySpace profiles for 33 of the defaced faces. 

You Have 43 Friends	dissidentguy15

By disposition I am naturally quite sympathetic to secret art projects, and I was particularly happy to be assigned my ”first-choice” defaced face, for whom I set up a profile under the name of dissidentguy15. 

(more…)