My Life and Thoughts

Caroline Kennedy tried her hardest, but she was not able to suppress the story of the Russian bells, which appears in the April 27 issue of the New Yorker, on newsstands today.   There is also a podcast on the New Yorker website where you can listen not only to the bells themselves, but also to me trying to remember some facts about bells, which you could probably find faster using Google.  Actually the nice thing about a phone interview, I learned, is that you can pause mid-answer to look things up on Wikipedia, and later the pause/ typing sounds will be edited out.

For some reason, they didn’t link to any images of the destruction of bells in Soviet times, so I will do it here instead.  There are some great images here, and especially here. 

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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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Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?

Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years.  What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”? 

No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!  

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The last time I was in New York, I went to a movie about sad young literary men, in the company of some sad young literary men, including the Danish novelist Christian Jungersen, with whom I was not previously acquainted. At drinks afterwards, someone mentioned that I have a blog, and Jungersen’s first question was whether I wrote about my cat: “Today my cat ate this, yesterday my cat did that,” he helpfully supplied.

I had to disappoint these generic expectations, because at that time I didn’t have a cat, and had no plans of acquiring any cats. I didn’t especially like cats. People who were really into cats freaked me out. I always wanted a dog. But who can predict the twistings of human fate? I can’t keep a dog in my apartment, so I recently adopted a kitten.  Now I am really, really into cats. So sit back and enjoy, Jungersen: this post is gonna be about how I tried to teach my cat to dance.

One day I noticed that if you wave a feather duster at my cat, he will run around and leap in the air. My first natural thought was: “I have to teach this cat how to dance.” Luckily I happen to own a copy of Dancing With Cats, which caught my eye some years ago at the discount table in the Stanford bookstore, because even if you don’t particularly care for cats, how can you fail to be impressed by pictures like this?:

Ralph and his cat Petipa, photo by Heather Busch
Petipa’s favorite kinds of music are cha-cha and “Handel’s oratorios.”

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Today I would like to salute some of the diverse and accomplished commenters to My Life and Thoughts, for example Michelle of The Maltese Bacon (a recipe blog—check out this beautiful tomato confit); as well as Gregory Freidin of the Stanford Slavic department (who, in his latest blog entry, shrewdly observes that, even if you live in Gori, you probably don’t hang your portrait of George W. Bush over a sliding glass door). 

In this recent, admirably concise comment, Freidin expresses solidarity with my father on the subject of creeping desecularization. Those of you who were disappointed by the Times’s decision not to air my father’s thoughts about creeping desecularization will be relieved to learn that they did publish the very next letter he wrote them, the following week.  This letter was in response to “My Literary Malady,” in which novelist Geoff Nicholson mulls over his recent gout diagnosis.  

James Gillray, The GOUT (1799)

But I would like to pause here to share with you my all-time favorite gout anecdote…

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