MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Anglophone readers!  In response to recent comments regarding asshole vs. arsehole, listen – this whole thing is a mystery to me. Or rather, a series of mysteries.

1. The first OED quotation for “arse-hole” (slang) is by an American: “This place [sc. Los Angeles] is the one true and original arse-hole of creation. It is at least nine times as bad as I expected” (H. L. Mencken, 1926).

2. Dylan Thomas apparently went both ways, because in addition to the shocking “asshole” quote of 1935 (see previous post), the OED also lists the following: “This arsehole of the universe… this… fond sad Wales” (1950).  What happened between 1935 and 1950?  The consolidation of Stalinism?

3. As for this gem from New Zealand, “It’s absolute comfort from arse-hole to breakfast-table,” Landfall (1948)… I like it very much, but what does it mean?

4. Personally, I first learned the word “arse” from a Canadian-American(!) author, Gordon Korman, in a novel called A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, which includes a humorous acronym-related misadventure: a girl creates the acronym ARSE and, not realizing what it means, puts it on posters all over the school. It is an American school. Nonetheless, one of the girl’s friends knows what “arse” means, and changes the acronym to EARS.

5. I loved A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag at age 12, to the extent that I recently bought a used copy and reread it. I still thought it was great. For this reason, I tried, twice, at intervals a month apart, to post a 5-star review of Semester on Amazon (part of my campaign of posting 5-star reviews of books by living authors).  Well, here’s the biggest mystery of all: my review has yet to show up on the site! All the other reviews appeared immediately, so I have no idea what’s going on. Is it that hard for Amazon to accept my love of A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag? Maybe they’re still busy comparing the review(s) to the rest of my body of work?

6. You’re going to think I’m crazy but I just looked on Amazon right now, and the Garbage Bag review is up – but it’s the review I wrote yesterday, and it’s dated June 28. I feel like I’m reading The Moonstone or something. Seriously, does any of this make sense to any of you people? Because if so, man, you’re on your own.

Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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Kia ora, dear readers! Many thanks for the kind and interesting responses to “On Complaining” (now universally accessible for £0). These responses have come from locations as diverse as New Zealand—“Kia ora” is not only a citrusy soft-drink, but also a Maori greeting!—and Norway. (Here is the message I received from a reader in Norway: “Interesting article, but I will not read the book.”)

My personal correspondents will forgive me for being a bit slow with my personal correspondence, since I just got back from L.A., where I was interviewing an internationally renowned film director. This was my first time interviewing an internationally renowned film director. That said, the last time I was in L.A., I did interview a nationally renowned comedy-traffic expert, for the New Yorker, which proceeded not to publish the story for the next 15 months (and counting). They also have yet to publish the story I wrote for them in June, about some Russian church bells… even though those bells weighed 26 tons!  I guess they are waiting for a story about some bigger bells. 

Anyway… I’m going to postpone revealing the identity of the extremely interesting movie director, who I am writing about for an exciting new magazine called Snob, or should I say: Сноб.  But in the meantime, I will share with you my impressions of L.A. 

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The reason for the cat moratorium is, I’m worried that if I keep going about my cat, and saying nothing about my life as a relatively obscure writer, people will assume that I have stopped writing, or even that I have run out of money. This would be a really incorrect assumption since in fact what I have stopped doing is getting published, and let me take this moment to assign blame where it is due, viz.: the mortgage crisis, the war in Georgia, the 2008 elections, and the Wall Street meltdown, all of which have been no joke for our nation’s more junior producers of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism.

“Someday, the world will be ready for the story of comedy traffic school.”

Personally I can tell you that nothing I wrote for the past 6 months is going to be published until after the elections—at which point, however, I am told that the presses will be flooded with interesting pieces about barrel-making and the feuding grandchildren of minor Symbolists. Therefore my message to you today, esteemed readers, is a message of change, and a message of hope. In America’s troubled times, you might not always see my footprints in the sand, but later you’ll see I was there, carrying somebody, or at least doing something, I think. (more…)

Well, yes, OK, this might not be the last time I ever write about cats. Still, I definitely promise at least a moderate cat hiatus—right after this post, which is about modern-day cat literature classic Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics.

The existence of Why Cats Paint was first revealed to me early in 2007, when I happened to attend a calendar sale at Kepler’s Books in the company of n+1 editor Mark Greif, who purchased a Why Cats Paint calendar, as a gift for the mother of a certain young person. “The genius of the thing,” Greif later observed, of the Why Cats Paint calendar,

is that they never tell you why cats paint—they just show you that cats paint. Which they don’t. But there is this further horizon of promise that distracts you from the original problem.

I remember thinking that this was an ingenious formulation, and that I could be the calendar girl for a Why People Dissertate calendar… but would it successfully distract my committee from the “original problem”? My committee of course was made up entirely of benevolent schnauzers:

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