MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

If there’s one thing about the writing life that recommends itself to young people, it’s the limited capital outlay.  You don’t need to pay salaries, rent a recording studio, or make weekly trips to Denver… but does that mean it’s all about sitting back and watching the money roll in?   Alas.  Today I bring you a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wind up with between $817–$1,067 work-related expenses.

It started one day in August, when I received a notice for a missed UPS delivery.  The only package I was expecting at that time was the first uncensored translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, which the publishers had been trying to mail me for some weeks, as part of a campaign to get people to write Solzhenitsyn profiles:

Although Solzhenitsyn died last August, the following individuals are available for interviews: Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia (who made headlines last month when she rebuked Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him); the author’s son, pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is musical director for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the noted Solzhenitsyn scholar. They can discuss:

· Where Solzhenitsyn fits in to the great Russian literary realist tradition bequeathed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky;

· The two decades he spent as an exile in Vermont, stripped of his Russian citizenship.  How he lived in such fear of the KGB that he built a barb wire fence around his home;

· The differences between Stalin’s regime and the Russian leadership of today—and what might happen if Solzhenitsyn were writing today;

· How he damaged his reputation in the West by championing Christianity and railing against American pop culture in a rambling commencement speech at Harvard;

· The “censored” portions of IN THE FIRST CIRCLE, which included suggestions that Stalin had been a double agent, and that the Soviet Union should not possess the atomic bomb;

· And much more.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Being overdue on three deadlines, I am obliged to leave the Solzhenitsyn-profiling to other and better C-list writers, whom I certainly wish a pleasant phone chat with the musical director of the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra on the subject of AS’s famous “rambling speech” of 1978.

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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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