My Life and Thoughts

Forsaken readers!  Please excuse the long silence of a C-list writer who has spent the past few weeks in a dark, dark place. Not only was I immersed to an Orwellian degree in the life and work of you-know-which master of the Kafkaesque (hint), but there was literally an enormous cloud sitting on top of my house.  Honestly it’s a mystery to me why I still live on this godforsaken mountain.  At least it was a mystery until I realized it was probably so I could convert Friday to Christianity.  Now I can say, with the immortal Crusoe:

when I reflect that, in this solitary life which I have been confined to, I… am now… made an instrument, under Providence, to save the life, and, for aught I know, the soul of a poor savage, and bring him to the true knowledge of religion and of the Christian doctrine, that he might know Christ Jesus, in whom is life eternal… a secret joy runs through every part of My soul, and I frequently rejoice that ever I was brought to this place, which I so often thought the most dreadful of all afflictions that could possibly have befallen me.

Friday, as you can see, was able to find great comfort in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior:

I too am slowly returning to normal life and, as a first step, I am happy and honored to report that I will be a guest tomorrow (Friday) on “Common Threads,” an open-mic show hosted by esteemed reader and San Francisco beat poet sensation Diamond Dave Whitaker.  Those who are in the neighborhood and not gainfully employed should please come at 3pm to the Pirate Cat Radio Cafe, 2781 21st Street (between Florida and Bryant); others are warmly encouraged to stream Pirate Cat Radio live or download the podcast.

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Well guys, it looks like all that hope finally paid off: “Safe Laughs,” my two-year-old article about comedy traffic school, runs in the August 31 issue of the New Yorker!  On newsstands tomorrow!  I still can’t believe it—I really thought I would go to the grave with the story of Mr. Traffic on my chest, like Dr. Watson with the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

As soon as I have a bit more time I will post some of the editorial outtakes (they cut out a whole character—Mr. Traffic’s Swedenborgian foil, Dr. Driving). In the meantime, I leave you with two brand new get-rich schemes:

1. Elegy Traffic School, conducted in odes
2. Comedy Psychoanalysis, specializing in hysterical cases

How is it that I’m not a millionaire yet??

Dear readers!  A month has gone by since the appearance of the story of the bells, and I have been running around like a demented person.  For much of May, I was in Florence researching an article about Dante mania.  I think it will be a longish article so I’m not going to go into it all here.  But probably the highlight was on May 16, when I and my dear friend Marilena Ruscica (who is just finishing a dissertation in Stanford Slavic about Dante and Mandelstam) participated in a Dante marathon.  That afternoon, the entire Divine Comedy is read in public spaces: Inferno on the outskirts of the city, Purgatorio closer to the historic center, and Paradiso on a straightaway ending at the Duomo.  Marilena and I were lucky enough to get Inferno XXXIII, in which Count Ugolino may or may not eat his own children.  We also got to say horrible things about people from the nearby cities of Pisa and Genoa:

Here you can see Marilena and me in our Inferno 33 jerseys, just before the reading, in the Chiostro dello Scalzo:

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I won’t say it happens every day, but once in a while I get emails from literarily-oriented young men asking whether I really look like the photo on my blog.  Well guys, I’m going to be honest with you. That is exactly what I look like, when I’ve spent a beautiful afternoon in the park reading detective novels and eating salted caramel ice cream. 

Other times, however, I look different. 

Last week, for example, FSG hired the amazing photographer Mikhail Lemkhin, author of an amazing book on Joseph Brodsky and Leningrad, to take my picture.  Mr. Lemkhin said he preferred to take authors’ photographs in their homes, where they feel more comfortable.  I was like, "OK."  Then I forgot completely about this conversation. Only at 11PM on the night before the shoot (I was working really hard on the introduction) did I suddenly realize, "Wah, Joseph Brodsky’s photographer is coming to my house in like 10 hours."  Obviously I had to clean up (my mom brought me up right).  This took some time, as well as some quantities  of an incredible bargain South African cabernet that I had bought at Trader Joe’s. In the morning I woke up with an incredible bargain headache, didn’t have time to eat breakfast, and also it was raining.  Although the light is very beautiful, somehow, to me, in these troubled economic times, the resulting picture doesn’t really say: "I just wrote a really entertaining book that you might like to pay $14 for."

D-list writer	C-list writer

So enjoy that picture now, dear readers, because I’m pretty sure it’s not the one we’re going to end up using.

As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

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