MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Eco-conscious readers! I am happy to relate that “Natural Histories,” my profile of conservationist Çağan Şekercioğlu and his badass Kars-based NGO, is on newsstands now in the October 24 issue of the New Yorker, with photography by superstar Carolyn Drake.

I think Çağan was not super-happy with the above photo, because the bird had started to fly away before he had completely released it, and apparently it might look to a bird professional as if he had been holding it wrong. In fact he was holding it fine and nobody’s leg got broken, least of all that of the bird.

The cotton candy didn’t even try to fly away:

Click here for an outtake from the story, plus another very beautiful photograph.

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Germanophilic readers! I’m really happy to share with you the cover designs for the German (Swiss) and Swedish editions of The Possessed.

Die Besessenen comes out this fall with the super-cool Kein & Aber. I love the image of some chick prostrated, clearly by the power of literature, on a green grass-like background:

I believe this is a visual allusion to the story of my first-ever magazine photo shoot:

I had to lie on my back on a piece of fluorescent green imitation fur, clutching to my bosom a Russian-language volume of Dostoevsky. The photographer stood over me on a ladder, snapping pictures. His assistant… opined that the pictures were coming out “too sultry”. She said I was showing “too much neck”. Overcoming a sense of injustice – if I hadn’t been lying on my back on some kind of pornographic fur carpet, maybe my neck wouldn’t have looked so sultry – I changed into a higher collar. Because the cover of the Dostoevsky was so brown, we switched to a green leatherette Pushkin. “Look like you’re reading,” the photographer suggested. Opening the book at random, I found myself staring at the epilogue to “The Gypsies”: “There is no defence against fate.”

(You can see the resulting photo on this page – scroll down, or just do a text search for “CAN’T SAY NYET.”)

There is no defense against fate, but against sultriness of the neck, that girl is protected by her upraised arm – just another example of the inimitable Swiss touch of class.

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Long-suffering readers!  As I unpacked my hard-won suitcase earlier this week, I was delighted to re-encounter a “bookmark” I had been using last month – a gift from a very kind Slavic professor at Boston College (where I had the honor of giving a Lowell humanities lecture in October), who had found it in the BC library copy of The Possessed.  ”I thought you might like to have it,” she told me, handing over this small slip of cardboard, adding that perhaps I shouldn’t over-interpret whatever it said about the possibly bilious condition of my readership:

As I turn this box top over in my hands, hoping that the loss of the UPC barcode didn’t prevent any of my esteemed readers from getting any kind of mail-in rebate, I am moved to think of the many and diverse uses that a book may fill for its public, if it is lucky enough to find one in this world.  Appreciated readers!  This Thanksgiving season, I am grateful to all those who have ever found in my work anything to bring them comfort, of any degree or kind.  To paraphrase the immortal Onegin:

…Whatever end
You may have sought in these reflections—
Tumultuous, fond recollections,
Relief from gassy pain and bloating,
Live tableaux, bons mots for quoting,
Or maybe merely faults of grammar—
God grant that in my careless art…
You’ve found at least a crumb or two.
And so let’s part; farewell—adieu!

These are some of the literary works cited in The Possessed, in chronological order by author’s year of birth.

Mir Ali Shir Nevai (Alisher Navoi) (1441–1501). Layli and Majnun (1484); Farhod and Shirin (1484); The Seven Planets (1484); The Language of Birds (1498); The Judgment of Two Languages (1499).

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530). The Baburnama (ca. 1529).

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). Don Quixote (1605, 1615).

William Cowper (1731–1800). The Task (1785). 

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783–1842). Rome, Naples, and Florence (1826); The Red and the Black (1830); The Charterhouse of Parma (1836).

Ivan Lazhechnikov (1792–1869). The House of Ice (1835).

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Eugene Onegin (1833); “The Queen of Spades” (1834); Journey to Arzrum (1835); The Bronze Horseman (1837).

Nikolai Gogol (1809–52). Dead Souls (1842); “The Overcoat” (1842).

Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891). Oblomov (1859).

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). The Idiot (1868–69); Demons (1872).

Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910). Anna Karenina (1875–77); The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); The Living Corpse (1900).

Henry James (1843–1916). The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Sherlock Holmes stories (1892–1927).

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). “The Black Monk” (1894); “Lady with Lapdog” (1899); Uncle Vanya (1899).

Thomas Mann (1875–1955). The Magic Mountain (1924).

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). “Just for joy, take from my palms” (1920); “When Psyche—life—descends to the shades” (1920).

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). “Homeward!” (1925); “At the Top of My Voice” (1930).

Isaac Babel (1894–1940). 1920 Diary; “How It Was Done in Odessa” (1923); Red Cavalry (1926); “In the Basement” (1931); “Guy de Maupassant” (1932).

Abdulla Qodiriy (1894–1938). Past Days (1922–25).

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 –1986). “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940); “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952).

Daniil Kharms (1905–42). “Pushkin and Gogol” (1934).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008). Cancer Ward (1968).

Valentin Pikul (1928–1990). Word and Deed (1975).

Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

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