My Life and Thoughts

This story begins last Friday, when I went to the Stanford library to check out some books about the Musin-Pushkin family.  (I think I might write a novel about someone who is obsessed with the Musin-Pushkins.)  And let me tell you, it took a long time to round up all those books.  My webmaster can confirm this since he was waiting for me outside, drinking espressos and getting really bored. 

Then when I finally got to the check-out desk, I got stuck behind a crazy old lady in a bright red Chanel suit and matching lipstick, who not only checked out like a million books but also prolonged the transaction with a 10-minute commentary about how she will only read books whose call numbers start with PR, because they “come from the Commonwealth.”  “Forbearance,” I counseled myself: “Someday you, too, may be a crazy old lady who is obsessed with call numbers.”

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Yesterday was Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the Historical Novel with the Stanford Working Group on the Novel. It was so great! I learned a lot about minor characters. The Working Group is co-organized by Alex Woloch, director of the Center for the Study of the Novel and author of an interesting book on minor characters, which my former classmate Na’ama Rokem gave me for my birthday in 2005.

Alex Woloch The One vs. the Many	Ilya Bernstein Self-Portrait entelechy: mind & culture

I recently realized that Alex Woloch and I are further connected, like two minor characters in the Bildung of some romantic monster, through the central life-problem of the magazine n+1.

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I was just preparing some questions for Luba Golburt’s upcoming presentation on Pushkin and the historical novel, when I made an interesting discovery. If you go to Google Books and look up The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, the book whose cover is displayed is not The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, but, rather, Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known, by Major General O. O. Howard.

Seriously: check it out.

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It seems like just yesterday that I was at Stanford’s Building 460, reading with n+1 magazine; but already the time has come for me to make another appearance in this fine edifice. On January 23 at 5pm in Building 460, Room 429, I will be a respondent for Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the historical romance, sponsored by the Working Group on the Novel.

The idea of the Working Group is that everyone reads a paper and a designated novel in advance; then, at the appointed time and place, they all confront the author of the paper, who sits at a long table with a respondent (me), who “kicks things off” with some hard-hitting questions that cut through the rhetoric and get to what really matters to you and me. Dinner will be provided. Think you can handle it? Here are the readings: Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; and Luba Golburt’s “Seeing History: The Russian Historical Novel between Sir Walter Scott and Les Jeunes-France.”

You don’t actually need a very firm idea of who the Jeunes-France were, in order to appreciate Luba’s paper; nonetheless, I share with you the definition from the Tresor de la Langue Française Informatisé:

A group of eccentric young writers and artists, wearing long hair, forked beards, velvet doublets, and soft fedoras, who, from 1830 on, exaggerated the theories of the Romantic school, drawing notice with their behavior and with their literary and artistic opinions, which tended to alarm the “bourgeoisie”… The most flattering thing for a Jeune-France at that time was to persuade his parents to let him wear a sky-blue habit and the yellow breeches of a young Werther (SAINTE-BEUVE, Literary Portraits).

Alphonse Daudet	Young Werther

Members included Alphonse Daudet (above), who was possibly wearing yellow breeches when that picture was taken… unless the yellow breeches were part of a different look from the forked beard and floppy hat…? I’ll be asking Prof. Golburt when we’re playing “hardball” next Wednesday. (more…)

Happy new year, dear readers, whoever you may be! Whatever you seek from 2008—be it

tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots
or faults of grammar—

may you find, in this blog, at least a few crumbs!

Some of you may recall that I spent the past seven years getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Well, in 2008 I will be putting this degree to use as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford, where I’m going to teach an “academic writing workshop” for seniors who are writing interdisciplinary honors theses in the humanities. I am very excited at this opportunity to convert my own recent dissertation-writing experiences into beautiful pedagogic theories. “Do as I say, not as I did,” I will tell my students, whom I will be instructing in the use of EndNote.

Do I myself use EndNote? This is a technical question. Many scholars don’t; I remember one professor who renounced it on the grounds that he didn’t want any superstructure mediating his relationship with the text. For me, it was always more about how EndNote costs $250. But now I have scored a free copy from the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (w00t!), so you know, bring it on. (more…)