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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Since the publication of The Possessed, I have occasionally received emails from readers in exotic locations, offering to send me things.  To such readers I have been replying that what I would really like is a picture of my book in said exotic location(s)—much as George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air asks wedding guests to take pictures of a cardboard cutout of herself and her fiancé, as a substitute for the honeymoon they can’t afford.  It’s like double-entry bookkeeping: I have to stay here at my desk, but at least my book can have some fun, right?

Well, dear readers, today I am really happy to share with you the first such pictures I received, from Israel via Avi Steinberg, author of the forthcoming Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.  I’m reading Running the Books now, with great enjoyment, and also with increasing amazement at how simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different it is from The Possessed.  In both books, an unemployed Harvard graduate, having attempted unsuccessfully to write a novel, is driven by lack of health insurance to seek a semi-permanent position in a hermetic community where books are taken very seriously, leading to seriocomic adventures.  In Steinberg’s case, the hermetic community was, not graduate school, but a prison library.

At the St. Louis Airport	At Gadara, Israel

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Inexorable readers!  I write to you with wonderful news!  It looks like FSG finally caved under the pressure of all those 3-star reviews… because The Possessed is now available on Kindle!  My one regret is that there is now pretty much no incentive to develop the S W Foska’s brilliant idea about making the paperback edition convertible into a Brita filter.  I guess it’s proof that great minds think alike, because my my smartest intern, Friday, who is also in charge of R&D here at My Life and Thoughts, actually explored this idea a few months ago by spilling a large glass of water onto my copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which promptly expanded to approximately 250% of its original, already non-negligible, size.  Notwithstanding these spectacular results, there are still a few bugs that have to be ironed out before we can go commercial—e.g., the water that actually made it through the “filter” looked sort of gray and unpalatable (I guess these are the visible traces of literary knowledge).

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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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An ordinary guy, ordinary in every way, except one… he is susceptible to catnip.  Is it a blessing or a curse?  Did God make him that way, or was he conditioned by his time?  Who is in the right—him or society? Dear readers, I really have a feeling about this one.  It might just be my foothold to the B-minus list…

more soon…