My Life and Thoughts

The reason for the cat moratorium is, I’m worried that if I keep going about my cat, and saying nothing about my life as a relatively obscure writer, people will assume that I have stopped writing, or even that I have run out of money. This would be a really incorrect assumption since in fact what I have stopped doing is getting published, and let me take this moment to assign blame where it is due, viz.: the mortgage crisis, the war in Georgia, the 2008 elections, and the Wall Street meltdown, all of which have been no joke for our nation’s more junior producers of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism.

“Someday, the world will be ready for the story of comedy traffic school.”

Personally I can tell you that nothing I wrote for the past 6 months is going to be published until after the elections—at which point, however, I am told that the presses will be flooded with interesting pieces about barrel-making and the feuding grandchildren of minor Symbolists. Therefore my message to you today, esteemed readers, is a message of change, and a message of hope. In America’s troubled times, you might not always see my footprints in the sand, but later you’ll see I was there, carrying somebody, or at least doing something, I think.

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Today I will tell you the story of my bittersweet first experiences on MySpace.  Sometime last fall I got an email with the subject line “Secret MySpace Project,” from Sam Frank: former n+1 copyeditor and current editor of Triple Canopy.   Sam sent out a number of  photographs of “defaced faces” by the multimedia artist Jon Kessler.  The faces were exhibited in a Drawing Center show called: You Have 43 Friends.  Sam, who had copyedited the catalogue of Kessler’s The Palace at 4 A.M. (the text of which includes ”a fictionalized interview between Jon, a four-star general, and the general’s youngest son, a Bard curatorial student“), decided it would be cool if he could get 33 of his friends to make MySpace profiles for 33 of the defaced faces. 

You Have 43 Friends	dissidentguy15

By disposition I am naturally quite sympathetic to secret art projects, and I was particularly happy to be assigned my ”first-choice” defaced face, for whom I set up a profile under the name of dissidentguy15. 

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Patient readers! In explanation for the long silence, let me tell you that I have been researching and writing a really time-consuming article, the precise subject of which should remain a wonderful surprise to those of you to whom I am not always personally unburdening myself about it, but, it involves the Russian Orthodox church. This is how I found my way to the Interfax Religion site: a resource which I cannot recommend warmly enough to my dear readers.  It is, unlike my blog, updated many times a day, with important stories such as, “Three Bronze Angels to Carry the First Monument to Enema in Zheleznovodsk“:

Stavropol, June 16, Interfax - The monument to one of the most wide-spread medical treatments will open in health resort town of Zheleznovodsk.

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Could the world survive one more day without learning the further developments in the story of my beautiful friendship with the German literary establishment?  I thought it was safer not to find out.  

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Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag).  It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.

In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.

A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.)  As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.

In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list.  In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…

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