My Life and Thoughts

Dear readers!  It has been a long time since I was able to update you on my life as a D-list writer.  But I’ve really had my hands full with the arduous transition to the C-list.   There are just all kinds of unexpected things you have to think about.  No sooner than you have finished wrestling with the ontological problem of the author photograph, and are looking forward to a well-earned respite from self-consciousness, than you are liable to find yourself involved in email exchanges like the following, which took place between me and my my much-admired editor at FSG:

Much-Admired Editor. “Dear Elif!!! Would you send me a photo of yourself? Let me explain!! I was talking to our head of paperback design about possible covers for your book. One idea that occurred to me was–I’d like to see a funny drawing of you, of an Elif-ish person, making her way through the words. Of course, if you think this is a bad idea, I’ll forget all about it. And if you have some idea for how the cover should look, tell me!!! My boss wants to see an Elif-ish person peering up—possessedly—from a big book. Or maybe head-down behind a big mise-en-abyme of a cover of THE POSSESSED…”

Elif (thinking to herself: “The next time I write a book it is so not going to be about my idiosyncratic and charming vision of anything). “Dear Lorin!!!  To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about a cartoonish representation of me on the cover. Aren’t I kind of a parody of myself already ?  I think the idea I had for the cover in the back of my mind was a battalion of possessed-looking matryoshki… have you ever seen a whole army of them on a table, staring at you, like something out of Hoffman?”

Editor. “…As it happens, the designer and I had already discussed matryoshka dolls. We both really liked your creepy-armies-of-matryoshkas as a visual joke; the trouble is, it doesn’t say READING. It doesn’t connote books and their pleasures, or wonderful-Elif-in-the-universe.”

Elif. “…Well, OK I guess, as long as it isn’t like one of those pages they do in the New Yorker with the author’s enormous head surrounded by weird floating apparitions…”

Editor. “…No, we weren’t thinking of that guy. More like Roz Chast!”

I thought that was a pretty good joke.  But… it wasn’t a joke!  They really got Roz Chast to do this incredibly beautiful cover!  I observe merely in passing, ain’t no Elif-ish people peering out of nowhere.

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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.

Dear readers!  I’ve been really delinquent with My Life and Thoughts.  You must all have thought I was either dead, or not thinking anything. In fact, I’m writing a book!  The working title is The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and it’s coming out as an FSG “paperback original,” so my thrifty readers don’t have to wait for the hardcovers to get remaindered!  And, I mean, which among us is in this game for the money, right?

When I mentioned the subject of advances to my fellow blogger Grisha Freidin, he kindly shared with me the following anecdote, from the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings (ed. Gregory Freidin):

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Dear readers!  I am happy to relate that my piece called "The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation" is in the February issue of Harper’s magazine, which subscribers can already read online—it has a really amazing piece of original artwork by Steven Dana which I will post here, if it turns out not to violate any copyright.  In the meantime, tiny, law-abiding people, like the ones who live in Lech Walesa’s mustache, might enjoy looking at a tiny, legal reproduction.  And also at a picture of home and its environs, back in the day.

"The Murder of Leo Tolstoy" is about how I went to an International Tolstoy Conference at Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana, and tried to determine whether Tolstoy died of natural causes or was… MURDERED.  It has some interesting generic features, e.g. I originally wrote it in the form of a short story.  Then my editor was like, "But it all really happened, right?", and I was like, “Well, pretty much,” and, to make a long story short, it was put in the Miscellany section, as a literary memoir, and was even assigned a fact-checker—you know, to fact-check my memoir.

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Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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