MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Which would you rather be – endemoniado or poseído? I saw both of these Spanish covers on separate occasions, before I knew which was being used.

I am so happy and excited to share with you the result…

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Irrepressible readers!  My loyal intern and I are well into month 14 of promoting The Possessed, which comes out in May in both Spain and Turkey.  Guess what this means?  It means more interviews!  I was just chatting over tea with Milliyet’s very lovely Zeynep Miraç Özkartal.  It is a rare Turkish interview that goes by without my being invited to talk smack about national treasure Orhan Pamuk.  Today, I got so excited talking about why Gogol is funnier than Orhan Pamuk that I somehow caused my tea glass (an Ajda glass, as it happens) to shatter into several pieces, covering me with both tea and broken glass.  (That is how I was occupied at the beginning of the royal wedding – I know because, when I went to get napkins, I saw it on TV.)

Shortly thereafter the photographer came, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on a stone parapet, my shirt (and a few glass splinters) stuck to my body with tea. I had to surrender my jacket for aesthetic purposes.  Bracing myself against a rather strong wind, I thought: “What if I fall off this stone parapet and break my head open?”  It was one of the many, many occasions I have found in the past weeks to take comfort in the words of Marcus Aurelius: “The good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.”

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The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

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When we were in Barcelona, I gave my traveling companion another chance to prove what a good sport he is, by dragging him on a day trip to the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat. Here, one day in the sixteenth century, St. Ignatius of Loyola almost threw himself into a hole in his room, because of his inability to stop writing his spiritual confessions. This was an important moment in the history of graphomania.
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