My Life and Thoughts

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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I was totally on time for the reading at Stanford! I knew just where to park my car, and how to get to the Terrace Room. (Seven years of graduate study, my friends.)

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In concluding the story of the n+1 Bay Area tour, mention should also be made of the events at USF and Stanford.

We were actually invited to USF, which made it a unique venue for us. I got there 10 minutes late because I had somehow parked in Cole Valley and then had to walk like half a mile uphill. Would Philip Roth walk half a mile uphill to get to his own literary reading? I don’t know; that’s just the kind of devotion I have to my craft.

We were reading in the law school, directly across from a church devoted to one of my favorite saints: Ignatius of Loyola. When I got to our room it was completely deserted, except by a bearded intellectual who was standing behind a huge coffee dispenser. The sight of an intellectual, partially obscured by a samovar-shaped object, produced a charming Chekhovian effect.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church, San Francisco (across from the USF Law Building)	K.S. Stanislavsky as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899); note samovar in background.

Because the other readers were nowhere to be seen, I concluded that I was in the wrong room. I then realized that I had lost the piece of paper on which I had written the room number, as well as the name of the guy who had invited us, and also Mark Greif’s phone number. Fortunately, I did have the number of Keith Gessen, whose fans have by now brought My Life and Thoughts a total of 79 viewers. Gessen’s closest rival, with 44 hits from Google, is the word-phrase combination: “venerability ‘Joan Silber.”

“Keith Gessen” and “venerability ‘Joan Silber’”: we do two things here, but we do them right.

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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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