My Life and Thoughts

Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

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Dear readers!  It took some time, but I finally outsmarted those turkeys and am back at my desk, just in time for the impending release of The Possessed, which you can preorder right now from Amazon for the low, low price of $10.12.  Those with concerns about my interns’ nutritional intake are particularly encouraged you to order from one of the links on this page: that way, thanks to the Amazon Associates program, we get 4% extra per copy.

That means for every copy you buy, we get $0.40: the cost of approximately 1.78 fl. oz. Ensure High Protein Complete Balanced Nutrition Drink!

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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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Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?

Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years.  What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”? 

No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!  

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As I was scrolling through headlines about the Istanbul bombing, I came across one potentially less depressing Turkish news item, from Sabah: “Mental Patient Beats Doctor in Elevator for Six Floors.” Tor the first time in ages, I found myself thinking of Grey’s Anatomy, a show I used to watch while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation. Grey’s Anatomy is so famous for its use of elevators that, even in the homeland of Genette, young girls are making video montages about it: in the words of Youtube user piluka6: “all happens in that elevator!”

The elevator in Grey’s Anatomy functions much like the inn in Part I of Don Quijote: all plot problems are resolved by dumping the relevant characters in there and letting them sort it out. The characters themselves openly acknowledge this formal property of the elevator, in metatextual remarks such as: “I don’t want any drama today, I’m taking the stairs”; or (meaningfully): “Anything can happen in the elevator.” This is an example of what Viktor Shklovsky called “laying bare the device,” and it always struck me as rather daring because, when you take a cold hard look at the formal narrative possibilities afforded by the device of the hospital elevator, “inexhaustible” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

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