Youthful readers! As you apparently know already, Vice magazine is actually full of pictures of naked girls doing some crazy stuff.  Naked girls in the 2008 fiction issue alone included, but were not limited to: a naked girl running through a supermarket aisle; a naked girl doing cartwheels around a bonfire; and an otherwise-naked girl wearing pasties and a thong made out of pizza. (Apparently it was the model’s own pizza.)

To learn more about Vice magazine, I consulted the Internet, which is famous for its sober and balanced treatment of controversial subjects. There I found the recent Vice magazine interview with Brazilian sculptor Zé Carlos Garcia, who reconstructs pig heads to resemble human faces:

Q. And then you started to turn pigs’ heads into human heads. Do you have any experiences in plastic surgery? It’s completely different to work with flesh, isn’t it?

A. Yes, but as I said, I did sculptures all my life. Also I just love animals, so that wasn’t a big problem.

Sculpture by Zé Carlos Garcia	Photo by Jamie Taete

Clearly I am super-excited to maybe write for this publication, what with depravity practically being my middle name and all—but to be searingly, revelatorily honest, there is actually an overdue book review I really have to finish before I start anything new. So I shook off the miasma of turpitude and installed myself at the dining table with a draft outline and a delicious, hydrating glass of water (I’m battling a diet Coke addiction).  Things were proceeding, I thought, in a highly seemly and upright manner, when I happened to glance up and was confronted by a tableau of total decadence, which I hastened to capture on video, thus finally joining the worthy demographic of people who make videos of their cats and post them on the Internet (I feel there might be some overlap with the diet Coke addicts):

Well OK dear readers, now I’m off to exercise some ceaseless moral vigilance… otherwise the next thing you know Friday and I will be running around the apartment wearing pumpkin-pie bikinis and making sandals out of chicken feet.

I was unfortunately unable to notify any of my dear readers of this event, because tickets sold out literally 90 minutes after they went on sale, i.e. before I managed to send out an email.  Next time I will write before the tickets go on sale—not a precaution one usually has to take on the D-list, but apparently that’s what happens when one ends up on the same billing with 8 different writers for Wired magazine.

For future reference, the live magazine format turns out to be great—it really takes the “painful” out of “painful literary events.”  Well, and it also takes the “literary” out, since there was so much other stuff—e.g., on Friday, a live interview with artist Wayne White; a demonstration of some inspiringly powerful LED-lit sneakers (unfortunately not these, which I believe can only be worn by taxidermic specimens); a really evocative sound recording of children splashing in a lake in Angkor Wat; some incredibly beautiful/ sinister pictures of racehorses; and, as Solzhenitsyn’s publicists say, much more.

I read a 3.5-minute excerpt from The Possessed, about judging an adolescent boys’ leg contest in Hungary, which I am posting here in an extended, 4-minute version, featuring my conversation with some Hungarian police officers.

Here is another great thing about a live magazine: it turns out that, instead of a Q/A session at the end, they just sell $3 drinks in the lobby and everyone mills around and receives free copies of Mother Jones. In this way I got to meet lots of people to whom I was now known exclusively in my capacity as a judge of adolescent boys’ leg contests; thus after shaking hands, one young man actually stepped back and gestured alluringly toward his own legs, as if to invite a rating. Because of the brief nature of our acquaintance, I didn’t feel comfortable rating his legs, and was greatly relieved when one of the event organizers stepped in for me and said: “8.8.”

It started one day in August, when I received a notice for a missed UPS delivery.  The only package I was expecting at that time was the first uncensored translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, which the publishers had been trying to mail me for some weeks, as part of a campaign to get people to write Solzhenitsyn profiles:

Although Solzhenitsyn died last August, the following individuals are available for interviews: Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia (who made headlines last month when she rebuked Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him); the author’s son, pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is musical director for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the noted Solzhenitsyn scholar. They can discuss:

· Where Solzhenitsyn fits in to the great Russian literary realist tradition bequeathed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky;

· The two decades he spent as an exile in Vermont, stripped of his Russian citizenship.  How he lived in such fear of the KGB that he built a barb wire fence around his home;

· The differences between Stalin’s regime and the Russian leadership of today—and what might happen if Solzhenitsyn were writing today;

· How he damaged his reputation in the West by championing Christianity and railing against American pop culture in a rambling commencement speech at Harvard;

· The “censored” portions of IN THE FIRST CIRCLE, which included suggestions that Stalin had been a double agent, and that the Soviet Union should not possess the atomic bomb;

· And much more.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Being overdue on three deadlines, I am obliged to leave the Solzhenitsyn-profiling to other and better C-list writers, whom I certainly wish a pleasant phone chat with the musical director of the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra on the subject of AS’s famous “rambling speech” of 1978.

When I conveyed my regrets to the publishers, they magnanimously promised to mail me a copy anyway—so that’s what I thought was in the package at the UPS depot.

Why didn’t I hurry to Potrero Hill that minute?  I don’t know exactly, but I somehow kept putting it off.  And Solzhenitsyn’s ghost really taught me a lesson in punctuality, because when I finally got to UPS a week later, what I found waiting for me was not First Circle but my own book proofs, due back to the publishers’ in 10 days.

Since I had originally turned in the MS two months late and, thus, in a huge hurry, I ended up making a ton of corrections. So, what with the lost week the proofs spent in the “first circle” of UPS, I missed that deadline too.  By days and days.   Finally one afternoon I got a polite email from my editor’s assistant, like, “Hey Elif, I just wanted to tell you that there’s a UPS drop box 3.1 miles from your house, where pick-up isn’t till 5:15.  That way we could have the proofs by tomorrow morning when we really need them.”

24 hours later, I had finally reached the point where I could relinquish the MS, and rushed to the closest fully staffed UPS location, which turned out to be staffed fully by incredibly excitable Indian people speaking an almost-incomprehensible variant on English.  While I was there, three different customers came in and left without mailing anything, because they couldn’t understand what the clerks were saying.

My first problem was that they wouldn’t sell me an envelope.  “It won’t fit in envelope!” shouted two clerks at once.  I was like, “Well, that’s odd, because I received it in an envelope,” but they were like, “No, no!  Box, box!”  One of them grabbed the MS, rushed into the back of the store, and returned with an enormous cardboard box completely covered with packing tape.  I was like, “Oh, uh, thanks.”   Then his colleague gave me a huge pile of forms, and I tried to give him the UPS account number, and then they really blew a gasket. They all started shouting at me at once, “Impossible!” and “There is no way bill!”

I probably didn’t improve matters, because I kept thinking they were saying “wabel,” i.e., “label,” so I was all, “But the label is right here!”—until finally one of them wrote “way bill” on a piece of paper. In certain respects, this was one of those clarifications that actually don’t make things any clearer; on the other hand, it did finally make me accept that there was no way they were going to send that box unless I paid for it myself.  I gave them my credit card, and then I think they were a bit sorry they had yelled at me, because one of them said: “We do not charge you for the box.”  Score!  Free enormous cardboard box! However, next-morning delivery to New York by that point cost $67.  This is the first example of a work-related expense.

The second, related example is, it turned out that the vast quantity of my corrections exceeded the in-house composition capacities of FSG, meaning that they have to mail the whole MS to Ghana to be retyped by orphans, at the personal cost to me of $100 plus $1.40 per line, for an estimated total between $750–$1,000.

Because my editor is a really nice guy and doesn’t want me to run out of money, he just sent the proofs back, and I have until Monday to reverse as many changes as possible. It’s like a wonderful video game, where you get $1.40 for each reversible change you find, and if you reach $500 by Monday, then—so I like to think—you have officially crushed your opponent (a Ghanaian orphan).

A nous deux, kiddo, and may the best man win.

1859 Way-Bill from the Pittsburgh to Erie Stagecoach line

Watching Reed’s masterpiece again, this time as a D-list writer, I realized that The Third Man is actually all about the existential condition of the D-list writer.  Holly Martins, an obscure pulp novelist, rushes to Vienna for no reason other than that a school friend has sent him a free plane ticket and offered him a nebulous job writing for a “medical charity.”  This makes perfect sense to me now.  A real obscure writer would totally do that!

On this viewing, the taxi scene immediately reminded me of the night n+1’s Marco Roth and I were rushed through Leipzig to read from our work at an abandoned cotton mill, as part of a literary festival whose organizers, like Harry Lime, had only to offer us free plane tickets in order to lure us to the Germanic East. The young man who drove us to the Baumwollspinerei actually had a blue police light mounted on his dashboard—a joke, but he really was driving very fast.  Fortunately, nobody was dead when we got there, except J. S. Bach.

Another aspect of Martins’s experience, now very familiar to me as an obscure writer, is that he is constantly obliged to introduce himself as a writer to people who have no idea who he is.  He is all like: “Ever heard of Death at Double-X Ranch?”  And they are all like: “No.”  Except for one character, Major Calloway’s comic sidekick, Sergeant Paine, who comes to Calloway’s defense when Martins tries to punch him in a bar:

CALLOWAY:  It’s all right, Paine.  He’s only a scribbler with too much drink in him.  Take Mr. Holly Martins home.
PAINE:  Holly Martins, sir?  The writer?  The author of Death at the Double X Ranch?

The reason I bring this up, dear readers, is that the denouement of The Third Man is in fact a poignant illustration of the tremendous value placed by obscure writers upon their dear readers.  For the whole last hour of the movie, Martins is vacillating about whether to turn Lime in to the police—right up to the famous chase in the sewers, when Lime finally clinches things by shooting Sergeant Paine.  I hadn’t realized before that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, more powerful even than the sight of all those children with meningitis: they killed his most loyal reader.  Martin takes Paine’s gun, runs after Lime, and shoots him dead.  A lesson to us all in reader appreciation, chers collègues.

Bay Area—based dear readers can still see The Third Man on Wednesday at the Castro Best of British Noir series.

In other beautiful fictions, the FSG winter 2010 catalog is now available online, and if waiting for enormous pdf files to load is one of your special hobbies, I warmly encourage you to check it out.  All others will have to content themselves with this excerpt:

In The Possessed we watch [Batuman] investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Although “Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg” certainly has a nice ring, there is this interesting circumstance that I have never, to the best of my knowledge, actually been to Switzerland.  Yet. I figure the Macmillan group can see into the future, and that must be the subject of my next book.  Avanti!

This clock tells the time of the future.