Here you can see Marilena and me in our Inferno 33 jerseys, just before the reading, in the Chiostro dello Scalzo:

In addition to the skulls and crossbones at the bases of all the pillars, the cloister was remarkable for its beautiful frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio, one of which represents Dante in the audience of the Sermon on the Mount.  I don’t know if you can tell from such a small picture, but Il Sommo Poeta looks pretty grouchy, as usual:

The following week in Pisa, I interviewed the forensic anthropologist Francesco Mallegni who, together with a team of experts, recently reconstructed Dante’s head and established that he didn’t really look like that.  Virtual modeling techniques have shown that the real Dante was "less severe" than we thought, more "worn out," "human," "perplexed," "less pointy":

Dante cenotaph, Santa Croce Stefano Ricci (1830)	Reconstructed Dante head Mallegni, et al. (2007)

Fascinated as one is by the work of Mallegni (the same forensic mastermind who exhumed Count Ugolino in 2002, proving that the real-life count didn’t have enough teeth to eat his own children), I nonetheless admit that, here at My Life and Thoughts, we were kind of attached to the severe, pointy Dante—that long-suffering poet who solved the problem of the time of writing only by being exiled from Florence for most of his creative life, which he spent writing a poem so long that it "made [him] lean for many years" (Par. XXV)… I guess it comes back to the question of the author photograph: which is the face of the true A-list writer?

For some reason, they didn’t link to any images of the destruction of bells in Soviet times, so I will do it here instead.  There are some great images here, and especially here. 

The article also mentions pictures of the mallet-wielding proletariat; and Soviet youth sitting in bells with cigarettes dangling from their mouths (this photograph was taken outside the Cathedral of the Assumption in Yaroslavl (1929), and reproduced in a terrific article by Richard Hernandez):

In further supplementary material, I will also share with you one editorial outtake, from the very beginning of the article, where Father Roman is first introduced:

“This is Father Roman,” Eck announced, and, turning, I beheld a towering figure, well over six feet tall, with enormous hands and a long beard, wearing a floor-length black habit and a skufya, the black pointed cap of a Russian Orthodox monk. “And this,” she continued, gesturing toward an easel, “is a picture of Father Roman.” A large photograph showed the gray-eyed monk in a belfry, beard blowing in the wind, against a leaden sky crossed by the ropes of Russian church bells.

It was startling to come so suddenly upon an Orthodox monk of such imposing and romantic appearance, accompanied by such a dramatic photographic representation, and somehow the first words that escaped me in Russian were: “Kakoi krasavets!” (“What a good-looking guy!”). Father Roman turned pink, but managed a small, constrained smile.

My editor thought I shouldn’t be seen "losing control" at such an early point in the piece, so he cut those last two sentences.  Nonetheless, here is a picture of Father Roman.

I would like to specially thank Father Roman for all his help with the research and fact-checking—he was really incredibly kind.  I would also like to specially thank my former classmate Luis Campos, who knows everything there is to know about those bells, and who was incredibly generous with his time and research.  Thanks also to Diana Eck, Benjamin Rapoport, Peter Riley, Marina Anisimova, Konstantin Mishurovsky, and all the Harvard students and alumni who were nice enough to talk to me last June. 

I leave you with a link to the Lowell House virtual bell tower, where you can ring the bells for yourself and entertain your neighbors. 

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.

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): 

Babel rented an apartment from Roza Lvovna Ginzburg in 1926 in Chisty pereulok [in Moscow]. <…>  “At first,” said to me her sister, Zinaida  Ginzburg, with a chuckle, “the apartment was to go to Viktor Shklovsky. But Mayakovsky  was honest enough to warn me of possible danger: Shklovsky might turn on the faucet and forget to turn it off. There may have been other candidates but ultimately the choice fell on Babel. When Babel arrived, I asked him if he was married. He replied: ‘If a morning dew or a slight breeze blowing over a haze can be called a wife, then yes.’”

“Oh what a thieving type he was!" said Zinaida, “and he liked lying, too… But what a magnificent, what an irresistible raconteur! I am still seeing his clever little eyes before me. Zhenya, his first wife, was very devoted to Babel’s writings, and of course, everything he wrote was truly brilliant. He was not sentimental, he could empathize with another’s misfortune. But he could be cruel, too.  <…> You are asking me how Babel managed to get his advances from the publishers? Nobody could get bigger advances than Babel. ‘Zinochka,’ he once told me his secret, ‘you must always ask for big numbers.’”

Ha ha, Mayakovsky totally ratted out Shklovsky for being a plumbing-illiterate dreamer!  And FSG had better look out next time, because now I know the Isaac Babel secret for getting big advances.

So anyway, The Possessed will largely consist of already-published things (including “Babel in California,” “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,” and “Summer in Samarkand” and its sequel, which is also coming out in the next n+1)… but there are going to be new things, too, and I’m working really hard on them, so these aren’t going to be big blogging months for me.  Unless of course one morning a magic smiley German lady shows up to notify me of the wonderful surprise:

In the meantime you are all in my thoughts, dear readers, from the garden-gnome genealogists, to the banana pie bicyclists, to the past, present, and future graduate students!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

I was also really impressed by Brian Joseph Davis, who works in some kind of a badass cave—kind of like St. Jerome, but with more audio equipment.

I, however, am the one with a miniature lion!

(He usually sits in that brown pillow… see here.)  Anyway, speaking of writers in caves, with animals, I was recently commemorating a certain very happy occasion at the restaurant Incanto, where I was intrigued to notice a wall mural depicting a tiny Dante Alighieri lurking in a cave.  I guess, like Souvankham Thammavongsa, Dante was one of those poets who liked his workspace to say he was in big trouble and had been sent away.