Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…

The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.

MONDAY, 5.1: “Noted playwrights Eric Bogosian and Christopher Shinn read and discuss their newest work” at Housing Works Used Book Cafe. 7:00pm, FREE. And, at The Strand, Colson Whitehead reads from his latest novel, Apex Hides the Hurt. 6:30pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, buckle up as teenage girls at the height of their power take over Brooklyn Independent’s programming for a wild ride through two shorts and a feature at Barbes. 7:00pm, FREE.

TUESDAY, 5.2: Robert Frenay, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired By Living Things, which is being syndicated in full (and for free) online at pulsethebook.com, reads from his work as part of KGB’s Nonfiction Night, along with Spike Gillespie. [Full disclosure, as always: Robert is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. And, Mo Pitkin’s plays host to a sure-to-be-lively “intergenerational dialogue” on “The ‘F’ Word: What Happened to Feminism?”, with guests Nancy K. Miller, “who came of age in the 1950s and came to feminism in the 1970s, trailblazing the path for female academics in an era when there were practically none, devoting her intellectual life to the pursuit, and practice, of feminism” and Kamy Wicoff, who “came of age in the 1970s and came to feminism in the 1990s, when feminism seemed to have become an academic specialty—or worse, a historical artifact—and is devoting her intellectual life to trying to understand where this vacuum leaves women of her generation.” Snap! Presented by The New Shul with moderator Esther Perel, the evening features a roundtable discussion and open debate. Highly recommended. 6:30pm, $10. Later on in the evening, The Paris Review’s “Spring Revel” honors Joan Didion. 8:30pm, $100.

WEDNESDAY, 5.3: Shhh… PostSecret’s having a New York event. A tip: steer clear of this guy at the afterparty. And this one, too. Not sure how to spot them? This might help. 7:00pm, FREE. Perfectly positioned for spring, there’s the “Eat This Book Party” atop The Delancey, with cupcakes, of course. 7:00pm, FREE.

THURSDAY, 5.4: The PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Bill Gordon (Mary After All) and Judy Doenges (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). [Full disclosure, as always: Bill is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, Cheryl B presents her superbly of the moment Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos. 8:00pm, FREE.

FRIDAY, 5.5: Absurdly talented singer-songwriter Devon Sproule performs at Pete’s Candy Store. 11:pm, FREE.

SATURDAY, 5.6: And, via our favorite semi-anonymous correspondents at Living with Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, “The Poetry Bash will feature verses in which the poet will take on the personae of the city’s geography, history and lore. Poet Max Blagg takes on the personae of the Chelsea Hotel:I am the Chelsea Hotel/ red brick walls /wrapped in black iron lace/ memory of a thousand/ parties still rocking /the staircase that runs through my heart /all the way to the starlit roof/ where Merce’s dancers once/ kneeled to face the dawn./ Hash smoke in the hallways/ ghost of Janis Joplin…. . At the City University of New York Graduate Center.” 11:00am – 5:00pm, FREE. And, let me guess — it starts at 4:20 but you plan to get there about six…ish. Wait, how far is it from Crif Dogs again? It’s the worldwide Million Marijuana March, dude.

SUNDAY, 5.7: I’ll take a note from the Sunday entry on the daily hours board at my favorite lunch spot: “Rest.”

In interviews, the chemistry between questioner and subject is everything.

While I’ve long admired George Saunders‘ writing (and once even suggested that he run for president), I didn’t think I’d manage much more than a serviceable question-and-answer session if I interviewed him myself. But my email pal Roy Kesey knew precisely what questions to ask. The interview that follows this introduction is Kesey’s handiwork.

For the uninitiated: George Saunders has published two short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

He has conducted oil exploration in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse. One of his most wrenching and least representative (but still frequently hilarious) stories is “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a nonfiction piece about his abortive stint as a roofer. Nowadays Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse.

His latest book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, appeared recently at bookstores near you.

 
Says Mr. Kesey: This interview was conducted over the course of five days, between the 19th and the 23rd of August, 2005. Throughout the interview, Mr. Saunders wore a brownish cowboy hat with a python-skin band, a sheer black cocktail dress of scalloped Thai chiffon, and yellow flip-flops. Actually, that may or may not be true. This interview was conducted via email. We have no idea what he was wearing.

Also, please note that the entire interview, if translated into Cantonese, would form a phonemic anagram. That was entirely coincidental.
 

RK: Good evening, Mr. Saunders. According to my sources, you have a new book out, a novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Word on the street, and behind the Shop-n-Save, and on the porch, and in many of Beijing’s top-drawer massage parlors, is that it’s a political fable. Any truth to that?
 

GS: I’m not really sure what to call it. It started out as a kids’ book, but then suddenly became about genocide. So much for the marketing tie-ins! But I’m glad they’re talking about it in the massage parlors. It just goes to show you that phone marketing really does work.

The way I usually work is to try and find some little thing — a concept or a bit of dialogue or whatever — and then let a story grow from there, with as little preconception as possible. In this case, Lane Smith, who illustrated a previous book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip) suggested I try to write a story where all the characters were abstract shapes. So I tried that. At some point — I can’t exactly remember when — this line came out about there being a country that was so small, only one of its citizens could live there at a time. And this raised certain questions. So that’s how a story like this proceeds, for me.
 

RK: Oh, no question about it — if you’ve got the masseuses on your side, the battle is won.

I want to get back to the new book in a minute, but just now I’m fascinated with this business of “with as little preconception as possible.” That gets right to the heart of the mystery, doesn’t it? I’ve seen you mention Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” elsewhere, heard you talk about how not knowing where a story is headed is actually a prerequisite for getting it on its way. Do you have a favorite metaphor for the way things build or accrete in spite of your not knowing? Magnetism, maybe? Gravity? Dust-bunnies? And a quick follow-up: you’ve also said elsewhere (again with the elsewheres!) that you know a story is working when it manifests a “complexity that results from 1) truth, and 2) accretion.” Could you explore the dark side of that coin for us?

How do you know when things are building in the “wrong” direction — and what would “wrong” mean in that context?
 

GS: Wow, okay. Excellent. I can see this is going to be fun.

I do have a favorite metaphor for this — but before I get to it, a disclaimer or apology of sorts. One of the weird things about being interviewed is that, if you’ve been interviewed before, and had one of those enviable moments where you answer sensibly, and actually come up with exactly the right thing to express what you’re trying to express, then you’re in a pickle: next time you’re asked that question or one similar, do you use the example you thought of before, or not? If you’re trying to be truthful and accurate and precise, you probably should — it came to you in a moment of revelation. But then you get to a certain point where these things start following you around — you start sounding like: “Ah, you’re asking about PLOT. Allow me to invoke Chestnut #9!” Continue reading…

Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…

The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.

MONDAY, 5.1: “Noted playwrights Eric Bogosian and Christopher Shinn read and discuss their newest work” at Housing Works Used Book Cafe. 7:00pm, FREE. And, at The Strand, Colson Whitehead reads from his latest novel, Apex Hides the Hurt. 6:30pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, buckle up as teenage girls at the height of their power take over Brooklyn Independent’s programming for a wild ride through two shorts and a feature at Barbes. 7:00pm, FREE.

TUESDAY, 5.2: Robert Frenay, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired By Living Things, which is being syndicated in full (and for free) online at pulsethebook.com, reads from his work as part of KGB’s Nonfiction Night, along with Spike Gillespie. [Full disclosure, as always: Robert is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. And, Mo Pitkin’s plays host to a sure-to-be-lively “intergenerational dialogue” on “The ‘F’ Word: What Happened to Feminism?”, with guests Nancy K. Miller, “who came of age in the 1950s and came to feminism in the 1970s, trailblazing the path for female academics in an era when there were practically none, devoting her intellectual life to the pursuit, and practice, of feminism” and Kamy Wicoff, who “came of age in the 1970s and came to feminism in the 1990s, when feminism seemed to have become an academic specialty—or worse, a historical artifact—and is devoting her intellectual life to trying to understand where this vacuum leaves women of her generation.” Snap! Presented by The New Shul with moderator Esther Perel, the evening features a roundtable discussion and open debate. Highly recommended. 6:30pm, $10. Later on in the evening, The Paris Review’s “Spring Revel” honors Joan Didion. 8:30pm, $100.

WEDNESDAY, 5.3: Shhh… PostSecret’s having a New York event. A tip: steer clear of this guy at the afterparty. And this one, too. Not sure how to spot them? This might help. 7:00pm, FREE. Perfectly positioned for spring, there’s the “Eat This Book Party” atop The Delancey, with cupcakes, of course. 7:00pm, FREE.

THURSDAY, 5.4: The PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Bill Gordon (Mary After All) and Judy Doenges (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). [Full disclosure, as always: Bill is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, Cheryl B presents her superbly of the moment Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos. 8:00pm, FREE.

FRIDAY, 5.5: Absurdly talented singer-songwriter Devon Sproule performs at Pete’s Candy Store. 11:pm, FREE.

SATURDAY, 5.6: And, via our favorite semi-anonymous correspondents at Living with Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, “The Poetry Bash will feature verses in which the poet will take on the personae of the city’s geography, history and lore. Poet Max Blagg takes on the personae of the Chelsea Hotel:I am the Chelsea Hotel/ red brick walls /wrapped in black iron lace/ memory of a thousand/ parties still rocking /the staircase that runs through my heart /all the way to the starlit roof/ where Merce’s dancers once/ kneeled to face the dawn./ Hash smoke in the hallways/ ghost of Janis Joplin…. . At the City University of New York Graduate Center.” 11:00am – 5:00pm, FREE. And, let me guess — it starts at 4:20 but you plan to get there about six…ish. Wait, how far is it from Crif Dogs again? It’s the worldwide Million Marijuana March, dude.

SUNDAY, 5.7: I’ll take a note from the Sunday entry on the daily hours board at my favorite lunch spot: “Rest.”

In interviews, the chemistry between questioner and subject is everything.

While I’ve long admired George Saunders‘ writing (and once even suggested that he run for president), I didn’t think I’d manage much more than a serviceable question-and-answer session if I interviewed him myself. But my email pal Roy Kesey knew precisely what questions to ask. The interview that follows this introduction is Kesey’s handiwork.

For the uninitiated: George Saunders has published two short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

He has conducted oil exploration in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse. One of his most wrenching and least representative (but still frequently hilarious) stories is “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a nonfiction piece about his abortive stint as a roofer. Nowadays Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse.

His latest book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, appeared recently at bookstores near you.

 
Says Mr. Kesey: This interview was conducted over the course of five days, between the 19th and the 23rd of August, 2005. Throughout the interview, Mr. Saunders wore a brownish cowboy hat with a python-skin band, a sheer black cocktail dress of scalloped Thai chiffon, and yellow flip-flops. Actually, that may or may not be true. This interview was conducted via email. We have no idea what he was wearing.

Also, please note that the entire interview, if translated into Cantonese, would form a phonemic anagram. That was entirely coincidental.
 

RK: Good evening, Mr. Saunders. According to my sources, you have a new book out, a novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Word on the street, and behind the Shop-n-Save, and on the porch, and in many of Beijing’s top-drawer massage parlors, is that it’s a political fable. Any truth to that?
 

GS: I’m not really sure what to call it. It started out as a kids’ book, but then suddenly became about genocide. So much for the marketing tie-ins! But I’m glad they’re talking about it in the massage parlors. It just goes to show you that phone marketing really does work.

The way I usually work is to try and find some little thing — a concept or a bit of dialogue or whatever — and then let a story grow from there, with as little preconception as possible. In this case, Lane Smith, who illustrated a previous book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip) suggested I try to write a story where all the characters were abstract shapes. So I tried that. At some point — I can’t exactly remember when — this line came out about there being a country that was so small, only one of its citizens could live there at a time. And this raised certain questions. So that’s how a story like this proceeds, for me.
 

RK: Oh, no question about it — if you’ve got the masseuses on your side, the battle is won.

I want to get back to the new book in a minute, but just now I’m fascinated with this business of “with as little preconception as possible.” That gets right to the heart of the mystery, doesn’t it? I’ve seen you mention Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” elsewhere, heard you talk about how not knowing where a story is headed is actually a prerequisite for getting it on its way. Do you have a favorite metaphor for the way things build or accrete in spite of your not knowing? Magnetism, maybe? Gravity? Dust-bunnies? And a quick follow-up: you’ve also said elsewhere (again with the elsewheres!) that you know a story is working when it manifests a “complexity that results from 1) truth, and 2) accretion.” Could you explore the dark side of that coin for us?

How do you know when things are building in the “wrong” direction — and what would “wrong” mean in that context?
 

GS: Wow, okay. Excellent. I can see this is going to be fun.

I do have a favorite metaphor for this — but before I get to it, a disclaimer or apology of sorts. One of the weird things about being interviewed is that, if you’ve been interviewed before, and had one of those enviable moments where you answer sensibly, and actually come up with exactly the right thing to express what you’re trying to express, then you’re in a pickle: next time you’re asked that question or one similar, do you use the example you thought of before, or not? If you’re trying to be truthful and accurate and precise, you probably should — it came to you in a moment of revelation. But then you get to a certain point where these things start following you around — you start sounding like: “Ah, you’re asking about PLOT. Allow me to invoke Chestnut #9!” Continue reading…

Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…

The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.

MONDAY, 5.1: “Noted playwrights Eric Bogosian and Christopher Shinn read and discuss their newest work” at Housing Works Used Book Cafe. 7:00pm, FREE. And, at The Strand, Colson Whitehead reads from his latest novel, Apex Hides the Hurt. 6:30pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, buckle up as teenage girls at the height of their power take over Brooklyn Independent’s programming for a wild ride through two shorts and a feature at Barbes. 7:00pm, FREE.

TUESDAY, 5.2: Robert Frenay, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired By Living Things, which is being syndicated in full (and for free) online at pulsethebook.com, reads from his work as part of KGB’s Nonfiction Night, along with Spike Gillespie. [Full disclosure, as always: Robert is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. And, Mo Pitkin’s plays host to a sure-to-be-lively “intergenerational dialogue” on “The ‘F’ Word: What Happened to Feminism?”, with guests Nancy K. Miller, “who came of age in the 1950s and came to feminism in the 1970s, trailblazing the path for female academics in an era when there were practically none, devoting her intellectual life to the pursuit, and practice, of feminism” and Kamy Wicoff, who “came of age in the 1970s and came to feminism in the 1990s, when feminism seemed to have become an academic specialty—or worse, a historical artifact—and is devoting her intellectual life to trying to understand where this vacuum leaves women of her generation.” Snap! Presented by The New Shul with moderator Esther Perel, the evening features a roundtable discussion and open debate. Highly recommended. 6:30pm, $10. Later on in the evening, The Paris Review’s “Spring Revel” honors Joan Didion. 8:30pm, $100.

WEDNESDAY, 5.3: Shhh… PostSecret’s having a New York event. A tip: steer clear of this guy at the afterparty. And this one, too. Not sure how to spot them? This might help. 7:00pm, FREE. Perfectly positioned for spring, there’s the “Eat This Book Party” atop The Delancey, with cupcakes, of course. 7:00pm, FREE.

THURSDAY, 5.4: The PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Bill Gordon (Mary After All) and Judy Doenges (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). [Full disclosure, as always: Bill is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, Cheryl B presents her superbly of the moment Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos. 8:00pm, FREE.

FRIDAY, 5.5: Absurdly talented singer-songwriter Devon Sproule performs at Pete’s Candy Store. 11:pm, FREE.

SATURDAY, 5.6: And, via our favorite semi-anonymous correspondents at Living with Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, “The Poetry Bash will feature verses in which the poet will take on the personae of the city’s geography, history and lore. Poet Max Blagg takes on the personae of the Chelsea Hotel:I am the Chelsea Hotel/ red brick walls /wrapped in black iron lace/ memory of a thousand/ parties still rocking /the staircase that runs through my heart /all the way to the starlit roof/ where Merce’s dancers once/ kneeled to face the dawn./ Hash smoke in the hallways/ ghost of Janis Joplin…. . At the City University of New York Graduate Center.” 11:00am – 5:00pm, FREE. And, let me guess — it starts at 4:20 but you plan to get there about six…ish. Wait, how far is it from Crif Dogs again? It’s the worldwide Million Marijuana March, dude.

SUNDAY, 5.7: I’ll take a note from the Sunday entry on the daily hours board at my favorite lunch spot: “Rest.”

In interviews, the chemistry between questioner and subject is everything.

While I’ve long admired George Saunders‘ writing (and once even suggested that he run for president), I didn’t think I’d manage much more than a serviceable question-and-answer session if I interviewed him myself. But my email pal Roy Kesey knew precisely what questions to ask. The interview that follows this introduction is Kesey’s handiwork.

For the uninitiated: George Saunders has published two short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

He has conducted oil exploration in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse. One of his most wrenching and least representative (but still frequently hilarious) stories is “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a nonfiction piece about his abortive stint as a roofer. Nowadays Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse.

His latest book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, appeared recently at bookstores near you.

 
Says Mr. Kesey: This interview was conducted over the course of five days, between the 19th and the 23rd of August, 2005. Throughout the interview, Mr. Saunders wore a brownish cowboy hat with a python-skin band, a sheer black cocktail dress of scalloped Thai chiffon, and yellow flip-flops. Actually, that may or may not be true. This interview was conducted via email. We have no idea what he was wearing.

Also, please note that the entire interview, if translated into Cantonese, would form a phonemic anagram. That was entirely coincidental.
 

RK: Good evening, Mr. Saunders. According to my sources, you have a new book out, a novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Word on the street, and behind the Shop-n-Save, and on the porch, and in many of Beijing’s top-drawer massage parlors, is that it’s a political fable. Any truth to that?
 

GS: I’m not really sure what to call it. It started out as a kids’ book, but then suddenly became about genocide. So much for the marketing tie-ins! But I’m glad they’re talking about it in the massage parlors. It just goes to show you that phone marketing really does work.

The way I usually work is to try and find some little thing — a concept or a bit of dialogue or whatever — and then let a story grow from there, with as little preconception as possible. In this case, Lane Smith, who illustrated a previous book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip) suggested I try to write a story where all the characters were abstract shapes. So I tried that. At some point — I can’t exactly remember when — this line came out about there being a country that was so small, only one of its citizens could live there at a time. And this raised certain questions. So that’s how a story like this proceeds, for me.
 

RK: Oh, no question about it — if you’ve got the masseuses on your side, the battle is won.

I want to get back to the new book in a minute, but just now I’m fascinated with this business of “with as little preconception as possible.” That gets right to the heart of the mystery, doesn’t it? I’ve seen you mention Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” elsewhere, heard you talk about how not knowing where a story is headed is actually a prerequisite for getting it on its way. Do you have a favorite metaphor for the way things build or accrete in spite of your not knowing? Magnetism, maybe? Gravity? Dust-bunnies? And a quick follow-up: you’ve also said elsewhere (again with the elsewheres!) that you know a story is working when it manifests a “complexity that results from 1) truth, and 2) accretion.” Could you explore the dark side of that coin for us?

How do you know when things are building in the “wrong” direction — and what would “wrong” mean in that context?
 

GS: Wow, okay. Excellent. I can see this is going to be fun.

I do have a favorite metaphor for this — but before I get to it, a disclaimer or apology of sorts. One of the weird things about being interviewed is that, if you’ve been interviewed before, and had one of those enviable moments where you answer sensibly, and actually come up with exactly the right thing to express what you’re trying to express, then you’re in a pickle: next time you’re asked that question or one similar, do you use the example you thought of before, or not? If you’re trying to be truthful and accurate and precise, you probably should — it came to you in a moment of revelation. But then you get to a certain point where these things start following you around — you start sounding like: “Ah, you’re asking about PLOT. Allow me to invoke Chestnut #9!” Continue reading…

Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…

The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.

MONDAY, 5.1: “Noted playwrights Eric Bogosian and Christopher Shinn read and discuss their newest work” at Housing Works Used Book Cafe. 7:00pm, FREE. And, at The Strand, Colson Whitehead reads from his latest novel, Apex Hides the Hurt. 6:30pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, buckle up as teenage girls at the height of their power take over Brooklyn Independent’s programming for a wild ride through two shorts and a feature at Barbes. 7:00pm, FREE.

TUESDAY, 5.2: Robert Frenay, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired By Living Things, which is being syndicated in full (and for free) online at pulsethebook.com, reads from his work as part of KGB’s Nonfiction Night, along with Spike Gillespie. [Full disclosure, as always: Robert is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. And, Mo Pitkin’s plays host to a sure-to-be-lively “intergenerational dialogue” on “The ‘F’ Word: What Happened to Feminism?”, with guests Nancy K. Miller, “who came of age in the 1950s and came to feminism in the 1970s, trailblazing the path for female academics in an era when there were practically none, devoting her intellectual life to the pursuit, and practice, of feminism” and Kamy Wicoff, who “came of age in the 1970s and came to feminism in the 1990s, when feminism seemed to have become an academic specialty—or worse, a historical artifact—and is devoting her intellectual life to trying to understand where this vacuum leaves women of her generation.” Snap! Presented by The New Shul with moderator Esther Perel, the evening features a roundtable discussion and open debate. Highly recommended. 6:30pm, $10. Later on in the evening, The Paris Review’s “Spring Revel” honors Joan Didion. 8:30pm, $100.

WEDNESDAY, 5.3: Shhh… PostSecret’s having a New York event. A tip: steer clear of this guy at the afterparty. And this one, too. Not sure how to spot them? This might help. 7:00pm, FREE. Perfectly positioned for spring, there’s the “Eat This Book Party” atop The Delancey, with cupcakes, of course. 7:00pm, FREE.

THURSDAY, 5.4: The PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Bill Gordon (Mary After All) and Judy Doenges (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). [Full disclosure, as always: Bill is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, Cheryl B presents her superbly of the moment Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos. 8:00pm, FREE.

FRIDAY, 5.5: Absurdly talented singer-songwriter Devon Sproule performs at Pete’s Candy Store. 11:pm, FREE.

SATURDAY, 5.6: And, via our favorite semi-anonymous correspondents at Living with Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, “The Poetry Bash will feature verses in which the poet will take on the personae of the city’s geography, history and lore. Poet Max Blagg takes on the personae of the Chelsea Hotel:I am the Chelsea Hotel/ red brick walls /wrapped in black iron lace/ memory of a thousand/ parties still rocking /the staircase that runs through my heart /all the way to the starlit roof/ where Merce’s dancers once/ kneeled to face the dawn./ Hash smoke in the hallways/ ghost of Janis Joplin…. . At the City University of New York Graduate Center.” 11:00am – 5:00pm, FREE. And, let me guess — it starts at 4:20 but you plan to get there about six…ish. Wait, how far is it from Crif Dogs again? It’s the worldwide Million Marijuana March, dude.

SUNDAY, 5.7: I’ll take a note from the Sunday entry on the daily hours board at my favorite lunch spot: “Rest.”

In interviews, the chemistry between questioner and subject is everything.

While I’ve long admired George Saunders‘ writing (and once even suggested that he run for president), I didn’t think I’d manage much more than a serviceable question-and-answer session if I interviewed him myself. But my email pal Roy Kesey knew precisely what questions to ask. The interview that follows this introduction is Kesey’s handiwork.

For the uninitiated: George Saunders has published two short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

He has conducted oil exploration in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse. One of his most wrenching and least representative (but still frequently hilarious) stories is “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a nonfiction piece about his abortive stint as a roofer. Nowadays Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse.

His latest book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, appeared recently at bookstores near you.

 
Says Mr. Kesey: This interview was conducted over the course of five days, between the 19th and the 23rd of August, 2005. Throughout the interview, Mr. Saunders wore a brownish cowboy hat with a python-skin band, a sheer black cocktail dress of scalloped Thai chiffon, and yellow flip-flops. Actually, that may or may not be true. This interview was conducted via email. We have no idea what he was wearing.

Also, please note that the entire interview, if translated into Cantonese, would form a phonemic anagram. That was entirely coincidental.
 

RK: Good evening, Mr. Saunders. According to my sources, you have a new book out, a novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Word on the street, and behind the Shop-n-Save, and on the porch, and in many of Beijing’s top-drawer massage parlors, is that it’s a political fable. Any truth to that?
 

GS: I’m not really sure what to call it. It started out as a kids’ book, but then suddenly became about genocide. So much for the marketing tie-ins! But I’m glad they’re talking about it in the massage parlors. It just goes to show you that phone marketing really does work.

The way I usually work is to try and find some little thing — a concept or a bit of dialogue or whatever — and then let a story grow from there, with as little preconception as possible. In this case, Lane Smith, who illustrated a previous book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip) suggested I try to write a story where all the characters were abstract shapes. So I tried that. At some point — I can’t exactly remember when — this line came out about there being a country that was so small, only one of its citizens could live there at a time. And this raised certain questions. So that’s how a story like this proceeds, for me.
 

RK: Oh, no question about it — if you’ve got the masseuses on your side, the battle is won.

I want to get back to the new book in a minute, but just now I’m fascinated with this business of “with as little preconception as possible.” That gets right to the heart of the mystery, doesn’t it? I’ve seen you mention Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” elsewhere, heard you talk about how not knowing where a story is headed is actually a prerequisite for getting it on its way. Do you have a favorite metaphor for the way things build or accrete in spite of your not knowing? Magnetism, maybe? Gravity? Dust-bunnies? And a quick follow-up: you’ve also said elsewhere (again with the elsewheres!) that you know a story is working when it manifests a “complexity that results from 1) truth, and 2) accretion.” Could you explore the dark side of that coin for us?

How do you know when things are building in the “wrong” direction — and what would “wrong” mean in that context?
 

GS: Wow, okay. Excellent. I can see this is going to be fun.

I do have a favorite metaphor for this — but before I get to it, a disclaimer or apology of sorts. One of the weird things about being interviewed is that, if you’ve been interviewed before, and had one of those enviable moments where you answer sensibly, and actually come up with exactly the right thing to express what you’re trying to express, then you’re in a pickle: next time you’re asked that question or one similar, do you use the example you thought of before, or not? If you’re trying to be truthful and accurate and precise, you probably should — it came to you in a moment of revelation. But then you get to a certain point where these things start following you around — you start sounding like: “Ah, you’re asking about PLOT. Allow me to invoke Chestnut #9!” Continue reading…

Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…

The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.

MONDAY, 5.1: “Noted playwrights Eric Bogosian and Christopher Shinn read and discuss their newest work” at Housing Works Used Book Cafe. 7:00pm, FREE. And, at The Strand, Colson Whitehead reads from his latest novel, Apex Hides the Hurt. 6:30pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, buckle up as teenage girls at the height of their power take over Brooklyn Independent’s programming for a wild ride through two shorts and a feature at Barbes. 7:00pm, FREE.

TUESDAY, 5.2: Robert Frenay, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired By Living Things, which is being syndicated in full (and for free) online at pulsethebook.com, reads from his work as part of KGB’s Nonfiction Night, along with Spike Gillespie. [Full disclosure, as always: Robert is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. And, Mo Pitkin’s plays host to a sure-to-be-lively “intergenerational dialogue” on “The ‘F’ Word: What Happened to Feminism?”, with guests Nancy K. Miller, “who came of age in the 1950s and came to feminism in the 1970s, trailblazing the path for female academics in an era when there were practically none, devoting her intellectual life to the pursuit, and practice, of feminism” and Kamy Wicoff, who “came of age in the 1970s and came to feminism in the 1990s, when feminism seemed to have become an academic specialty—or worse, a historical artifact—and is devoting her intellectual life to trying to understand where this vacuum leaves women of her generation.” Snap! Presented by The New Shul with moderator Esther Perel, the evening features a roundtable discussion and open debate. Highly recommended. 6:30pm, $10. Later on in the evening, The Paris Review’s “Spring Revel” honors Joan Didion. 8:30pm, $100.

WEDNESDAY, 5.3: Shhh… PostSecret’s having a New York event. A tip: steer clear of this guy at the afterparty. And this one, too. Not sure how to spot them? This might help. 7:00pm, FREE. Perfectly positioned for spring, there’s the “Eat This Book Party” atop The Delancey, with cupcakes, of course. 7:00pm, FREE.

THURSDAY, 5.4: The PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Bill Gordon (Mary After All) and Judy Doenges (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). [Full disclosure, as always: Bill is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, Cheryl B presents her superbly of the moment Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos. 8:00pm, FREE.

FRIDAY, 5.5: Absurdly talented singer-songwriter Devon Sproule performs at Pete’s Candy Store. 11:pm, FREE.

SATURDAY, 5.6: And, via our favorite semi-anonymous correspondents at Living with Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, “The Poetry Bash will feature verses in which the poet will take on the personae of the city’s geography, history and lore. Poet Max Blagg takes on the personae of the Chelsea Hotel:I am the Chelsea Hotel/ red brick walls /wrapped in black iron lace/ memory of a thousand/ parties still rocking /the staircase that runs through my heart /all the way to the starlit roof/ where Merce’s dancers once/ kneeled to face the dawn./ Hash smoke in the hallways/ ghost of Janis Joplin…. . At the City University of New York Graduate Center.” 11:00am – 5:00pm, FREE. And, let me guess — it starts at 4:20 but you plan to get there about six…ish. Wait, how far is it from Crif Dogs again? It’s the worldwide Million Marijuana March, dude.

SUNDAY, 5.7: I’ll take a note from the Sunday entry on the daily hours board at my favorite lunch spot: “Rest.”

In interviews, the chemistry between questioner and subject is everything.

While I’ve long admired George Saunders‘ writing (and once even suggested that he run for president), I didn’t think I’d manage much more than a serviceable question-and-answer session if I interviewed him myself. But my email pal Roy Kesey knew precisely what questions to ask. The interview that follows this introduction is Kesey’s handiwork.

For the uninitiated: George Saunders has published two short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

He has conducted oil exploration in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse. One of his most wrenching and least representative (but still frequently hilarious) stories is “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a nonfiction piece about his abortive stint as a roofer. Nowadays Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse.

His latest book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, appeared recently at bookstores near you.

 
Says Mr. Kesey: This interview was conducted over the course of five days, between the 19th and the 23rd of August, 2005. Throughout the interview, Mr. Saunders wore a brownish cowboy hat with a python-skin band, a sheer black cocktail dress of scalloped Thai chiffon, and yellow flip-flops. Actually, that may or may not be true. This interview was conducted via email. We have no idea what he was wearing.

Also, please note that the entire interview, if translated into Cantonese, would form a phonemic anagram. That was entirely coincidental.
 

RK: Good evening, Mr. Saunders. According to my sources, you have a new book out, a novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Word on the street, and behind the Shop-n-Save, and on the porch, and in many of Beijing’s top-drawer massage parlors, is that it’s a political fable. Any truth to that?
 

GS: I’m not really sure what to call it. It started out as a kids’ book, but then suddenly became about genocide. So much for the marketing tie-ins! But I’m glad they’re talking about it in the massage parlors. It just goes to show you that phone marketing really does work.

The way I usually work is to try and find some little thing — a concept or a bit of dialogue or whatever — and then let a story grow from there, with as little preconception as possible. In this case, Lane Smith, who illustrated a previous book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip) suggested I try to write a story where all the characters were abstract shapes. So I tried that. At some point — I can’t exactly remember when — this line came out about there being a country that was so small, only one of its citizens could live there at a time. And this raised certain questions. So that’s how a story like this proceeds, for me.
 

RK: Oh, no question about it — if you’ve got the masseuses on your side, the battle is won.

I want to get back to the new book in a minute, but just now I’m fascinated with this business of “with as little preconception as possible.” That gets right to the heart of the mystery, doesn’t it? I’ve seen you mention Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” elsewhere, heard you talk about how not knowing where a story is headed is actually a prerequisite for getting it on its way. Do you have a favorite metaphor for the way things build or accrete in spite of your not knowing? Magnetism, maybe? Gravity? Dust-bunnies? And a quick follow-up: you’ve also said elsewhere (again with the elsewheres!) that you know a story is working when it manifests a “complexity that results from 1) truth, and 2) accretion.” Could you explore the dark side of that coin for us?

How do you know when things are building in the “wrong” direction — and what would “wrong” mean in that context?
 

GS: Wow, okay. Excellent. I can see this is going to be fun.

I do have a favorite metaphor for this — but before I get to it, a disclaimer or apology of sorts. One of the weird things about being interviewed is that, if you’ve been interviewed before, and had one of those enviable moments where you answer sensibly, and actually come up with exactly the right thing to express what you’re trying to express, then you’re in a pickle: next time you’re asked that question or one similar, do you use the example you thought of before, or not? If you’re trying to be truthful and accurate and precise, you probably should — it came to you in a moment of revelation. But then you get to a certain point where these things start following you around — you start sounding like: “Ah, you’re asking about PLOT. Allow me to invoke Chestnut #9!” Continue reading…

Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…

The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.

MONDAY, 5.1: “Noted playwrights Eric Bogosian and Christopher Shinn read and discuss their newest work” at Housing Works Used Book Cafe. 7:00pm, FREE. And, at The Strand, Colson Whitehead reads from his latest novel, Apex Hides the Hurt. 6:30pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, buckle up as teenage girls at the height of their power take over Brooklyn Independent’s programming for a wild ride through two shorts and a feature at Barbes. 7:00pm, FREE.

TUESDAY, 5.2: Robert Frenay, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired By Living Things, which is being syndicated in full (and for free) online at pulsethebook.com, reads from his work as part of KGB’s Nonfiction Night, along with Spike Gillespie. [Full disclosure, as always: Robert is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. And, Mo Pitkin’s plays host to a sure-to-be-lively “intergenerational dialogue” on “The ‘F’ Word: What Happened to Feminism?”, with guests Nancy K. Miller, “who came of age in the 1950s and came to feminism in the 1970s, trailblazing the path for female academics in an era when there were practically none, devoting her intellectual life to the pursuit, and practice, of feminism” and Kamy Wicoff, who “came of age in the 1970s and came to feminism in the 1990s, when feminism seemed to have become an academic specialty—or worse, a historical artifact—and is devoting her intellectual life to trying to understand where this vacuum leaves women of her generation.” Snap! Presented by The New Shul with moderator Esther Perel, the evening features a roundtable discussion and open debate. Highly recommended. 6:30pm, $10. Later on in the evening, The Paris Review’s “Spring Revel” honors Joan Didion. 8:30pm, $100.

WEDNESDAY, 5.3: Shhh… PostSecret’s having a New York event. A tip: steer clear of this guy at the afterparty. And this one, too. Not sure how to spot them? This might help. 7:00pm, FREE. Perfectly positioned for spring, there’s the “Eat This Book Party” atop The Delancey, with cupcakes, of course. 7:00pm, FREE.

THURSDAY, 5.4: The PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Bill Gordon (Mary After All) and Judy Doenges (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). [Full disclosure, as always: Bill is a client of mine] 7:00pm, FREE. In Brooklyn, Cheryl B presents her superbly of the moment Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos. 8:00pm, FREE.

FRIDAY, 5.5: Absurdly talented singer-songwriter Devon Sproule performs at Pete’s Candy Store. 11:pm, FREE.

SATURDAY, 5.6: And, via our favorite semi-anonymous correspondents at Living with Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, “The Poetry Bash will feature verses in which the poet will take on the personae of the city’s geography, history and lore. Poet Max Blagg takes on the personae of the Chelsea Hotel:I am the Chelsea Hotel/ red brick walls /wrapped in black iron lace/ memory of a thousand/ parties still rocking /the staircase that runs through my heart /all the way to the starlit roof/ where Merce’s dancers once/ kneeled to face the dawn./ Hash smoke in the hallways/ ghost of Janis Joplin…. . At the City University of New York Graduate Center.” 11:00am – 5:00pm, FREE. And, let me guess — it starts at 4:20 but you plan to get there about six…ish. Wait, how far is it from Crif Dogs again? It’s the worldwide Million Marijuana March, dude.

SUNDAY, 5.7: I’ll take a note from the Sunday entry on the daily hours board at my favorite lunch spot: “Rest.”

In interviews, the chemistry between questioner and subject is everything.

While I’ve long admired George Saunders‘ writing (and once even suggested that he run for president), I didn’t think I’d manage much more than a serviceable question-and-answer session if I interviewed him myself. But my email pal Roy Kesey knew precisely what questions to ask. The interview that follows this introduction is Kesey’s handiwork.

For the uninitiated: George Saunders has published two short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

He has conducted oil exploration in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse. One of his most wrenching and least representative (but still frequently hilarious) stories is “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a nonfiction piece about his abortive stint as a roofer. Nowadays Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse.

His latest book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, appeared recently at bookstores near you.

 
Says Mr. Kesey: This interview was conducted over the course of five days, between the 19th and the 23rd of August, 2005. Throughout the interview, Mr. Saunders wore a brownish cowboy hat with a python-skin band, a sheer black cocktail dress of scalloped Thai chiffon, and yellow flip-flops. Actually, that may or may not be true. This interview was conducted via email. We have no idea what he was wearing.

Also, please note that the entire interview, if translated into Cantonese, would form a phonemic anagram. That was entirely coincidental.
 

RK: Good evening, Mr. Saunders. According to my sources, you have a new book out, a novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Word on the street, and behind the Shop-n-Save, and on the porch, and in many of Beijing’s top-drawer massage parlors, is that it’s a political fable. Any truth to that?
 

GS: I’m not really sure what to call it. It started out as a kids’ book, but then suddenly became about genocide. So much for the marketing tie-ins! But I’m glad they’re talking about it in the massage parlors. It just goes to show you that phone marketing really does work.

The way I usually work is to try and find some little thing — a concept or a bit of dialogue or whatever — and then let a story grow from there, with as little preconception as possible. In this case, Lane Smith, who illustrated a previous book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip) suggested I try to write a story where all the characters were abstract shapes. So I tried that. At some point — I can’t exactly remember when — this line came out about there being a country that was so small, only one of its citizens could live there at a time. And this raised certain questions. So that’s how a story like this proceeds, for me.
 

RK: Oh, no question about it — if you’ve got the masseuses on your side, the battle is won.

I want to get back to the new book in a minute, but just now I’m fascinated with this business of “with as little preconception as possible.” That gets right to the heart of the mystery, doesn’t it? I’ve seen you mention Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” elsewhere, heard you talk about how not knowing where a story is headed is actually a prerequisite for getting it on its way. Do you have a favorite metaphor for the way things build or accrete in spite of your not knowing? Magnetism, maybe? Gravity? Dust-bunnies? And a quick follow-up: you’ve also said elsewhere (again with the elsewheres!) that you know a story is working when it manifests a “complexity that results from 1) truth, and 2) accretion.” Could you explore the dark side of that coin for us?

How do you know when things are building in the “wrong” direction — and what would “wrong” mean in that context?
 

GS: Wow, okay. Excellent. I can see this is going to be fun.

I do have a favorite metaphor for this — but before I get to it, a disclaimer or apology of sorts. One of the weird things about being interviewed is that, if you’ve been interviewed before, and had one of those enviable moments where you answer sensibly, and actually come up with exactly the right thing to express what you’re trying to express, then you’re in a pickle: next time you’re asked that question or one similar, do you use the example you thought of before, or not? If you’re trying to be truthful and accurate and precise, you probably should — it came to you in a moment of revelation. But then you get to a certain point where these things start following you around — you start sounding like: “Ah, you’re asking about PLOT. Allow me to invoke Chestnut #9!” Continue reading…

Whatever the limitations of the experience as a whole, here’s an advantage to reading a book on the iPhone: If you drop it, you don’t lose your place.

I had this reconfirmed this morning, when, as I dashed to the train, my phone slipped from my hands and plummeted to the subway tracks. There it lay, illuminated for a minute or two amid the straw wrappers and crushed soda cans, until it went dark.
 

I’ve always wondered what happens if something falls down near the rails — I mean, assuming you’re not willing to risk your life for it — and now I know: You go to the upper platform and notify the attendant, who calls the lost-object-picker-upper and tells you to stay where you are until he or she arrives, some 30 to 45 minutes hence.

Sure enough, two guys showed up a half-hour later, with one of those claw-hand poles, and retrieved the phone on the first try. I thanked them effusively and offered them money, but they wouldn’t take it.

Moments later the train pulled into the station. I climbed on, grabbed a pole, and picked up where I’d left off on Twain’s Life on the Mississippi ($1.34 at eReader).

Long, long ago I promised to tell the rest of the story about the upstairs neighbors whose fist-fights and make-up sex marathons unfolded weekly at 3 o’clock in the morning. (See The Price of Garden Access in Brooklyn, Part 1.)

The whole thing is a tale best spun out over drinks, but to cut to the last act: Their tenure in our former building came to an end shortly after the guy, a tall but wispy unemployed British actor who spent his days watching Time Bandits on endless loop, proclaimed Mr. Maud a “pathetic little man” and the two of us “pathetic little people” from his perch at the top of the stairway.

In hindsight, that was pretty great. Everyone should be imperiously insulted by a failed Shakespearean villain at least once in her life.
 

Now I live in a quiet neighborhood, on the top floor of a midcentury building with thick plaster walls, where I am grateful to know next to nothing about the private lives of those who reside in adjoining apartments.

Not so my friend GMB, whose neighbors get off on having screaming sex with the windows open. The point of this post is that she’s figured out the perfect line to shout to shut them up.

New Yorkers: In case you didn’t know, the city is battling a whole new breed of vermin. New to us, I mean. Old to humankind. Pliny and Aristophanes both wrote about these pests. One is a character in the Tales of Bidpai. The scourge even predates King Tut.

It is often pointed out, by the media and politicians alike, that 311 bed bug reports still number only in the low thousands. But I know at least a dozen people who’ve fought these things, and none of them has, to my knowledge, notified the city. In general victims call only if their landlords refuse treatment altogether.

Earlier this morning GMB forwarded a McBrooklyn post, Beware of Garbage With Something Written on It. Good advice! May I also present, for your delectation and delight, Mangy Cur’s Infested (from which the shot at the top of this post was taken)?

I’m going to take McBrooklyn’s warning one step further: Steer clear of curbside finds (and, really, used furniture) altogether. Bed bugs don’t just live in mattresses. They hole up in wood. They thrive in paper. They even camp out in electronics. They hide all day, coming out only to feed, and once inside a building, they move easily between apartments.

Based on the suspicious collections of refuse I see on the streets, I’d bet good money that few people discarding infested items actually bother to wrap them in plastic. Pass the Astral, at 76 India, the night before trash pickup, and you’re likely to find a motley collection of mattresses and rugs, armchairs and bed frames, none of which are labeled, although some bear visible signs of a problem. Mae West may once have lived in the building, but a squadron of wild horses and a year’s free rent couldn’t drag me there now.

And yes, Greenpoint, my old neighborhood, is a hotspot and has been for years, but the plague isn’t confined to any one area. It’s in Manhattan, it’s in Queens. It’s even, according to some reports, invaded the subway.

On my way to work yesterday morning, I passed a couch and two twin mattresses, all wrapped in plastic. When I was returning home last night the couch was still in the same spot. The bedding was gone.

But hark! What was this? Just down the block two young gentlemen trotted off into the night, new beds on their backs.

By this morning, only a wad of plastic wrap remained.

Boston has warning stickers. Lexington, Kentucky is distributing leaflets. San Francisco has assistance for low-income residents.

New York City, meanwhile, has… a Department of Health fact sheet that is, to put it generously, a little on the short side? A booming used mattress industry? A local government that’s done next to nothing?

But if you see an Asian Longhorned Beetle, just call the special hotline. You’ll know the bug because it’s pictured on that leaflet that came in the mail last summer.

The MTA’s Emergency Instructions (above) might provide a diversion if your subway car goes up in flames and you can’t escape, but I wouldn’t bother with them if you’re in a hurry.

Essentially, the redundant and confusing information (presented in four separate columns — Fire, Medical, Police, and Evacuation) boils down to:

• (1) DO NOT PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE (conveniently located above);

• (2) Notify the crew in case of fire, danger, or illness (yours or another passenger’s); and

• (3) Do not do anything else unless or until instructed by an announcement or MTA employee.

I know there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about hapless bureaucratic directions. But unless you were familiar with these, I couldn’t effectively convey why the agency’s Subway Emergency Evacuation Information (pictured below) is just crying out to be a subplot in a satirical novel.

The second sign, as you can see, incorporates the first one — in a size too small to read.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Yeah, once the emergency is over, be sure to go home and watch the helpful video at mta.info.

(Max pointed this out sometime last year, and now I can’t look at any of the emergency signs without wondering: Do they want us to die?)

Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.

The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.

Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.

“Divorced…”

“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”

“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”

“She just told you.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died…”

“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”

(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)

Yes, it’s true. Your friend’s choice of hobbit to hop into the sack with may be baffling. But please do not call Frodo a fudge-packer.

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

When you live in a neighborhood that sits over the largest oil spill in North America, something you really don’t want to wake up to is a billowing tower of black smoke in the sky. I mean, assuming you’re a neurotic like me.

I saw the clouds from my back window this morning, learned nothing from WNYC, and ran to the computer hoping Google News would have the answers. It always does.

The 10-alarm blaze is many blocks from Exxon’s legacy, it turns out, but it’s ravaging an industrial landmark. The fire department is calling it “the city’s worst fire since 9/11.” R.I.P. Greenpoint Terminal Market. (Image credit: Grubby Kid.)

There are no stars in the north Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean really, truly, almost zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky.
 

Every couple of months I take the train up to visit my sister and her partner in Massachusetts. We sit in their living room and watch the sun set over the mountains, and I’m always astonished to see the pinpricks of light appear on the horizon. I remember then how, back in Gainesville, nighttime drives across Paynes Prairie took my breath away.

I haven’t visited Florida in nearly a year and a half. That’s the longest time I’ve gone without setting foot in the state since my parents moved there when I was two. Maybe that’s why I’m compelled to be outdoors lately.

My Brooklyn friends hate the summer heat, but I don’t mind it. I mind the lack of trees and flowers and stars, and the glare of the sun on the asphalt. I mind that the square of sand that brought my friends and me a few weekends of joy has been overrun with hipsters.
 

Bottom line: you know you need a break from the city and your life here when you start reading W.S. Merwin’s “Unchopping A Tree” as an instruction manual.

“Want to just split a bottle?” she said, at the bar last night.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I don’t think I need to tell you how the rest of the evening went.

Dinner is never optional, guys.

In what surely must be the funniest goddamned thing ever written about peeing — notwithstanding his own prior achievements — Kevin puzzles over intricate urinal graffiti.

While we’re on the subject: at a bar patio on the Lower East Side not long ago, some friends and I witnessed a man urinating into his empty beer mug. When he finished, he set the mug on the table in front of him, plopped back down on the porch swing (next to his smiling, entirely nonchalant date, who’d seen the whole thing), and continued his conversation.

One of my companions muttered, “If you’re going to whip it out in the middle of a bar like that, you better have something substantial. That looked like a tiny turtle head.”

Fortunately, I didn’t scrutinize things closely enough to know if she was right. But the description has stayed with me all the same.
 

I’m aware that this anecdote marks a new low here at MaudNewton.com. Still, if you’ve read this far, you followed the “more” tag. Did you think you were going to get Shakespeare on pissing-conduits running with claret wine?

If the roach stories aren’t enough to deter you, please be aware: that discarded Ikea sofa you’re tempted to pull off the street could be riddled with bedbugs. Especially if you live in my neighborhood.

Last week I spent several days wringing my hands after reading Sean Wilsey’s terrifying and exceptionally well-written New York City rats piece, which appeared recently in the London Review of Books and doubles as a review of a recent book on the subject. Wilsey’s article emphasizes the horrors of large, toothy, plague-carrying rodents.

Not to diminish these horrors — rats, evidently, would eat you if they could — but they’re only slightly more frightening than the stories one of my friends tells of finding bedbugs in her Upper East Side apartment. She called ineffectual exterminator after exterminator, bought a new mattress, and then threw out 90% of her stuff and moved to Jersey City, only to carry the bugs with her to the new place.

She was reduced to sleeping in a sealed tent with a flashlight and dealing with a new round of exterminators who implied that she was imagining the whole thing. Finally she threw out everything she owned — every last thing — and moved into another apartment, leaving the bugs behind.

Since I’ve heard her stories, and read independent warnings about the horrors of bedbug-infested hotels, I’ve become a bit neurotic about checking floorboards, sheets and towels of my hotel rooms while traveling. All it takes, says my friend, is one pregnant bedbug in your luggage, and you’re screwed.
 

The last time Sister and I visited my mother’s place in Asheville, we hightailed it the hell out of town at 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until we reached upstate Virginia. I insisted upon checking the room while Sister stood in the hallway with the luggage. Then, satisfied that it was bedbug-free, I gave the all-clear.

No sooner had we nestled into our beds and turned on some vapid reality show than I saw a little bug moving on the table between us. Sister and I stared at it, mesmerized, as it made its way toward my bottle of water.

“That’s an ant, right?” I said.

She hesitated. “I think so.”

It stood at the edge of a pool of condensation gathering at the bottom of the bottle. “But isn’t it a little big for an ant?”

“I don’t know? Maybe?”

We went on like this for some time, watching the bug, wondering if we should ask to be moved to a different room, but fearing retaliation for being, to all appearances, picky Northeasterners. My fake southern accent would be of little use to us, since the clerk had my Brooklyn address on file. Maybe, I hypothesized, they would intentionally put us in a room with bedbugs if we complained.

At last I called up Mr. Maud and coaxed him into looking up a photo of a bedbug online.

He was, of course, delighted to be roused from bed for this purpose. But he did it, describing the thing you see depicted throughout this post. Satisfied that the bug was an ant, rather than a bloodsucker, we flicked off the light, only to wake in the morning and find the entire nightstand, our water, and part of my pillow, covered with ants.

But they didn’t bite, and we didn’t carry them home with us.
 

Anyway, we’re all totally screwed.

But at least those guys from the Department of Homeland Security are keeping the subways safe.

If you wake up and log on to check the weather and the little Yahoo weather icon for the afternoon looks like this: ?

Just go back to bed. Especially if you’re trying to pretend it’s springtime. I think I’m going to need a canoe to get home.

My friend Sean Carman extolled the virtues of paperback fiction last month, saying:

I don’t like hardcover editions of novels. There, I said it. Am I alone in this? Paperbacks are so friendly. They bend considerately in your hand, and turning the page requires only that you gently release the pressure on your right thumb to make the odd-numbered page jump obediently to its even-numbered side. They are also light, and travel well. So accommodating!

I agree. Paperbacks are superior in every way — except on the subway, where if you drop a hardcover you can remove the dustjacket and not contaminate your hands with floor germs — unless you’re a collector. (I’m not. I’ve said it before, but I put a book in my bag for five minutes and it looks like it was mangled by wild dogs.)
 

Sean and I aren’t the only readers holding out for paperbacks, evidently.

As Rachel Donadio recently observed, novels that aren’t best sellers in hardback can find “new life in paperback.” She cited Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as examples, and pointed out that “some titles seem to take off only in the independents.”

Among these is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake, which “has sold steadily in paperback, with 325,000 copies in print,” but has never placed on a major chain list.
 

I visited lots of local indie bookstores over the holidays, and I discovered that many excellent smaller stores — Three Lives and 192 Books, for instance — wait for paperbacks.

Customers at these establishments are understandably reluctant to shell out $20+ for a hardback when the paperback will appear a year later. So a significant proportion of indies simply don’t order hardcovers at all.
 

I’ve been wondering how all of this plays into the current “fiction is dead/nonfiction reigns” wisdom. And along comes the Literary Saloon’s careful examination of a recent, somewhat muddled study of British “fastsellers” (defined as “books published in paperback for the first time in the calendar year”), which seems to establish that “88 of the top 100 best-selling paperbacks first published in the UK in 2004 were works of fiction.”

The Literary Saloon’s proprietor says:

People (an astonishing number of them) keep telling us that non-fiction is more popular than fiction — relying, it seems, on anecdotal evidence (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus’ non-fiction heavy coverage at the NYTBR), but here, it would appear, is yet more proof that it’s simply not true (at least as far as the sales-totals — i.e. reader-interest– go). Yes, paperbacks first published in 2004 are only part of the market, but as far as units sold go they made an impressive dent. And fiction — as always — dominates.

Subsequent posts of possible interest: Novelist back in print, electronically; Reading on the iPhone 1 and 2; Practical city living #12: Your cell on the subway tracks; When is a book not a book?; Publishing and writers in the Great Depression.

Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re on the subject of kept men and great men, here’s Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man? Continue reading…

Here Kevin Kinsella interviews the fascinating Anya Ulinich, whose first novel, Petropolis, he’s been recommending to me for months. I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately. (The image below, Marx, Bird, Monster, is one of Ulinich’s own paintings.)

Imagine my surprise upon learning that someone had written a book entitled Petropolis. Okay… now imagine it after learning that I recently spent two years of my life translating from Russian a book of poems originally published in 1922 that I was beginning to think that no one in the twenty-first century United States could possibly care about but from which Anya Ulinich ultimately takes the title of her remarkable debut novel.

For me, what started as an over-earnest graduate thesis (“Transparent Spring: Problems Translating Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia into English”) quickly graduated from a pet project to an obsession. And like most people with a personal obsession, I couldnâ’t understand why no one else seemed to care about — or at least understand — the urgency of my project: to bring a general reader’s edition of what was, arguably, the best poems of one of the greatest of the Russian Silver Age poets to an English-speaking audience. Now imagine my dismay — and then my delight — upon actually reading it, when I learned that Ulinich’s novel, which references Mandelshtam’s poetry in such a smart, funny, and contemporary light, isn’t really about the poet at all, but rather is a coming-of-age story that starts in a tiny Siberian town and ultimately ends in Brooklyn, not far from where I currently live. Okay, just trust me that translating poetry from Russia’s Silver Age is a monkish business, but also understand that reading smart, highly entertaining novels written by young Russian-American authors is anything but.
 

Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow. She began studying art as a child. When she was seventeen, her family left Moscow and immigrated to the United States. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, “abandoned” painting and began to write. Petropolis is her first novel.

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted “child of the intelligentsia” from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha’s father takes off for the U.S., leaving her to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half pipe in the town’s dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid’s Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I interviewed the author by email.
 

You’ve said that you chose Petropolis as the title of your novel because it was the only one from Osip Mandelshtam’s collection Tristia that you thought you could translate well enough (excellent job, by the way). But I think this is just too easy an answer. Not only is it the title of your novel, but the whole story is sandwiched between the poem. Also, “Petropolis” the poem, is in many ways Mandelshtam’s key lament on the end of Western civilization, as he sees at the beginning of the 20th century. What does “Petropolis” mean to Sasha Goldberg? Could another poem from that collection have sufficed if you felt that you could have done a better job translating it? I don’t think so.

Before I talk about the particular poem, I’m going to say a couple things about the Soviet “intelligentsia” class.

Russian culture was interrupted in the 1920s. After that time, for sixty-odd years, all forms of expression remained tightly regulated. While American culture is a vast collection of subcultures that enjoy different art, music, writing, movies, fashions etc., the Soviet Union had no organic pop culture (with some exceptions such anecdoti jokes and prison folklore). In this cultural vacuum, certain landmarks of Western civilization (the so-called “high” art, basically, cultural artifacts of a freer world) — classical music, ballet, some types of painting, poetry — attained an exaggerated, cult-like status, becoming a signifier of the “intelligentsia” class.

Poetry becomes especially powerful in times of oppression — it’s compact; it can be memorized, its paper evidence can be discarded, you don’t need an orchestra to perform it. Had Russian culture developed organically, Mandelstam would have been as obscure there as he is in the U.S. But in the Soviet Union, he and the other Silver Age poets became kind of folk heroes of samizdat-reading “intelligentsia” underground.

Okay, so the point is — this “intelligentsia” designation is very important to Sasha’s mother, Lubov Goldberg. In her mind, it distinguishes her from her drunk, fish-off-newspaper-eating neighbors, although her daily life is exactly the same as theirs. Continue reading…