"I remember one of the first things my parents would say about Americans when we immigrated to America, was that they always seemed so unhappy..."

"... despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time, and my parents and other Russians would say: Oni ot zhira besyatsa. Which translates very vaguely as: They’re wild with their own fat. They’re so juicy and fat, and yet they don’t know what to do with it. Just enjoy the fat. But sometimes this greater meaning combines with this egotistical impulse to have more and more and more. And to not die is one of those almost Protestant extensions of everything. And striving. Why should the striving ever end?"

Said Gary Shteyngart, in his interview with Ezra Klein, the "I" in the headline "I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel" (NYT). The novel is Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" (commission earned).

"Wearing a shark costume while quoting [Cory Booker] seemed sweet and suburban. Maybe that was the point of the silly costumes."

"It was a small island of old norms within a national emergency. There were a small number of scowling dudes bullhorning loudly about their love of communism, as the First Amendment entitles them to do. But most of the other Chicagoans exercised their right to amble on by in, for example, inflatable corn costumes, without so much as a nod in the dudes’ direction. This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants...."

Writes Gary Shteyngart — one of my favorite novelists — in "The Rise of the Inflatable Chicken Resistance" (NYT)(free-access link, because of all the humorous details).

"Toward the end of the protest, around 2 p.m., I met two Jesus impersonators. 'He’s more classical, and I’m the more modern Jesus,' one of the Sons of God told me. He was wearing a crown of barbed wire instead of thorns, which is what made him more modern.... I left the parade full of the pleasure of being a part of a vast humanity. It’s a feeling that may soon be extinguished if we do not exercise our power of free assembly and free speech.... We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling."

I'm reminded of Saul Alinsky's 6th rule in "Rules for Radicals": "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic."

"Kids: They’re pint-size spies. They’re little data processors, soaking things up and spitting them back, until one day they’ve grokked enough to knock you into the gutter."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart’s New Book/'Vera, or Faith' follows a 10-year-old girl navigating family drama and a dystopian America" (NYT).

1. Garner, the name, is not a "garner (the word!)" spotting, within the logic of the Althouse blog.

2. "One day they’ve grokked enough" might be one of the last appearances of "grok," the verb, in this Musk-permeated word.

3. I just finished reading "Vera, or Faith" last night. That's why I'm reading a review of it this morning. The quote I pulled from the review was chosen because of that "grokked."

4. About that dystopia — to quote the book — "[T]he states are having their constitutional conventions. And these conventions will decide whether to give an 'enhanced vote'... counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called 'exceptional Americans,' those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains."

5. Lots of novels use that child as pint-size spy idea, don't they? I think of "What Maisie Knew" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." You can think of more. Or ask Grok. But whether the character is a child or not, many novels make their plot out a character gradually putting clues together and figuring something out. The thing to be figured out may not be an interesting story at all — who killed X, who is X's father/mother, why did X leave town all these many years ago. The story is the unlocking of the mystery. But to make the central character a child is to blend this mystery-solving with the mystery-solving that is every child's life: What do words mean? What are adults doing? Where do I fit into all this?

6. "Vera, or Faith" (commission earned).

"'Enjoy the simulacrum of actual learning,' Stella the Car said as she deposited them in front of the school."

"Now she was mirroring Daddy. Really, the key to being less odd was to develop your artificial intelligence. Daddy had once mentioned creating a computer program that would flash the most obvious next line of conversation right into your eye. You could go through the whole day thinking about important things and just letting the program prompt you every time you had to open your mouth."

I'm reading "Vera, or Faith: A Novel," by Gary Shteyngart (commission earned).

"Cannelloni arrived. Sausage. The sommelier poured orange wine from Virginia. Then more food, more wine. 'I’ve always loved good stuff, because I grew up with so little'..."

"Mr. Shteyngart said. His 2014 memoir, 'Little Failure,' is a chronicle of ill-fitting clothes and disapproving parents who seem convinced that he is not going to meet their traditional immigrant expectations. His father hits him at home. At school, bullies await."

From "Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?/Mr. Shteyngart was once told he might be. With his sixth novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' out now, he’s spent the last few years spending it well" (NYT).

About that new novel: "In an era when the charge of cultural appropriation still carries professional risk (though perhaps not quite as much risk as five years ago), Mr. Shteyngart’s decision to write in the voice of a tween Korean American girl was a bold one. He said he was partly motivated by his own son’s experience. 'He and his little friends, they mention Trump all the time,' he said. 'And when you’re growing up and you have to think about the Great Leader all the time, that’s always going to stick with you.'"

"Flow."

I watched this on Max over the weekend and recommend it for the beauty of the visuals — I love the light and the water — and the wordlessness of the storytelling. 

There are various animals — cat, dog, secretary bird, lemur — but I was interested to see the capybara, because I'd just been reading this New Yorker article by Gary Shteyngart, "How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s/It’s not hard to understand why capys have a cultlike following on Instagram and TikTok. I fell for the giant rodent decades ago."

Looking back at that now, I see that Shteyngart discusses the movie "Flow":

"After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one..."

"... the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. 'Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,' the husband said. 'I work with a lot of Cubans, so …' I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared...."

Writes Gary Shteyngart, in "Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever/Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas" (The Atlantic).

Shteyngart is well aware that David Foster Wallace already wrote “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — AKA "Shipping Out" — and much as I'd rather read a Gary Shteyngart novel than a David Foster Wallace novel, he has no hope of besting Wallace in what, after Wallace, became a genre — the author-on-first-cruise-ship-voyage genre:

Gary.

How could you not name a heat wave “Gary” given that Garys are so hot? https://t.co/N1qEY7G1ot

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) July 26, 2023

From the linked article:

"Once she was deported from the U.S., [Maria Butina] became a member of Russia’s parliament and, of course, the host of her own TV program...."

"Today, the redheaded Butina, wearing an equally red blouse and suit pants, decides to talk about Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Who still cares about Hillary Clinton? Apparently, Butina and Tanya from Taganrog still do. Tense music begins. According to the program, Clinton laughed 'hysterically' when she was shown pictures of the death of Muammar Qaddafi. 'What kind of monster responds to a person’s death like that?' Butina asks. A 'psychiatrist' appears and says, 'Yes, she’s a monster. But it’s because she has had to compete with men.' Donald Trump, whom Russian television adores, is shown calling her 'unstable.' 'What an awful woman,' the former U.S. president says. 'Hillary Clinton,' the chyron reads. 'A shark floating belly up?' A so-called expert on America is produced to diagnose Hillary’s early years: 'She wore big glasses, she had terrible teeth, and then she threw herself at Bill Clinton.'..."

Writes Gary Shteyngart in "I Watched Russian Television for Five Days Straight/My full immersion in Putin’s propaganda" (The Atlantic). The watching took place in 2023.

"In academia the Soviet Jew has long been seen as an ideological suitcase ripe for stuffing."

"Whether as an idealistic but ultimately failed Communist, a Zionist in training, an eternal refugee, or a Tevye-like throwback for his nostalgic American brethren, the Soviet Jew wanders across the imagination with a counterfeit passport always in need of stamping....  The inability to conform to either traditional Jewish practice or the nascent Bolshevik state, matched with the ability to 'play them off one another' in true trickster fashion, is perhaps the central conceit of How the Soviet Jew Was Made.... " 

Writes Gary Shteyngart in "Beyond the Pale/After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man" (NYRB)(reviewing "How the Soviet Jew Was Made" by Sasha Senderovich).

"When you run out of ideas, just write down a list. Readers love lists."

Says a character — an author who teaches writing — in a novel I'm reading, "Our Country Friends" (by Gary Shteyngart).

I'd highlighted that line when I read it, and it popped to mind as I was listening to the audiobook of the other book I'm consuming this week, "On Animals" (by Susan Orlean), and I got to the last paragraph of the essay "Lost Dog." The dog (Coby) was found and it seemed as if we were closing in on the miscreant who stole the car that contained the dog (and a viola da gamba)...

At this point, the police certainly knew the thief’s name. After all, it was on the pawn voucher and in the detention records from his previous lockup with Chris Walker, and there were fingerprints on the Volvo, the viola da gamba, the pawn voucher, and probably on Coby. But the man was still at large. Before the car was towed to a wrecking yard, [the dog owner] went through it one more time to see if there were any last belongings of his or [his wife's] still inside. There was nothing of theirs, but the thief had left behind some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name.

... some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name — a list! Just write down a list. Readers love lists. 

The next thing that the reader wanted to happen was the capture of the thief, but it's a true story, and that didn't happen. So how do you tie it up satisfyingly? Out of the blue, there's a list, miscellaneous items, indicative of miscellaneous things — the man had a girlfriend, he wrote poetry.... 

I appreciated the essayist's artistry. And oh! how pleased I am that I have a tag for this: lists.

Eerie early-morning happenings.

I got up just before 3 a.m. and, brushing my teeth, I dipped back into my new audiobook, "Our Country Friends: A Novel," by Gary Shteyngart.

He messed up the bed’s careful sheets as if two lovers had just enjoyed a tussle on it. He spotted two carved wooden statues of pineapples on the modernist desk... and knocked over one of them, adding some asymmetry to the deathly hospital order around him. What would his mother say from her immovable Gangnam cocoon, her throat tingling with hot barley tea? Advice she would never follow herself. Be strong for your friends. 

A woman—Masha, it would have to be—was screaming...

Her what cocoon? Cheongsam? That's a tight-fitting dress, perhaps cocoon-like, but it's a Chinese dress, and the character was born in Korea.

Settling in at my desktop, I open up the Kindle version of the book and do a word search on "screaming" to find the page and see "Gangnam cocoon." It's a place name — the mother's not trapped within her clothing, but her district of Seoul. The word is familiar to me because of that song, "Gangnam Style."

Idly, I scan book titles in my Kindle app and notice "Pain: When Will It End?" What's that? Something I added to the Kindle at Meade's request? I open it up. Oh! It's a fantastic book of cartoons. I don't recognize the artist's name — Tim Kreider — but I must have put this in the Kindle. (Yeah, I see now, that I blogged about the purchase back in 2019.)

I become completely absorbed in the brilliance of "Pain: When Will It End?" and I arrive at this cartoon:

We're so self-absorbed. I get it. But I wondered, what would happen on earth if the moon were to disappear? I click out of Kindle and over to Safari and google:

5 suggested completions and 4 of them are about the loss of the moon?! How can that happen? I was in Kindle, and I hadn't typed "moon." I hadn't even encountered "moon" in searchable text, only seen it handwritten in a drawing. 

But maybe the disappearance of the moon is the number one thing people are wondering about when they muse about what might happen on earth. Perhaps there's some movie or TV show where the moon is suddenly gone for some reason and all sorts of disasters ensued. 

But what disasters? Something about the tides? The oceans go wild? Is there some weird psychic damage that would occur if we could no longer gaze upon that big white circle in the sky?

Too little, too late.

I'm reading "A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath/The constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain. It is impossible to think about anything else" by Gary Shteyngart (The New Yorker):

Most poorly performed circumcisions stem from two misjudgments on the part of the circumciser: either too much or too little foreskin is removed. In my case, it was too little (and, one might add, given that I was seven years old instead of the eight days prescribed by the Torah, too late). After the infection had subsided, the shaft of my penis was crowded by a skyline of redundant foreskin that included, on the underside, a thick attachment of skin stretching from the head to the shaft of the genital, a result of improper healing that is called a skin bridge. A small gap could be seen between this skin bridge and the penis proper. In texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation. It produced no pain on its own after the infection had died down and the two years of difficult urination were over, but the strangeness of my penile appearance—and the manner in which it was brought about—became lodged in my consciousness....

"I would love to know how to be more American, but I can't find any books or courses on the subject."

A question for the WaPo advice columnist:

My family and I came to America from the Soviet Union when I was a teenager. We became citizens. I got educated here and own a successful business. I write well and speak correctly, with almost no accent. I feel like I am an American.

I love America and try to learn new things every day, but I feel like something is missing in me.

Since I was born and spent my formative years in a communist country (truly like another planet, compared to the USA), my "autopilot" reactions are not like those of typical American-born people. For instance, my manners, topics of conversation, humor, dress, attitude toward money and even body language sometime seem "foreign."

I feel like it is hurting me to be "culturally different." I don't think I say or do anything straight-up offensive — it's more like a lot of subtle little things.

How can I fix this "handicap?"

I would love to know how to be more American, but I can't find any books or courses on the subject.

I haven't read the answer yet, but I love the question, and the predictable answer seems obvious: America is (or should be) about diversity, and you shouldn't think of yourself as foreign, but another great part of nation of immigrants. Thanks for contributing your special, individual mix of manners, topics, and attitudes. You belong here, and we love you. The only fix for your "handicap" is to stop thinking of it as a handicap.

The columnist, Amy Dickinson, does begin with something like that: "[H]ere is a beautiful 'American' ideal (so different from the culture you were raised in): All Americans have the right to be uniquely themselves, and that definitely includes you."

But she does give him some ideas to transform himself into a person who comes across as more stereotypically American:

1. Commit to some community activities. Amy suggests volunteer firefighting, teaching English as a second language, and poll working.

2. Consume cultural materials: study American history, watch some movies that embody Americanness (“Singing in the Rain,” “Goodfellas,” “Barbershop,” “13th” and “Ramy"), read some novels (Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Sherman Alexie, Gary Shteyngart and Jericho Brown), and listen to music (the only music suggested is... Dolly Parton!).

3. Get a friend to keep prompting you about each little thing you say or do whenever it seems less than American. And the punchline is that this person might say that "your effort makes you the most 'American' person they know." To which I say absolutely not. Your effort is the most foreign thing about you. Be yourself, with whatever set of quirks and predilections you've got — that's the American way... at least it was or should be... but those bastards want to take it away from us....

By the way, Gary Shteyngart was a good suggestion for something for this guy to read:

Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart... in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as typically Soviet.... Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York, with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language. He did not shed his thick Russian accent until the age of 14....

"Only a few of the saddest, most destitute Albanians still wanted to emigrate to the States..."

"...  and that lonely number was further discouraged by a poster showing a plucky little otter in a sombrero trying to jump onto a crammed dinghy under the tagline 'The Boat Is Full, Amigo.' Inside an improvised security cage, an older man behind Plexiglas shouted at me incomprehensibly while I waved my passport at him.... A half-dozen of my fellow citizens were seated behind their chewed-up desks, mumbling lowly into their äppäräti. There was an earplug lying slug-dead on an empty chair, and a sign reading INSERT EARPLUG IN EAR, PLACE YOUR ÄPPÄRÄT ON DESK, AND DISABLE ALL SECURITY SETTINGS. I did as I was told. An electronic version of John Cougar Mellencamp’s 'Pink Houses' ('Ain’t that America, somethin’ to see, baby!') twanged in my ear, and then a pixelated version of the plucky otter shuffled onto my äppärät screen, carrying on his back the letters ARA, which dissolved into the shimmering legend: American Restoration Authority. The otter stood up on his hind legs, and made a show of dusting himself off. 'Hi there, pa’dner!' he said, his electronic voice dripping with adorable carnivalesque. 'My name is Jeffrey Otter and I bet we’re going to be friends!'... 'Now tell me, Lenny. What made you leave our country? Work or pleasure?' 'Work,' I said. 'And what do you do, Leonard or Lenny Abramov?' 'Um, Indefinite Life Extension.' 'You said "effeminate life invention." Is that right?' "Indefinite Life Extension, I said."

I'm reading "Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart.

"They left the park chatting about Trump. Seema liked that Luis had to bend down at least half a foot just to talk to her."

"It wasn’t only that he was tall, it was that his height made him a bit clumsy, and that was sweet. They continued to talk about Trump on autopilot, the way people were doing that summer. All of a sudden, Seema wanted to say something real. 'When things are tough with my family,' she said, 'I like to watch Trump, because he just takes my mind off stuff. No matter what happens personally, there’s this much greater disaster taking place.' 'Very well put,' Luis said. 'I do a lot of private-slash-public toggling of my own. So, how do you handle shame?' 'Sorry?' 'Is there a Hindu mechanism for dealing with shame, or is it just internalized like Julianna’s Confucianism?'"

I'm reading "Lake Success" by Gary Shteyngart (the author of that "This American Life" segment about the stabbing of the ending-spoiler in the Antarctic that I liked so much).

"Down at the base, the dome of the endless sky is its own prison. To look up at it is to see just how far away from God one can be."

"It's not quite hell, a place in which God has a unique, almost competitive interest. It's just a place he would never think to look — a place he ignores, a place where, left to our own devices, we become exactly who we are."

The novelist Gary Shteyngart imagined how it really unfolded, down in Antarctica, where a Russian scientist, Sergey Savitsky, stabbed a co-worker, the welder Oleg Beloguzov, purportedly because Beloguzov was spoiling the ending to the novels Savitsky was reading.

I strongly recommend that you listen to the audio reading (by Shteyngart, who is Russian). It's one of the best things I've ever heard on "The American Life." Transcript here.

I listened once, then listened again, then went to Amazon and bought the Kindle and Audiobook versions of his Shteyngart's novel "Lake Success."

For a journalistic version of the real-life story Shteyngart imagined, here's "Antarctica scientist stabbed colleague for spoiling book endings" (from last October in the NY Post).