Sulfurously funny and intellectually provocative, 7 Tattoos is a journey without maps through the labyrinth of a human soul. There are only a few landmarks as guideposts: the ones carved on the author's own flesh. Each section of this innovative book is the story of one of Peter Trachtenberg's tattoos, as well as a daring, intelligent exploration of the themes that each tattoo evokes: death, sacrilege, primitivism, rebellion, atonement, sadomasochism, and downfall. 7 Tattoos introduces us to a man responding ingeniously and emotionally to the harrowing events of his life: funerary rites in Borneo, heroin addiction on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the deathwatches of both his parents. Though it features deft portraits of famous tattoo artists like Spider Webb, Trachtenberg's book is not about tattoos; rather it is an arsenal of ideas fired off with great emotional power. At once memoir, wild anthropology, and meditation on love, faithlessness, and faith, this stunningly original book redefines what a literary memoir can be.
I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s and '60s. Anyone who wants to know what the neighborhood was like then should read Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, a book I love for its signature mix of intellectual rumination and amorous and fiscal misadventure. My parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe. They had arrived in this country in the 1940s, my father as a refugee. They passed to me a portion of their awed gratitude for the American promise, not the promise of fast money but the promise of laws and rights that are as binding on the powerful as on the weak. This may be why I am sickened and outraged whenever I see that promise broken. I suspect that my parents also imparted to me a sense of myself as an outsider, someone for whom setting down roots might be, if not impossible, unwise.
I attended a public grade school and private high schools, with some interruptions on account of stupidity and bad behavior. From very early on I read eagerly and indiscriminately. I read the Hardy Boys and Moby Dick, The Bacchae and Naked Lunch, On the Road and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Free-Lance Pallbearers and The High Window. I loved literature and I loved trash and for a long time had only a vague idea of what distinguished one from the other. I earned a BA in English and Theater from Sarah Lawrence College and then a MA in Creative Writing from City College, where I studied with Donald Barthelme, Frederick Tuten, and Francine du Plessix Gray.
For most of my life I lived in New York City, except for seven years in Baltimore and six months in Amsterdam, Holland. For the last nine years my wife and I have lived in the mid-Hudson valley. I've worked as a free-lance journalist, copywriter, and editor; an instructor of creative writing, an arts administrator, receptionist, security guard and a (staggeringly inept) stage carpenter. I have also been an actor and performance artist. Part of the inspiration for The Book of Calamities was being commissioned to write and perform a monologue on the theme of an angry and judging God for an evening at The Kitchen. My subject was the Book of Job.
In the course of researching The Book of Calamities, I interviewed genocide survivors in Rwanda, people in refugee camps in Sri Lanka (where I worked as a volunteer for local NGOs in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami), a survivor of the 900-day blockade of Leningrad, and Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Dallas.
In 2008-9 I was an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Since then I've taught at Manhattanville College and Bard College. In June 2010, I'll be teaching at the Iowa Writers' Festival.
The Book of Calamities is the winner of the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, given to a book that contributes to the interpretation of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.
