IDENTITY THEFT

I was amused the other day when I received the following email:

“Dear Mr. Malaspina,

What you write about David Schoffman is simply not true. Week after week I read your postings and each one is more fantastic than the next. You are spreading lies, weaving elaborate fables, prevaricating and exaggerating. You are a mythmaker, a calumnist, a delusional fantasist. You, with all your convoluted inventions are a literary nuisance.

I don’t even know where to begin. David Schoffman has never been to Morocco, has never exhibited his paintings in Laos, does not windsurf, does not speak Dutch, was not romantically involved with Carla Motta and her twin sister and has never spent a single solitary night in jail.

I have known Schoffman for over twenty years and I can assure you, he does not practice Sufism nor is he a vegetarian. In all the years I’ve known him he never once mentioned an epistolary relationship with Goddard, nor have I ever heard him discuss UFO’s.

The things you write about are spun from whole cloth. They are complete fabrications. As to your purpose, I have no idea.

The David Schoffman I know is a church going father of four who has spent the better part of his adult life practicing family law in Crown Point, Indiana. He hasn’t had a string of exotic mistresses nor does he associate with dancers and architects. True, he paints, but despite his impressive talent, he has never exhibited his work. (I own one of his oils, “Children Playing,” and it hangs proudly above our fireplace).

Mr. Malaspina, you do yourself and your readers a disservice with your weekly deceptions, regardless of how engaging and well written your posts are. In the future, before you publish another vignette, please send it to me for fact checking.

Sincerely yours,
Benny Toland”

Its funny to think that there is someone else with the name David Schoffman. I and so many others associate that name with the high-minded pursuit of aesthetic enchantment and delight. Odd to think that he could be confused with some guy in Indiana.

Anyway, Benny and anyone else out there who is puzzled about the identity of the man the intellectual community knows as “the” David Schoffman, I have posted a recent photo of him above.

THE BREAD OF LIFE

Any pleasure that David Schoffman may take from life will only be that which manages to slip between the gallops of recollection. He lives with the murmur of futility. He paints in order to recover the ignorance that precedes memory.

When he studied with the writer, Allejo Abulafia, the ageless visionary and grand master of Ladino prose, he discovered the inevitability of sadness. Abulafia, who lived for many years among the flaming dunes of southern Morocco, saw life as something entombed in predestination. To him, our personal histories were merely grim rocks of insignificance. It was the artist’s bitter duty to impersonate meaning through creative introspection. The products of that puny introspection should be fit to rest upon Earth’s chest with a noble dignity. If it passes that test, then one has created Art.

Abulafia’s imagination, in his later years, was a dry river. Schoffman told me once that it was his mentor’s weakness for atonement that proved to be his undoing. “Be quick, before you are crucified by time,” were the last words Abulafia wrote in a journal entry titled “Conclusions.”