Around the time he moved from SoHo to East 12th Street in 2004, Nikolas Kozloff – author of three non-fiction books about Latin America and numerous pieces about Occupy Wall Street for Al Jazeera and Huffington Post – was writing a novel loosely based on his brief tenure as an adjunct professor at CUNY. “Post-Academic Stress Disorder,” which Mr. Kozloff, 43, finally self-published last month, is the story of a young, socially vexed young man attempting to carve out a niche for himself in academia, latching onto subcultures in his new East Village neighborhood, and desperately seeking love and companionship – all while dodging a nefarious plot hatched by a fellow faculty member. The Local asked Mr. Kozloff, who now resides in Brooklyn, just how much of his novel’s wry observations about the anarchists, spiritualists, health nuts, pet lovers, and pie-throwers of the East Village were based on his six months there.

To what degree does your novel portray an exaggerated version of the East Village? The scene where the narrator, Andy, visits A&H Dairy (an exaggerated version of B&H) and is told that his grandfather had an affair with the neighborhood’s great anarchist, Emma Goldman, is pretty over the top. 

A lot of times the reader may have difficulty figuring out what’s reality in this novel and what’s surreal. I’ve been very influenced by an author named Arthur Nersesian who also writes about the East Village and Lower East Side, and I also enjoyed “Brigh Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerney – they both write about a lot of the places I’m referring to, but this is much more surreal. It’s taking these colorful, larger-than-life characters in the East Village – like the Tibetan lama, Norbu, and some of these other political types – and amping them up.

About those political types: the activist group Andy joins very much foreshadows the Occupy Wall Street movement, not to mention recent anarchist activity in the neighborhood. Was it based on anything in particular?

In 2004 I was active in the anti-war movement and a lot of people involved in the group were from the East Village, and part of that older squatter scene around Tompkins. We’d have meetings in that area. I portray some of the activists as “messianic” – that’s a bit exaggerated, but sometimes these meetings can get rather exhausting. I’m a very idealistic person, as Andy is, but I think that a lot of people just don’t understand what it takes to get through these meetings and plan successful actions. I have this one scene in the book where they’re meeting for the first time in the Ukrainian Community Center in the East Village and it basically peters out because it degenerates into this sectarian fight between Stalinists and anarchists, and the narrator is asking himself, “What is this all about?”

Courtesy Nikolas Kozloff

One of the members of that group, the Pie Man, is presumably based on the Aron Kay, the Yippie Pieman. Did you have any encounters with Mr. Kay?

I had heard at the time about some anarchist that had pied famous people and I thought that was a great scene for the book because it gets at the multigenerational aspect of the East Village. You have young anarchists and old people going back to the ’60s. You saw that in the antiwar movement in 2003 – there were all these older guys. I think anyone who has grown up in the East Village will appreciate the local color of the Pie Man that tries to bake tofu pies and who isn’t taken seriously by the others, but also anyone who is politically involved or who is interested in the antiwar struggle at that time and how maybe it evolved into the Occupy movement of today.

At one point Andy, during his online-dating travails, e-mails with someone who works at the neighborhood’s Holistic Pet Care Center. At another point his Cuban landlord, referring to a dog day-care center, tells Andy, “Here in the East Village people want to prove that they are better because they have a new breed. It’s just like that in this neighborhood; many people are posers and have something to prove.”  Is that how you feel about East Village pet owners?

Halfway through the book the narrator, in an attempt to get a life, gets this thought that, “If I get a dog my life will become a lot more social,” and I think a lot of people do think that way in the East Village and New York. What they don’t realize is, having a puppy is an incredible social responsibility. The dog provides a lot of comic relief and at a certain point Andy has to do couples therapy with the dog and his psychologist.

He also starts visiting a Himalayan Center where if you donate $3,000, you get free access to the meditation hall, a complementary zafu and carrying case, reduced prices to the annual retreat in Woodstock, and front row seats to see the Dalai Lama. Were those scenes based on a particular place?

Around that time I went to a talk in the East Village in someone’s apartment and there was some Tibetan lama talking to local East Villagers; that talk as well as some other talks I’ve attended can be strange from a cross-cultural perspective. It’s not just that Tibetans have a different accent; they have different mannerisms as well. Sometimes they’ll be speaking and they’ll pause and chuckle and I’ll wonder, “What’s the joke?” A lot of the Americans, for fear of being out of synch with Tibetan culture, will laugh also, even though the joke isn’t obvious. They want to be perceived as mystical as well.

Andy starts buying green-tea smoothies at a place called Healthy Pleasures and working out at the “newly gentrifying Crunch gym.” He wants to support family businesses but the produce at his bodega looks brown and unappealing. At the same time, he wants to befriend a woman who’s handing out flyers about Starbucks pushing small businesses out of the East Village. Did you see a lot of gentrification during your time in the neighborhood?

I lived over on East 12th Street between First and Second Avenues which is not over in Alphabet City, in the more Latino areas, but I’m very familiar with those areas. There are a lot of over-the-top moments in El Barrio because Andy is renting an apartment in the home of Señor Lopez, who’s loosely based on a landlord I had in Venezuela who would sit and watch Spanish telenovelas. There are a lot of scenes where the narrator will try to fit in by trying to speak Spanish and putting on a Yankees outfit and talking about baseball. It’s all part of his quest to figure out what it takes to try to fit into this community.

Where do you live these days?

Park Slope. It’s a little bit distant from all that, although not entirely. Park Slope is kind of crunchy and granola in its way, and I’m part of the Park Slope Food Coop, so I guess I stayed true to my political origins.