Any lessons in consumption or in style must occur inside the pattern of entertainment and not weigh it down like a pigeon with The Naked and the Dead tied to its leg.
-- Lawrence Alloway, "The Long Front of Culture"

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

(Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," Collected Poems, p. 489)

And here is some visual pleasure to go along with the words.

I've had a rather strange home-coming to a place that, as usual, is not quite home. (Yes, you are warned in advance, this is going to be that sort of post). I slept for most of the bus ride, partly because of intellectual overstimulation of the last few days, partly because I just haven't been getting the requisite 8 hours of sleep a night. I woke up somewhere in Queens to a stunning sight -- the clump or hedgehog or bar graph that is midtown Manhattan. The sky behind it was blue. But to the right, there was a second clump, with the sky behind it yellow, the silhouettes lit up by the sunset. Be it sleepiness or stupidity, I wracked my brain trying to figure out where there could exist across the river in Jersey some phantastical counterpart or twin to Manhattan that I was seeing for the fist time. A minute later I figured out that what I was seeing was both the financial district and midtown at once, which I haven't seen from this angle before. It's so strange to see them and the way everything between seems a bit like a gap, even though the actual experience of being in the city feels nothing like that, in addition to lacking the clarity of outline and form and the cool contemplative remove that distance affords. Anyway, it was spectacular to behold and I stayed awake as we crossed the bridge that turns into Delancey St. and entered Chinatown. It was, of course, crazy busy and disorienting. Liking shiny objects, I was bedazzled by that block of lighting fixture stores on the Bowery right next to the Bowery Savings Bank with its lions, which look weirdly un-Chinese and seem like they should be replaced with something more colorful and befanged. The bus driver was honking a lot at the people who seemed to insist on blocking traffic -- we were half an hour late coming in. I know Russians too get accused of sounding like they are yelling even when carrying on a perfectly normal conversation, but by the time we got to the storefront cum bus-stop, the dispatch device, which was very audible, at least if you were sitting close to the front, was positively screeching with slightly crackly Chinese of a parodically high-pitched woman's voice. In fact, from that point on, the whole evening felt a bit like a bad parody of Fellini's Roma were it to be set in New York. On the platform opposite mine at the Grand St. subway, a man -- hard to tell why, may be crazy or high or both -- started banging on walls and trash cans, talking out loud to no one. Hardly unusual in New York. But then a man on our side of the platform starts speaking to him -- loudly, obviously -- first, "Yeah, you're gone," and then "Do you really want to live like that" and then "You can save your life, brother." I think there was something in there about "I love you," but Jesus never came up. While I'm following that with my right ear, with my left ear, I hear an amateur Chinese musician playing one of those small stringed instruments with a long neck and singing along, rather unmelodiously, I think. This is when it occurs to me that there are cities -- like Moscow or London -- where you never see the other platform when you're standing at yours (at least not at the vast majority of stations) and there are places like New York and Boston where you do. Incidentally, while in Boston today, on the platform opposite I heard a rather good singer who accompanied himself on the guitar and harmonica and thought that if I collect anything, it should be the recordings of subway musicians. This thought will become relevant in a moment, but, alas, a collection was not started today and may never be.
I get on the train, make it up to 59th St. to switch trains, only to realize that I can't due to construction. I go to catch the train down to 42nd and on the platform, there's a woman doing a rendition of "I will always love you" in really quite an amazing voice - there's a crowd gathered round her. I had literally no cash left on me, but I actually teared up a bit. So then I make it back to 42nd and in the underpass see another crowd. This is when the evening jumps the shark. Because the crowd is gathered around a dwarf doing a rather impressive Michael Jackson dance/impersonation with the hat and jacket and blasting soundtrack and everything. Eventually, I get onto a 1 train and reading the newly purchased Sergey Gandlevsky book make it up to my stop.
Reading this book is in a lot of ways a stupid decision since it exacerbates that feeling of being misplaced, displaced, and disconnected I get when my head is in too many places at once. And unsurprisingly, hearing something like 40 talks on the various and sundry aspects of Russian and Eastern European history and culture in a short span and being around hundreds of people familiar with various aspects of it might induce that feeling. I was feeling today that irrational sadness of not being able to share fully or to my satisfaction my Russianness with people I really care about, particularly C. This was largely in light of the one panel I went to today -- amazing, though almost totally anecdotal -- reminiscences of long-time immigrants about a small group of thinkers and poets in 60s Moscow totally obscure to me. One man in particular there, a Lithuanian speaking still accented, but absolutely spectacular, literary, playful and erudite Russian (he used the expression "posadit' v kaloshu" -- I haven't heard it in years!) was mesmerizing. Seeing these people speak with such tenderness and absolute conviction of its importance about their past, about friends many of whom are now dead and who haven't really gotten into the cannon made me think again of that strangely self-conflicting human need: on the one hand to form closed-off groups that set their members apart and in certain ways insulate them from an undiffirentiated mass of humanity (and this process happens on various scales, from the regional to the itnra-familial), but on the other, also to be recognized, acknowledged and accepted by the world outside the confines of one's circle. I think that these contradictions are always highlighted by any immigrant experience, but for whatever reason, members of the Russian intelligentsia have waxed at greater length than most about their nostalgia and sense of loss of a hope for a perfect balance of difference and unity that is disturbed by linguistic and other barriers. Anyway, sometimes I succumb to these sentiments, though I started to write this an hour ago and now have lost my train of thought, so it obviously isn't a permanent state of mind. I'm gradually readjusting to being ok who and where I am. I talked to C., and while when it comes to Russia, I think I will always feel like something essential is being left unsaid and profoundly misunderstood, I've lived here long enough to know that in this situation, having someone to have the conversation with is more important then getting the "true" meaning of your experience across since that I cannot usually do even with people who do share with me this particular bit of cultural literacy or even an obsessive love of the Russian language. I find it heartening that my love of Russian history and culture largely comes from my dad, who hasn't actually suffered from nostalgia almost at all. For him -- much like for C., I think -- science is ultimately his home, rather than culture or language, and while I'll never be able to say the same about myself, it's important to have a different model at hand, to know, when I consider my own convoluted psychic ridiculousness that things could be otherwise.

Pure awesome

Li'l Brother writes: "As a follow up to the Kazaki pishut pis'mo sultanu post: Научно-Исследовательский Институт Химикатов, Удобрений и Ядов (НИИХУ и Ядов)" We're in the process of sorting out if that's a real institution :).

I think the highlight of today was the sequence of first a highly theoretical and really polemical panel on the applicability and meaning of "trauma" to the post-Soviet experience, followed by a really detailed and nuanced examination of the three members of the Fridlyand family (Mikhail Kol'tsov, Boris Efimov, Semyon Fridlyand). So cool!

What I lack in reason, I make up in rhyme

This I wrote a few days before leaving Ljubljana:

***

Ride out the emptiness
Write out the bout
Fill in the void
Like a blank
Of a grey sky
Or a gaze in a crowd.

"She li-i-i-ves on disillusion road" --
The radio twang of some country hack.
I put in earplugs and thought
Of the boredom cul-de-sac.

Why do they blast the volume so loud?
Is it meant to be drowning something out?


And this one is a bit more recent

***

We keep stubbing our toes,
Running up against the limits
Of where "I" end and "you" begin.

Skating, gliding, speeding, skidding on the thin ice of the thin skin.

Pilots, before they broke the sound barrier,
Used to think
There was a brick wall in the sky.

And so do I.

Sing his praises on high on this,
The feast day of St. Chuck Yeager.

* * *

Differences are not resolved
Any more than they are removed or dissolved --
Either way, they will,
With a change in temperature --
A passing heat wave,
Or a sudden chill --
Precipitate out of the solution,

Irreducible dregs of the spirits
One can no further still or distill.

Nor are differences wished away,
Shooed, booted,
Until an empty trace
Of the myriad steps we might have made
Is all that's left to stay.
All that's left to say.

* * *

Differences are --
Are you expecting shocking revelations?!!! --
Accepted and caressed.

When one is at one's best.

When she is not

There is the darkness
Of an introspective corner
And the light
Of glowing autumn bushes --

The interlocutors

Of a more quiet and less wrathful God.

Какой же ты к чёрту рыцарь, когда голою жопой ежа не убьёшь?

Письмо запорожцев турецкому султану

I take a short walk from 10th St. to Washington Square park, and some supposedly Israeli schmuck tries to scam me into doing some sort of bank transaction for him! Also, apparently, there's a Slovene Catholic church at St. Mark's place.
Never a dull moment.

Going for an English

I find it's good to leave the house in the first few days in a new place, and so I went to a performance that I heard about yesterday. It was taking place in a gallery close to or in Chinatown. I noted the exciting grocery stores on my way there and passed on the street two young men experimenting with the smaller intonation variations applicable to the word, "Maaaan." "Life is hard," one added, presumably explicating the nuances. The place was full of people who certainly looked like members of the bohemian hipster crowd. There were artworks - slide projections, video, pages of a newspaper posted on the wall. A very feisty young woman with beautiful black curly hair got into a rather protracted argument with the man running the gallery because he wanted her to put down the newspaper where she'd found it, while she was adamant that she was simply reading it and had no intention of disobeying hand-written 'Read / Don't take' sign. I rather take her point that it's difficult to read a newspaper without taking it in your hands. The newspaper piece was the most interesting, at least to me. A woman with a Polish-sounding name had worked with a professional clairvoyant consulted by the likes of the Interpol and published an issue of The New York Times with news from 2020. There were reports of some sort of uprising in China, Russia exerting its influence over it, and higher infant mortality in Louisiana due to microchip rejection in babies following the financial crash of 2014. It seemed at once very sci-fi and very believably current. The newspapers, moreover, were published in an ink that disappears at temperatures over 26 degrees C. In the basement, there were turntables with records of secret presidential conversations, which you couldn't hear cause they were covered by upturned lamps, with lightbulbs suspended above them. The performance was pretty short and ended suddenly, but it was pretty cool, at least in terms of raw excitement, while it lasted. The two artists, clad in shiny black suits bits of which looked like insect carapaces, fenced. With two weapons each, an epee and a sabre, I gather. To a pumped up soundtrack. They even took their masks off, and I think one got a small cut on his face. Then they were done fencing and people started leaving. Outside, I noticed a video in the window -- I think it was a tape of someone "intervening" in the Today Show by standing close to the camera during filming and holding up a "Jacques Ranciere is so cool" sign. I'm sure that the 5 theory and philosophy buffs who watch the Today Show for pleasure were very amused.
Just as I was walking away, a young man in silver shoes and with lots of rings on his fingers was saying on his cellphone to someone, "Oh, like, I don't know what happened, it's over."
I was very hungry and also decided to cease the opportunity to combine the pleasurable with the practical and get some food I'd had trouble getting around here. Soy sauce, tofu, a delicious sweet chili sauce and jasmine tea were all procured at more than reasonable prices. With my last change, I got a red bean sesame cake. I definitely wanna do more shopping in those stores, so much delicious seaweed and the like to be had. Then I walked up the Bowery to Houston and discovered a Whole Foods there. I try to avoid going there -- to painful on the wallet and it's a place of privilege (says the academic) -- but again, there are fake meat and hippie-dippie beauty product needs that my neighborhood shops are just not meeting, so I went in. I found what I needed, though looking at the price tags took a long time, but it's really the food bar that got to me -- whatever else one might say, I think the quality and variety of the food available there is amazing and incredibly tempting. I realized yet again that for someone who tries to minimize eating as much as her feeble powers allow, I spent an awful lot of time and, it seems, money, on food. Living alone is a real disadvantage in this respect -- I think it would actually be not just cheaper but less time consuming to not have to figure out ways how to buy the right quantity of food so as to have both variety and prevent spoilage. Anyway. Finally made it to subway, walked past Angelica film theatre, of which I have good memories, thought of how even when exceedingly unhappy otherwise, this city has always thus far made me happy by just being there, got home. Now, sleep beckons. Now that I'm pretty much over jet-lag, getting up early is gonna be more of a challenge. I hope exercise helps. I ran for the first time in weeks today, and it was glorious.

Last night, I fell asleep with my face on Munchkin's fur and with him purring. He's a truly great cat, though I wonder if he minds not being able to go outside.
It seems a bit ironic that after having lived in a foreign country for 10 months, I've come 'home' to a place where I yet again do not understand most of what is said around me (this time, it's in Spanish).
The immigrants from the former Soviet Union are getting harder and harder to spot. Used to be a breeze, now one actually has to talk to people a lot of the time to find out.

There is an absolutely wonderful, very friendly and very large cat here called Munchkin, though he's only staying till his mum comes home. My experience in JFK wasn't painful today -- it's the getting out of the airport that was less fun -- but I think it would be such a good idea for all involved to have some shelter cats at airports and let travelers have 10-min petting sessions. Cats win, people win.

So strange to be back on American soil. I'm told there's good Dominican food in the neighborhood. Need to go get din din.

Written the day before last:

Yesterday we took a short trip through the Trossachs and walked for 2.5 hrs along the shore of Loch Katrine. Incidentally, if I sound autistic, it’s because I’m reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. We still got rained on quite a bit, but were better prepared this time – better raincoat for C., I knew to tuck my pants into my wellies – and so the walk was delightful. Absolutely spectacular trees, lovely lake (Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” was set on Loch Katrine, apparently), lots of bens on the other shore in the fog, a really cool island in the middle of the lake pyramidally overgrown with trees. On a little pier that protruded into the lake, I found a j’accuse stick. It looks like it has a single pointing accusatory finger and will, no doubt, come in useful in any possible future disputes. There were lots of birches, thicker and a little darker than the Russian ones, but wonderful, with some copper iridescent patches, some oaks, lots of dead brown ferns, bushes. The birches were amazing and everything was overgrown with moss on the ground and lichen on the bark or stone, which produces this effect of every inch of everything feeling alive and visually interesting. As we were almost back at the parking lot, the sun came out, a glorious patch of it fell on one of the hills behind us and there was a rainbow in the sky. As we drove back, we saw a full moon. It was very medieval. At night, we watched the Fish part of the Life series. It was beyond incredible, the footage they got. I am not sure if BBC iplayer works in the States, but if it does, it's well worth watching.
Today, saw the Hunterian Art Museum at the university of Glasgow. I’ve never seen that bit of Glasgow properly, though I’ve been to the Kelvingrove museum down the road, and it turned out to be a very lively student area. For whatever weird reason, I like Glasgow. It’s very disheveled. The Hunterian has quite a small collection, but I spent an incredibly long time there and still didn’t make it through it all. The McKintosh house is attached, and that was a pleasure – the chairs look incredibly uncomfortable, but if you’re not allowed to sit in them, the design of the rooms, esp the living room, done in whites with this oddly proportioned furniture and a mix of geometric and organic elements is quite stunning. The museum also has the Whistler estate, and I loved learning more about Whistler and his life, including the dispute over the Peacock Room, which is now at the Freer in D.C. They had some very strange Old Master paintings, mostly Dutch/Flemish and Italian, a few nice Chardins (one of the scullery maid – we were discussing yesterday at dinner what the difference between a scullery, larder, and pantry might be). Saw some nice works by the Glasgow Colourists and curious 18th c. prints of Rome and its daily life by an artist called David Allan. Curiously, on the radio getting into Glasgow heard a show about destruction in art, from Duchamp to Pierre Piloncelli (or smth similar), who smashed the Pompidou urinal with a hammer. There’s currently a Gustav Metzger show on in London. Wish I could provide coherent analysis of anything at the moment, but am too tired and too stuffed with fantastic food so will leave it at this.

Drove up to Dunblane by way of Blackpool. Blackpool is quite depressing -- garrishness trying to cover up poverty is never a pretty sight to behold. Rows of hotels converted out of terrace houses, everything looking a bit run down, even the signage somehow different -- may be it's the fonts or the specifics of design. I fell asleep in the car as King's College Choir was singing and woke up in Cumbria, which under the very overcast sky was gorgeous -- hills of slightly patchy grass with black dry-stone walls snaking up, down and over them, lots of sheep around. Spectacular, really, though I couldn't live with that for long. As we got closer to Scotland, I marveled at the sheer number of shades of brown and ochre in the landscape. The trees have almost lost their leaves, but some are still holding on and have that intense yellowness turning to rotting brown of the very last leaves of the season, looking both striking and somehow insufficient against the grey, black, and brown of everything else. Got here, saw the gorgeous Japanese maple, which is bright red and still has at least half of its leaves, were given a lovely lunch, went for an extremely wet walk in the pouring rain through the bit of wood behind the town -- oh, the joy of Scottish vacations -- came back, had a wonderful dinner and have watched two shows on the telly, one about 19th c. human zoos, focused particularly on the story of Ottabanga (sp?), a pygmy who was brought to America for the St. Louis World's Fair, went back to Africa, found he did not feel at home, returned to the US, was put on display in the monkey house in the Bronx Zoo and eventually killed himself ten years later in Lynchburg, VA. I hadn't heard before of Madison Grant and his connection to Hitler, either. It was a pretty good documentary, though I thought all the experts could have sounded a bit more expert. Still, compared to the amount of discussion that goes about this in US public media, it's kind of amazing that people in the UK are willing to talk about race, however clumsily. Tomorrow, there's a show on about the genetic advantage that multiracial people might have... Probably worth watching. Also, I l-u-v BBC radio. Second show we watched was Garrow's Law about an 18th c. lawyer who introduced the idea of adversarial witness interrogation for the defense at the Old Bailey. A bit cheesified for the purposes of a conventional story line -- an entirely unnecessary love interest thing going on -- but the historical aspects are fascinating, if also deeply disturbing, and the cases are based on actual cases -- apparently, the Old Bailey archives were made avaialable on-line recently.
So really quite a fabulous day all around, more wet fun expected tomorrow.

We made it all the way out to East London for the dilapidated chic of the Bethnall Green Working Men's Club to see some classic avant-garde films. Upon our return home, C's first Google search was "avant garde cinema why is it so crap?" During the interval, he was asking for a lethal injection to put him out of misery while I spent my time rating the room average on the Wilde Pretentiousness Scale (ranging from .87 to 8.71). I'd give it a 6.9. Surrounded by a sea of hipsters, I suddenly felt very self-conscious about my mismatched striped socks (one with yellow stripes, one with red, worn on grounds of frugality). The guy who introduced the films seemed very devoted to avant-garde cinema, but possessed an unnerving affection for the phrase "kind of,"
I thought Brackhage's The Riddle of Lumen was ok (I think I recognized Boulder sites) - it had its moments. Dorsky's The Visitation, obviously inspired by Brackhage, I found quite beautiful and meditative, the effect augmented by the rhythmic sound of a runnin 16-mm film projector. The Hart of London was 70 minutes, and while I thought some of the techniques Chambers used (multiple superimposed shots, solarization, the slowing and speeding up of film) produced beautiful effects, so much of the print was a blur (don't know if that was intentional or the quality of this particular print) that the prospect of watching these totally non-narratival, often almost invisible sequences for over an hour when very tired didn't seem appealing, and we left early.
The cool thing was that before the movies, we had stumbled on the bagel shops in Brick Lane, where C. had wanted to take me anyway. I guess the first of London's "begel" shops was there. And I tell you what, those bagels were good. Really crisp on outside, really nice and chewy on inside, served to me with boiled egg, mayo and an excellent pickle -- an Eastern European delight if ever there was one.
Got home, found somehow a David Attenborough BBC show about Mammals. That was really cool, the kinds of footage they have on nature shows is truly amazing. They had a bit on the elephant shrew, now known as the sengi. And the fruit bats 10 billion of which migrate to a megaroost in equatorial Africa (Zambia) for a few weeks each year and eat 2 kg of mangoes a night each. Amazing stuff...

A short fiction exercise

There were streaks and dried up dirt from an earlier rainfall on the windshield. The driver’s side had been wiped clean for obvious safety reasons, but the passenger side demanded no such practical consideration and its occupant could be permitted to drift in and out of accidental visions. She had always found travel in a vehicle of any kind at night to be a profoundly moving experience – perhaps because the only things she liked better than bad puns were obvious metaphors. There was something sad and glorious about the glow of evenly interspersed lights in the darkness, or the moment of suddenly being blinded by an oncoming car when turning a corner, glancing off sideways to keep track of the white line where the road ended, seeing only enough road to focus on it from one minute to the next. Strangers in the night, exchanging insurance policies. And now, as she leaned back in the passenger seat, she was treated to an almost phantasmagorical journey when the headlights of each on-coming vehicle were refracted by the dirt and formed on the surface of the concave glass tilting arcs, so that a steady flow of cars moving in the other direction created for the passenger an illusion of speeding through a giant, endless suspension bridge of light, precariously coming in and out of existence, so suddenly, unexpectedly, pointlessly, and accidentally beautiful. It was as grand a spectacle as one could hope for in order to capture the smallness of her life, and when combined with the Jaffa cakes prudently purchased before the journey, it was an experiences verging on the sublime.

Na svidanje, lepa Ljubljana...

 
My last evening in that lovely city.

It's nice living in fairytale land, but the dragons can be a bother

 

People have been so nice to me as I was tying up lose ends. Folks at the museum, librarians, the lady at the post office. Slovene, like any language, has some very distinct characteristics that I think reveal a lot about the culture. The use of the "we" in speaking of the Slovene people, the insane love of diminutives, the slang borrowings from German. In the last few days, I've heard a lot the phrase "Kako si pridna." It means, "How dilligent/hard-working you are." What interests me is not the compliment's applicability to me, but it's very frequent use -- I've never heard the word for "diligent/hard-working" used as often as I have here. I like the fact that this is something Slovenes value. And everyone keeps saying, "You should come back..." Though it's not quite that simple; my friend C., onto whom I happily pawned off almost everything I couldn't take with me, was telling me about all the complexities of trying to get citizenship, and it's almost as if the bureaucrats will look for any reason they can to deny it... Saying good-bye to C. was good, my least awkward good-bye, helped along by the fact that we had practical matters to resolve (getting a box and bag of things on bike in rain home -- check!). It's always nice to see someone really excited about the books you give him/her, and I'm even willing to forgive his disinterest in giving Vacky the Angry Feminist Cow a good home.
On my last night, I walked through the rain and I wasn't even unhappy. This is the sort of thing that happens to me despite myself. I had to walk about 20 mins to the youth hang-out at Metelkova to pick up a copy of a movie from this guy I contacted at a student theatre troupe. It was incredibly loud in the club where they were, I have no idea why people voluntarily submit their ears to that, but the kids themselves again were so incredibly nice and friendly and willing to help. Couldn't really hang out, but left there feeling good, which was a nice treat after all the stress of recycling paper and shipping shit all week. Treated myself to a falafel on the way there (from Ljubljana's only quick falafel stand, but they make really good stuff) and a cup of hot chocolate at the gay bar on the way home. I'm pretty sure they were showing Maedchen in uniform on the big screen. Classic. I think I like cafe-bars a lot more than I like just bars. I found myself actually feeling comfortable in this one... Took some pictures on the way back of temporarily re-decorated lamps. My feet were soaking wet, but it's beautiful out with everything glistening in the rain. This town feels so familiar and comfortable... I almost can't believe how much I've come to like it in the last nine months. It's very special in general and special to me in particular. I don't know if I'll ever have the chance to feel the intimacy of a resident here, but I hope I'll at least have a chance to visit. So strange where my life has taken me...
And tomorrow is London, which has also come to feel strangely familiar, though in an entirely different way.