От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: moment, in a moment, and someone is already hammering

Дата: 1 апреля 2005 г. 13:22

dear zhen,

i don’t know if it’s late of not. it feels late: the light is bright,

the small fruit shop across the street outside my kitchen window is

already open, but it is only 9:00, and though it would have been

simplest for me to be at the passport office half an hour ago when

they opened, i have all morning, and i shouldn’t have to wait very

long for (hopefully) a few answers. of course i will be rather

distracted if i don’t get any answers. if my trip to the passport

office is successful, i think i will go to the shoe shop and buy a

pair of new shoes, which, as you know, for me, is quite an event. this

pair of shoes i will wear every day for the next two years. i also

have an errand or two to run at the institute (copies of readings for

students that i forgot to put in their folders) and i think i will try

to download some materials from the internet at the computer there, if

no one is using it. how much or how many of these things i do will

depend on my mood after the passport office. do you know at the dunce

college that i still struggle with students who don’t know the

difference between “how much” and “how many”?

when you have the chance and the wish and the will, which means, if

and when you feel like it, can you try to find out on the internet in

russia if there is anything resembling a dvd of “Man With A Movie

Camera” or any parts there of, or any essays in an available book

form? this not so much for the essay i may have to write for the

conference here the first week of june, but for future reference, and

to ask you if you can bring one or two important books with you, i

don’t mean art books, but i am thinking there might be a collection of

essays published by russian film scholars on this very important 1929

film by Vertov, though the encounter must be difficult, due to his

1934 Three Songs of Lenin and other works from that period, though

eventually his aesthetic ran foul of the social-realist policies and

enforcements. Though he lived until 1954, his film production

apparently more or less came to a halt by the time and event of the

patriotic war.

Man with a Movie Camera, though, is one of those gems of

experimentation with layers of narrative, self-reference, collage,

jump-cuts, just about everything, and any prolonged attention to this

film i think returns one to the proposition of the film as a personal

medium, just like a lyric poem, instead of a mass production by a

studio. have you ever heard of ‘cinema verite’ (with a french acccent

on the last e). cinema of truth, or kino-pravda (vertov’s term) which

documents, with a personal (lyric) camera, the daily life, the

non-heroic life, the social life. this was a popular concept in 50

french cinema, for example, though i think chris marker continued it

among others, the kind of film, in other words, where you are not

allowed to forget that there is a film in progress or in the process

of being made, i don’t think vertov ever used actors. the film with

the actors, with the stage, is a distinctly other kind of film, and i

am interested, in the long run, which means eventually, and as i have

access to materials, in the post-war (1940s) pressures and gaps among

theater and film, not as entertainment vehicles, but as art, and high

art, if one can still speak of serious art any more.

i promise to talk to you a lot about the seriousness of art when you

get to lodz. i hope you don’t mind.

kisses, i’m off to the passport office …

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: new shoes and not so good news

Дата: 1 апреля 2005 г. 16:07

dear zhen,

i don’t know now why i waited so long: i went to the doc martens shop

and bought a pair of shoes in 10 minutes after trying on 42, 43 and 45

(no 44s) which was just as well, the 43 fit perfectly and i walked

home in them after paying 110 dollars, which is a fair price for these

shoes in the u.s. though i have paid less on sale, my pride being the

last pair of shoes which i wore new to Tomsk in september two years

ago en route to Poland i only paid 28 dollars for, though they were

half a size too small, and it took some time for them to feel

comfortable on my feet. the new shoes feel perfect, and i wonder if i

have been having trouble with my legs because of the old shoes, since

i actually do a lot of walking, on cement and pavement and even

cobblestones.

now, for the ‘not so good’ (though hardly surprising, at least for

you) news: as a temporary resident i cannot issue you an invitation.

only a permanent resident can, and of course the university can, so

that is an option, though i don’t know how to ask for this (that

doesn’t mean i won’t find a way somehow, and soon) but, and the

officer, someone i’ve worked with before and who recognized me and

immediatley began speaking English, she said you should, you must, you

need to contact the Polish embassy in Moscow and find out what their

requirements are (might i add the subjective comment that this is

Poland and Russia, not the U.S., and nothing is fixed in stone). what

does this mean?

i think we should this weekend compose a fax message, in English,

since you can communicate by fax from your office, addressing the

Polish embassy and in one short sentence or two informing them of 1)

your marital status 2) your wish to join your husband who works in

Poland and 3) what are the requirements for a three-month visa. we can

sign the fax jointly, giving them all my contact information here in

lodz, and request a soon-as-convenient response by fax, which

response, i am almost sure, will request, demand, require a personal

visit to the embassy. those are the words the passport officer used

here: “has she been to the Polish embassy in Moscow to find out what

they need for her visa?”

this leads me to propose, for us, to plan for a one-week or two-week

visit in Moscow in either later June or early July, trying to arrange

for you at the very least a one-month visa (the residency paperwork

here for me has only taken several weeks previously, but that was

then, and this is now, and we really shouldn’t count on being able to

satisfy your residency status in one month, though it is possible that

it may be done – it would be a risk, that is all) and maybe a

three-month visa, if we are both there, etc. otherwise, i am going to

have to work on getting you a private invitation either through the

university or someone willing to do this for me.

first things first, though, we should try the fax followed by a

telephone call, maybe, maybe, maybe. i remember hearing how Russians

from Chita trying to travel to the U.S. would need sometimes need a

phone call from someone who knew someone to facilitate the process,

but at the moment, i don’t know anyone who knows anyone in the Polish

embassy in Moscow. i do remember and well as you, i’m sure, my need to

go to the Polish embassy in person even in the U.S. so maybe this is

what we need to do in Moscow. what do you think?

i guess we have a lot to talk about if you call this Sunday.

i miss you.

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: did you get your laptop back?

Дата: 2 апреля 2005 г. 12:54

dear zh,

i thought there might be a letter from you this morning since i wrote

you yesterday after returning from the passport office, or else, you

are upset. silence is a good antidote sometimes. still, it is nothing

we did not expect. i am just uncertain as to what to do next. one

thing i am not uncertain about, my new shoes really do hurt, i could

barely make it back from the supermarket last night. all the way home

i was dreaming of taking off my shoes. i forget how long this process

is, making the new shoes fit the shape of your feet, but i do not look

forward to the next few weeks, if i remember the last time, which, as

you remember, was in Tomsk, and i was almost certain that i had bought

a pair of shoes that were too small for me. now i am almost certain

that i have bought a pair of shoes that are too large for me. this is

the difficulty of good leather that will last a long time.

i have been reading, for my seminar, once again, as i have read it

several times before, a novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison (who won the

nobel prize and i hope for this novel) and it makes me very homesick

for American English. no one who is not raised there, inculcated

there, can know, from outside, either from the movies or from music,

the depth of sound and resonance, echoing, of the “delta” (southern)

(black) influence on American English, and i don’t realize just how

much i miss this English until i read an author for whom this is her

native idiom, and it is almost as though i cannot read the novel for

very long, i have to stop and catch my breath, or bearings. and i have

to confront as well the existential problem of living and using an

artificial, no, not artificial, but certainly not the native English

into which i was born. also, there is this thing also, when i lived in

cleveland, a manuscript came into my possession, a kind of slave

narrative, and i wrote a great poem from it, one which took me several

years to write, and which i could not have written if i did not live

in the ghetto, and even the manuscript would not have come into my

possession had i not lived and worked with students who also came from

the ghetto, and now, reading Beloved, i realize that i was influenced

by this novel, which i remember reading sometime then, because

Morrison was from Ohio, and there is a lot of Ohio landscape in the

novel. it is almost as though the poem i wrote is a kind of addendum

to or supplement to the novel, and i had either forgotten this, or

thought at the time that it wasn’t important. now i think it is.

but you are probably worried about the problem of the visa, and i

shouldn’t take up your time with writing you about my writing, past or

present. where do we begin? and what are your fears?

i miss you.

k.

p.s. have you heard that the Pope is dying? life will come to a stop

here in Poland for a few days when he does, there is no other

programming on the three television channels that a kind of ongoing

vigil.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: so this is Sunday mo(u)rning

Дата: 3 апреля 2005 г. 12:15

dear zhen,

i learn this morning from the guardian online news site that the Pope

has passed away, so i don’t know whether i will have classes tomorrow.

one wonders how long the official mourning period will be. there was

nothing, absolutely nothing, on television last night except na zyvo

vigils at different Polish cities, and interviews with various Polish

bishops. it was as though the world had stopped, and maybe it has, in

Poland. one of my colleagues called yesterday, looking for someone

else’s phone number, and didn’t mention anything about the Pope,

which, perhaps, is a sign that for many it is an official, even

bureaucratic, “sign” which most would rather leave alone, let alone,

though a state-sponsored or church-sponsored holiday would be very

welcome (holidays are always welcome here, and there are not enough of

them, one should work only two or at most three days a week, and then

have what we used to call in the u.s., a month of Sundays.

as for myself, i am just now realizing how exhausting this conference

will be which starts on Monday and lasts until Thursday, with my

participation. i will be very tired when Friday arrives. i was very

tired yesterday, for some unknown reason. i went to bed early, and

woke late. worse, and more disturbing, though i read most of the day,

i could follow, understand, what i was reading, nothing was clicking,

nothing was being transferred from the page into my head by way of my

notebook, so i felt, all day, spectacularly dull. i may as well have

gone to Warsaw. some days i am incapacitated by feelings of discontent

and restlessness, and a sense of confinement. i went outside twice:

once to see if the poczta was open, and it wasn’t, and second to

return my videos to Beverly Hills Video, in between, i read, with one

or two little naps (short sleeps). but nothing was happening in my

head all day. now, today, i must worry about whether i must teach

tomorrow, and even whether there will be a rector’s day at the

institute, we have had rector’s days for football games, rector’s days

for ukraine, why not rector’s days for the death of the Pope (who in

all seriousness, is a very revered figure here, someone who symbolized

for many Poles the very best of Polish society, even including how

conservative this society is, more convervative than Russia, in fact,

in comparision, Russia is rather wild, or loose, around the edges).

i will give you an example: for my American Culture class i showed the

film Smoke, which has almost all dialogue and no action, not a

Hollywood film, and the students, as last year, were captivated, and

laughed at very delicate jokes (the film was dubbed in Polish) and

afterwards there was a consensus that they liked it very much, and

wanted to see the end of the film the next time we met. in the U.S.,

most of the students would be bored, without drama, without action,

without exaggeration, the spectacle and release from boredom that is

typically craved in the U.S. at least among the student populations

that i have taught before. so there is an observable difference, one

that is social and cultural, there is even a difference among cultures

about what is thought to be funny. for example, no one, whether

believers or disbelievers, would find a joke about the passing of Jan

Pavel funny or in good taste, and there are many who do not believe,

or who comment on the Catholic burden of growing up Polish. it is

really, quite a Catholic country, more so, in a way, that Italy or

Spain, perhaps, and sometimes i think Poland most resembled Ireland.

your voice yesterday sounded very calm and your mind reasonable in

light of the bad news from the passport office, though i think that

your fear of one more year in Russia is a little extreme, you will say

that you are only being cautious. how to contact the Polish embassy in

Moscow i will leave to your judgment, though to send a fax you can use

any business office, fax services are provided like xerox services, i

think you can even send a fax at the post office, the main one on

Lenin Prospect where we mailed my manuscript (not that office but the

one upstairs – i sent faxes to several jobs in Poland from there). i

am sorry to hear that your own fax privileges have been taken away. it

certainly seems like a deteriorating (suspicious) climate there. for

whatever reason, probably the Ukraine one.

i will hope for a letter from you today though i understand you are

visiting Sveta and i hope (demand) you have a good time, in fact, do

you know that i worry about this, because you do have quite a wide

circle of friends, and though you say you don’t take much care about

them, they obviously take great care about you, and take you out often

to dinner and drinks. whether we are in Poland or eventually in the

u.s., you won’t have any friends, only me. doesn’t this sometimes

worry you? it is not so easy to make new friends. i only make

colleagues, as a matter of speaking, which means, as a form of

emotional protection, and distance which i habitually inhabit, i form

only professional relationships, so that communication is only about

practical matters, the job, students and requirements, or, like this

weekend, having to read and comment on someone’s essay, complicated by

the fact that i don’t care for the essay but of course i can’t say

this, in other words, i suppose you could say that i provide services

(the services of a native-speaking English foreigner) to colleagues,

but i never share intimate information with anyone, i never confide. i

think this is very different from the “since childhood” friendships

you have and it is a real Russian cultural trait, and i mention it

once again to remind you of the deep change that we are slowly (too

slowly!) undergoing, not to warn against it, only to open the problem

to examination, consideration, etc., so that we are aware of some of

the stresspoints, and do not find ourselves more surprised than need

be.

on a day like yesterday, when, for all the beautiful weather, i simply

couldn’t read worth a blank page of paper, those are such surprises

that i can live without. what i mean is the sensation of trying to

read and having literally nothing else to do but read and be unable to

read because one is unable to concentrate, to keep eyes on page. that

is the kind of day i had yesterday, and i hope that i do not have such

a day today. i will try to read in the morning, though by

mid-afternoon my thoughts should turn to my classes, though i have

promised myself not to concern myself with teaching on Sundays.

by the way, i had a weird supper yesterday, as i had bought on sale

several blood-sausages (a real Polish treat) and i chopped them up and

cooked them with onions, made a side dish of chopped cabbbage, and a

pot of rice, and the blood-sausages, which, well, looked rather

bloody, cooked and tasted like liver, so it wasn’t so bad after all,

though not very pretty on the plate. i promise not to cook such a dish

for you. there’s a lovely blue table just perfect for the kitchen in

the window of a nearby “meble sklep”. should i buy it?

i miss you

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: you are already asleep and i soon will be

Дата: 4 апреля 2005 г. 1:18

dear zhen,

i promised you to write you a letter at the end of my day which you

could receive in the morning so here it is, though i’d be better off

not writing, or you would be, or both of us, as i have been listening

most of the afternoon and early evening to the clunk-a-clunk-a-clunk

of my printer, trying to print 12 essays for 12 students, after

finding a number of essays on the novel i’m teaching for my seminar, i

decided for a paper topic i would give each student a 12-15 page essay

on the novel, and have them write a 3 page summary, very good practice

for working with secondary sources, which they will need to do soon.

so i spent the better part of my day struggling to print them out,

going through one ink cartridge, and a momentary break-down in my

printer ports, which took me an hour to troublehsoot. i am so

exhausted, or my nerves are, from hearing the sound of the printer,

that i think i will call it a night and go to bed. still, i never

would have got this done after today, so if it was going to get done,

it had to be today. i forgot to mention that a colleague called

yesterday from whom i learned that our faculty meeting is postponed

for two weeks, so i will try to make an appointment with Agnieszka if

and when (i expect to) i see her at the conference. probably it will

be next friday. i also put in an application at a college in new york,

for a job that i saw advertised only the night before. it is creative

writing, at a college, somewhere near syracuse, wherever that is.

doubts beset me on all sides. the manuscript i sent from russia, it

turns out, was not accepted, as the press announced the prize winner

today, someone from ireland. at least that clears me of any doubts

about sending the manuscript out this week to another publisher, the

one with the April 30 deadline. this is beginning to feel like a long

long bad dream. when do i wake up?

kisses.

k.

p.s. you were right: there is nothing but dead pope on tv.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: so it begins again once again

Дата: 4 апреля 2005 г. 11:11

dear zhen,

there you have it, or here you have it: i am sitting at the computer

with cup of coffee in hand at 7:00 in the morning instead of 6:30

since i lay in bed once again, having already, after the daylight

savings time switch, changed my alarm clock to 6:00 from 5:30, so i

really should be writing you an hour early, and, it would appear, i

have lost an hour of preparation for classes i have absolutely no

interest in teaching. it is getting worse and worse, this interest

element. how do you do it? does the idea that there is a time limit to

continuing to teach meaninglessness help you get through a day? so i

sent a letter of interest and a cv to somewhere in the u.s. yesterday.

almost as cruel as the silence i can expect in response is the false

hope that it creates, even in me, who, yes, once in a while, actually

dares to hope for something else than the meaninglessness with which i

am surrounded. here, i think it is the effect of too many people

living together in very small rooms, and in rooms where they can hear

their neighbors sneeze and cough. it has the effect of putting people

in a box. maybe we are all in boxes. or maybe it is just the problem

of teaching the second language. yes, i think that is the problem. and

i am getting tired of coping with this problem. or coping with this

problem is succeeding in exhausting me. i have to admit that after

friday and my visit to the passport office i felt more than ever like

the notorious “guest worker” (migrant worker) who has the right to

work tirelessly in the host country, but not even the right to invite

his wife to live with him. isn’t this the typical scenario? man goes

to host country to work and sends salary back home from where the

other is not allowed to leave? i think that is one reason, that

feeling of resemblance to the guest worker, why i could send a letter

to the job in the u.s., and especially, of course, absolutely, if we

are not able to arrange a visa for you or if you are not able to

acquire residence here (suddenly, i have my doubts, were we to fill

out the form, and send it to the Wojewoda, that it is just as possible

that they would refuse you residency status without american

citizenship, in other words, probably the only way that you could

reside here legally is with an invitation from the university). this

is what i think we can expect to learn from the Polish embassy in

Moscow as well. so you see i am being a little suspicious,

pessimistic, just a little. the other thing to remember is the virtue

of patience, though that virtue runs thin after a time. you are quite

correct about the E.U. status, that our problem with the visa and

borders is caught up in border tightening among E.U., U.S., and Russia

(non-E.U. “East”). if i had a job in the u.s., there would be

absolutely no difficulty in arranging a visa to the u.s. for you, nor

would i lack the confidence that i do here in having to deal with

Polish regulations and customs, that is if i had to deal with the u.s.

consulate. maybe that is the route we will have to take, or maybe it

is one option, one choice, though a precarious one, since you know how

conflicted i am about working in the u.s. really, i am only conflicted

about the threat of part-time teaching, which consumes one, without

health benefits or pension, and once you are in this “track” it is

difficult to get out of it. i am not very full of optimism this

morning, and can only hope that classes have been cancelled. the

streets look quiet, though it is still early, and last night, trying

to fall asleep (i had insomnia) i heard a drunken man shouting in the

street, maybe he was mourning.

i miss you

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: minutes before going to the dunces

Дата: 4 апреля 2005 г. 15:00

dear zhen,

i have a few minutes before going to the dunce college and then

afterwards, to register at the conference at which i am to give my

paper on thursday. just thought i say hello in the middle, hopefully

towards the end, nearing the end of your day, in case you happen to

check your email and in case the server there is up and running. my

proposal was not accepted for the conference in the u.s. next

december, which is somewhat of a relief, but a blow to the ego

nonetheless – at least a long lost book arrived in the mail this

morning, a study by a russian scholar teaching in canada of

Mandelstam’s poetics, not the poetry, just the poetics, which is the

text i know best, so this book is rather exciting to me, and i can’t

wait to read it. the length of the study is perfect: 150 pages, i

don’t know why anyone ever bothers to write any more, scholarship just

becomes repetition. i know the essays so well, that is will be hanging

on to every word (well, not literally) and, of course, now, the next

question is, when will i have time to read it?

yours, out of time

with kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: home now for the evening and then?

Дата: 4 апреля 2005 г. 22:10

hey zhay,

i thought i would write you your wake up letter, or is it morning

letter, at 18:00 sharp, now, even though you won’t read it until the

letters are cold, if ever they are warm in such machines, that i am

finally finished with my errands, having registered with the

conference, though i didn’t stick around to attend the late afternoon

panel, i didn’t feel dressed up enough, and the registration only cost

me 100 zlotys, when i was expecting to have to pay 300, so i feel as

though i have just saved two hundred zlotys, which was the exact price

of the books i just ordered from krakow, so i guess everything evens

out in the end.

thank you dearly for you words of encouragement. i am incredibly

lonely some days, and it is disturbing to think of not even perhaps

seeing you until september, which makes me wonder, do you think that

we should go ahead with the three-month invitation for me to russia

this summer? at least we know that it’s practicable. i want to see

you, and soon. your description of the–what was the beer we had, was

it Danish, or Irish–restaurant that we remember well since i was

going to tip 500 rubles, yes, i remember that afternoon, and just how

much you enjoy a good glass of cold beer, or wine, or cognac for that

matter, when the timing’s right. but you do let yourself enjoy life,

and i like this very much about you, among other – other – other …

okay. i have to grade papers tonight but i don’t want to and maybe

i’ll use the conference as an excuse. the teachers here make a big

deal out of it, and everyone was dressed in suits. i don’t have a

suit, dear. and my essay, now i think it will be heard as rather

provocative, i don’t know. i have a talent for insulting the

authorities, whoever they may be. it is strange to send this when i

know you won’t be reading it for a very long time. and guess what? the

presidentially-declared national day of mourning is Friday! i don’t

have any classes on Friday! how many times am i going to be in a

country the birthplace of the Pope when the Pope dies? and Friday! it

is all bad luck, like, i think, my prospects of publishing in this

life. the book on mandelstam is an encouragement, when one gets

discouraged, how much worse could life be? very simple. MANDEL’SHTAM.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: early tuesday morning

Дата: 5 апреля 2005 г. 11:18

dear zhenya,

coffee and my morning letter to you. i woke up this morning a minute

before the alarm and i was in the kitchen taking a drink from my

bottled water, mineral water, a habit i suppose i will have to break

when you are finally here, and the alarm went off, i dutifully

returned to it, turned it off, and lay back down on the sofa, as

lately i am sleeping on the sofa, in the beige room, your room, when

and if you finally arrive, and the next time i woke up i consulted the

conference program, and decided there wasn’t anything of interest

until this afternoon, so, i’ve just decided, i’m not going anywhere

until 14:00, which leaves me the morning to mark american culture

papers, which seems fair, and according to the justifiable standards

of my personal work ethic, since i went to bed early again last night,

about 22:00, and i am beginning to think that i am in a state of

depression, since all i want to do is sleep, and sleeping feels very

good, when i can sleep, and when i am not pursued by dreams, which for

one whole night i could not stop dreaming, like watching a bad film

and you can’t leave the theater.

now i will turn to the bad film that is my teacher’s life and read

exercises in boredom and obligation. what else is school? at least you

can’t say that i’m doing anything that i believe in. the final copy of

my conference paper i printed out last night. i hope it’s not too

provocative. Marx is mentioned once in it. one of my colleagues is

giving a paper on Brecht. so it shouldn’t be a forbidden reference.

but i am in that state and condition where, not knowing where i am,

not even having the slightest clue as to where i am, i simply act on

my own sense of inner necessity, without the slightest idea of the

consequences it may have. perhaps they will be negative consequences.

i am, after all, a visitor, and worse than that, i am not a philolog,

and such conferences, as i could see at a glance yesterday, are for

philologs, and the culture of the professor, very european, not at all

the sleeves-rolled-up average guy talking about books which americans

(and even brits, if you remember the fellow from the Center for

European Social Thought), and i don’t have the proper sense of ritual,

though at least it is warm enough for me to wear my dress jacket, the

same one i wore when it was so hot that day of the conference in

Tomsk.

every mention of which city reminds me of you, and more and more i am

thinking that i would like to come to Tomsk by the end of June, it’s

not that far away, i could process my residency papers with the

changed marital status before i left, so that would be in the record

of my file, and what you mention about the European Union citizens not

gives me further pause to think, though i shouldn’t try to think too

much this early in the morning, but if for European Union citizens

their spouses are allowed no matter from what country, this won’t be

the case for U.S. citizens except by special dispensation, that’s what

worries me.

so, for this morning, in a chronic condition of worry, and wishing to

sleep, simply to keep on sleeping, but thoughtful at least enough to

send with this letter a kiss, just a light one this morning, for i am

very worried. that’s why i want to come to Tomsk. i don’t want to

spend the summer here alone.

kisses.

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: short p.s.

Дата: 5 апреля 2005 г. 11:54

dear zh,

i’m still not marking papers yet. reading my email this morning, the

good news came that my conference proposal for the first week in june

was accepted, a conference at another college here, but there will be

some academics from Turkey there, which is always another option for

teaching (wild associations this morning). now, however, i have to

turn my attention to writing this new essay, though i have the topic

narrowed down enough that i don’t have to search for a lot of sources.

the added benefit is that, unlike the present conference, all

proceedings will be published, as in Tomsk, so, even though it’s not a

requirement, i am starting something of a rhythm of publishing at

least one conference paper a year, which is good for – good for what?

i’m just trying to fit in somewhere, belong somewhere, and i should

know better than that, and should know that there is no belonging, no

place to stay.

i miss you

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: time to go to the conference

Дата: 5 апреля 2005 г. 17:22

dear zhen,

i have finished with marking 12 papers in four hours, about 20 minutes

per paper, and it turns out i have only ten minutes in which to write

you, as i must take a shower and make a shave, dress, catch the bus,

and arrive by 14:45 at the conference site, listen obediently to the

plenary lecture, yes, wait a moment, let me consult my schedule, it

begins at 15:00, maybe i have 15 minutes instead of 10, the important

news, of course, is the simpler, comparatively simpler, requirements

for getting you here, where you can amuse yourself periodically

watching me idiotically marking papers and eating cheese in between

every third paper. the sunlight is saturate today, blocks of sun bars

on the floors and walls, and furniture, already the beige room feels

less mine, as soon it will be yours, i think i will buy that blue

kitchen table in the window of the nearby furniture store some time

this week.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: rain last night after a week of blue skies

Дата: 6 апреля 2005 г. 10:51

dear zhen,

i saw and spoke with Agnieszka yesterday and she is going to contact

the international department, so we should have some answers (an

invitation!) soon. i hope very soon. your teaching schedule sounds

terrible. every week mine is like a distraction, and i can’t believe

there are still eight weeks left in the semester. i am ready to give

out signatures and call it quits. i had an appointment about some

translations after yesterdays panel and drank two cups of coffee which

kept me awake until 2:00 a.m. or later, the last time i looked it was

1:30. i think it was more than the coffee. any ‘in person’ or ‘live’

discussion of poetry agitates me, especially _wrong_ discussions,

because then poetry itself is wronged, and my life appears even more

meaningless than it does on a day-to-day basis (i have to have some

illusions to survive) but the academicism was so stale, in the one

plenary lecture (some english professor from france) and then four

papers by either graduate students or people working on their

habilitacja that i felt really suffocated, unable to breathe. everyone

nods their heads and talks about t.s. eliot’s four quartets as if it

was written yesterday. my suspicion is that this is what has been

translated, and so that is what people know. it makes me more homesick

than ever. and so, insomnia, and one wakes into or walks restlessly

among one’s thoughts about the reduced terms by which life is lived,

radically reduced. i think for the june conference i am going to try

to give a powerpoint presentation.

i am going to check my email now for a letter from you, every few

words help.

i miss you.

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: rain last night after a week of blue skies

Дата: 7 апреля 2005 г. 10:40

dear zh,

of course it is very nice to wake up to a letter from you, even though

it is inspired by the absence of a letter from me. this morning i have

to give my paper at the conference, so i am a little nervous. if you

were here, i would probably be a lot more nervous, not because you

were here, but because you would give me the opportunity to perform my

nerves, whereas now all i can do is wish to sleep. i went to bed early

last night, and woke up early this morning. it is a grey sky outside.

i heard two very good papers from two of my colleagues in the drama

dept. about contemporary plays (1980s and 1990s) in England, very

transgressive, even shocking, i think, some of the passages that were

quoted, shocking at least to the students in attendance. there was a

dinner and reception at 20:00 but i did not go to it. i am too tired

from teaching to be very social, and i feel very much like an outsider

(i think i would feel this anywhere, and i think i have always felt

this).

i was reading a little while before going to be from the book that i

had originally intended to include as part of this morning’s

presentation, but it did not arrive soon enough, but i can see where i

can include it in a second part to the essay i am presenting this

morning. now, also, there is an essay i must write for the first week

of june, which will occupy my weekends, and at the end of june i think

i will submit a proposal for a conference at the end of october in

southern Poland. to that end, last night i ordered for 80 dollars a

set of two increasingly rare books, i had paperback copies which i

left in Chita Russia thinking i was going to return there, and as it

was i think that trip i paid about 80 dollars in overweight luggage

fees, so you see there is no end to injustice, and expenses. the two

books i ordered last night, though, are of a set of 750 copies,

hardcover, so that makes them a little more special, maybe. my

interest rekindled when, teaching this novel Beloved that i mentioned

last week, i noted a lot of criticism on trauma, historical wounds,

and breaking the narrative of culture progress, American myths of

egalitarianism, etc., and Testimony, written more than 50 years ago,

does this superbly: they are narrative collages from court records of

the lowest immigrant and african-american classes, i have always liked

them and i think i could write a good essay on them for the conference

in october, if i have all summer to work on this essay. i will also

set as a task expanding the paper i am presenting this morning and i

will submit to a Polish American studies journal. that is another task

i am setting myself this summer, so that i have work to do, in

addition to enjoying your presence.

now, could i ask you to return to the subject of a favor and the

subject of Dziga Vertov? could you search when you have the time the

Russia google and see if you can find any digital stills, images, from

his 1929 Man With a Movie Camera? this is very important as i would

like to create some kind of powerpoint presentation, and i would like

to include a few images from this film.

i hope this letter satisfies your requirements, and that it makes you

a little less lonely. even the fewest words from you in the morning

are very welcome to me, as the mornings are especially hopeless some

days.

i miss you.

k.

On Thu, 07 Apr 2005 07:45:11 +0400

“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

> hi, no letter for me in the morning? well, i see. it is winter here

> again. it was snowing the whole night and now everything is white

> and  slidy(?). my first class is over. i have a break, and i think i

> will  go to look for new boots for my mother. it will be -20 on

> sunday. in  moscow it is about 15 above. where is the justice in the

> world. no  justice, no letter from you. i will check e-mail later

> today. i miss  you. bye zh

>

> 

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: some more questions about vertov

Дата: 8 апреля 2005 г. 13:26

dear zhen,

i don’t doubt that there’s a letter from you asking where is my letter

and i can only say in my defense that my nerves were exhausted last

night and i went to sleep early and woke up late on the day of

national mourning for the pope. so here i am with cup of coffee

writing to you at 9:00 a.m.

the panel went well, i suppose, though mostly in attendance were my

students, and the chair of the panel was a colleague, on leave this

semester, with whom i have very cordial relations, and he seemed

impressed by the paper, though i’m puzzled by the absence of my other

colleagues, and whether this is due to some rivalry with the

department which sponsored the conference, or to inhibitions regarding

the “ghost” of projectivism and the poet Charles Olson (everyone is

mentally situated in the 1960s-1970s here), or just plain snobbery,

since i’m not a Polish philolog, I don’t know, and i don’t even know

whether it bothers me or not. about 20 of my students were there, and

they appeared, at least, very impressed, and this is good for my

status as a teacher, as i appear to them as someone who has ideas in

addition to a native accent.

this is a resemblance betweeen russia and poland, i think: the

foreigner is tolerated only to extent that he remains a foreigner,

outside of the system processes, and the simpler and even the more of

a likeable fool he is, the better, as this conforms to the stereotype,

especially of the American, as someone who is genial and likeable, but

not to be taken seriously. do you agree? also, to judge from some

writings, cultural writings, here, there is a real vituperative

academic style, and aesthetic “positions” are fought over as on a

battlefield. still, i am looking at the culture from the outside, and

as i always expect, i have perhaps insulted some sensibilities,

perhaps, and not at a very good time, obviously.

but i already have a second chapter for this essay, though i don’t

think i’ll have time to write it until summer. my 80 dollar books

proved not to be available. oh, how i miss those two volumes i left in

eastern siberia.

today i really should begin writing the essay i need for the first

week of june. i began reading the book written on mandelstam’s poetics

last night, and i think you would like the author very much, who

writes in her introduction that her father, an academic, introduced

her to mandelstam during the samizdat period, and after signing a

petition, he was blacklisted from working for four years, until they

were able to leave the country. this is a history that you know so

well, and must make curious, at the very least, my interest in Dziga

Vertov. be that as it may, could you tell me a little more about the

690 megabyte download? i wouldn’t be able to do it here, obviously.

but maybe there’s a way i can download it at the institute. is it on

the page of the website the url for which you sent me? if so, i

couldn’t find a link to it, or were there other url addresses? also,

please, what information do they give about the content of the

download? are the excerpts from “chelovyek”?

now i am sending this to you hoping you are at the office and will

know that i am thinking about you on the mid-morning of the day of

mourning.

i miss you

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: it is raining again this morning fine misty rain

Дата: 9 апреля 2005 г. 11:24

dear zhenya,

what am i doing up and awake at 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning? at

least you get an earlier than usual letter. for not writing you in the

evenings, i am sorry, but it is psychological, as i cannot expect a

letter in response from you, it is difficult to write into the void,

and the void is what i can almost sense tangibly, concretely, lately.

in such a depression (and you don’t sound in very good shape yourself

– i know this and like this about you) it is best to sleep, and that

is what i have been doing, falling asleep last night at about 22:00.

my troubles and travail with the two books by reznikoff, called

Testimony, continues (these are the two books which for a reason i

simply cannot fathom, i left behind in chita)–did i think i was never

going to read them again? not that i want to read them and write about

them, they are too expensive! i almost ordered two available paperback

copies from the uk last night, until i realized that with shipping the

two softcover editions were going to cost 80 dollars once again. too

much! also for 80 dollars is a new critical book that i wish i had

written, about reznikoff and depression-era photography. i really need

access to libraries if my own “critical book” is ever to get off the

ground.

is that what i am writing? a critical book? maybe just a series of

disconnected essays. but this process can be organic, or more so that

writing for the classroom. already there are three more chapters or

sections to the essay i just presented, so maybe i will expand it into

a 35-40 page essay by the end of the summer. yesterday i wrote the

first paragraph of my essay on olson and vertov, and there are several

paragraphs lurking in my head. this morning, for example, i woke up

with the angle that i couldn’t find yesterday to continue. what is

exciting (sometimes) is that i feel that i am searching for a way to

write about my own practices–writing i have done in the past–not to

explain what i was doing, but to find parallels in earlier

writings/other arts (like vertov) and most of all, i know see at an

earlier phase of my own writing that i was enacting (i wasn’t

conscious of it) a synthesis of sorts between neo-classicism and

romanticism (form and expression, line and musical phrase) and then

the writing developed along a trajectory of exploration of the

notational fragment, which i associate with a kind of camera-work of

the eye, and which is really the genius of the poet Charles Olson

whose work i have always liked, always felt comfortable reading, but

whom i have never read closely, day by day, as i am reading him now. i

think for many poets, for all his energy and insight and blindnesses

and even aggressions, he feels like a long lost father. that is of

course (at least in our pitiful west) a bit of a problem. the Russian

society doesn’t seem to have the same family psychosis as the west,

maybe because everyone is just try to bail the water out of the leaky

boat of the household and the need to survive.

it is the luxury class and the luxury society that has the luxury to

dwell and agonize over psychic wounds and conflicts.

i was going to go to warsaw today but it feels like a dreamy day, wet

and rainy, and i am not inspired to go anywhere, maybe only write and

read all day today and tomorrow morning. by the afternoon and evening

i will be already distracted by having to teach the next day.

as for your questions, i only remember two: no i did not eat free food

at the conference as i would not have enjoyed it, and yes my shoes are

feeling more and more comfortable, and they are very good for my feet.

this i am convinced was one of the problems with my old shoes, they

were hurting my legs, and this is why i was beginning to suffer from

muscle seizures, because i really do walk quite a lot, and sometimes

quite furiously.

i feel very rested right now and in less of a dark gloomy mood though

you know this as my nature and such moods will come as no surprise to

you nor, i hope, personal offense. most of the time, i just bury

myself in a book, and isn’t that what is writing anyway? doesn’t

everyone who writes “bury” themselves in their book?

gloomily yours

(and you know that i miss you?)

k.

p.s. can you give me yet still more information about the vertov

download? is it, in fact, The Man With The Movie Camera? what is the

content that you can tell of the download. i can probably find one of

my students who downloads a lot a music from the internet to burn a cd

for me of this download, but i’d like to know what it consists of.

thank you very much for your help on this question.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: one more small favor asked at mid morning

Дата: 9 апреля 2005 г. 14:04

dear zhen,

here is yet another request for your help, though i think it is less

frustrating (i don’t imagine that you care very much for dziga vertov

and i am not trying to persuade you otherwise. in fact, when i saw

“Three Songs of Lenin” in new york a couple of years ago, i had quite

a strong reaction against it).

attached in pdf format are three pages that i have written yesterday

and this morning, and i am unhappy with the verb, “complicate” in the

last sentence. i am looking for the meaning of “emmendation” or

“amend” so i was wondering if using your dear Webster, you could send

me the definitions of “emmend” or “emend” and “amend” (because i am

looking for the word that will add to Manovich’s use of Vertov, one

that will include Olson’s poetics, so “amendment” sounds right, except

that it is such a political term, used for legislation, and “amend” is

more at fixing the picture, but “emend” or “emendation” has something

to do with scholarly apparatus, though i forget (which means, i don’t

know, and i don’t have a dictionary!)

also, this is another excuse to write to you, and to solicit a

response from you.

kisses

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: saturday’s rain is sunday’s grey sky and heavy wet air

Дата: 10 апреля 2005 г. 12:28

dear zhen,

i am writing you from the other side, this morning, since usually i

write you from the windows partition, due to the fact that i still

must put the computer on “suspend” instead of turning it off

completely, and closing the lid of the box, which effect, as you

observed in Cypress, necessitates resetting the system clock in

emergency repair mode every time i turn the computer back on. the

suspend function turns the computer off, it’s just that i can’t close

the lid. so usually, for the sake of convenience, instead of

rebooting, with one click i open the email program on the windows

partition, and write you, though writing you this morning from the

linux partition, i remember how much better the applications (i use

the same email program, for example) work here, on the linux side, so,

from the other side, i greet you with a good morning. Good Morning!

are you going to call me today? your letters lately have been few and

far between, and i now fully appreciate the luxury of your having your

own laptop and being able to write me in the evening and send the

letter to me. i became quite dependent on that letter, and it is a

little sad to be without it. yesterday was a day of strong drizzling

rain, so i couldn’t go outside at all, and the day before the Pope’s

day, and everything was closed, so maybe i will go to the supermarket

today. i have a breast of chicken to cook for dinner, though i can’t

use the oven anymore, as you may remember. also, there is laundry, the

usual underwear, undershirts and socks that i must have clean for the

coming work week. if i was wise, which i am not, i would mark student

papers today, since i have two classes to mark for, but i have no

commitments on tuesday, so i will probably put it off until then.

what are you doing today? are you going to call me today? i get very

used to this luxury too! i read almost two complete novels (novels my

students are supposed to be reading for their seminar) yesterday, that

is how rainy it was, in addition to writing three solid pages of an

essay for which i need about twelve pages, so every weekend, if i

write about two pages, then the essay will be written in good time,

before the conference deadline. i think i am forcing the point a

little. i think vertov was ahead of the poet, olson, maybe it was the

medium, and maybe poetry is by the nature of its medium more

‘old-fashioned’ — right now i stuck on the problem of the

‘breath-space’ which is in my title, so i need to include it in the

paper. it’s obviously a way for the poet, Charles Olson, to emphasize

the “speech-force” (which i do think is forward looking, even if we

include it in a conception of the “audio” of multi-media) though this

“speech-force” he problematically locates as coming from inside, from

the body, of the poet, rather than from the outside, the anonymous

voice of the language, what is sometimes called the “demotic” or

vernacular, which has had the prestige proper to it for poets since

Dante.

what is beyond the scope of this paper i have to write for june, is

that this “breath-space” is feminine, in a very forward-looking

inclusion of gender concepts, because all this time these ideas

develop and the writing about them he is writing almost daily to

someone he loves (very physically) and who is making him think about

the corporeality of language and language-utterance, and somewhere or

other, not in the essay i am writing about, he refers to that opening

passage in King Lear, where Cordelia refuses to speak (do you remember

our talking about this passage once on one of our walks? i would like

very much to have such talks again, and walks again, the absence of

them affects me), and the “breath-space” and “speech-force” are all

about overcoming silence, so i think that will be my point of contrast

in the essay, since Man With A Movie Camera is a silent film, written

on the threshold of the use of audio in cinema, in 1929, and for the

kind of cinema Vertov wanted to make, audio posed all kinds of

problems–the condition of silence previous to utterance and the

silent film–i don’t know if i can but i will try to make this

connection.

one thing is certain, the demand of having to produce a certain number

of pages on a topic makes me read more closely than i am in the habit

of doing, and this is very positive. for instance, i don’t know how

many times i have read pages from the Vertov writings about cinema, or

how many times i have read and re-read this essay by Olson,

“Projective Verse” (so strange that he includes no reference to the

film projector in that essay). also, i think i am going to give up on

trying to obtain a copy of Reznikoff’s Testimony, and for the

conference which i need to write an abstract for by the end of June, i

think i will find another perspective to continue writing about

Charles Olson. these are the books that i have here, and i might as

well keep working from them.

looking forward to your call …

(with kisses)

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: did you call?

Дата: 10 апреля 2005 г. 17:05

dear zh,

did you call? when i came back from the supermarket–and just now once

again the phone rang, but when i picked it up, disconnected–anyway,

the sign was, my computer was on, which it does, it comes on, when the

phone rings, don’t ask me why. i only hope that if i did miss your

call that you will call again, though, i don’t know why, you don’t

like calling from home, only from the office, and i don’t like the

thought of you in the office on Sunday.

kisses.

k.

p.s. i bought four lightbulbs at the supermarket today.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: saturday’s rain is sunday’s grey sky and heavy wet air

Дата: 10 апреля 2005 г. 19:44

dear zh,

i am just now writing you in response in a letter you won’t receive

until tomorrow.

thank you for the dictionary help. i think “amend” is the word i want.

i don’t disagree with anything lev manovich says in the part of his

book i will reference in my presentation, but he uses the word

“poetics” and you can’t use that word without remembering Charles

Olson, who redefined poetics, and who really, i think, was thinking

along very weird similar lines as vertov, at least as far as Man with

a Movie Camera.

i will try to find a student to download the movie (i really can’t

believe it’s available on the internet and i may project it while i am

talking at the media conference in june – because i think everyone in

the rush to AMERICA as forgotten it – and it is not political, not

like the other work, not in the same way – maybe it is even a symphony

for his brother, the cameraman, Mikhail Kaufman – and you know,

regardless of the ideologies, you should be very proud of such

brilliant Russians as the brothers Kaufman)…

and thank you also for not refusing right away to think about

Palestine. only if they are not very responsive here about your visa,

then i will as a last chance be able to send my resume to Jenin, i

know that you really don’t have prejudices against anyone, and it

would be a very interesting and dynamic place to be – you see, i

didn’t like the conference here, i have never lived in a colony of the

U.S. and that is what Poland is, and everyone is very sycophantic (the

behavior of beggars) towards the most official representations of the

culture – the highpoint of this sycophancy when some idiot on my panel

was talking in the question period about how you are only free when

you are in bondage – i think he wanted someone to whip him – and i

just wanted to laugh at my fate that i am in such at least a practice

– philology – which breeds such worms.

i have to try to find some way back to the energy of my work, and

Palestine is such a reality. but maybe it is too much too soon, and

only, as i said, if there are problems with your visa here. i am not

going to wait for a year to be able to be with you.

i’ll write in the morning when i’m up and dreading the marking of

composition papers.

kisses

k

p.s. please, what do they say about raeshnik on the internet?

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: now the workweek begins again

Дата: 11 апреля 2005 г. 10:53

dear zhen,

i am unshowered and unshaven and i can see the shadow of my uncombed

hair against the wall, the shadow thrown by the light above me and

behind my back. i am still tired. i did not sleep enough last night as

i stayed up to watch a very good French movie set in wwI about a group

of soldiers who had been wounded in the face and their gradual

recovery, what fascinated me was not only how well i understood the

dialogue, but how much more clearly was the Polish translation, and i

understood how, when it is English that is being dubbed, that i hear

my own language differently, one might almost say absolutely, and it

is harder to hear the Polish words, as if the one lanugage, the native

language, blocks the other out, and listening to the learned language,

French, lets the unknown language into the ear. there are so few

French films played here, that i don’t experience this very often.

now i must go to work, marking papers, and trying to find once again

some materials at the last moment, the lesson plan! the lesson plan!

if i was only teaching at the institute, i wouldn’t have class until

wednesday, and i could sleep in as late as i wished today, the dreaded

monday. i believe you have already been teaching since 8:30 this

morning. are you ever tempted to just sit there and make your students

read? it is probably more than they do at home. after this letter, and

cup of coffee, i think i will shower, in an effort to force myself

awake. i noticed yesterday that after about noon, on sunday, i cannot

read or think anymore, so full are my thoughts about the coming week,

and my resistance to this thought, that i am more or less rendered

immobile, and sit around or lie around staring into space. maybe i

should just read novels on sundays.

than you for your help with amend and emend. i need a dictionary

sometimes, as i forget _all_ the possible meanings in a word. the

vertov that is on video, which film is it, did you find out? the idea

that one might be able to buy videos or dvds of vertov and/or

tarkovsky is new to me, and yet they should be available, though

probably not here. when your laptop is returned to you, do you think

you will watch some more dvds on it, after returning to ‘our’ store?

you don’t seem to have the time to even indulge this pleasure lately,

and it is a pity. we are both being worn down by our jobs.

unfortunately, this seems to be the way of the world. i have to go run

some water over my head to make myself wake up. the coffee doesn’t

seem to have any effect, yet.

i miss you.

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: now to the workplace

Дата: 11 апреля 2005 г. 15:09

dear zh,

in other words, i made money for one of your bosses. who can predict

the future of such a bureaucracy? in the u.s., even in the state

universities (especially in the state universities) they have what is

called a comptrollers office which audits expenditures and etc.

apparently such an office is unheard of in Russia. but your “heads”

seem very good at making money for themselves materialize out of

nowhere.

i have been marking papers and preparing my lessons from 7:30 to

11:30, for classes today that will last from 12:30 to 3:30 and for

which i will earn 50 dollars: that means 50 dollars (before taxes)

(more like 40 dollars) for 6 hours work. not very good. the bosses,

everywhere, take advantage.

i wouldn’t worry too much about the “shooting” place, it is only a

thought about what can i do if your visa is impossible to obtain here,

if people are uncooperative. the u.s. is also a “shooting” place,

though the shooting is more random, but as tired as i am, i suddenly

have a fit of great longing to live in the country somewhere, in a

farmhouse with a small garden and a dog. i have lived this way before.

it is very quiet. and i am very tired this morning.

kisses

k.

(thank you for writing and of course, i write you this in hopes that

you will have time to write a few more words before leaving (unless

you have already left) because it is always nice to come home to a few

words waiting for me from you.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: pomedorki i ugorki

Дата: 12 апреля 2005 г. 11:10

dear zh,

i was hoping for a letter from you this morning since i apparently

wrote you my late morning yesterday and you had already left for home,

perhaps (hopefully) you are still there, at home, rather than the

office, the perpetual office, above which, in the rooms immediately

above which, you spent your childhood. this fact never ceases to

astonish me, that the “geography” of your entire life is comprised of

less than two meters, your home life i mean, as i am well aware that

you have traveled more than me, but to have for one’s “home” that kind

of concreteness, and locality–it is fascinating, or more important to

our psyche’s than we can know, if we believe that memory is attached

to place, if place is conducive to memory, and if language and memory

are at all related, so one of the complexes i am working my way

through is the abstraction in a non-coordinate, the fact that the

place where i live has no memory-meaning for me, and leaves almost

without language: though i think often i have only wanted this one

sensation: in the French movie i stayed up till 2:00 a.m. watching the

night before last, when the good friend, “mon ami”–it sounds very

nice in french–comes to visit (this friend himself is later killed at

the front) he is so visibly shaken by the terrible wound in the face

of his friend that the wounded man writes on his chalkboard: “vas

t’en” which any first year student of french would immediately

understand and in that moment as i was staring at the “vas t’en” i

heard, “idziesz” (which any speaker of Russia would immediately

understand, though wouldn’t it sound like “idzyoosh?) and, in English,

“go away.” here are four languages embedded in one idea: Go Away. he

was telling his friend to go away. of course, without dvd or video, i

can’t stop the film and repeat this, but i was surprised at the

clarity or the relation, and as i mentioned yesterday, the fact that

the french is less of a block than english is quite interesting to me,

i think i am always amazed when i do hear french that i understand so

much of it, because i live in a daily world where i understand

nothing, i just nod my head and shake my head and say thank you.

yesterday i sent a poetry manuscript to another press in the u.s., and

when she asked me how i wanted it sent i could only say, normalne

proszha, which she interepreted as “priority” i think because it has

“U.S.A.” in the address. but what is important to me is that gap

between “vas t’en” and “idziesz” is where my future writing waits, not

in anything i have written before, and that makes the mere act of

handling my old writings difficult, as sometimes i feel i have

outlived them. i am in another life now. i am among other languages

now. even at one time (then) i would use french words in my texts, but

it did not have the physical immediacy that the words have now, and

among such immediacy, paradoxically, i could never use them in my

writing as i once did, trying, i think, at the time, to make the

poetry have more rings of meaning than a single language makes

possible, some kind of resonance not otherwise available, but not this

space, this sign space, that i am in now. from time to time when i

grew tired of watching the “scenario” of the film, with my headphones,

i would just lie on the sofa with my eyes closed listening to the

French/Polish voices, words, and i had a very nice sensation of

floating in an element where i have never before been.

today, however, is a miserable task day: last night i read my

remaining 12 american culture essays, and sorted them in order of the

mark i will give them, from very good to not-so-good, and this morning

i must write comments and put the dreaded mark on the page and into my

records. then i have a number of one-page citation exercises to mark

for my academic writing class, and then i should prepare for my

seminar tomorrow which is really quite hopeless, most of the students,

and in fact i have two papers from students that i should give back to

them, so i must read those two papers today also. i also have two late

papers from the first group of american culture students: so that

makes 16 essays in all plus about another 12-14 single-page exercises,

plus class preparation. fortunately, i don’t need to go anywhere

today, i am home today, and it is early, and i went to bed early, so i

am fully rested, and i can give all my rest and energy to the task of

teaching, which is gradually and surely and slowly destroying any

poetry that there in me. but i did read yesterday that Bakhtin,

another of your formidable Russian intellects, spend all his working

life at a teacher’s college, his doctoral dissertation (a book on

Rabelais that is a cornerstone of literary study) having been

rejected. i am no Bakhtin, not an innovator of concepts, but at least

his fate is less severe than Mandel’shtam’s (whose life is a rather

somber one to take as a model of isolation and rejection). on themes

Russian, yesterday i had a fit of craving for “pomedorki i ogurki” and

bought at the grocer’s across the street two tomatoes and two

cucumbers which i prompty sliced and immersed in the olive oil from

cypress and very good balsamic vinegar, and i ate three helpings of

this fundamental component of any Russian table in summer. i don’t

remember tasting anything so good for a very long time. it is not a

bad idea to have such salad in the refrigerator permanently, don’t you

think?

i miss you

k.  

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: today the worst day and tomorrow, even worse

Дата: 13 апреля 2005 г. 11:05

dear zh,

of course i did not know that you have your laptop back, so i assumed

last night (and i did not check my email) that you were out of range,

home from the office. now, as they say, you have your office beside

you, every hour of the day.

today and tomorrow are the unpleasant days. i am more and more

convinced that i will not write an abstract for the october

conference, as the books are harder and harder (more and more

expensive) to find, the ones that i need. so, after the june

conference, i will relax in my spare time, and hopefully you will be

here by july.

in case you have difficulty, in case we have difficulties, now i am a

little worried that we are not pursuing the matter of a three-month

visa for me to come to you in Tomsk by mid-June. it is because i wish

to see you, and i do not like the thought of being here alone all

summer, in case you are not able to come until September. i do not

know what you think about this.

last night i had insomnia too, but for a different reason: i was too

rested. during the afternoon, i took a three hour nap (and the papers

i should have graded are still waiting for me, and i must do them this

evening) and when i woke at 18:00 i drank a cup of coffee, and the

evening coffee, in combination with the nap, meant that i spend all

but one hour of the night awake. now i do not feel very pleasant, and

all memory of just how rested and calm i felt after my nap has

disappeared.

finally, though, i have a letter to look forward from you in the

evening, and i will try to write you as well, tonight, however, there

is nothing but 12 papers (thankfully they are short) to mark, and two

culture classes to prepare for. these next few weeks will be very

trying, as i have next to no energy nor interest in them. i can only

think about the summer.

thank you for the pronunciation correction, though here i think they

say, ogurki. at least they give me the correct item when i ask for it.

i still do not know the word for potato. this should suggest that i do

not buy them very often. i eat more rice and pasta instead. but i have

absolutely no interest in eating this morning, only returning to bed

and sleeping through the morning. i still cannot believe that they

only declared Friday the day of mourning for the Pope. there should

have been at least a week when everything stopped.

please remember me to your mother and father.

i miss you.

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Looks like no Palestine this year

Дата: 13 апреля 2005 г. 21:25

dear zhen,

it is beginning to look as though we will have to wait to go to

Palestine another year. Agnieszka today gave me the name of the person

at the rektorat who will arrange for your invitation. i will call her

tomorrow for an appointment either friday of early next week. i am

sure, quite sure, though, that she will need a copy of your passport,

so can we reverse the procedure for once, and you send me the very

nice picture of Evgenia Victorovna Lukyanova born 1964 citizen of the

Russian Federation? as soon as you can. i will take your passport

copy, my passport, our marriage certificate, and hope that will be

most of what they need, though i wouldn’t be surprised if they need

the certificate translated officially into Polish, and i know someone

who lives nearby within walking distance of my flat who is notarized

to do this. so that is no problem. i know of course that you will not

overreact with undue optimism, on the other hand, i was rather gloomy

expecting the worst, and received the best, news. now i could

celebrate if i didn’t have four classes to teach tomorrow, and papers

to grade tonight, and even some essays to read. and that is all my

great news for the day. i went to what is called the “American Corner”

to watch a classic American culture gangster film, The Godfather, and

i was the only one there? so i said no thanks, i didn’t want them to

show the movie (only on video) to only one person, and i was in my

mind imagining a dark quiet cinema in the late afternoon for the

escape. there are very good cinemas here though, and we will become

habituees of them, as of several small but very good restaurants. i do

not think you will be bored. this summer especially i think you will

find very beautiful, and we will make trips to Krakow and Warsaw, and

i will finally begin to enjoy being in a foreign country. i know, my

optimism is making you suspicious. hope you enjoy your stewed

vegetables. please tell your mother that i would eat them without

complaining (though i think she knows that already). now that your

laptop is home and in your lap, you better write me a letter before

falling asleep!

kisses

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: thursday morning in a rush

Дата: 14 апреля 2005 г. 11:00

dear zh,

i haven’t any time to write you this morning. i went to bed early last

night, 21:00, and woke up at 4:30 to prepare my two american culture

classes, which took 2 hours, from 5 to 7, when i am writing now, and i

need to be at the institute by 8:00 for no better reason than to fast

forward a video tape, to show the end of a movie for the morning

class, and i have still to shower and shave and i don’t even think

that i have an ironed shirt (the big problem with the warm weather is

that i can’t hide my unironed shirts under a sweater). i will call the

person at the rektorat this morning betw classes or tomorrow morning,

isn’t it good news? though i think you were expecting it. now i am all

in nerves with the four classes today, at the end of which, the day,

will find me exhausted, with the feeling of endless looping

(repetition). at least i will not have anything to grade this weekend,

wait, that’s wrong, my academic writing class is turning in an

assignment today. sigh …

i miss you

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: Looks like no passport photo

Дата: 14 апреля 2005 г. 11:02

zhenya,

WHERE’S YOUR PASSPORT PHOTO?

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: please resend your photo

Дата: 15 апреля 2005 г. 0:32

dear zhen,

did you send the jpg image inline in your email or did you attach it?

the 800 kilobytes crashed my email application and when i opened the

email from a text browser it appeared as though you just sent in

inline, instead of attaching it. still, it might have opened if i was

using the mozilla email, but i wasn’t. as it is, i can’t open it. the

coding looks screwy in the first half-dozen lines (this may be the

result of the scanning problems you were having). anyway, i go to see

the woman who will arrange your invitation at 10:00 a.m. which means i

will leave here about 9:00 a.m. so, please, if you could resend, AS AN

ATTACHMENT, please? as soon as possible? by noon or 13:00 your time?

again, please, send it as an ATTACHMENT, not in the body of the email

message.

thanks

kevin

p.s. why is the file so large? did you scan it at 72 dpi?

p.s.s. send it also to magee@uni.lodz.pl

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “Lukyanova” <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: please resend your photo

Дата: 15 апреля 2005 г. 10:48

dear zh,

i just received this from you though it appears you wrote it a couple

of hours ago. it is near 7:00 here. i will be here another two hours.

so far, no photo. i think it may be too big to try to send through a

webmail like rambler. can you sent it from lev@tpu.ru, over your

connection there? maybe this does not make a difference. but i have

not received any photo (the page from your passport) yet. at the very

least, i should have your passport number and other relevant

information. thanks. i miss you

please remember to cc it to magee@uni.lodz.pl

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: my funny valentine

Дата: 15 апреля 2005 г. 12:09

dear zh,

i have the photo now, but it is enormous! fortunately i have about

half an hour to resize it so i can print it out. i don’t have time to

write anymore, except that i like – as always – i like very much, any

image of you, which makes me hungry for you (this hunger which i never

mention to you, but which, i think, you (safely) assume. bye.

i miss you

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: nothing but good news

Дата: 15 апреля 2005 г. 16:26

dear zh,

i have just returned from my meeting which was very short with the

woman who will arrange for your invitation: she needed your passport

copy which i had, my passport information, and a copy of our marriage

certificate. that was all. the invitation she is going to arrange for

you will be a one-year visa for you, to be signed by the rector of the

university, and sent to the Polish consulate in Moscow. she will let

me know when it has been sent. i gave her july 1 as the date, which

seems good, a Friday, though it won’t matter, as i won’t be doing

anything then. we will have a lot of time to spend together roaming

around lodz, warsaw and krakow. what do you think?

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: friday evening fanfare

Дата: 15 апреля 2005 г. 21:54

dear zh,

you get an evening letter since i am home, unlike yesterday, when i

stayed at the institute to look up some materials on vertov on the

internet, leaving at 18:00, and then going to the supermarket on my

way home, leaving there, in fact, at the bag check-in, my bookbag,

which i had to recover this morning, before going to the

Woman-who-will-arrange-your-invitation. actually her name is Ania

Wisniewska. everyone is always very helpful here. i don’t know what i

ever complain of. after seeing about your invitation, i had to go

somewhere in lodz where i had never been, so that took a while, it was

another school where i will give my (as yet unwritten) paper on Olson

and Vertov. today was the deadline for the conference fee. i notice on

the conference in southern poland in october (deadline june 30 for the

abstract) that participation in the conference also includes

publication, so i will probably apply for this after all. the essay i

just gave at the conference here i will submit for a festschrift in

honor of Agnieszka Salska which other of my colleagues are soliciting

essays for – but not until sometime next year. the publication of my

poetry is another very indeterminate matter. i have two manuscripts at

two different publishers, so at least that is a positive step. but i

don’t expect miracles. i am too far away from everything.

early this afternoon, coming home on the tram, the colors were so

bright, they almost hurt my eyes. very warm day. i returned a video i

showed to one of my classes, and next to the video store was the

lodz-baluty open market, just like a century ago, where you can even

hear people speaking russian. perhaps you would like to go there

sometimes (it is 15 minutes walk from the flat). i haven’t bought the

blue table for the kitchen yet, as i never seem to walk in the

direction of the furniture store. tomorrow i think i will go to

warsaw, if the weather is nice. in the evening there is a party/dinner

at my american colleague’s house, the one in the country, and a place

you will not doubt visit. now, whatever i do, i imagine you seeing the

same thing, and wondering about your impressions. i do think you will

like lodz very much, though more and more i think you should fly,

rather than go by train. we will wait and see what the air fares are.

please remember me to your mother and father, and assure them, if you

wish, that everything is going well, and in our favor.

kisses

k 

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: today i will go to Warsaw

Дата: 16 апреля 2005 г. 11:03

dear zh,

yesterday afternoon i had my first attack in reaction to barometric

pressure dropping. i know you’ve complained of this before in Tomsk.

when i was out and about in the morning, the weather was like

mid-summer, very warm, bright, etc., and when i came home, in the

mid-afternoon, i napped for two hours, and upon waking, the

temperature had dropped and it was raining (and it has been raining

all night) and i had a terrible headache, sore throat, and feeling

that my head was being clamped and tightened. this didn’t go away

until this morning.

you needn’t be surprised by my efforts on your behalf about your visa,

though i appreciate that aspect of your personality which takes

nothing for granted, assumes nothing, how do you do this? i think that

i was afraid of greater problems, and i am especially surprised how

helpful everyone is. it is not something i am “acculturated” to

expect. what i mean is that, given my experience, my social and

cultural experience, in the u.s., no one ever does anything for you,

as a matter of being helpful or cooperative. there is an overwhelming

competitiveness which transforms people’s everyday interactions, and

perhaps there is also a greater sense of insecurity and

distrustfulness.

i do not know (because i forgot to ask) whether the invitation will be

sent to the Polish consulate in Moscow, or to you directly. i don’t

think Ms. Wisniewka has your mailing address. it is also likely that

she will give me the invitation to mail to you. as i remember, they

mailed directly the invitation to me when i was last in the u.s. that,

also, is strange, though it is what i have always wanted: to be away

for a long time from the u.s. now it is beginning to be the third year

since the last visit, and next year will be my fifth year abroad. when

does one start becoming other than the from the native country?

probably never. i must admit that i thought it would be easier to shed

one’s skin (and even, language, i didn’t know just how deep the

mechanism, the motor, of the native language is–it is perceptible in

the phenomenon i described last week, when listening to French and

Polish). there was nothing worth watching on tv last night.

did i tell you that i ordered a dvd of “Man With A Movie Camera”?

hopefully it will arrive in time for the writing of the paper for the

conference. what is also amazing is that, for its time, 1929, it is

one-and-half hour’s long. and you have never seen it?

my coffee is very good this morning, though i am still using my coffee

machine. we will get a large belgium coffee press when you arrive. i

am beginning to worry now about the availability of Russian language

books for you, though i have never investigated the main university

library, from which i can check out books. i imagine there are

thousands of novels there, though library books are sometimes not the

kind of books you feel like you are living with. i had a dream several

nights ago that i was somewhere where there were three large

libraries, and i was able to find every book that i needed, and the

sensation in the dream was one where i was extremely happy. then i

woke up, and no libraries.

it is strange how good i feel this morning after the “barometer”

attack yesterday. it really was an uncomfortable headache. stranger

still, was to read your evening letter with the information that you

were not feeling well either, though it sounds like fatigue,

exhaustion from the job. as always, caution is very important, so i

wouldn’t tell anyone you are leaving until you have the visa, but this

may not be practical, if you were going to try to arrange for a leave

of absence with pay for six months. maybe i cannot advise you on this

point.

i think i will go to warsaw this morning. another flat was broken into

last week, and i would like to put all my computer data (manuscripts)

on cd, though that is a false excuse, as i have them saved on floppy

disks, but then again, i have many megabytes of scanned digital images

of my notebooks, and these two i should make copies of, though many of

them were corrupted by accident last summer when i was moving them

from the storage disk to reformat it (the storage disk). it is a good

lesson that anything digital is unstable and impermanent.

let us hope that humans are a little less impermanent.

i miss you

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: the trains in spain

Дата: 17 апреля 2005 г. 13:03

dear zh,

yesterday was a day of trains: four of them. the train to warsaw

didn’t leave lodz until 10:30, and i was at the station by 8:45 (the

public schedule says 9:30 but yesterday was not a day when the trains

followed the schedule) so i walked around lodz for an hour,

appreciating the clean and fresh air after the rain, and the slowly

waking city in the morning on a Saturday morning. the train to warsaw

took two hours, during which i admired the view of the spring Polish

countryside. when i arrived in Warsaw, i had only two blocks (very big

blocks as Warsaw’s plazas where the train station is are vast) to go

to my “address” of the shop from the internet, the magic number now

imprinted in my brain: 115 Marszalewska or something like that. there

was a shopping mall where my shop was supposed to be, and the numbers

on the street signs went from 100-114 and 124-134. no 115. i bought a

trifle from one of the street sellers of trifles for 5 zlotys who

spoke english, and she asked a woman in a kiosk, who said that the odd

numbers ran on the opposite of the wide boulevard, and opposite of the

wide boulevard was an Albert’s food supermarket (odd, they have

Albert’s in the u.s.) and an very Russian-looking assemblage of kiosks

under one roof (like the sports auditorium in Tomsk). so my computer

shop was not there either. i kept walking down the boulevard however

(all this time there were thunderstorms, and i have long ago lost my

umbrella) and finally found the mysterious number, which turned out to

be a private college! i asked for the shop at the reception desk,

showing my printed page from the website, and they said it was a

single office, for internet connection, and no one was there on a

Saturday. my expectation, from the website, was that it was a computer

shop (i saw several others but they were all closed, apparently it is

not the tradition for shops in Warsaw to be open for business on

either Saturday or Sunday – shades of Cyprus?) so i returned empty

handed, though i must say that i enjoyed the trip. once back at the

train station, again the train did not come on the scheduled time

(others were also waiting on the platform with me) but an hour later,

so i did not leave Warswa until 3:30 and get to lodz until 5:30, where

i had to transfer by tram to another train station to go to my

colleagues’ country house for dinner at 6:00. when i got to the train

station there was a train everyone was running to board and so did i,

asking “do sierwicz?” (the end of the line on the line of the train

that i take to my colleagues’ house) and everyone said “tak, tak” and

i said “tick, tock, tick tock” (just kidding) and then once the train

started i realized it was not a local train but the express, which

sped past my stop and all stops until 20 minutes past my stop where i

had to get off and get a ticket on the train in the opposite

direction, which of course was 20 minutes late, so i did not arrive

for dinner until 8:00. they had waited dinner waiting for me and

worrying whether i was lost or not (good guess) and as another of the

guests was driving back, i drank a lot of wine without worrying about

getting home, and that is the present state in which i write you now,

slightly hung over, especially from two bottles of very good french

and spanish wine that i bought at Albert’s the store that was in the

physical location where my imaginary computer store was supposed to

be.

i did see, however, from the train, three pheasants, one rabbit, and

one deer: so spring is definitely here.

sorry that you waited for a letter from me yesterday, my day of

transit. my feet are rather raw from the new shoes, since, as is

inevitable, one walks a long way between trains.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Russian Ark & Man With A Movie Camera

Дата: 17 апреля 2005 г. 15:04

dear zh,

i am sitting here with half-a-headache writing a few notes towards my

essay and it just occurred to me that “Russian Ark” is a re-make, as

erasure, of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera: the (inverted) parallels

are fascinating:

a. the photographer who carries the digital camera thru the museum

b. the photographer-as-filmmaker the subject of V’s film

a. the museum as site and location of culture, history, memory

b. the city in V’s film as site of dynamism, utopia

a. the seamlessness of the single (frameless) take in Ark

b. the montage and relation to the still photograph in V’s film

there are other parallels, contrasts, i will have to write about this.

did i tell you i ordered Chelovek? how about the availability of

Russian Ark on dvd? sometime when you have a free moment, could you

call that video store and inquire? suddenly my interest – suddenly

Sokurov’s film makes much more sense to me – as an effort to overcome

(to film past) Vertov, not Tarkovsky.

a few thoughts from a foggy (but summer bright) morning

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: the trains in spain

Дата: 17 апреля 2005 г. 15:09

dear zh,

no, you are wrong, about the availability in lodz. the problem is the

age of my laptop, and i cannot find a cd-writer/dvd-player (they make

them in all shapes and sizes) compatible with my pentium II. the one

that is compatible, made by iomega, i have asked several shops here to

special order, and they say they cannot. when they look on their

suppliers lists, all they get are products by samsung and one or two

others. there is a product website for iomega in france, but they do

not ship to poland. it is the problem of the chaos of the european

union (it is not one integrated economy) that i am experiencing in

trying to solve a problem which would take 10 minutes in the u.s. it

is typical. my only mistake yesterday was assuming that there was a

physical store behind the virtual website. at least it looked like a

store.

don’t be petulant.

hope you write later, Miss Petulance.

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: another train story

Дата: 17 апреля 2005 г. 21:15

dear zh,

all right, you’re right. i went to the local hipermarket for hitech

products and bought for 20 zlotys less than the one i wanted to find

in warsaw, a part that both plays and burns dvds and cds, the minimum

reguirements for which are pentium III (my computer is pentium II) and

500 megahurz bus-speed (my computer is 366) and i just watched part of

the fahrenheit 9/11 dvd and the image is a little shaky, so i have to

watch it in a reduced frame, but other than that, it works fine, and

only consumed 75 megabytes for installation, so, yes, i was able to

find (just about) the same thing as i went to warsaw (fruitlessly)

for, though i forgot to tell you, on the trip back from the train

station after i took the wrong train, two hours late and after a

wasted day, when i should have been frustrated and angry, instead, the

evening was so beautiful, far in the countryside, and in my car on the

train, there was only a young mother with an infant, and another

couple, and the young mother for half an hour sang polish folk songs

to the baby, and listening to her singing, watching the setting sun on

the polish fields, riding in the train, i felt that i had absolutely

no reason in the world to be unhappy, quite the opposite. yes, quite

the opposite. i hope you have had a restful day. i am about ready to

make dinner. should i go out for a bottle of wine? i think i had

enough wine last night, only, there is never enough wine. it tastes

very good with chicken paprika, which is what i am going to cook

tonight.

kisses

k 

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: the week of work begins again weakly

Дата: 18 апреля 2005 г. 11:28

dear zh,

and where is my letter from you, dear? i think you are either taking a

vacation, or your internet card has expired.

in the middle of the night last night there were sirens and sirens,

passing by one after another on the street outside, one can only

wonder what was the emergency. it is something that i don’t often

hear, here.

i have the worst case of ‘summeritis’ imaginable, which means i am

afflicted with not wanting to do anything. i have two classes today at

the dunce college, but again i haven’t the least idea what to do with

them. the problem is the familiar one: i have had them for so many

classes that i have run out of ideas for them, and i am obviously

bored.

when i finally figured out how to burn cds on my new contraption, i

was going to burn the cds of the manuscripts and images of notebooks

whose loss i am sometimes apprehensive of, and realized that i had no

blank cds, so i went to the supermarket around the corner, but just as

it was closing, so someone could still break in and rob me blind. i

have promised myself not to be upset if this happens.

you would have enjoyed dinner last night: i am getting very good at

cooking chicken breasts over the stove, not in the oven, and i made

brocoli and rice also, it was very good, and there was enough for you,

so where were you?

i hope for a letter from you by the time i get home today, sometime

around 16:00-17:00. now i have to pretend to be an english teacher.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: a sudden decision

Дата: 18 апреля 2005 г. 23:04

dear zh,

i am sure you will sympathize when you realize why i am only now

writing you your evening letter round (your) midnight (19:00 here). i

went to another computer shop to buy some cd’s for writing and i saw a

close-out model of another ibm thinkpad, called a R40e, in the same

series as mine, but much, much faster, reduced from 3200 zlotys to

2500 zlotys, so i bought it. my decision was helped by the fact that i

had been paid by the dunce college today for two months wages, so i

had to take out very little money from the bank. so now i have a new

laptop, for about 700 dollars, which is much better than my old one,

though the frame seems less well built. it is also very quiet, much

more quiet than this one. probably i shall be able to swap

motherboards if it turns out that i like the frame of the old one (the

one i’m writing you now on) than the new one. the dvd writer i bought

was not superfluous, since this new model plays dvds, and writes cds,

but does not write dvds, so really i bought the dvd writer for free

with the amount saved from the reduced model. what do you think? am i

impulsive? i am so tired of being unable to work with my dv camera,

and i am worried that my original tapes are getting old. well, not i

have a lot to keep me busy. do you approve or disapprove of my

decision? i think you will say that you don’t care one way or another.

at least i am not bored, now.

i miss you

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: a sudden decision

Дата: 19 апреля 2005 г. 12:18

dear zh,

so far everything works, though i want to get rid of the XP (the

laptop didn’t come with XP discs, which i have read on the internet is

a feature of this model). the dvd drive works with it, and last night

i burned one of my first cds. but it is a very different machine, and

yet quite similar to my old one, which is why i bought it, thinking i

would use the old one for word processing (the keyboard on the old

machine feels much more sturdy, where the keyboard on the new one

feels more like your asus, responsive, but not the kind of keyboard

you can pound on without negative consequences. my old laptop is

actually heavier. but i wanted to have two machines with similar

parts, and no doubt the motherboard of the new machine is very good,

it’s just the frame that is weak, or light. the important fact of the

matter is that it did not require a huge investment, about two months

pay from the dunce college, and that makes me feel a little less

self-indulgent. you are kind not to accuse me of this (though i think

you are being a little ironic). yes?

i worried yesterday about your mood, but i think it is inevitable. you

know that i am often irritated by my work here, my job, which feels

rather meaningless, on the other hand, everything appears rather

stable, for the moment, and we (the americans anyway, are treated

rather well, and i think you will find this to be true when you come

here). it really is a different environment than the one you are

working in now, though, that is your home, and you should be nervous

and upset some days about leaving it. i don’t want to make light of

this, or pretend that it is not important, or worse, to pretend that

your emotions are not important, because they are, because you are,

and you are very wonderful about trusting my ability to support us in

the short term anyway. i know that you have always worked, and that

you must look at the prospect of now guarantee of work (coming to

Poland as wife without job) with a bit of horror, because you are not

a very dependent person. once in my life as i told you i was very

dependent, and it effects all aspects of the psychology, and is very

difficult to free oneself from, so i do not underestimate your cause

for worry. that you worry so much about everything is another aspect

of your personality that i hold very dear. so i write you in response

to your mood yesterday as one who wishes to say that he understands,

and refuses at the same time to dismiss it with a gesture of

confidence.

most of all, when you feel such ways, on certain days, i think it is

most important to write about it.

i miss you very much, and i imagine our long walks in the parks and

everywhere, once you are here.

kisses

k

> От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: awake and it is early and too much i haven’t done

Дата: 20 апреля 2005 г. 10:10

dear zhen,

i hope you have not been worried about me. as you might expect, i am

experiencing a fit of obsession with the new machine, and yesterday

after about six-seven hours i succeeded in booting it with a linux

system, as the only system on it. for some reason, the distribution

wouldn’t load the way you saw me installing it on my laptop last

summer, so i had to do it by hand. after a while, i felt like i was

sewing a strange quilt, but at last, around 22:00, last night, i got a

graphical display, so now, finally, i can work on it. though now,

finally, i can think: why did i buy it? what do i have to do on it?

these are the strangest combination of laptops, since they look almost

identical, though the motor on the one is a loud as the other is

silent (not as quiet as your Asus, but close). on the other hand, as i

mentioned, it is obvious that the frame, the body, of the old laptop,

is built out of superior materials, and i can understand why that

strange sound started coming from your laptop, different and cheaper

materials are used on the newer models, i think. and yet inside, of

course, they are extremely powerful. i kept being surprised by the

difference between the architectures of the two machines, and there is

a lot to learn about this difference, and i won’t do it in one week.

now i have my crush of classes for which i have done no preparation,

and chances are i will teach them the same as if i had prepared for

them. that is truly a disturbing thought.

i do have some time now to try to get my materials together for

today’s classes, so i hope you will not mind such a short note. i am

going to send this now, and read your messages, wondering why i did

not write you yesterday.

what is obsessive about the installation is that you always think you

are almost finished, and if you stop, you will forget where you are,

and then you look up, and hours have passed.

i did accomplish one thing, though: i have a number of software

programs in my old laptop, and i successfully burned them on cd and

inserted the cd into the new computer, and installed them. this thanks

to the part that i went to warsaw for saturday, and which i found

here. as i mentioned, it writes both cds and dvds and appears to be

very good hardware. comically, the dvd-rom drive in the new laptop

seems to be very cheaply made: it is called “Mashita” or something

like that, i think to rhyme with “Toshiba” (by the way, what is the

model of the dvd-rom drive in your Asus?) not that it matters.

but what does matter, though, at least to me, is that i was able to

entirely get rid of the windows side of the computer, and still make

the machine work, even though it is a very different built than the

computers i have been using, so i feel a small sense of satisfaction.

the archive, among other things, that one can build from the internet,

making disks, a digital library, is still a ways away, but i have made

my first steps towards it.

(kisses)

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: in the middle of a very long day

Дата: 20 апреля 2005 г. 21:14

dear zh,

on days like today i always feel like writing you as though i was

groaning, six hours of teaching and at least another six tonight wait

for me as i have papers i must give back to students tomorrow and i

haven’t yet graded them, of course, and i also assigned two rather

(and different) ambitious sets of essays to my culture classes, so i

have to prepare double, for both classes, separate materials. i ate at

the chinese restaurant on the way home to save myself the effort of

having to cook something, and i can already feel a slight headache

developing more from lack of sleep than anything. so i write you to

complain.

strange, when i was walking home i was having such nice thoughts about

you, and how to write to you about them? i was thinking about this

word, dependency, and how much i wanted to tell you (writing is

slightly different) that the dependency works both ways, and is not

altogether only about questions of job and income. i was thinking as i

was walking home that i am not in very good health, tired all the

time, bored to tears (it’s an expression, another one is “bored

stiff”) and it is i who need your company and companionship,

friendship, sharing of meals and walks and other difficulties of

living, anywhere, and i am very happy that you are so adventurous as

to consider it. this is what i was thinking, and i was wishing that i

could say to you, that you would know, that you shouldn’t take this

word “dependency” solely upon yourself. if it means anything, it

signifies in both directions, and we should remember this.

that is my thought for the day on a day when i feel all absence of

thought. of 23 students for my second period conversation class at the

dunce college, 20 came to day, so i had to work very hard, and i am

very tired as a result. surely it is partly a consequence of staring

too long at not-very-blank screens (i am getting better at it) and i

have no one to blame but myself. still, i don’t look forward to

tomorrow, which i must already begin presently. if you were here, i

would not be very good company tonight. i think we both understand

this about each other, that we are very difficult (and moody) from

time to time. i hope you do not mind.

do you mind if i write that i miss you?

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: looking ahead

Дата: 21 апреля 2005 г. 10:25

dear zh,

let’s see: coffee, shower, shave, clothes, email, reluctance

(resistance) to go to the institute, yes, it is Thursday morning.

today is a full day, no movies, no nothing, just four classes in eight

hours with only one-and-a-half hour break, and i will come home by

16:30 in condition of exhaustion.

at least, for a few minutes, there is coffee, and the pleasure of

writing a few words to you. there may even be the pleasure of reading

a few words from you, once i send this, and check my mail.

then i will go to the institute, and practice the fine art of being

bored, and pretending the opposite, to be interested, engaged, eager

to listen to the thoughts of those who have no thoughts, only a

schedule. at least i do not have to mark homework this weekend.

not next monday and tuesday, but the ones following, will be a

holiday, independence day, here, so there is a reprieve in sight, and

classes this semester end in the first week of june, so i will be done

with everything (i hope) by Friday, June 10, though i will probably

have to make myself available the following week, an exam week, for

signatures.

i may have mentioned this, but through some oversight, no one assigned

me to an exam this June, and i will not have to read any

dissertations. i think that means that i have only six more weeks of

suffering, then a more-or-less three month holiday, which will include

(yes, let’s be positive for a change) your arrival on July 1 or

shortly thereafter.

it helps to think like this on a day like today, when there appears to

be no end in sight.

what is the news in Russia? is there any? do you care? when will your

classes be over? do you know yet how you are going to leave your job?

(again, the best policy will be probably to wait until you have your

Polish visa in hand–remember, in case of any emergency happening

after you arrive here, there is always the u.s. where we can go, that

is always my avenue of retreat, as they say.

i only wish for you to worry a little less.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: in the middle of a very long day

Дата: 21 апреля 2005 г. 20:14

dear zh,

this zombie is done for the day. i am writing from the institute. very

good feeling, this, the classes over, i feel like going to the restaurant.

rest. repose. a beer. or two. or a glass of wine. though i am tiring of

wine (i drink too much of it) as my colleague in the country at dinner

last saturday said: wine? what else is there? the elixir of life. we say,

wine and dine. this will be a custom you should expect to observe, after

long work day, equally long dinner at the restaurant, with wine. do you

mind? my classes went very well today, almost superlatively. i have no

idea why. i surprise myself sometimes, i mean, my energy, and the

enthusiasm i pour into the lecture, the discussion, and immediate

spontaneous strategies to involve students. they leave with smiles, saying

goodbye. it is a positive feeling. i suddenly realize i am rather happy,

are you, at least, for a few moments, sometimes?

i miss you

k

> zombi, they call us zombi, i mean those who do not sleep enough and

> feel like robots. i have two more classes today and heve no idea how

> to survive by the end of the day. it was raing yestreday, my mind, you

> call it cats and dogs. and today i put on my new white overcoat. and

> what is the hint that i am unbearable sometimes? a very delicate one,

> but i am very generous in the morning after my morning class and

> professional schmoosing after it. and now i try to struggle with

> myself as i want smth sweet, i.e. a cake or a cookie which i  can

> easily buy in the next kiost, but i have to start a slim diet as i am

> becomimg too fat. such highly intellectual message. sometimes you are

> very kind, i mean your letter , the last one, and i miss you. bye zh

> 

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: momentous

Дата: 22 апреля 2005 г. 13:18

dear zh,

i guess i slept late this morning, not even remembering when i went to

sleep. last night was a night of a first experience: watching a dvd on

my new laptop. this might not sound like such an accomplishment, but

you might remember that i erased my windows xp installation and put in

a linux one only, which, as it turns out, i had to download the extra

software for dvds. the dvd software seems much less “bloated” than

windows, and i am hoping that the same will hold true when i start

trying to record my own dv footage. as always, however, you have to

make a lot of adjustments, and really learn something about the

software you are using.

the movie i watched is called “py” or “pie” (the mathematical symbol),

an independent film made by Daniel Aronofsky. very interesting

black-and-white photography, and clautrophobic (german expresssionist)

shots of subways and streets of NYC. oddly, the story of a

mathematical genius trying to figure out the secret equation (216

numbers) behind nature, the world, and his isolation, and nervous

attacks, reminding me of my life in cleveland for several years, when

i wrote the most of i have written, when almost every day was a day

when i was writing, inside writing, only writing. as i have written

you before, it was also a time of intense suffering, very close to

madness, you may call it what you like. the thought i was intrigued

by, and which sent me to bed in a stupor, is that for any art (and

mathematics is an art–the movie is really about making art) you have

to suffer tremendously to really find something new or do something

new. you can’t just sit around and wait for something to happen to

you, and worse, you can’t be responsible. there are these moments of

pure estrangement represented in the film, when somebody talks to him,

and it is crushing, overwhelming, the sound of another person’s voice,

and all the demands that such voices, anyone’s voices, make on the

consciousness, because another’s voice is always a call back to our

own self-presence, which is unbearable during writing, which writing

is always going somewhere else, inside and across other voices, and it

is to go far away, and be unable to say where one is, and to the

outside, it looks like madness, or inaccessibility, what an ugly word,

okay, to be unapproachable, someone with whom it is impossible to

communicate. once i used often to have these states, creative states,

from which i would emerge with pages and pages of writing.

the problem is, you have to have a secure environment for such

exporations of consciousness, and i think this is one of the tolls of

living in a foreign country, that i can never forget myself, never let

go. any mistake might be a terrible mistake. the film also made me

feel a little more forgiving to myself (i have the tendence to condemn

myself) for the series of tumultuous events that led to my years in

cleveland and the isolation there, the writing there, that i had

absolutely to estrange myself, and put myself in this incredible

abstract loft-space that was my writing room for several years

(1996-1999) in order to write great poetry, and if it was suffering,

it was also absolutely necessary. that if i had continued to live the

life i was living in san francisco, i would never have written that

poetry, and i might even have become the very person i hate and

despise: someone who is satisfied with the art that they make.

now i am thinking of making art from the new technology. i am very

intrigued by the idea of vertov-like grabbing of moment-images and

making visual rhythms from the ocean of scenarios we are flooded with

as a culture, an international culture, a form of visual work that

operates as quotation, and collage, called very simply by the

software, “grabbing.” to seize this instant and that from the flood of

images.

i like very much the growing relationship betw. my two laptops: one

very good for writing, very strong keyboard, and strongly built, but

slow, and only very good for writing and printing and similar

operations, the other laptop used only for the moving image, a kind of

digital video box. it may seem extravagant (though curiously, i think

you are indulgent towards all forms of extravagance, including

creative forms, and i think you know the special demands on one’s life

made on the one who wants to make something in this world and from

this world) to have two laptops, but it is helpful for me to remember

that all in all i still haven’t spend more than 1500 dollars over

several years for this equipment: the original laptop, 400 dollars,

with another 100 dollars of memory added, maybe another 150 dollars of

peripherals like printer and modem, and then the new laptop, about 700

dollars (the better part of a month’s salary, like the month’s salary

you spent on the colleced works of Mandelstam). of course, when i

place it in the context of the salary i make here, then the cost goes

higher. and yet, i don’t think i ever remember a time while living in

the u.s. that i had extra money at the end of the month. you earn less

money here, but they take less of it away from you. it is a different

system.

by the way, the movie as a story was disappointing: the scenario was

not equal to the photography. vertov’s war against the scenario is

very interesting to me in this regard, and i had better get writing

about it soon, or i will have nothing to talk about at the conference

the first week of june. did i tell you that i ordered the dvd of the

man with the movie camera? now i am interested in the availability of

copies of Russian Ark and any Tarkovsky film, though especially Andrei

Rublev. are these available in russia? i am curious about their

prices. there are many dvds available through amazon.com and shipping

is less than for books, because of the weight i suppose, and yet the

price is still around 30 dollars, with shipping. that’s the equivalent

of about 1000 rubles per dvd, too much.

this is a long letter, maybe because i was impressed by the

photography last night, maybe because i am satisfied with my ability

to develop a working linux system without relying on a windows

partition, maybe because i have to start writing this conference

essay, and maybe because i miss you.

(kisses)

k 

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: momentitious

Дата: 22 апреля 2005 г. 22:14

dear zh,

another first (for slowly learning me) today: the program calls it

ripping so that’s what i guess i did: i “ripped” a cd track from one

of my cd’s and saved it to an mp3 file on my computer. i suppose this

is what everyone has been doing for a number of years, but it suddenly

impressed me as what all the controversy is about: you can copy any

music off a cd and save it in your own files. for literature, it is

really no big deal, as there isn’t the money involved, but music? mass

media, oh, yes. i think i enjoy (at least for the moment) of being so

simple that it took me this long to learn how to copy my own music

into computer files and to save them on a cd (by the way, i don’t

think i’ll ever use a floppy disk again). i am glad you liked my long

letter, though i think maybe you are too tired and harassed by your

own schedule to detect the mood of gloom in it, and determination, and

thought about writing. you can’t say i didn’t warn you when the storm

clouds gather …

(looks like rain, so i think i’ll go to the supermarket).

kisses

k

On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 17:51:00 +0400

“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: dancing in the dark

Дата: 23 апреля 2005 г. 12:00

dear zhen,

why am i awake at 7:00 a.m. on a saturday morning and i am not even

going to warsaw? at least now i know that the trains only run every

two hours on saturday.

last night i watched another movie of my own choosing (what a

difference it makes when you do not rely on the luck of the draw, as

we say, though chance has had it that i have seen some rather good

polish films from time to time especially on friday nights and tuesday

nights, very late, after midnight–the films generally are shown no

earlier than 11:15 on television here) and the film that i watched is

called “Dancing in the Dark” by lars von trier. i knew of this film

from a discussion of it by slavoj zizek in one or another of his

books, and i had even seen about 15 minutes of the end (when the

heroine is hanged, a public execution) but of course, watching the dvd

on the computer, listening with headphones, there is a different

visual/narrative impact than the television, even though i have a very

nice one, 21 inch screen, one which would be very good as a video

monitor.

back to the movie, made in 2000, set in 1950s united states, a czech

immigrant works in a tool & die plant (great shots of the factory

itself, and the work going on there, absolutely sedimented with the

soviet-period tradition, all those black & white films from the 50s

and 60s in russia that show and dramatize people in factories as

having subjectivities, souls, which is certainly an anomoly in u.s.

mass culture, this image) and she is going blind, and since it is an

inherited disease, she knows that her 14 year old son will go blind

also if he doesn’t have an operation, which costs about 2500 dollars,

most of which she has saved, and keeps in a candy container in the

aluminum trailer she rents from Officer Friendly and his beautiful

blond wife (Officer Friendly’s name is Bill, but as i will soon

mention, the individual names really don’t matter much in this

“parable”). Officer Friendly lives beyond his means, is broke, his

wife will leave him if she finds out, so he steals the cash from the

czech immigrant, and when she confronts him, he begs her to kill him,

to shoot him with his police revolver (this track on my dvd didn’t

work so i have to rely on what i know of the plot from zizek’s several

pages of discussion). somehow or another, she does, and of course, she

goes to trial, and is hanged.

that is the plot. maybe it is an unremarkable scenario, but several

other elements are notable: one, the hand-held video-like camera

movement, which produces an almost unbearable intimacy at times, such

as the scene when Officer Friendly confides to the immigrant that,

contrary to all appearances, he has no money and is going to lose his

house (this fact is dropped from the plot, as in real life the first

thing the defense lawyer would do would be to supoena the bank records

to show motive for the theft of the money, instead, as a kind of

overkill which the movie indulges in, just like the best soviet-period

films, the immigrant is herself accused of theft as the motive for the

murder). two, the setting, which is “shown” almost exclusively through

the object of the automobile, those huge boats made in the 50s in

detroit, as some form of imaginary index and sign of American

Prosperity, even though the cars are ordinary cars, their sheer size

makes them function as a period piece, so that we know with this one

element that we are watching a scenario taking place 50 years ago (the

hanging itself is the other clue, as the only state which still hangs

convicted criminals is nevada, i believe, everyone else is either

electrocuted or given an injection of something that kills them).

three, the use of the musical (you might think in this connection of

that film we watched at your dacha, the one set in the collective

housing apartment in 1960s moscow, and it’s use for purposes of comedy

of the motif at least of the musical, i don’t remember if there was

actual singing and dancing, except at the very end) and the musical

functions in this film as the staging of fantasy: what we are and how

we see ourselves and others in reveries, day-dreaming.

what i am most interested by, however, is the way that the figure of

the immigrant operates as almost a pure sign, allegory: the story is

only barely a story, and wants to be an image instead, and the image?

the victimization of eastern europe, and the police state, the u.s.

this is both so obvious and yet unstated, embedded in the scenario,

which, without this subliminal image, is almost pure fairy tale, or

folk tale. the experience of the baltic countries (trier himself i

believe is from denmark) and eastern europe of the former police

state, the u.s.s.r, perhaps lends it a certain vantage point from

which to experience “americanization” now as the arrival of another

police state, the new “big brother” to use orwell’s term, his 1984,

which is actually a very popular book here, they sell it in the kiosks

with cigarettes and bus tickets. i just wonder how much the absorption

in this image has been responsible for the film’s popularity, as it is

one of the films i can generally expect many of my students to have

seen, and it always gets mentioned when we talk about capital

punishment in the u.s.

the coding, in other words, is similar to flemish paintings. you are

looking at one thing, and really seeing another. the story the viewer

is given is a form of a parable, and while you are watching, you

experience the characters, in their abstraction, as signs of your

deepest fears about this megalith, this all-powerful place, the u.s.,

which, strangely, directly places the film squarely within the

tradition of socialist-realism, though of course no one can remember

what that was. there is no “global” cultural memory of the

soviet-period films, and the great contradiction, of course, is that

there were some very good ones. i am thinking of the earnestly serious

scenarios of the films about the high school teacher that we watched

at your flat, or the parts of the film that we saw in palangas, where

the young man and woman simply cannot live for one another or with one

another, the demands that the society places on them are too important

to be sacrificed for something so selfish as the wish for private

happiness. these are parables also. one might look at the films made

in this period in russia as social parables, again, where the division

between sign and signfication is almost absolute, like the coding of

the “political critique” films which of course couldn’t do that

directly, so they have to embed the code in the visual form another

way, to get past the censor.

maybe it is not censorship that is operating so much in “dancing in

the dark” as overlay (and overkill): isn’t this how fairy tales and

folk tales function? when the immigrant (we are never for one moment

in the film allowed to forget that she is an immigrant) breaks the

machine for which she is fired at the tool & die plant, the mistake is

placing two sheets of metal in the press one on top of another, when

the machine can only tolerate the one sheet of metal without breaking

down. that is a metaphor, i think, for the two layers of meaning

superimposed in the film.

right now i am merely surprised by the visual/psychological impact of

the film when it is viewed through the computer, and one navigates the

tracks, as well as also the simple element of choice, that you choose

what time you are going to view this scene or that, and you don’t have

to watch the whole film, only the scene in which you are interested. i

know this is very basic, and yet i have deliberately refrained from

experiencing visual information and narrative this way, i think out of

fear for the harm that it might do to my poetry. now i am not so sure.

in some way, i am trying to experience directly the space of

contradiction that i want to write about: between poetics of the word,

of language, of poetry, and the language of film, video, and it is a

contradiction so vast that i can’t imagine exhausting it. those

opening lines of “russian ark” for example, “I open my eyes and see

nothing” are echoed in “dancing in the dark” (the film itself a

satellite of the jupiter of planets of russian film) when the

immigrant says, either “I’ve seen enough” or “There’s nothing more to

see” when she is asked by Officer Friendly (before he steals her

money) why she doesn’t get the operation for herself. what are poetics

is not about the problem that nothing we ever hear there, read there,

is visible? we don’t see when we read. there’s no worse lesson and

nothing more wrong that when we say that we can see something there,

something, anyway, for which there is a referent in the real world.

did i tell you that i found what we call a “find” in the bookstore

near the institute thursday? a facing english/polish edition of Percy

Bysshe Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”, one of those poems the reading

of which began to call out of me my own desire to write poetry almost

25 years ago. reading from it again, after all these years, i found

these two lines in the concluding stanza which might stand for the

epigraph of the 1996-1999 period that i wrote you about:

“To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

*

well, such is poetry, and art, and the making of it, no one, not even

those who write, are capable of accounting for. what is difficult for

me now is that i know that i am in some new period of influence,

gestation, and i cannot know it for what it is, that i can profoundly

not know where i am, though i have intimations, some days, that i will

never again see the u.s., more out of stubborness than any other

reason, and most of all, simple chance and accident. this has a great

emotional effect on me some days.

right now, i am merely satisfied with the evidence of simple

technological competence, since i made my linux box run by itself, and

it writes cds and displays digital video. now i must begin asking the

question: what is all the fuss about (the language of the new media).

always, always, i must remember to think as simply as possible, and

try to see things as though for the first time, everyone is always in

such a rush conceptually, they are forced to, from the position in the

society they sustain. it is left to the “under” or “lower” inhabitant

to sift through the pieces left over.

(kisses)

k   

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: once again i am awake when i needn’t be

Дата: 24 апреля 2005 г. 10:49

dear zh,

once again i have no idea why i am awake so early, since i didn’t go

to sleep until around midnight. it must be the change in season. that

must be the reason. no! i am beginning the day hearing terrible

rhymes! i must go back to sleep. impossible, the light is too bright.

i returned my two dvds last night to the video store, and overcame the

temptation to rent any more until next weekend. all things considered,

it’s still entertainment, and i have the puritan cast of mind, that i

must be reading something, even when i am reading nothing. also, to be

truthful, i recognize all the symptoms of total burn out at the end of

the academic year: i have taught hard this year, very hard, and i am

one month away from finishing the year, except that i am already

finished with it.

i did cancel all the rest of my academic writing classes: in other

words, i am meeting individually with students now for 20 minutes.

this is actually quite good for them, but bad for me, as it means i

must read 24 essays very closely. i wonder if i will. the great thing

is that i don’t have to sit for any exams this year, so i will really

be done with everything the first week of june. it is so close! and i

am so tired of it all! it must be the weather.

today will be a good washing day. i have absolutely no inspiration or

interest for this paper i must write the next month. right now, i have

no idea as to how i will do it, though yesterday as i told you i had

the bright idea that i would write it as a presentation first, and

after the conference (and after classes are finished) write the paper

for the conference publication, if i can get an deadline extension,

which i am hoping i might. this will take some of the pressure off

writing, which i simply don’t feel like doing right now.

the problem is, through with my classes though my classes are not

through with me, i don’t know what i feel like doing, except, of

course, watching dvds. now another obsession. i hope not.

i promise to write you an evening letter, perhaps even this very

evening!

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: a beautiful sunday

Дата: 24 апреля 2005 г. 20:45

dear zh,

i just lost a letter trying to send to you and the computer froze so i

had to reboot and maybe the letter is buried in a tmp file somewhere,

but i might as well write you again – can i remember what i wrote?

the subject was: a beautiful sunday, which it is. only, i haven’t even

gone outside, preferring instead to wash and clean and cook, and etc.,

well you can guess, though i think i finally have my new laptop

running the way i want it (maybe).

yes, that’s what i was writing about, the fact that, though i have

solved my problem with how to watch the vertov dvd when it arrived, i

still won’t be able to work with my own digital video until i upgrade

the memory and attach one more piece of hardware for editing and the

video card. maybe i will be able to do this by the summer.

as you may remember, i seem to like to shoot footage when we are

walking here and there (both in tomsk and palangas) and especially in

palangas, several of those times at the sea in the snow, i think these

are among some of the best images i have taken, but i have to keep

waiting to find out.

i am drinking a cup of coffee which will probably keep me up quite

late, doing what, who knows, but i should be writing that, that, that

conference paper. it is almost as much fun to write about not writing

it. and finally, yes, i remember, asking you what you are doing this

evening?

besides writing me?

(kisses)

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: after a night of rest

Дата: 25 апреля 2005 г. 10:48

dear zh,

have you ever thought what a pleasure it will be for me to make two

cups of coffee in the morning rather than one? or to sit with you at

the (as yet not existing) small kitchen table in the early morning

light, watching the passersby below us walking to the bus across the

street? i like to imagine us talking very little in such moments,

enjoying one another’s company, and our coffee, yours black, mine with

cream. this way we won’t need coffee cups of different colors.

what a difference a night of sound sleep makes. i don’t think once

this weekend i even made it to my bed, falling asleep on one of the

two sofas, which is my solitary habit. last night, though, i couldn’t

keep my eyes open, so i went to sleep at 23:00 and my alarm went off

at 5:30. i have papers to grade! actually, though, i think this week

will be a pleasant week. i show a movie on wednesday morning,

presentations for my conversation class are scheduled, i meet

individually with writing students 11:00-13:00 on thursday, so that

means the only two classes i need to prepare for are my american

culture classes, and one of the classes is reading the same text i

discussed with the other one last thursday. and then, come thursday

afternoon, i have friday, saturday, sunday, monday and tuesday to

write my conference paper. yes, i think i can write 10 pages in five

days without interruption. i also have a long weekend at the end of

may, since may 26 (my long day, a thursday) is a holiday, and classes

at the dunce college are over on may 25! so that means may 26, 27, 28,

29, 30 and 31 will be free also for fine-tuning my presentation the

following weekend.

i have nothing to complain about, nothing at all, don’t you see? even

this last week of computer-obsession has its purpose, and what purpose

is that? i think i am totally fed up (i know, you like to use this

expression for when you are full and cannot eat any more eggplant, at

least when i haven’t already eaten it) with my Fedora linux that i

bought in tomsk. computers have different architectures. although it

works great with my old laptop, it doesn’t work the same way on the

new one, so last night i looked up some pages on the internet for

installations of linux on my new laptop, and learned that one works

really well with the other cd that i bought, if you remember, and also

with a distribution called SUSE 9.0, which i remember even last summer

they had at that shop (we looked at it, and i didn’t buy it because it

was a “live” cd, but now i am thinking this would be a good

distribution to have, since it is based in Germany, though operating

systems are hardly like computers, and i don’t think it makes much

difference where the operating system is located, except that i think

there will be a lot of information available about using this SUSE

linux with digital video.

that is worthwhile, i guess, to obssess so much with something that

you realize its limitations, which is the conclusion i have come to

regarding the Fedora operating system, except that it took several

days to realize this. though it is never as bad as microsoft windows,

still, so much of the system is designed with interdependencies (you

can’t install this unless you install that) that there is really quite

a lot of manipulation built into the system, and it doesn’t really let

you designed a system according to your needs, which is what a good

user-friendly operating system should do, and neither, i think, should

a user have to be a computer genius to have a working operating system

designed for specific purposes. instead, even with these highly-touted

open source distributions, there is still emphasis on the total

package, the appearance of seamlessness, so that everything runs just

like a microsoft operating system, only just a little different in

appearance.

the question of “seamlessness” is actually what i think my conference

paper will be about, how as viewers of film and readers of poems we

are cued (queued!) to expect a certain “as if” relationship, which is

always the assent to, if not demand for, illusionism (socialist

realism did this as much as any art) and when art refuses to indulge

in illusionism, when it foregrounds its relations of production and

makes its meaning from this emphasis, then it becomes a critical form

of cultural production traditionally associated with avant-garde

practice, and both Vertov and Olson were vanguardists in this sense,

only what the recent book i am using as my segue into the paper, a

book theorizing computers and their popularity (their mass

distribution) sees these avant-garde practices of foregrounding how

the work of art is made rather than an illusionistic surface (in film

this would be the scenario, and vertov reminds us of this, that any

time you have a story you are staging something and simply

photographing the staged reality rather than trying to capture a

moment of the “real” world, society, whatever it is that we inhabit,

wherever it is that we are at any given moment) embedded in the

computer interfaces themselves, so that we see a return of the

avant-garde in the mass practices of computer uses: from sending email

to playing computer games, there are all kinds of virtual camera

application that the computer user practices, only at such remove!

where there is no referent at all! no outside world! this apotheosis

of the insularity of perception and subjectivity may be where i can

work towards, if i ever get off the ground with this essay.

now i must read student compositions, and make a few comments on them.

i am going to make my students do translations today, having totally

run out of ideas about what else to teach them.

by the way, do not criticize yourself for being simple, as i have

never quite understood what you mean when you say this. “i have had to

learn the simplest things last.” it is a good motto, or slogan. i

don’t think it is a positive thing to do, to make this division

between complexity and simplicity (if complexity is even the opposite

of simplicity). in writing, sometimes they use the word “difficult”

(something whose meaning is not transparent). and yet the simplest

forms in nature are hardly transparent, clear, easily understood. when

you are washing windows this weekend, if you remember that so much of

art is divided exactly between the mirror and the window as models of

perception, what we are looking for when we read a poem or look at a

visual work, since it seems that we are always looking for some form

of reminder of how we thing the world we live in is made and how it

appears.

enough aesthetics for so early in the morning. i miss you.

k.  

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: a lovely day in Poland

Дата: 25 апреля 2005 г. 13:45

dear zhen,

on such a day one cannot possibly complain. the windows are open for

fresh air, there is stunning sunlight, and my compositions are marked,

all i have to do now is go to the institute to make a few copies for

the translation exercise, and today will be settled. tomorrow i am

home all day. i hope the weather (pogoda) holds. the words for weather

and for ceiling are very close in Polish, and on such a day, who would

ever want to live anywhere else? strange, the effect of light and

warmth on the mood, i almost (almost!) want to go for a walk. did i

mention that my new shoes fit perfectly now? they are excellent shoes,

and i think they will last for the entire year, and they have the

virtue as well of being black, so i won’t need to polish them. i just

realized that the shirt i am going to wear today is unironed. life’s

little difficulties. at least reading this letter won’t be one of them

for you.

do i really frighten you sometimes? “there are extremities of

consciousness a poet must undergo” (what a romantic i once was!) now i

see only the virtue of a day when the sun is shining, and yes, there

was a full (waxing) moon last night, though once again, i didn’t go

for a walk to enjoy it. that will have to wait until you are here.

kisses

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: home is the hunter, home from the hill

Дата: 25 апреля 2005 г. 20:27

and the sailor home from the sea

dear zh,

i thought i would write you a short note as soon as i returned home

which i have, having returned home, putting the potatoes to boil, and

changing into my civilian clothes, now i have a beautiful warm

afternoon to contemplate the approach of four months summer vacation,

as now it is, at such time, that i appreciate my career choice, as a

wandering English teacher, who works seven months out of the year

(remember the three weeks off between semesters) and this semester, i

don’t even have to go to work until noon on monday.

i knew something was wrong in my youth when everyone around me worked

55-60 hours a week. i knew there were other people who didn’t work

half as much as that, and i wanted to be one of those people! now that

i am one of those people who work on 25-30 hours a week, and for

little more than half a year, i wonder how i ever worked 35 hours a

week at the law firm for four years. it was unbearable. i only hope

that you can bear the change in schedule once you get here. it’s

important to get into the frame of mind of having time, and once you

have the time, to learn how to be idle, for that is when the good

thoughts come.

really, it such a lovely day today, i enjoyed every step of my walk

from the tram stop to the door of my flat. that doesn’t happen all the

time.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: workday

Дата: 26 апреля 2005 г. 11:44

dear zh,

i am awake a little later than usual today, 10 minutes after 7:00,

though my alarm when off as usual, at 5:30, which i reset recently

from 4:30, which was an experiement, about waking up early, just how

early, i did not know how early, and then last week a student’s report

on a contemporary British playwright, Sarah Kane, who woke up every

morning at 4:48, because, as the student reported, it was the

suicide’s hour, according to Kane, who, at the age of 28, accordingly,

committed suicide. so i reset my clock the next day to 5:30, when

there is light spilling into the rooms.

i have a lot of tasks related to teaching to do today, so i should

properly treat it as a working day, though i am working at home. the

buffalo upstairs is awake now also, and roaming with abandon through

the rooms, heavy tread (stomping). at least when you are here, we

should feel the right to make equal amounts of noise. i still can’t

figure out how many people live in the flat above. it is the only flat

where i here the goings-on of others, and nothing from the flats on

either side. i wonder if this is always the case with the flat above,

since i remember you remarking that you could hear the fights between

the mother and daughter in the flat above you, made more complicated

by the fact that you have known this family for many years.

do any of your schoolmates and friends know anything about your plans

for july? when are you going to tell them? i am sure that they will

want to give you a party, and knowing you, i don’t think you enjoy the

thought of this very much. it may help if you make it clear that we

plan to return to russia for 2-3 months the following summer, this way

your friends won’t feel like they are saying goodbye to you. it is my

impression that you, yourself, have said goodbye to quite a few

friends recently, such as Tania going to live in Boston. how often do

you hear from her? how hard is she finding it to learn English? does

she ever say what she finds strangest about life in the u.s.? or does

she stay mostly in the suburbs, where i understand that is where she

lives with her brother. and did Olga ever move to Canada? or do you

still see her at Englification functions?

maybe you will not answer many of these questions, maybe none at all.

if you are interested in answering them, some times it is easier to

press reply in the email client so that the message is in the writing

space (you do this sometimes) and answer specifically in the space

near the paragraph you are responding to. this is often done on email

lists, to address a specific point. on the other hand, i have no idea

how interesting to you are such questions, and the fact is i am simply

curious, because i think Siberia is a very different place from the

u.s., though Poland perhaps less so. there are dark moments, such

moments when i realize i know little about the conflicts and tensions

here. yesterday i was teaching several pages from a book by a Polish

author about a village in Poland set in 1934, and there was a

reference to a Hassadim, and several students started laughing.

several of my colleagues, both american and polish, mention from time

to time just how deep anti-semitism is in Poland, though “Jew” is used

as a hate word less to refer to actual Jews, since there are so few,

than as a general epithet meaning lowest-of-the-low (to put it nicely)

and is especially popular among hooligans and footballers. there is

that culture here too, and it is rather ugly, similar to Moscow.

i do not mean to discourage you by these remarks, and to tell the

truth, i rarely come across an such ugly incidents of obvious racism,

or even violence, much, much less than daily experience in the u.s.

when one is in a big city, and the cultural level of the students at

the dunce college is rather low, so one gets an insight into the

ignorance of certain levels of Polish society, especially among the

equivalent of the “new Russians”. they have no such term here, but

those are the students that attend the dunce college. there parents

have a lot of money, but both parents and children are ignorant and

crude in general culture. at the university, in contrast, since it is

free and the entrance requirements high, many students attend whose

families have no money at all, and yet these students are very bright,

as there is a tradition here for professionals (doctors, professors,

etc) not to earn money, as they are not business people, and only

business people make a lot of money. this is very different from the

u.s., where professors and doctors especially make very high salaries,

and so identify closer with the business class.

you asked me why i am giving this paper in june, the one that i must

write this weekend or else. my one reaons is that it is a very nice

school, though private, much higher standards and better students, so

i am hoping, if i give a successful presentation, to perhaps be

offered a job there, so i can leave the dunce college. i am too fond

of my 1200 dollar a month salary, and do not want to live on anything

less, though i do not like teaching at the dunce college. maybe i will

be offered a job, maybe not, but it is my way of trying not to be

passive, and to make a few things happen. there is no reason to ever

worry though, since in a difficult situation i could always teach at

private language schools either here in lodz or in warsaw. last year

we received a raise from the university. maybe after this summer i

will reach 3000 zlotys a month (1000 dollars) which is a decent income

here. i say these things to relax your concern a little, so that you

do not feel that you are putting yourself at risk by leaving your job.

once again, it is a matter of cultural perception: in the u.s., people

quite often change their lives and their professions in mid-life, and

i know that in russia this is very uncommon, that one does not dare to

change unless it is moving to the u.s., canada, or germany. i cannot

say anything that will make you feel any less the approaching big

change in your life (and i think sometimes the tone in your letters,

the emotional exhaustion, tiredness, and moodiness, reflects having to

cope with this change?) except that life here, my life, seems rather

stable, and relatively more relaxed and bearable than life in a big

city in the u.s.

so what have we to worry about, except the weather? today the morning

is grey.

i miss you.

K

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: workday

Дата: 26 апреля 2005 г. 20:19

dear zh,

no, i am not writing my conference paper today, only reading essays by

students and etc., all related to school. i have also been researching

the possibility of a permanent internet connection to be established

by the time you arrive, since we have three laptops, it might be a

good idea to arrange for such and one of my colleagues called

yesterday and learned that i do not need special permission from some

office or other for what is called an adsl modem providing broadband

connection, the 512 (based on rate of transfer) sounds most

appropriate, though i am worried by the fact that they provide only

usb modems, not RJ45 ethernet, so my router won’t work with it (the

router allows you to connect up to four computers on the same network)

and i am a little suspicious of usb modems, never having used one. but

the temptation is great to arrange for this by mid-june, so that we

may have a permanent internet connection. you may find that you need

one, especially if you begin to do private translation work.

everything, though, is wait and see, wait and see.

i think i am bored right now with student writing, and maybe i will go

to the supermarket for the distraction. there is still a lot of the

day left, and i hate seeing a day wasted doing nothing but grading

papers, what i do today though, i won’t have to do tomorrow. that

thought has never inspired me before.

and thanks for the answers to your questions, and the long-ish letter.

sometimes i feel so out of touch with you when all we exchange are a

few lines. i know you are overworked and very tired, but i don’t have

anyone else to communicate with, so…

and so…

kisses goodnight

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: workday

Дата: 27 апреля 2005 г. 10:35

dear zh,

it’s too early to tell whether the day will be unbearable or not.

yesterday was lackluster, at least until i went to the supermarket

around 18:00 and found in a big bin of reduced video cds (a little

different than dvds, but the same idea) two movies: Jane Campion’s

Piano and a film by Bertolucci which also features the theme of piano,

only it is about the meeting of an exiled African woman and a

classical pianist, i only watched half of it, so i don’t know whether

they fall in love or not, though it seemed very likely that is where

the plot was heading. i continue to enjoy the surprise of the film in

the computer screen, and i am fascinated by this change in interface,

since there is a different psychology involved in the computer than

the television, though that too is influenced by the fact that there

are only three channels here, and they only play films very late at

night. still, when i run the film in the computer at minimal size,

about the size of a movie you would find on the web, there is a

different order of attention to the visual rhythms, which is what i

would say i am most interested in right now. i am still not at the

stage where i feel competent enough to start capturing fragments from

these films, stills, or durations of one or two minutes, though of

course when it becomes a still, there is another effect, and one is

viewing a static rather than dynamic image. the idea amuses me that i

can find for 10 zlotys (3 dollars) films which are rented in the local

store for 1.50. in general, though, i think i am headed in the

direction of an intense visual period, mediated by the computer

interface. there is a kind of absorption involved, and, i hope, a form

of attention, which i badly need, since, obviously, to cope with the

boredom of a boring job, one begins to suffer lack of attention and

focus, which i often think of as my worst enemy right now. it’s funny,

i can’t find the english title anywhere of the Bertolucci film, since

everything is in Polish, and why should there be any english in the

first place, since it is an Italian film? one wonders just how much

has been recorded in vcd and dvd formats, and my guess is that this is

how filmmakers are working now, which returns thoughts to Russian Ark

and how it was filmed right into the computer. i hope you won’t mind

going with me to the cinemas here in lodz, that is one of the great

resources that i haven’t even begun to explore, though the one cinema

i went to was very nice, small, and serious. there are several here

like that, and the film school which apparently shows films almost

every night of the week for free.

now i have to go to work.

kisses

k.

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: one long day over

Дата: 27 апреля 2005 г. 22:08

dear zh,

i’m writing you a letter from the other side. that means linux, since

i just read my email from the client that i use to download from the

university server. most days i write you from windows, though from the

same email client, as they have versions for both linux and windows.

sometimes i can hardly tell the difference, though there are great

differences. i boot the computer into windows since, as you may

remember, if i turn my computer completely off i have to go into

emergency disk mode and reset the clock, so i prefer to put the

computer on suspend, and close the lid almost completely though

without locking it shut. for a time, whenever the phone rang, the

computer would turn on, something to do witht the external modem, so

now i turn off the peripherals which are all connected on one

extension. see how complicated life with electricity is?

i stopped by the furniture store with the blue kitchen table and they

still have it, and i was surprise how cheap furniture is (maybe i was

expecting the same prices as electronics). a large mirror such as you

will need only costs 100 zlotys. there are also chairs, desk chairs

and table chairs, reading chairs (though i am particular on this item

and none impressed me). i think we will take all our meals at the blue

kitchen table when i bring it home, as i honestly can’t figure out a

place to put a dining room table. to tell you the truth, i often eat

in front of the tv in my study, so perhaps we can get what is called

an in-table (a low table) to put in front of the sofa by the tv. i

don’t know what your preferences are. eating in the kitchen is nice in

the morning, but sometimes, since it is a small kitchen, the smell is

very strong from the cooking, and it is nice to go into another room,

though what room? that is the question that concerns me this evening.

i am tired, would like to sleep, i woke up too early this morning,

etc., when i got to school, not only was my regularly scheduled

seminar there, but so was my american culture class that has been

meeting on thursday afternoons. apparently their schedule was changed,

so i was scheduled to have two classes at the same time. typical

Polish system. i asked the secretariat what happened and they said

they must have made a mistake. duh. very nice expression. maybe the

students won’t come tomorrow. i wouldn’t mind. still, i have to read

culture tonight, preparing somewhat, and also read at least one essay

that didn’t arrive until today, though i am meeting the student

tomorrow. i am sure you are thrilled with all these details.

i hope you had a bearable day. my day was not unbearable, though i

wish it were over. walking, leisurely, home, i realized i was in a

foreign country when a mob or gang or army column it looked like, all

dressed in green, came marching down the sidewalk, about 50 of them,

chanting and singing slogans in a collective voice that reminded me of

the sensation of what it must have been like to hear the first squads

of nazis singing their party songs. there were merely football

hooligans, many of them drinking beer as they marched and sang, and

not long afterwards i saw a police wagon and a hospital truck pass by,

so i guess there’s a soccer match in lodz today. it was quite unreal,

and not only i stared. when i see such sights, i realize how deep is

the demagogery in many here, and that Europe is in as much trouble and

the U.S. is.

i don’t mean to disturb by these comments. on the other hand, i was

talking to my students about place to visit in Poland, and realized

that i should have them do an exercise telling me where to go, for one

student, especially, Gdansk was the place to go, very nice at night,

very big city atmosphere. so maybe we will go there. i would like to

travel around Poland with you this summer on day trips, leaving early

in the morning and returning late at night (late by train always means

about 21:00 or 22:00). what do you think? are you amenable? dear?

i miss you (with kisses)

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: in a rush

Дата: 28 апреля 2005 г. 11:05

dear zh,

i have exactly ten minutes to write to you on a rainy morning when i

had to wake up at 5:30 and mark papers until just now, 7:00, since i

fell asleep early last night, about 22:00, falling asleep even with

the light on, i must have been that tired.

but i thought you would like to have a few words from me even though

they are about nothing except being in a hurry, which condition i

think you might sympathize with, yes?

did you visit luba? your letters don’t seem to indicate much variety

in the rhythms of your daily life, in that i am reminded of my own,

life, here. i don’t think you will find much on the shelf in the dvd

store on lenin prospekt, probably, if they exist, dvds by tarkovsky

will need to be ordered. perhaps they do that there. but, please,

don’t order anything. let’s just find out what the prices are.

now i am thinking i will try to write the reznikoff paper this summer.

it turns out that there’s the possibility that the conference papers

from the recent conference will be published, so i am looking at the

possibility of three, maybe even four, publications, from this year

and last year’s work. i am beginning to feel like an academic. whether

or not it is important here i have no idea, though it can’t hurt. what

does?

i am only thankful right now that i don’t have my two classes on

monday. happiness in small portions.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: orders of friday

Дата: 29 апреля 2005 г. 11:31

dear zh,

i am awake as usual at the usual time and as usual i must write

something creative today i must be creative today as i am invited to

two places this weekend my colleagues in the country and another

colleague to help entertain on sunday a visiting professor from the

u.s. – why did i agree? because as usual i am always making an effort

to be agreeable, even when and especially when it is against my best

interests, and my best interests right now are to write that

conference paper, or prepare that presentation, however it is that it

will and must materialize, as i just a few days ago rec’d the website

address for the conference listing of the participants and there among

scholars from Turkey, Croatia, UK, the U.S, and elsewhere, not to

mention Poland, is the lowly poet, yours truly, with his ambitious

concept, which, of course, presently, he has no interest whatsoever in

writing.

i am my own worst enemy! always this has been true. i am counting on

you to reform me, though i don’t know how yet, maybe with a strong

overdose of common sense, with which i associate you, as someone who

is at least comparatively more common sensical that i am, though i am

always amused at the memory of how apparently you wander around in

precise circles in tomsk since they are footsteps you have taken for

40 years and you do not need to be reminded of where you are going so

you don’t have to think about them – i noticed this, i think, because

i am never actually quite sure where i am, which is to imply that i do

not take mechanical or unconscious steps, it’s just that they are a

different order of steps, as on a collapsing ladder, or accordian.

aren’t you grateful that i have no special requests for you this

morning? this does not mean that i am any more pessimistic about your

invitation, as i trust that it is being taken care of, though if i do

not hear from “them” by the middle of May i will make a call to the

woman i met with, but really she did not indicate that anything was

out of the ordinary, rather to the contrary, that it was a very

typical procedure, though one of course which requires the rector’s

signature, and as you know, rectors at all universities are very busy

figures, though to my mind there is no Englification process here. by

the way, your request vis-a-vis such process in your own academic

wilderness leaves me rather mystified? what exactly do you need?

another letter? to what imaginary conference are you going this time?

i will gladly provide any such document you need, though don’t you

worry a little that, since your director’s line their pockets with

bonus money on the basis on false documents, that someone, sometime,

will, as we say, put two and two together, and realize that it does

not equal 46,000,500,000,000 rubles? are you working any more for the

mining project? you never mention it. i think it is just as well if

you are not.

now i must concern myself with inspiring myself to be thoughtful,

philosophical, articulate and creative … what a demand!

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: orders of friday

Дата: 29 апреля 2005 г. 18:40

dear zh,

i have been doing nothing today except trying to get my dv camera to

work on my new laptop (sigh). i did succeed in physically seeing the

device attached to the processes, but i can’t get any image on the

screen.

conference paper? now i will try desperately to write a few

paragraphs. i can’t believe how lackadaisacal i am being about this.

nor do i know why, except that it is bad timing. i am not very

thoughtful during the semester.

i will try to write you again this evening. my mind 800 rubles is a

lot for a dvd, about 25 dollars, the same as here. i have not rec’d

any presents in the mail, though it is nice of you to think of me. the

only present i would truly wish for above all would be for this essay

to write itself.

now i try again …

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: images of Tomsk

Дата: 29 апреля 2005 г. 22:15

dear zh,

well, i finally succeeded in capturing a few frames of dv footage, but

on my old laptop!

it turns out that the neomagic video card when i run xvinfo tells me

that it “puts” (captures) both video and images, whereas my new laptop

apparently needs a driver to capture video, and since on the windows

side it says there is no capture device, or driver, i have to capture

the frames on the linux side of the old laptop, transfer to the

windows partition, burn it onto cd and transfer into the new laptop,

where the image is a little better. obviously, i’m not going to do

much work under these conditions, but it was very satisfying finally

to hear the digital camera spin up and the images start feeding into

the video editor, though at such a slow speed, and i don’t know why,

since i used to capture digital video on my macintosh which ran at

only 233 megahurz. at least when the footage feeds so slowly, you pay

close attention to the frames, and i have been looking all afternoon

at frames from your dacha in the rain, and the very colorful dacha

next to you which i photographed repeatedly and also that whatever you

call it, the day on the shore of the river they were flying in the sky

in the, well, what is it? what were they flying in or on? there are

some very nice frames of that and also of the river itself.

i am sending this to you now hoping you get a few words from me before

you go to sleep.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: second not-writing (yet) day

Дата: 30 апреля 2005 г. 13:49

dear zh,

i am finally up this morning, as usual, in a state of distraction,

after going to bed quite late, you might say, in the early morning.

you can tell how distracted i am from the fact that i have run out of

coffee cream, though i have five pints of yoghurt in the fridge.

obviously, i have been thinking about other things. this and that

work, now, on my laptops, and that and this still don’t work. at least

i am not bored. last night i watched parts from the two vcds (video

cds) on my new laptop, which i hadn’t been able to do when i last

tried, so i accomplished a very little, after almost frying the screen

(black screen!) with a driver that turned out to be incompatible with

my particular (particular, they are so particular, set of hardware

components) and the only consolation was that i found comments on the

net much to the same, that at least i was not the only one to try to

apply a certain driver to a certain machine, etc. at the very least,

my new laptop is almost set up to edit video and compress video, it

just cannot capture it. i can capture video now, for the first time

ever, on my old laptop, but only under linux, and only at painfully

slow speeds, so they are like taking photographs, which, as i

mentioned yesterday, is not necessarily bad, since it is not a

“seamless” effect that i am interested in, rather, the splice, which

is what i need to write about, if i ever get around to writing. what

is the equivalent of the splice in writing? that also is what i need

to write about, something about the splice, cut, interval, even,

perhaps, semantic enjambment, which is a phrase that i just coined the

other day, and if you can believe me (if you were here you would be

laughing at me, and with good reason, and i am absolutely obsessive as

you know from last summer about getting things to work on a machine,

and of course, they almost never work). don’t you see a pattern here?

last summer i had that conference paper to write and i spent hour and

hours configuring my old laptop (which by the way runs almost

perfectly now) (it’s just that my learning curve is so slow!) and then

wrote the paper very quickly, within a couple of days. the images of

the dacha in rain, the dacha in sun, are very lovely to see, stored as

they are in my poor little dv camera, now i only wish i had taken more

footage. last night when i began watching the beginning of the Piano

(have you ever seen this film? if they have it for rent at the dvd

shop i recommend it) there is a swath of blurred red of a curtain, and

though it only lasts a few moments, it is a perfect resemblance to the

kind of image i am most interested in: unstable color, maybe occasions

subjects/objects (maybe) but really only color, i just want to study

color, which of course, involves some attention to light. the problem

is the electronic light meeting the natural light, if there ever is

such as natural light anywhere.

well, these are my notes from days when i should be writing and i’m

not. maybe i’ll write today. sorry for the delay in writing you this

morning. i didn’t wake up until less than an hour ago.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: first picture

Дата: 30 апреля 2005 г. 15:40

dear zh,

i am writing you less than a minute after speaking with you. here is

the virtual kiss. i am afraid it is not very spectacular, simply the

first fragment that i happened to record and which is not too long.

still, after trying different kinds of compression, the mp4 file

(which the windows media player–at least mine–doesn’t play, but

quicktime and realplayer do, and i think you have both on your laptop

(i remember installing quicktime myself when i installed the adobe

video software). if it doesn’t play, let me know. soon i will be able

to send you better fragments.

i miss you.

K

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “Lukyanova” <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: dear from dear (deer for deer, bear from bear, and beer and beer)

Дата: 30 апреля 2005 г. 21:58

dear, dear, dear zh

i have been writing for the past couple of hours and finally wrote two

paragraphs which i can stand. most of the time i can’t stand my

writing, especially if it is an essay. so this i send you as a

slightly smaller attachment. you didn’t mention whether you were able

to open my earlier (enormous) attachment. i know it is only 12 seconds

of the view from the second story porch of your dacha, but it is

something very lovely for me to look at.

i am having a very nice afternoon, modulated by the appearance that i

may be capable of writing this paper after all. but it takes so much

time, which i would rather spend chasing down drivers on the internet!

from the distracted one, yours

with kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Seven small snapshots

Дата: 1 мая 2005 г. 13:22

dear zh,

would you watch a film based on the following paragraph?

“In thinking about the eras of Benjamin’s cinema, La Jetee and Twelve

Monkeys, they represent ways in which to conceive of the idea of

temporality in the three different time periods. Naturally, these

periods should not simply be seen as comparable with each other.

Still, we continuously use different spheres to discuss time, from

subjective to objective, quantitative to qualitative, or sometimes

presented simultaneously. This causes us to question, whether the

specific temporal differences are understood by the subjects or

discussants themselves, and whether the conceptualization of time has

really changed? The two films (although my commentary on Twelve

Monkeys remains fragmentary) present both their inner idea of time,

described by the images, and represent the ‘film-time’ of their

contemporary. The roughly thirty years between the films has changed

much of the story, and although they belong to different genres of

film-making, the images of time themselves represent the temporal

transformation in viewing as well as in making films.”

i know Chris Marker’s Ja Jetee (a French filmmaker who also made a

film called Letter from Siberia) and since this paragragh is in a book

that i use quite a lot, and find accessible for commentary on Walter

Benjamin, i watched the film Twelve Monkeys last night, and couldn’t

see the comparison. it is by the same British director, Terry Gilliam,

who made the film, Brazil (Orwellian fantasy). but i don’t think there

was any redeeming value in watch Twelve Monkeys, a little like the

equivalent of a crocodile movie, though, once again, and perhaps as an

index of the separation of the “thirty” years, a typical film made for

a mass public has to be more spectacle than theater (and Lindroos

mentions this difference, how in the Gilliam film time-travel is

represented as purely physical, and in the Marker film it is

psychological). in the spectacle, there has to be constant movement,

and the image is mobilized around the expectation of sequence, so that

even if the plot is fantastic, one event is related to another, even

in the form of an assembly-line process of events represented

(absolute repetition of sameness). isn’t that what a spectacle-plot

is? we always more or less know what we are going to see based on the

pattern that is established quickly in the film.

but i didn’t remember that Marker’s film is composed entirely of still

photographs, and it is his only ‘fiction’ film (all the others being

documentaries) so that if i ever develop these first hesitant

(descriptive) remarks on Vertov, i would have to watch Marker’s films

sometime. another thought about film-as-spectacle: something is always

happening in such films, and the expectation that something happen

severely restricts perception, and even if it is history that is the

subject of the representation (one of the spectacular moments in

Twelve Monkeys is when the time traveller lands in the middle of a

battlefield in world war I – a falser image of history could hardly be

imagined than the parallel spectacle of the battlefield, it is simply

an undisguised imitation of 19th century historical painting) the

suppression of the temporality of perception turns the experience into

a sort of visual (and virtual) emptiness, as if the false

representation of history depended on such perceptual emptiness.

well, if these sound like notes for my essay, so they are. you know

that i have the habit of thinking aloud, in those few hours when i am

able to think at all. i think these will be my points of discussion on

the filmmaker and the poet:

1. the use of archive material (manovich calls this “database” and

writes several paragraphs about the image of the archive in Man with a

Movie Camera)

2. temporality of perception and the exposure of the processes by

which language tries to materialize and signify (never a stable

process)

3. naming the body: sound (for Olson) and visual (for Vertov). it is

not just a matter of eye and ear. how inadequate those words are. they

mean nothing. breathing is respiration, in and out, a rhythm of beat

and counter-beat, upon which the concept of sound rhythms depends. the

word Olson uses for this is breath, the breath-space, its intervals.

Vertov also writes about the interval, but i haven’t thought about it

yet. the duration between one point and another in space?

the images of the single eye reflected in the camera is often invoked

as an image of the kino-eye, mediated by the machine. so maybe it is

not so much about naming the body and situating the production of a

vocal (Olson) and visual (Vertov) art somewhere in the relation

between body and machine.

the camera extends perception. Vertov writes that human perception is

faulty, and the camera helps us to see. what happens when the camera

starts to see for us? when the camera, the machine, constructs for us

an interpretation which we search to be confirmed in our daily

experience, so that we understand our life-rhythms according to an

external projection?

i keep coming back to this play of meaning between “projection” and

“projective” without, as yet, being able to do much with it. certainly

both words share an emphasis on externality, the outside, and making

the outside the force of the representation.

so: archive, temporality of perception, and physical projection, those

are my three “categories” of comparison. now i have to write about

them!

kisses

k

p.s. i am sorry about the mp4 file. it is not worth updating your

quicktime application for that single file (it is not something to be

unpacked, by the way, there are all these compression algorithms i

guess they are for huge amounts of data: .mp3 and .mp4, .avi,

quicktime itself makes a .mov file, the .avi which is the standard

file format whenever you record moving images from the camera,

compresses the data, but those 12 seconds i sent you were originally

45 megabytes, and the .mov file brought it down to 5 (still too large

to send in an email). since i could open the mp4 file in my quicktime

6.3 application, i though you would be able to as well (did you try

the quicktime movie player?) anyway, i only intended it as a sample,

and i am sending instead this morning a few small .jpgs which i was

able to capture from the windows side of my old laptop. i simply can’t

figure out why if i can record video on the linux side of this

computer, why i can’t on the windows side. my graphics card obviously

has capturing capability, but i spent two hours on the internet last

night trying to find a driver that would allow me to capture film and

i simply couldn’t, it was a waste of time, which time spent searching

for a solution to a simple technical problem seems to be a feature of

images mediated by the machine. this morning in the manovich book i

read a sentence that was a reminder of the fact that every image we

look at through the computer is a recomposition of sheer numbers. it

is all numbers. we are looking at a representation of numbers. that is

a little bit different than the old photographs on paper and movies on

film stock.      

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: between parties

Дата: 2 мая 2005 г. 13:43

dear zh

i returned home late last night and instead of going to bed i stayed

up most of the night recording video footage from the linux side of my

old laptop, copying it one huge file at a time (betw 200 and 300

megabytes) to my windows side, where i would burn the files onto cd,

then transfer them into my new laptop. if it sounds like a laborious

process, it is, especially since everything doesn’t work consistently,

though the quality of recorded footage is good, since apparently you

do not need that fast of a computer to record, only to compress into

different formats. that’s at least what i read. yesterday of course

was an entire day given to eating and drinking, and very soon, with a

couple of hours, i will resume the same. so it is a weekend where i

more or less successfully figured out how to record dv footage in my

two halfway compatible laptops, and socialized. i did rearrange and

clean the kitchen yesterday, making room for a kitchen table. so you

see i am waiting for you. i will not enumerate all that i had to eat

yesterday, though you may be satisfied that i believe i ate enough for

both of us. do you mind?

i miss you

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: party’s over

Дата: 3 мая 2005 г. 10:29

dear zh,

the party’s over, or, i should say, parties, both yesterday’s and the

day before lasting each about 8 hours, and as for the wine, and

spirits, i can think of no better word than “copious” so now, today, i

think, is a day of national recovery, though i don’t feel hung-over,

only even further removed from any capacity to exercise my cogitative

powers.

i have been greatly amused both days by long conversations with a

visiting fullbright professor, here or a month to give a lecture or

two, he is the editor of the “library of America” edition of William

Faulkner (you may remember my reading two novels by this writer in

Tomsk when i found them in the local bookstore) and he is also the

editor of a university journal, The Mississippi Quarterly. why amused?

he is not very well read, as too many of ‘our’ American professors,

and simply an academic settled into a very comfortable lifestyle. i

take interest in such figures since these are the order of

“colleagues” one would have at an American university, and it even

further discourages me from the prospect.

to tell the truth, all my attention is on my first fragments of

digital video, and my fascination with the same. i realize now that

the camera is a sponge which absorbs far more movement and

pattern/shape relationships than one can know. for example, in several

two minute fragments from footage taken from the window of my room in

the hotel in Tomsk, extremely still because i set the camera on the

ledge of the window, against the motionless landscape of the river and

buildings in fog, the arm of a crane moves first in one direction and

then another, almost imperceptibly, and then a bird, only a very small

flitting and fleeting shape, moves across the screen, so between the

arm of the construction crane (the rest of the machine is not visible)

and the bird there is the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical

movement in the most minimal of forms. when i took this footage, i was

not aware at all of this.

there are also passages from our walks in Palangas, when i shot not in

color but in duotone, two colors, and the winter landscape through the

nearby woods opening upon the sea, are very mysterious, dreamlike, and

there is a narrative between the footsteps in the snow and a very

distant and minute figure that appears in the great distance walking.

there are also deliberate blurrings of focus simply the result of

zooming, which perhaps i do too much. actually, i really know nothing

about filming, and yet i am reminded of my youth and my very first

poems, and this kind of excitement when one doesn’t know what one is

doing, but likes doing it very much. i think that is my relationship

to the camera right now.

yesterday i spoke more with others about day trips in Poland this

summer, and rec’d more recommendations, so i think even now if and

when you have time and if you are ever bored, if you want to look for

information about places to visit in Krakow, Gdnask, Poznan, not to

mention Warsaw, and smaller towns, anything will help, since i don’t

know much about these places, obviously. but it would be very fun for

us to do this, and very easy, apparently. we could almost always

simply make a day trip, leaving early in the morning and returning

late at night. outside of Krakow and Warsaw, even the hotels are not

very expensive. i think i would also like to photograph a lot,

especially in the villages. one of the Polish guests yesterday was

saying to visit the eastern Polish towns, so many people speak Russian

there, and it is an authentic feel of the old Poland, especially in

the villages, so i am thinking how interesting it would be to take

buses and trains to certain regions, and walk around, have picnics,

sit in open cafes in deserted village squares, and enjoy being

together in a new country for both of us, because as you know i do not

explore very much where i am during the school year and being alone,

now this will change and i think there are many things we can do and

place we can go this summer that will not only interest you, but help

to convince you that you have made a wise decision, though it is one

of necessity, where it is possible to feel that there is not very much

choice, and this can sometimes not feel very good or positive, and i

wish for you to feel as positive and hopeful and happy about the

future as possible.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: a few more pictures

Дата: 3 мая 2005 г. 17:56

dear zh,

i hope you enjoy these few more photographs. i feel literally

cross-eyed from recording dv footage all morning. now i am going to go

for a walk. it is a beautiful day. and i promise i will try to write

later today.

kisses

k

p.s i am still hoping that a picture says a thousand words

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: the blue cup

Дата: 3 мая 2005 г. 18:00

and how could i forget the blue cup?

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: the blue cup

Дата: 3 мая 2005 г. 21:24

dear zh,

i don’t know if this will reach you before you go to bed as you seem

to be sleeping mostly lately. it must be about 22:00 your time. my

time the evening is approaching, though there are still a few hours of

daylight left. yes, the eye for the camera. i have made some progress

today. for convenience, the images i sent you are small and not very

high quality reproduction (because of the application in the old

laptop i was using) but i notice when i save the stills in the

programs in the new laptop the resolution is much better, though i

realize now that i have been making a mistake with my own dv camera: i

have not been using manual focus, and the automatic focus is a problem

in the stills. i can see that now. it is a little exciting because

this is absolutely the very first time since i have had my dv camera

that i have been able to work consistently with the image-taking. i

haven’t had the computer hardware until now. it turns out that my old

laptop “captures” the video and audio quite well, the speed of the

machine is not a problem for capture (grabbing the video data from the

camera) but editing and saving and compressing i.e. processing

requires very fast computer with big gigabyte storage, so it seems

that my new laptop will work quite well in this regard. i think i have

told you that sometimes i think writing was a great detour that in my

childhood i always took art classes and even in college in photography

i was considered the best photographer in my class (though this was in

community college and i did not pay attention to it – i also took art

classes then and i used to draw for hours and hours and i threw

everything away). sometimes i wonder why i have not thrown all my

writing away.

i did go for a walk in the hot sun (it is almost summer here) to

return my 12 monkeys stupid movie and it was so warm i had to “have a

cold one” as we say so i have been sipping on a cold beer and working

with my video files and right now i am listening to that russian folk

group who recorded at the cafe kakushka and i like this recording very

much and i dream of recording it to accompany my images of russia on

dvd but my footage is so minimalist and slow and their music is very

rhythmic, when i listen to it i imagine rapid image shifts and

juxtapositions, which is not the character of my footage at all.

you do not look to me to be sad in the pictures, but pensive, as you

are, more than you know, especially when you are walking, or, when you

think you are alone, and i am not watching you (and of course i am

always looking towards you then, when you think i am not) and this is

a good word for how you are in such moments, pensive, almost floating,

i think you like to float a lot and you are very unhappy because no

one lets you float. well, i have a good news for you, for me there is

no other reason for living than to float. so, so? i don’t know. no one

lets us float. that means to drift here and there in a day, nothing in

particular, it most definitely does not mean working, in that other

sense. and yet, when i am floating, that is when i really begin to

work, almost obsessively, just to get the thing done the way i like

it, when i am working on my own work, which is the only reason, for

me, to work at all. enough of this word, work. i hope if you are

sleeping that you are sleeping deeply.

i miss you

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: p.s.

Дата: 3 мая 2005 г. 21:28

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: walking

Дата: 3 мая 2005 г. 21:46

more “attachments”

i hope you like them

kisses, (me)

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: now for the first of two days of work

Дата: 4 мая 2005 г. 9:01

dear zhen,

once again last night i had the curious experience of drinking a cup

of coffee around 19:00 and then feeling an overwhelming need to sleep,

contrary to all expectations of the caffeine, so i went to bed early,

probably a consequence of the previous two days of frivolity and also

the late nights i put in trying to figure out how to record digital

footage from my camera (i forgot to ask, is the camera you must show

your mother how to use a still-photo camera or a camcorder? the

still-photos are easier to use, i think, though even my camcorder is

very simple to operate, it’s the question of what you do with the

footage afterwards and how you process it in a computer which is

rather complex). now that i have answered my own questions, and

resolved the four-year mystery of the digital camcorder (my mother

gave me this camera the summer i first left for russia) i have no

other excuses for refusing to work on my conference paper.

as for this week’s classes, only two were missed on monday, so i

should feel the same crush of demands, but oddly, i don’t, even though

i don’t think i have anything planned for today’s classes. for

tomorrow i will show a 90 minute film to two classes, one with a

colleague, listen to presentations in another class (my conversation

class) and meet individually with a few writing students, so by

tomorrow afternoon i will be free again for several days, and that is

probably when this conference paper/presentation will write itself,

since i have assembled all the sources. i keep reminding myself that i

only have to talk for 20 minutes, and i will use powerpoint, so i have

the images to entertain the audience.

what other distractions. there is a letter i must pick up from the

postoffice today, and though it may be a few books that i ordered, i

am hoping that it is your invitation. so you see i worry about this

also. i don’t think there is anything to worry about, only the

expectation that things take a little while longer than are sometimes

convenient, and it is likely that you will find yourself having to

make arrangements at the last minute, though i hope it does not result

in delaying your arrival here. do you remember that you promised to

show me how to live simply? (i don’t think you wil be able to recall

this promise, as i think i imagined it after days and weeks moving

across the space of your dacha, which, yesterday, looking again at

some of the photography from that space, i am reminded that at least

where you live is still an object world, with depth of perception).

here, at least in the “here” of my study, facing two screens,

everything tends to get flattened into an image, and i don’t know how

simple of a process this is. looking at the photography from the dacha

(and i am always surprised how few pictures i take, as though turning

the camera on represents some uncontrollable flood of images) i worry,

now, that you will not like the space, the living space, here, though

of course it will not be something that you say or are even that

conscious of, it’s just that in comparison there is dominant here a

certain functionality, and i don’t quite know what is the opposite of

this, unless there are still forms of purity in the world, which

sometimes, being reminded of how you spend your summers at your dacha,

i think still exists, though certainly very remote from the spaces i

navigate and inhabit.

if i continue like this i will start to feel as depressed as i did

last night when i thought about having to go to classes today and

tomorrow. now i will send this and hope for a letter from you to greet

me when i return home at 16:00 today.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: mud!

Дата: 4 мая 2005 г. 20:37

dear zh,

home, home at last, on a long wet day, very wet, so wet, as a matter

of fact, that i invested in yet another umbrella, without which i

would have gotten very wet indeed, so wet, as a matter of fact, that i

might have turned into a duck. quack.

we have all of your bad weather and then some, unfortunately, the

students still came, 3 in one wave, 12 in another, 14 in yet another

and in the final wave, 5. there was not a single student i was happy

to see. i wanted them to all go away. why don’t they? don’t they know

that we only teach for the money? (as they only go to school for the

money). isn’t it a wonderful world.

on the bright side, the photos of you make me think of you, and i

imagine you strongly sometimes, and remember you in Palangas, in

Cypress, in Tomsk – such exotic settings! aren’t we world travelers?

that is why i worry sometimes that you will be unhappy in the dullness

of my very dull life.

did anything exciting happen to me today? i already told you: i bought

an umbrella. maybe i will keep it for more than a few days. and i

almost forgot: i went for a latte and croissant at a cafe. it was

supposed to make me feel better, and it did, though i realized that i

hate sitting in cafes and restaurants alone. fortunately, this cafe

was quite empty at 11:30, so it was not unbearable. that was my great

out-of-the-ordinary extraordinary event: latte (not an ordinary cup of

coffee but espresso with steamed milk, i don’t think i’ve had one

since the starbucks in cypress, though even then, didn’t i buy regular

coffee? i think there that was strong enough.

you never mention whether or not you go to any of our old cafes around

tomsk. this would be interesting news, since then i could imagine you

in some places, maybe you went to one today with Marco and Larissa, by

the way, what did you talk about? very likely it is a great pleasure

for Marco to speak with you, not only do you speak English quite well,

but you are also cultured and have a sense of humor, even if it is

often at the expense of your interlocutor.

tonight, for the first time in a long time, because it is so wet and

getting cold, i wish i had some vodka. don’t worry, i won’t, since i

have to teach tomorrow, though i can only hope there will be no one in

the room when i go there to earn my salary. it’s just one of those

days, dark, dark, grey, wind and rain, rain, rain, and mud, and cold,

and wind, and rain. sound familiar?

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhen” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: cold and grey

Дата: 5 мая 2005 г. 10:47

dear zh,

the day continues cold and grey.

the cold and grey persists, today.

cold and grey, today, as yesterday,

as even the wind is blowing somewhere

through an open window. did i forget to say

that the day continues cold and grey?

does this mean that i am in a good mood? not hardly. i fell asleep

while downloading a large video application last night, for which i am

missing one small library file from my installation for it to work, so

the one and half hour on the internet was wasted. this often happens,

though it is not responsible for my cold, grey mood. it is simply the

kind of day when it is best to stay home, and today is one of the two

days this week when i must go outside.

i did go to the post office yesterday evening, and in the rain, and in

a long line, almost half an hour, and it was not your invitation,

instead my copy of Man With A Movie Camera. it is really a very good

film, or should i say, it is very good filming. i am beginning to

learn what a tracking shot is, something i do all the time (in the

absence of knowing one kind of shot from another). i think the dvd

arrive at just the right time, as it will help me visualize my paper,

and give me the sense that what i am writing about is an object in

front of my own eyes that i can study.

as for documentary film, so with poetry, who knows why the mass of

people enjoy theater and spectacle? there is a kind of built in

‘estrangement-effect’ in V’s film, as there are so many different

kinds of filming that the viewer’s eye can never rest, and that is

what we do most of the time, watching this film or that, we rest our

eyes, and it is not really about seeing anything at all. probably

those moments in our life are so very few that we actually experience

perception and why, what is so challenging about not simply looking at

something, an event or a process, but being changed by the experience

of sight, the visible world, our visual capacities. instead,

repetition, sameness, perhaps habit helps to orient us so that we do

not feel lost.

why is fiction and make-believe so popular instead? there is some kind

of elemental fantasy which cinematic technique engages, though i have

read conjectures that our mental life (how we image and visualize our

experience) is in turn influenced by the impact of film and other

visual technologies. for myself, i think i am just beginning to be

able to analyze the cut, though one of the most common techniques that

we watch all the time is shot/reverse-shot (when you are watching one

person’s face and then the camera moves to the other’s face and then

back again and then back again, one to another, like a one-two one-two

metronome, which it is, even visual rhythm means anything. “Chelovyek”

is surprisingly rapid, and one is reminded of even contemporary music

videos in their movement from frame to frame. in one scene he even

splices in black frames which you see fleetingly, and since they are

at precise intervals, this also, establishes a form of rhythm.

now i must check my email for late papers with students with whom i am

supposed to meet today.

kisses

k

От: “Kevin Magee” <magee@uni.lodz.pl>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: let’s hope this is good news

Дата: 6 мая 2005 г. 15:26

dear zhen,

this came yesterday evening. i will go to the personnel office Monday

for the required document, and maybe (certainly?) you can email the

Polish consulate in Moscow, since you have written them before, asking

for the appropriate fax number and whether they also need a hard copy

mailed priority mail before preparing the invitation. i can probably

send the fax from my dept. we have a faculty meeting on Tuesday so i

can ask Agnieszka then how best to send a fax from the English institute.

otherwise, i slept late, after returning home last night and reading

your email that you had already gone to sleep. i stayed up late

working with dv recording, which, now, i think, i have solved the

problem of recording. now it is only a problem of the enormous file

sizes. also i will not be able to edit the files into a movie until i

upgrade to at least fedora 2 or 3 (which i hope you can find in that

shop that has moved in tomsk, since their fedora 1 distribution worked

so well – but that is a matter i will talk about later).

right now, i am only interested (you might say obsessed) by the visual

logic that can be found in examining recorded video footage. so much

of it is accident. and yet there is a language there that i feel i am

just beginning to be able to read.

thank you for calling a minute ago, as i said, i am never far away

from my computer screen, for better or worse.

kisses

k

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: visit in Poland

Resent-Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 10:04:38 +0200

Resent-From: magee@UNI.LODZ.PL

Resent-To: <magee@poczta.uni.lodz.pl>

Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 10:07:31 +0200

From: Anna Wisniewska <anneke@uni.lodz.pl>

To: <magee@uni.lodz.pl>

Dear Sir,

My name is Anna Wisniewska from the International Research Programmes

Office(at the University of Lodz). You visited me a couple days ago

asking about the invitation for your wife to come from Russia. It

appeared that such invitation is not necessary. The only one thing you

should do is to take a prolongation of your employment contract from

the Personnel Department (at our University-as far as I know this

paper is prepared and waiting for you) copy it and send this copy to

the Polish Embassy in Russia (probably Moscow-where your wife

resides). On the basis of this doument they will prepare relevant visa

for your wife.

Please visit now  the Personnel Department to take your papers and

copy it sending next to the Embassy. In case of any further questions-

feel free to ask,

Regards,

…………………………………….

Anna Wiśniewska

Biuro Międzynarodowych Programów Badawczych

Uniwersytet Łódzki

Narutowicza 65, 90-131 Łódź

tel.:  42 6354171

fax.: 42 6786379

e-mail: anneke@uni.lodz.pl

_________________________________________________________________

List sprawdzony skanerem poczty mks_vir ( http://www.mks.com.pl )

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: large files

Дата: 7 мая 2005 г. 12:34

dear zhen,

yesterday as you can guess was a manic day in front of my two computer

screens, and in the absence of any words from me yesterday, i will try

to compensate by a long letter this morning, though you may have given

up checking your email.

do you remember that one day on the shore at Palangas, when i filmed a

distant figure walking and later when i played it through the monitor

in the hotel room, the effect of the zoom lens, since the figure was

so far away, that the three horizantal areas of shore, water and sky

were abstracted to ‘washed out’ colors, though more than washed out,

since the sea, which is pounding on the shore, is transformed to the

color of light. i spent all day trying to capture this shot, since it

is a long one, and too large of a file, and i now think also that the

color abstraction, the unreality of the shot, is caused by my pointing

the lens at the sun and filming it for about a minute, even though the

sun was very far away that day and one could stare at it with their

naked eye, i think the camera, since it operates on a microchip, was

affected, and the result is 1) the filming of sunbright light in one

shot, and then 2) the transformation of the sea into the same kind of

light. the result is very striking. the file size of the entire shot

of the distant figure walking is about 700 megabytes (it is not

uncommon for some .avi (movie) files when captured to be over a

gigabyte, but you have to have the space in your computer to handle

this, and obviously, i don’t. i spent a couple of hours yesterday

simply emptying out the windows side of my computer, and after all the

programs were gone, i was stll left with only about 450 megabytes of

free space, when in a moment of insight, i came across in my “window”

folder (the system files) a folder called “options” which, i

understood at a glance, is for updates to the system and

installations, and when i copied this to storage and then deleted it

from my hard drive, i found that i now have 850 megabytes free on the

windows partition, which is more than enough to move large movie files

after their capture on the linux side, and then burning them on to a

cd and transferring them to where i will eventually try to make a

sustained dv film from them in the new laptop, when i have the

appropriate ram (right now only 128) and editing software (why i am

interested in either fedora 2 or 3 if they have it, and they probably

do, at that computer shop in tomsk.

i think you must be thoroughly bored right now with my account. the

results are stunning, though, to be able to capture and then view,

once it is in the new laptop, the film footage from chita, tomsk, and

lithuania, and i think in the most general sense it is an experience

of duration, very small increments of time, passages of time, in which

everything is captured, filmed, and there is the sense of a real

referent, even though the logic is obscure to me sometimes, the visual

logic, and obviously there are a lot of passages which are not very

interesting, but in general i feel this sense that i am seeing for the

first time, and thinking only in visual terms, not verbal ones.

in the hotel room in palangas one morning when you were in the shower

i filmed a fragment from a german documentary on auschwitz, and there

is one frame (most of the frames are affected by the light thrown by

the tv so it is impossible to avoid this glare-effect) from actual

footage shot of the camp yard of distant stick-like figures standing

in the space, and this one frame seems to provide the key or code to

so much of the footage shot in my tapes, where i am filming a

landscape or seascape which is empty, an empty open space, but across

which at a great distance a figure is found moving, obscurely.

eventually, when i am able to cut and paste and work very closely with

the footage, some narrative around this will be able to be

constructed, and i am no longer sure that i need to record music over

the ‘natural’ sound recorded. in chita for about one and half minutes

i recorded a nearly perfect still shot and at the same time a passage

of spoken russian from a movie on tv which provides all the narrative

to the shot. this passage continues to amaze me with how it signifies,

very much like a poem, and perhaps that is one way to approach the

different ‘takes’ or shots: each time one turns on the camera, one is

writing a poem, and then the narrative that one assembles is not a

movie in the narrative sense, but an assemblage and arrangement of the

separate lyric passages into a large coherent whole, what we used to

call a book.

suddenly i am fascinated with the idea of making instead of books,

such film assemblages, arrangements of moving image, recorded onto

dvd, which will represent experiments with time, color and light. i

have absolutely not interest in fiction or theater. i never have. time

and color and light, though, that is what painting used to be made of.

so you see i am approaching a dilemma similar to yours: what to do in

the middle of my life. it is very easy to advise you how easy it is to

change one’s life, and yet, i am filled with anxiety about whether or

not it is possible in my own case. and yet no one really taught me

poetry. i taught myself, by reading, and one of the great

disappointments was how poorly actual poets, especially those who were

supposed to be teaching, resembled the actual experience of poetry

itself, which after all these years, partly because of the torturous

relationship i have had to publishing my poems, is still rather pure

for me, and i would wish for this relationship to develop with the

visual image also, and at the same time i am filled with doubt as to

my ability, what do i know, what do i know, and it is true that i

don’t know a pan from a tracking shot, my mind they are the same, and

i am already bored with the lens moving in and and out, and across,

which is what i tend to do now, in addition to taking very long still

shots. i am very interested in how the handheld camera trembles, and

makes the shot unstable. but basically, i don’t have the least idea

what to do with the camera once i turn it on and start filming. and

yet, in terms of writing poetry, this same ‘not knowing’ produced

hundreds and hundreds of pages of trying to know how, and trying to

express emotion in language, which one can never assume, never take

for granted, never believe that anything is ever entirely expressed in

language.

i think now sometimes, i have these passing thoughts, that i was never

really a poet in the professional sense (there are so many

professional poets!) and approached poetry in purely practical terms:

the most embarassing to say: i wanted to say something. or, i wanted

to feel something. so, i felt something, even in very tremendous

terms, in a very painful and extreme way, and so the poem entered my

consciousness, and i was equal to writing this experience, absolutely

immersed in my native language.

now my relation to my native language is itself torturous, and really,

silent most of the time, filtered across other languages, and again,

almost as a form of compensation, i am driven to the visual, and when

i look at these filmed passages, i can actually feel something, and i

am myself moved by the experience of time and the view and voices of

others that enter fragmentarily in the moment of the film time.

that is a little bit of an explanation for my silence yesterday, and

there will be such days in real time too, when you are here, when i am

simply not available. i think everyone is like this. sometimes it

seems that i just have to solve a problem, and can’t rest until i do,

and it is a great comfort to me now to know that i can capture video

in the one computer and transfer it to the other and there is no

corruption to the recorded files, they play as they were filmed. i

only just learned this, as i mentioned in another letter, that for

capture, simply grabbing the film from the camera into the computer, a

very fast computer is not necessary, it’s only when saving to other

formats and processing and editing that a fast computer is needed, so

suddenly i am able to do something that i have not been able to do for

four years, when i first started filming, and i have done surprising

little filming as a result.

to tell the truth, i don’t often feel like turning the camera on. i

don’t like pointing it at people, and i don’t like filming landscapes

simply for the impressionism. the Baltic ocean in winter is something

else though, and in some of the frames i am reminded of many paintings

from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

again, though, to have this difficult question: what does one film?

i have no idea. i think i am ready now to write a little about

‘projectivism’ which i think is a term i am going to appropriate from

Olson through the constructivists. would you mind five years from now

visiting archives with me in Petersburg and Moscow? i want to get a

grant to research film footage, and to do that maybe i need to start

writing a book. i also need to publish more. i need to work more. i

like to dream of us traveling together on research projects, looking

through archives, looking for films that have disappeared, and i don’t

mean feature films, but footage, miles and miles of documentary

footage. this is the subject i am interested in. not in anything ‘out’

there, at least in the terms of the Spectacle.

i am so bored with my Mallarmean life of an english teacher, and

sometimes i can’t see my way out of this, not only is it demanding on

one’s time and attention, it prevents me from seeing the larger

framework for projects, for writing, for work, for thinking. sometimes

i think you would very much like to live this way, as part of a daily

rhythm of going places and for good reasons, to work on a project,

even, perhaps, if you don’t mind, to help me navigate this or that

foreign place, something you are very skillful at doing (as you may

have noticed i am rather helpless in this regard).

i am also helpless in writing a few compunctionary words so again i

apologize for my silence yesterday. there was something i guess of a

‘do not disturb’ sign on my door, though as i said, really i only

wanted to solve a problem, and now that the problem is solved, i need

to ignore all the other ones, and produce something for this

conference.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: goodnight kiss

Дата: 7 мая 2005 г. 20:28

dear zh,

here is my goodnight letter at long last! i just finished eating an

early supper (i was surprised to find out that it is only 16:15 as it

feels later) and what did i eat? cubes of beef marinated in garlic and

vinegar and served over boiled potatoes. definitely a zhenya meal. i

miss cooking for you also, did i mention (among other things that i

miss from our time together in tomsk). though we finished our talking

today on the note, “you make me laugh” (and you do) still, i have

enough serious thoughts left over to last me for several days if not

longer – the most serious the question of trust (though i did not

introduce this topic, it was introduced by another to me, and reminded

me just a little of how you must feel some times). it would be

insensitive and stupid of me to suggest that you should feel

otherwise, and i keep falling back on the “un”truth that i have a good

job, in comparison, and especially here, maybe yes, but it is also a

contract job, year to year, and anything can change. my polish

colleagues always seem to assume that i will live here for a very long

time, and as you know, several of my American and British colleagues

have been here for five or six years. so there is some continuity. i

didn’t mention to you that even at dinner last weekend one of my

senior colleagues (the one who was hosting the dinner) a dean at the

university and probable successor to Agnieszka when she retires, was

again talking to me how she would like to help you find teaching work,

though i never know how to press her and say, yes, that’s very nice,

can you find her a job then? somehow i don’t feel right about doing

this, that it is something that should come about more naturally, so i

just said, our first worry is getting you here, and then everything

else will happen. i really do believe that, though, once again, i am

not the one leaving a job that i have had for 15 or more years, so,

once yet again, i cannot place myself in your position, and see

contingency in so benign a light as is my tendency and even, often, i

think, my weakness (i have others). so i am thinking about this, and i

am at least glad that i can say that for the short term i don’t

believe you need to work, that you won’t feel that you need to, as i

seem to always have plenty of money here. i would like to stop working

at the dunce college, and it would be ideal if we could both teach at

the university, for as i said, they are rather kind and good to

foreigners here. everyone seems to think that you will be in great

demand as a native speaker of Russian, and with an advance degree, so

i am hoping i can convince you in terms of taking a half-year vacation

without having to worry about rent and food and etc. and then (and

then). of course, that is the big question and the one that you must

be worried about.

i have finished three slides for my presentation. it is beginning to

make me laugh, this present effort to demonstrate my intellectual

fitness. i am more bored than anything though, and you know this, that

boredom is one of my great weaknesses.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: mid-thought Sunday

Дата: 8 мая 2005 г. 12:53

dear zh,

yesterday was a day of progress: 15 slides. not only am i learning how

to write on them, with them, which i have never done before, but i

also returned to several “false” starts at what i thought was an

introduction, and among these i was able to assemble the first part of

the paper. now it does not look so very hard to complete, and i am

less intimidated. i think the fact that i had never before composed a

powerpoint presentation intimidated me, and made the thought of

writing at all more difficult than it needs to be.

also, last night, i watched again the film, Chelovyek c

Kino-Apparatum, and once again, it is impossible not to notice just

how superior the film is, there is so much energy and movement, and

the society at the time is caught, captured, imaged, shown, which is

all really that any art should do. the very fact that the film shows

the ‘kino-apparatchik’ (is this how you would say cameraman?) in the

very process of his filming contrasts remarkably with the effacement,

the erasure, of the photographer in Russian Ark, who is a distant

descendant, and who accomplishes a physical feat similar to the

cameraman who is shown carrying this enormous movie camera on his

shoulders everywhere in the society where production takes place,

including even childbirth.

then the question occurs: after such a work is made, which synthesizes

at the time all that has been made before it in the medium of film,

why does it not prove to be popular? why, instead, are the crudest of

forms and the falsest of representations what fills or fulfills a need

of the mass audience? that is perhaps one of the most poignant moments

in Chelovyek, the movie theater filling with its audience, and even at

the end of the film, watching the very film that we have seen being

made, when in fact it is well documented that Vertov was long

neglected and his work unavailable. the film scholar who introduces

the English translation of his essays identifies 1970 as the year when

Chelovyek became available again to be viewed, and the video that was

made from it did not happen until 1995. she cites 40 years of neglect

as the period of time separating Vertov’s film work (he worked in many

films with his brother who was the cameraman, and his wife, who was a

researcher and film archivist). but he did not make fiction, and

polemicized strongly against the fiction feature film. in the 30s of

course his constructivism was counter to the prevailing

social-realism, which, if anything, is hyper-fiction, or

hyper-fantasy.

perhaps the documentary mode does not appeal to our need for fantasy,

and for story. how often do we (even unconsciously) wish for

everything to be shown to us without our having to work at all in

contructing the meaning, the perception. and what order of pleasure is

there in seeing a representation of the society in which we live which

does not provide us with enough fictive distance from it? yet there is

also the perceptual habit of plot, character, conflict, action,

resolution, and it is difficult to break this habit, and every time

attention is drawn to the actual making of the film we are watching,

that is experienced as extraneous, an interruption, if not intrusion.

maybe these are some of the reasons for Vertov’s neglect.

since i have been reading Malevich, off and on, when the texts are

available, for about 10 years now, i have also assumed from his

references that Vertov was as famous as Eisenstein, and as influential

on early soviet filmmaking. such apparently is not the case. it is

more a case of second- or third-generation influence. Vertov uses a

number of visual tricks (trompe-l’oeil?) in his film, but i don’t

think he would be capable of the scene in the Potemkin film of the

baby carriage falling down the steps. one is reminded also of the

problem of the restaging of the insurrection in the film, October (as

if that is what the historical imagination is: restaging an event).

something more profound and more deeply historical is happening in

Chelovyek.

now i wonder if i can turn my thoughts to another day of writing my

paper. what would i rather be doing? today would not be a good day for

a walk with you, as it is grey, cold, wet, and well, just not very

nice outside. it is a good day to lie on the sofa and read. by the

bye, there was news coverage of Victory Day yesterday, and the Polish

president was shown at a Russian ceremony placing a wreath of flowers

on a monument (the grave of the unknown soldier?). are such images,

news images, representations of history, or collective fantasy?

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: Re: large files

Дата: 8 мая 2005 г. 13:28

dear zh,

i’d recommend frying the olives with the toothpaste, since toothpaste

and yoghurt are rather similar in texture, and you won’t need to use

any olive oil, since you will be using olives. the question remains

then, what to do with the yoghurt? i don’t remember you ever eating

any yoghurt! actually it is used in many middle-eastern recipes, and

is a very good substitute for smetana.

i figured out myself no thanks to you the font question, and wound up

using 24 for the text. even 20 seemed to small, and there is the

impression that one does not want to put too much text on the screen

at one time. it is a very interesting difference than writing for the

paragraph, and i think there is the result of simplifying the

expression of my thought just a little.

you are in the habit again lately of writing me only a very few lines,

though i should not complain, since i did not write you very much

Friday or Saturday, still, doragoya, it’s nice to know what you are

doing, especially on a holiday.

kisses

k

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: end of victory day

Дата: 8 мая 2005 г. 23:02

dear zh

hopefully this will not arrive too late but only if you have found a

good movie on. it is your midnight. victory day is over. but you have

a holiday tomorrow. i have spent all afternoon working with my new

laptop, and as usual, very little works at first. like modems. what is

strange is that there are no serial ports on this model, which creates

a certain technical problem, though my hardware modem also has a

connection for parallel port, i can’t get it to recognize. i’m sure it

will take me weeks to figure out. it case you’re wondering, i’m

terribly bored with my paper topic (i have always hated writing

papers). thank you for a very nice and chatty letter. it makes me feel

closer to you. just get here, and we’ll worry about everything else

later.

i miss you

k

(goodnight)

От: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>

Тема: moot

Дата: 9 мая 2005 г. 11:19

dear zhen,

i have never quite known what that word means, “moot”, though i think

it applies to my day yesterday. for the better part of it i devoted

myself to connecting my new laptop online, which meant having to find

a modem driver somewhere on the net, which i eventually did, around

midnight, so i went to bed with a small sense of accomplishment. soon

i will be able to send you emails from that computer as well (no harm

in having a back-up). what is “moot” about this is that i should

connect to the internet as little as possible, since i am still paying

dial-up costs, and will, i think, until the end of the summer, which,

when teaching begins again, i should have permanent access to the

internet, and i rather imagine that you would prefer this also, though

i know it is not the highest of your priorities, and when and if i do

so arrange such a connection, it will have to be broadband, which will

present another range of challenges (days spent trying to do something

which should take minutes). such is life.

and yet, there is a strange pleasure in the message, “ok” which the

minicom application gives when it recognizes your modem. perhaps i was

having distant memories of a year before when i connected this old

laptop online through the internal modem (how much less work and even

cheaper it would have been to buy an external modem, which i

eventually did and which works much better). in the process because of

resource conflicts i almost fried my systemboard. of course, the last

thing i did last night was test my soundcard, to make sure that i

hadn’t done the same thing in the new laptop. it works. everything

works. amazing. i can now dig up a url from an information doc, go to

the website, download a few tarballs, unpack them and install them

manually, and i have a working application. this is something of an

accomplishment when using linux, though it is a very minor

accomplishment. one must simply get used to minute details, which,

last night, appeared to me in the form of the different between an

Intel 436 and 437 chip. this is getting to know your hardware with a

vengeance. what was really funny was that the modem software that

eventually worked was for another model or make or whatever, not one

of the drivers from the intel website. but it did (does) work very

well, and well, i am beginning to favor the new laptop a little, since

everything works so fast, much faster than this one (of course you

will not be able to tell the difference when i begin writing and

sending emails from the new laptop, except that perhaps my mood will

change?)

it is a slightly bigger screen, the bus speed is very fast, and even

the colors seem intenser, though that is moot also, as i have spent a

lot of time configuring the old laptop so that it is a very nice

machine to write in, even if it is rather slow in comparison. now,

though, you have guessed it, an insight into my terrible boredom, when

i spend days on the project of the “black screen” (nothing is quite so

satisfying as when one realizes that the point of no return has been

passed and there is no accessing a formerly perfectly working

operating system). we have a good phrase for this: back to the drawing

board. i also wish that i could report to you that i used my day

yesterday somewhat more productively, but even for supper i only had

an omelet with beets (no yoghurt, no olives, no toothpaste).

yes, we should try to have a sense of humor for the next several

months, i would rather wish that i could say that i expect everything

to happen very easily about your getting here, but the fact that

neither of us have done this before is, often, disturbing to me, as i

more and more learn to expect that i cannot expect what i once had no

reason not to expect as possible, when i lived in that other world,

which, from all indications, regarding freedom of movement and the

right to live and work where one wishes, is changing also. i am going

to send this letter to you now, and then answer the letter about your

invitation, though suddenly i forget what it was that i was going to

ask Anna, the woman who i consulted about your invitation? doesn’t it

sound rather rude to write: where did you get your information from?

maybe i should just ask for clarification, since from the email i

understand that all i need to do is send to the Polish consulate in

Moscow a copy of my next-year contract, which i will try to obtain

today. in order to do this, i need a fax number, and that is where we

began discussing the problem, since you are convinced that you are the

one who must present the required documents. i do not even have a fax

number for you, so does that mean i should send my contract to you by

priority mail? more delays. no wonder i am mildly depressed. bored.

distracted. and growing slightly more agitated. sorry to end on such a

note, i really don’t feel as pessimistic and simply in a condition of

not-knowing, not really knowing what to do next.

kisses

k