A private letter is the logical beginning of every day fused into the appearance of pure narration. “Homage to Mary Engle,” Recent Events, San Francisco 1995.
Portraits by the letter writer of the addressee in south dakota 2007+
ะั: <magee@uni.lodz.pl>
ะะพะผั: <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Over and done
ะะฐัะฐ: 21 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 3:28
dear zhen
today i gave my presentation: one and a half hours and with no internet connection, though i had been promised one. i had enough materials in
my computer and the presentation was rather successful. last night i stayed up until two a.m. preparing it. now i have just come home, 11:00 p.m. after the presentation was over (4:00 p.m.) i visited with agnieszka (my dept head) actually she took me to lunch and beer and we talked for two hours and then the past and present presidents (scholars) of the European Studies Association (one german and the other french) came to our table and we talked for another two hours. so i am all talked out, talking about poetry and modernism and etc. etc. though i was inspired as is my tendency when energized, and the scholars were laughing at my characterization of russia as the glacial other in terms of time, historical time, material time, when i said that i went to russia and will keep going to russia to “experience time.” (it is somewhat of a common place in cultural discourse in the west that we live in a perpetual present with no access to the past, so i guess this provoked the perce
ption that i was witty).
so strange, to return immediately into the swim of the high cultural after the conference in tomsk. i am a little altered, as i am tired. and now i have something interesting to tell you: during our lunch as we were talking about the objectivist poets, dante, mandelstam, dickinson and hart crane, the poetries and the emptying out of the english language and the needs, well, i did talk to agnieszka about our discussions about where to live and about our plans for the winter and she simply suggested going directly to one or another u.s. embassy official whom she knows professionally and with whom she has worked many years (two of these embassy officials were at the conference) to do whatever it is that embassy officials do to confer whatever we need for you not to have to worry about what you worry about all the time. basically i think we were talking about at lunch about arranging citizenship for you, after cypress. so, i must have given a pretty good presentation, don’t you t
hink?
you, of course, will be sceptical, to say the least. i will only say that if i was ever able to accomplish such as this through my work, that my presence and person were so valued that someone would actually, as we say, “intervene,” and resolve this problem of the borders and citizenship and which would allow us not only to be together, but to travel together, without ever having to worry about moscow, wouldn’t that be an accomplishment? a success? you will think that i exaggerate, but she really did suggest it without the slightest suggestion on my part. it appears that i am a valued person here, and respected. i tried to earn this in my presentation, and there was a warm applause after my talk (all but my colleagues here were from other eastern european countries, including ukraine and georgia). i am glad now that you heard me speak some in tomsk, and that you have now just a little idea of the person i am when i am not teaching english language, but talking about culture a
nd art and history.
do you know that i am so very tired now.
do you know that i miss you? i haven’t gone to the internet to look for a letter from you. i wanted to write you first.
my new letter style is never to say goodbye or anything. just to stop in mid thought, mid sentence, to be continued the next day. tomorrow i go to the immigration office. i’ll write you about that. and when i am not so tired, i’ll write you about my trip. right now i am too tired to remember it as anything other that pure cauchemar.
ะั: <magee@uni.lodz.pl>
ะะพะผั: <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Day 2
ะะฐัะฐ: 21 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 17:41
dear zhen
i know it is day 3 but the first day i do not remember already the
sunday do you remember?
now today i will go the passport office and for the money order for the
book i know longer wish to publish in the u.s.
there is always now this thought made sharper by the conference that i
don’t want the capital, the prestige, of any publication in the u.s.
when there is so much prestige attached to it, and yet of course the
problem is that my survival depends on being able to publish there. so
yes i will send the money order.
now for my first travel story.
the give you vouchers as you know for the novotel and as you can imagine
the incompetence of aeroflot insures that there is almost an entire
class being formed by stranded passengers (there was an army of them at
the aeroflot office in shm). so of course with this birth of the voucher
class infesting the novotel, the service help it appears has divided
their perceptions of the world into two: those who tip and those who
don’t. those who pay and those who vouch. ignorant of this for lunch i
sat in a pretty part of the restaurant, and ordered from the menu very
simply as you know my tendency not to over-participate in the
consumption-oriented society. i ordered a plate of polmani, borscht
soup, and beef stroganoff. the waitress was very attentive, and ever the
malchik who serves the water poured my water like it was french
champagne. however, when i presented my voucher at the end of the meal,
there was as great a commotion as if Basandai the Mongol had arisen from
the grave. i was not very kindly requested to pay immediately in rubles
or by credit card in the currency of my country (dollars, you know). i
had a credit card, though the amount amused me: it was exactly the sum i
gave to the cab driver to get me from shm 1 to shm 2 in 5 minutes (he
ran two red lights). then i returned to my room, and napped (fitfully,
but it was badly needed sleep as the events of the next day would prove)
and at 4:30 (two hours before check-out) the front desk called my room
to remind me that dinner would be served at 5:00. well, i thought that
there had been some communication at the confusion and the restaurant
was going to serve me a nice dinner, but when i presented my voucher the
waitress would not even speak to me, only to ask me to move to a less
conspicuous table (i am surprised that they do not make the aeroflot
voucher people eat in the kitchen) and then i was served first a plate
of the kind of canned vegetable salad with a kilo of mayonnaise and then
two chicken drumsticks in a sauce with macaroni that was so salty i
could taste the salt for the better part of 12 hours.
one omitted detail: during the lunch in the part of the restaurant for
Those Who Pay, there was a table with two couples ordering off the menu:
two thick men with two younger very well dressed women. The one and
thickest man ordered the waitress around like she was a dog, making her
run back and forth for every little thing, and at one point shouting so
loudly something or other that just in its tones sounded like the curse
words you hear all the time from your students. It was just a table of
four badly mannered people, and i won’t draw any more general
conclusions from it, though as you know the New Consumption-Oriented
Society must produce its Monsters of Consumption and this table was one
of those of the New Legion of the Rich and Contemptuous (and of course
the service class internalizes this contempt and transfers it to the
Aeroflot Voucher People which constitute the majority of humanity).
As for Poland, don’t you think it is a positive item that the very
phrase, “Consumption-Oriented Society” you took from the the 1960s
Polish movie we saw in Palangas? Historically, I think the problem is
that in order to transform the society, you have to suffer it first (go
through it instead of around it) and what they were trying to do then
was avoid it or prevent it through ideology (which of course did not
work). It is the world of the Hot Time, Glut of Goods, and Orthodoxy of
the New.
And there is no way around it.
Do you like my letters?
21 sent. 2004
Patience
dear zhen, i’ve written you two letters so far one late last night after
getting home from the conference and one this morning, both sent to your
tpu address. don’t forget that email is not always reliable and please,
don’t assume that i am not writing you just because you don’t receive
email. this morning i was up early to go to the passport office and
finished finally at 2:00 p.m. now i am at home. it’s no mystery. i
returned to the conference and even missed this day of it (no great loss
as i had my fun with the eminent scholars from france and germany) and
tomorrow i will be in exams until the mid afternoon. this evening i
think i will read though my flat is still in the process of being
unpacked and i need to do laundry. what else is new. i need some warm
food, as once again i fall to old habits of bread and cheese. do you
know that i left my corkscrew in tomsk? now i have to buy a new one
before i can have a glass (ha ha) of wine. actually, i feel like vodka,
but i think i will save that for the end of the week when i stop to
catch my breath.
what are you doing?
On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 08:59:27 +0400
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:
> kevin, it is not funny. where are you? you do not answer the phone,
> you do not send e-mail. let me know that you are alive, please.
> missing you and worrying about you. zh
>
ะัะฟัะฐะฒะธัะตะปั: km@hypobololemaioi.com
ะขะตะผะฐ: Re: good night from zh
ะะฐัะฐ: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 02:43:15 +0700
ะะพะผั: “zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
dear zh
you wont get this till the morning but it’s a miracle i got your emails
as you have sent them to an account i’d deleted, km@hypobololemaioi.com,
but not to worry, i’ve reactivated it, and it will be your own account,
that is, no other email except yours will arrive there. you were writing
me at my lodz account where students write and also all the detritus
(nice latin word for shit) comes from the u.s. and the lists there.
you are strategically silent about my conversation with agnieszka. yes,
perhaps it is too much to hope for, but she is extremely sincere. and
yes, i do like it here, because i am respected here, and i have work to
do. students today smiling to me at the university when i went there.
here i am among colleagues. do not make any more of it than that. or
make of it what you will. i have always lived as though success meant
nothing to me, but here it means to me, being valuable, helpful,
purposeful, and serious and sincere. all things that are good in the
world flow from sincerity.
such sincerity as larissa’s. i hope her conference ended well. you have
good and deep friends. cherish them.
—
For the Future City by the Inland Sea
http://hypoboloemaioi.durationpress.com
Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:40:10 +0700
What are you doing?
dear zh
in a dark room of dark grey lightening slowly in the early morning
before going to the university with a cup of coffee beside me, writing
you, before going to work. seven o’clock in the morning. i should have
bought an umbrella yesterday but i am too much like you in that regard.
you, though, have an umbrella, and you refuse to carry it!
what are you doing! get up!
(though i am afraid you are already up and running, as they say).
to be up and running means working like a machine.
today, exams, though i think we only failed five students in june, so
the morning should not be too bad. i don’t know why i thought yesterday
going from building to building across the city carrying my paperwork
for my work permit this year and getting quite wet in the process that
it would not rain again, now it is raining and i must get wet again.
last night i slept in my sweater, though two men in uniforms came to the
flat yesterday to do something with something that i had to sign, so i
hope they turned on the gas for heat. remember all the times i
complained of how cold the flat was after the heat was turned off in
early march?
my neighbor, from germany, stopped by last night and told me he had gone
to a friends wedding party at Klaipeda in Litva and one of the members
of the wedding party drowned in front of their eyes in the same
beautiful Baltic sea that we walked along for two weeks. The undertow in
a wave carried him out to sea and the lifeguard that tried to rescue him
had to be pulled back in by three other lifeguards pulling the rope. So
that sea must be quite a strong sea. The young man who drowned was from
Germany working in Lithuania with a wife from Estonia and small child,
both of whom were there on the beach when he drowned.
After the events in the news, it seems like a small story, but i was
thoughtful as to how i heard it, simply as a story, told to me, and that
it took place in a place that i know and you know, and i think we would
both agree that it is a very beautiful place there, and how sudden
disaster hides quiety and happens so quickly, that i think i agree with
you more now about all you worries and cautions and precautions about
personal safety.
did you ever go swimming in cyprus? my german neighbor also went to
greece this summer and said that it was very much like Israel, the
climate. as for our conversations about the cost of cyprus, i should
tell you that things here are much as i expected them to be: there are
5000 zl in my account over the summer from summer salary (about 1250
U.S. dollars) and i returned with about 800 euros, so really i have the
amount for the cost of the flight and hotel for three weeks, and i
really think we should try to stay for three weeks if at all possible,
yes? lets keep writing about it and talking about it and planning about
it and it will happen, though i am uncomfortable about waiting for as
long as you suggested with making flight arrangements. i think i should
follow the prices here, and get a czech airlines ticket while the price
is as low as it is. the first step is confirming the calendar dates for
classes and finding out my responsibilities (the American Literature
survey exam at the end of the fall semester). very likely the necessary
dates will be last week of jan. and first two weeks of feb.
i am thinking about going to krakow tomorrow or friday for books. what
do you think?
and seriously, what do you think about poland if things worked out here
from the perspective that they want me to teach here and stay here and
will use influence to make sure that i can and that you can, it’s just
that in poland and with the right papers and permissions it would be
easier to return to russia every summer (perhaps even keeping a dacha
there) than from the u.s.
i have promised myself not to be doctrinal about any possibility though,
and yesterday i had my bank send a money order to the press in the u.s.
and though it is the smallest step, it is a step towards beginning to
publish my work, and with this publication, in parallel to successful
teaching here, will present to me some measure of security in about five
years. this is all that i mean by success (a very damaged word in
english). here is one definition: freedom from fear and anxiety which is
all that i have known for so many years.
when i was telling agnieszka about my language woes (that i don’t hear
english any more as something physical, tangible, material, the way that
a poet works with his or her language) she said: you are suffering from
sensory deprivation. i think this is very true. reading does not
compensate for it. so i must either eventually be able to move and
breathe in another language, or return sometime to my own. this middle
period is the most difficult, and that is the period i am in now.
well, has it been about half an hour? let me pull up another screen and
enter the command date at the terminal. yes, it was just 19:32:14 and of
course this moment in the machine has passed. do you remember all my
half hours of letters to you in the morning. do you look forward for
more? my cup of coffee is empty. now i must to the university.
remember me to your mother and father.
—
https://hypobololemaioi.com
http://hypoboloemaioi.durationpress.com
Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:22:21 +0700
Re: go to bed
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:50:40 +0400
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:
> I have a very nice sensation that our phone is listened to.
dear zh
if you mean what I think you mean by this, yes, it is possible, though I
don’t think it’s necessary to become upset by it. When, in Tomsk,
teacing, that year, and I broke my internet silence of six-eight months
with a very powerful (to my mind) but brief account of the Greek
ambassador’s speech at TPU and published it on an email list called
nettime, I had clear evidence from strange emails sent me that my phone
conversations were being tapped, and there was an even stranger
translation request concerning some Gazprom agreements on natural gas
exploration. My theory though, in my case, is this is not govt. tapping,
but the far more sinister listening of –what are they– I associate
them with that mailing list, you may visit it yourself, www.nettime.org
(I showed you the text in Palangas by the young Russian writer) but many
of the contributors to this list who publish under pseudonyms and masked
internet addresses practice what are almost everyday surveillance
methods, especially cellphone transmissions and emails. With just the
basic software, it’s very easy to intercept these transmissions. The
point is not the technology, it is the will to listen, to practice
surveillance, which I associate with the deep corruption of cultural
elites (the underground ones) in Western Europe and the U.S. My mind
writers and artists who come from the Soviet period in Russia and
Eastern Europe have a different orientation towards this listening. Most
disturbing is the fact that of course the listeners, the tappers, must
let you know they are listening (govt. does not do this?) and this is
done through coded emails which include references to one’s own emails,
so that you are reminded that your words, even private correspondence,
is being read, that you are, in other words, being followed, “stalked.”
Very precise and almost-observable psychological effects follow from
this in the one who is “stalked” in this manner, and I can’t help but
associate it with the social-psychological reality (or unreality) of the
U.S. at the moment, and it contributes towards my conception of the
silent terror of living there, and of course on the surface level there
is an everyday paranoia that sets in, and I simply find that here,
rather than in the U.S., I feel less “stalked,” fewer strange
machine-messages on my phone, fewer harassments online (mostly I suspect
since I don’t spend nearly as much time on the internet here as in the
U.S.). Perhaps all of this is the price one pays with being a writer who
has something to say (and I present myself as someone who does has
something to say once in a while, I hope you sensed this at Larissa’s
conference). Last night I was reading an interview with a French
philosopher who was talking about just this problem, the institutional
confinement-identity of literature, and where are the boundaries to
where literature has something to say socially and politically, and does
this make literature (always) responsible for what it does say? I will
quote to you the one passage since it speaks to the Soviet experience:
“The writer can just as well be held to be irresponsible. He can, I’d
even say that he must sometimes demand a certain irresponsibility, at
least as regards ideological powers, of a Zhadovian type for example,
which try to call him back to extremely determinate responsibilities
before socio-political or ideological bodies. This duty of
irresponsibility, or refusing to reply for one’s thought or writing to
constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility.”
One thinks (I always do) of Mandelstam’s heroism in this regard.
No, I didn’t go to Krakow, I spent 4 hours online yesterday at the
university at their website and ordered almost 200 euros worth of books,
about 22 or 23 books, an average of about 10 euros per book. About the
same price as the Manhattan Transfer novel I wanted to buy in Tomsk for
350 rubles? I’m glad I didn’t. It turns out that we have about 20 copies
in our library here, and I fell asleep last night reading the first
chapter. I’ve tried to read this novel before and never liked it, though
the eminent Professor Heinz Ickstadt claimed in his Monday evening
lecture that it is the great novel of early modernism. I guess I’ll have
to read it again. I told you about my dinner with this professor and
another, the equally eminent Marc Chenetier of France. I hope this story
you will enjoy:
I was sitting and had been sitting with Agnieszka in the cafe at the
conference where she had bought me lunch and beer after my presentation,
and we were talking for so long (hours) about the fate of American
literature, Benjamin’s perception of Goethe’s historic compromises which
I applied by analogy to Contemporary America poetry in general, that
it’s best poets have compromised themselves in a way analogous to
Goethe, that they have no moral position from which to challenge the
State, nor to speak to the younger generation, the poets just beginning
to write now, because they are compromised, they have been rewarded by
the State and occupy positions of real power (as did Goethe), and I was
also talking about Dante, though I forget what I said, anyway, the only
Dante I know is Mandelstam’s Dante (and Agniezska was telling me about
the embarrassment in Poland, for her generation, that there was a
national debate about what to do with Milosz’s body (their great poet
who died this summer) and this debate made everyone remember everything
that is wrong with Polish culture, its insularity and
self-referentiality, etc., and we were in the middle of this
conversation when the eminent professors entered the room together
looking for dinner and as we were the only ones in the room they
couldn’t ignore us, especially after Agnieszka told them to sit down and
indicated the two empty places at the table. The problem was that I was
to them an “unknown academic.” The first point of the conversation
alluded to just how difficult it is to finish the dissertation, with
Ickstadt remembering his Hart Crane dissertation when almost no one had
written on him, and Chenetier admitting that he had written his on
Vachel Lindsay (someone no one reads now who writes poetry). Maybe they
should, I don’t know. Then the unbearable: both eminent professors
agreeing that one really needs to get into contact with one’s unconcious
to finish the dissertation. Then the thought came to me: They were
speaking like this because they had seen my name on the conference
program: Kevin Magee, M.A. (both of them had not come to my
presentation) or they were simply assuming I was a graduate student or
teacher in search of a PhD. So I quickly let them know I was a poet and
we began to compare bibliographies and they immediately warmed up and
let down their professional pretenses and masks and I had them talking
at the end of dinner (with Agnieszka leaving to talk with someone else)
about the clash of economic-social worlds as I appealed to their sense
of professional solidarity with educators around the world and told the
story of the Historical Linguist who wooden hut right out of Chekhov
that I visited in Tomsk, reminded these two fat cats (so bourgeois!)
that there are intellectuals, scholars and educators in the world who
are paid starvation wages, and that we inhabit a world that is
systematically starving members of our profession. So the conversation
ended with Russia being said by me as one of the few places in the world
where one can still experience time, since it moves so slowly there. Do
you agree?
Anyway, it was a matter of pride to me that I identify myself as a poet
without any relation to academic degrees, and poets as you know are
extremely well read, and this poet in particular never asks for anything
else than a good conversation about poetry and ideas. That at least was
the self that I heard speaking, and I enjoyed being that self. I much
prefer it to being a teacher. But that is what I am now and must be for
a long time.
Zhenya, I have never before thought of you a Big Green Case, but now
that you mention it, there are resemblances. My Big Green Case is in the
middle of my room, unpacked now. There is never any room in the
Marshutka for my Big Green Case when I travel in Russia. I was so
worried about someone stealing my Big Green Case when I left it here in
my flat. But my Big Green Case was waiting for me when I returned and do
you know what was inside it: My bedclothes. Here is the point of
resemblance: I do rather miss you being in my bed, or my being in your
bed, or our being in one bed (the pronouns are unimportant). I also
sleep in my grey sweater (the one you remember) and this is a terrible
turn of events, since, as you remember, neither of us required any
clothes to keep each other warm. So now we are both sleeping in
sweaters. Do you accept just this small association of resemblance? The
Big Green Case is very important in my life. It reminds me of the
future.
Yes I am happy to be back in Poland, because I am back at work,
yesterday I met by chance the dept. chair at the other school, and he
said there are as many classes for me as I want there, so I have the two
jobs and I will do those only, makeing about 800-900 dollars a month, a
decent salary here (keep in mind the expenses are the same as in
Russia). So you see on this salary I could support you without you
having to work. Why would you not work? Having you been working at a job
you didn’t want to do in the first place when you were 20 years old.
Didn’t you want to study Philology? Didn’t you want to read books? Well,
why not stop your life and start reading Russian literature, ALL OF IT,
from top to bottom, every morning, every afternoon, every evening, and
maybe once in a while you will talk to me about what you are reading.
You yourself must decide if this is what you want to do: reading,
literature, I mean, from detective stories to emigre novels to your
collected Mandelstam and the Kharms you pretend not to like. There is so
much more. I was really rather surprised how much you seemed to like the
Chaadev. This is the only way I know how to live. And I know this: if
you like to read, and if you feel that your life does not permit you to
read, then you should read without any requirements, no essays, no
translations, only absolute and pure cultivation of the mind and body.
That is where anything that is important in literature is. How important
it is to read without requirements. To read for oneself! And then it is
absolutely amazing what one becomes, once you give yourself the
permission to read literature in the way that it was written to be read.
Don’t argue with me! Get up! What are you doing!
Now, if you like such long letters, I promise to write you more, but in
return I demand the right to demand that you write me long letters in
the evening when you would rather read. You have the computer (I’ve seen
it! and I know that it works!) and you can give to me about an hour of
your time in the evening, write me a letter before you go to bed, I will
read it upon waking, and I will write you to the rhythm of the morning’s
coffee. These way we will build a rhythm between us, but you must write
me for at least an hour in the evening, I demand it! What is your
excuse! You do not know so many words! I don’t believe you! True, you
would rather write me in Russian, and as I am something of a simpleton,
I know no so many words in Russian, but, yes, haven’t you, before,
mentioned the need to practice your English? Here is the opportunity!
(Ach, that was the title of my first book of poems, the one they gave me
a degree for). Maybe there’s a better word.
Doragoya, letters have a life of their own, if we allow them to get
written in the first place, so, no more hibyes from the office. I don’t
like what they do to you there, and I don’t like how they treat you.
Offices have long-term negative effects on the mind. Write to me from
home. Tell me everything your mother says. Tell me the weather. Tell me
about your cat, is he at the table playing with the strands of fiber
dangling from the table cloth the Chinese visitors gave you, their
beloved translator? Or is he trying to decide to cross the threshold of
the door between kitchen and balcony with your mother speaking so softly
to him, asking him to eventually make up his mind? Tell me about
anything you happen to read. Tell me how tired you are. Tell me how much
you miss me. Tell me to go away. Tell me to get up. Tell me to go to
work. Tell me to make coffee.
I will make you coffee everyday …
(laughter)
ะั: <magee@uni.lodz.pl>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Where’s my hibye!
ะะฐัะฐ: 23 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 15:19
Evgenia Victorovna Lukyanova!
Where’s my hibye!
What are you doing!
Why don’t you write me a line!
Just a line I ask you!
Don’t you have the time!
(hugs and kisses)
Fri, 24 Sep 2004 07:59:24 +0200
Re: blackmail
dear lazy zh
who would rather read
than write to me
I was wise yesterday, if wisdom has anything to do with frugality. I
need sound for my computer, and I have been considering buying external
speakers that come with a usb external soundcard. But the problem is
first price, and then of course making sure that the soundcard is not
simply a chipset for a pc, incompatible with laptop. This project took
me several hours yesterday, identifying the right product (serial
number, etc) (rather difficult when everything is in Polish), going to
university near the shop with the product and looking up the product on
the internet, and then, at the last moment, contemplating spending 450
zl (about 150 dollars) on this product, simply for sound that, as you
will enjoy remembering, I lost in the first place not by erasing my hard
drive, but by connecting the modem on my linux operating system (the
same linux os from which I write to you and send to you emails every
morning). Well, walking to the shop from the university, I saw another
small shop on the same street as the univeristy. I had noticed this shop
last year and wondered what it meant. The shop is called: NOTEBOOK. In
English. Rather obvious, wouldn’t you agree? I went inside 30 minutes
before closing and said with all the deferential tone of one accustomed
to being unable to make himself understood: zaprasham, po-angielsku?
There was a friendly-looking man in the open-area upstairs of the shop,
and he came down the ladder speaking perfect English and smiling. I
noticed the woman at the reception desk was typing on a Thinkpad just
like my own laptop. In fact, I found myself in a shop surround by IBM
thinkpads just like my laptop. I described my sound problem and the
friendly man said he didn’t think it sounded (no pun intended!) like a
serious problem, and certainly not one that justified buying an external
soundcard, since in his opinion the sound card in the thinkpad laptop is
quite a good one. And he can simply and quickly add another memory chip
(ram) so I will as of 15:00 this afternoon take my laptop there and
begin restoration with the help of someone who knows what he is doing.
Isn’t this a positive story?
The bookstore in Krakow wrote me informing me that several titles I’d
ordered were not available, so that reduced the amount of my order
somewhat, and I am not disappointed, and so very badly in need of books
for my own writing (and I realize now how all last year almost all of my
reading was for my teaching, and this is deadly, for a poet, you must
have your own projects, you cannot simply read for your teaching without
beginning to sound like a know-it-all). I would even say that knowing
anything, in the way that we pretend to know for the classroom, is
terrible for poetry, and produces terrible poetry. Or very little
poetry, which is my problem right now. I did order a few books related
to my City Sites course, but the bulk of it is poetry, and as I’ve
mentioned I badly need to begin to build a library again, a working
library, for my writing. It occurred to me that you might think that I
was being extravagant, after all my emphasis on frugality in Tomsk
(refusing to buy the Manhattan Transfer book, etc), but as with the
sound in the computer, I need sound for playing sound files of poetry
recordings, not just for listening to music, though I need music too for
my sanity, it is so quiet here, and for the moment, cold as a tomb. Most
of all I do not wish for you to think that I spend money thoughtlessly.
So far, as you might expect, no new shoes (you will cry at me!)
I heard from the publisher in the U.S. He has my manuscript and it is
being considered, and he thanked me for the information regarding the
small payment (we call it a reading fee). I do not expect to win the
award, but the positive thing is that one manuscript will be accepted
for a 1000 dollar prize by a “judge” (another writer selected to read
manuscripts) and another manuscript will be selected by the editor of
the press. Both books will be printed in an edition of 1000 copies. This
would be an important first step for me, seeking to enter print ten
years after the original writing. This is very solid patience. It is
absolutely necessary. But if the book is printed, it would encourage me
to send out other manuscripts, and at the very least I should like to
publish 4-5 books as print books. With these books, say, in five years,
someone, somewhere, would hire me for my knowledge of poetry, and not
the kind of teaching I am doing now. Economically, it is difficult to
ignore the possibility of teaching in the U.S., but as I’ve mentioned,
any publication no matter how small is regarded here and elsewhere in
East Europe as the greatest prestige–everything connected with the U.S.
is prestigious. I realized this from the audience of young faculty from
Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, etc. at the conference
here. Everyone, at least in public, was so pro-American (maybe they
better than myself were aware that the conference was sponsored by the
U.S. embassy) (Agnieszka jokingly referred to the embassy officials when
she introduced them at the conference as “the powers that be”) and they
do be, no doubt about that. I detected even a form of servitude in the
way that the East European faculty (all so young!) spoke about American
literature, with such reverence! It is not a reverence that I feel, but
then I am not coming from a social-political environment caught (or, at
least, situated) between empires, and this I suspected also: one empire
has gone, and another has taken its place, and one must adjust one’s
language and beliefs accordingly. When, in my presentation, I projected
on the overhead a copy of one of the teaching units from the American
materials, and the title of this teaching unit was “Social Realism”,
the entire room erupted in laughter. I laughed also, and told them the
U.S. was just now discovering “Social Realism”, though in the U.S. it is
always SOCIAL and never, never, SOCIALIST. So, not to worry. I don’t
think they got this part of my joke. But I was surprised that I was
joking too much, and apparently my presentation was appreciated by my
colleagues here who attended, because it wasn’t theoretical (as most of
the presentations were) and I guess I was rather relaxed and even,
perhaps, a bit garrulous.
Frugality, garrulous, deferential …
Do you notice, my dear, that I’m providing vocabulary words for you?
Since you have assigned to me the task of writing to you while you are
the one who reads and reads and does not write, at least to me, then
shall I provide you with new vocabulary? The problem is, that with such
words one always risks sounding pompous, pretentious, and do you know
that I would probably avoid them if I were writing for publication? I
actually heard one of the eminent professors at the conference say
“indubitably” which I always pronounce, “in-doooooo-bit-ahhhh-bleeeeee.”
It is the most pretentious word in English imaginable. You say,
undoubtably, since that’s what everyone says. No one says indubitably.
It is purely a written word. Like, “albeit.” I hate these words.
Albeit indubitably my garrulity betrays a deferential quality in my
character, eftsoons it behooves me to practice greater frugality in the
vocal mode. Ach …
We also say, when someone is boring, “shut up or put up.” That is more
direct and too the point, do you agree?
Who was Zhadov or what is Zhadovian. We had a movie here called Zardov,
though I don’t think the one has much to do with the other.
By the way, do my letters bore you? Would you prefer that I adhere to a
strict rendition of the facts of my daily life.
The temperature, the color of the sky, the sound of the cars in the
streets, what I eat (and yes I have purchased for myself a new
corkscrew, thank you for worrying about the little pleasures in life,
like wine).
As for the big pleasures, you are not here, so I have none, no pleasure
at all. (The French call it, “jouissance.”)
So I must read, as the French also claim there is a pleasure of the
text. What do you think? Which do you prefer? The pleasure of the text
or the pleasure of the bed. I do not think they are unrelated pleasures,
that the more pleasure one has in bed, the more pleasure one has in
books. I am not quite sure what the relation is, but I am sure there is
one. All those ascetics who retired to their caves to write about their
victory over the temptations of the flesh were rather severe, yes? Have
you ever read Flaubert in Russian? I am sure he is everywhere translated
into Russian. His Temptations of St. Anthony is hilarious in this
regard. Though for a good read I would recommend Sentimental Education.
But really, there are probably quite good Russian translations of
Flaubert. I seem to remember you expressing familiarity with Madame
Bovary. Somebody said once, another French writer, that for Flaubert
every sentence was like painting with enamel, or enamelling (a little
different than giving the language a shellacking–colloquial English for
a good whipping). Actually, now that I think of it, Bulgakov must have
been a great reader of Flaubert.
Now I am looking around my room at various books in various conditions
of undress, and how shall I close this letter. By scolding you? You
deserve to be scolded for your short yesterday’s letter! But I promise
not to complain as long as you write me at all. I am not quite sure what
I will do today until about 13:00 when I will go to the university.
Yes, one more important matter. I spoke with my mother last night and as
for the documents that I need from the U.S. and the small fees required
to release the documents (difficult to arrange from here), I will
arrange everything through her address and then when all the documents
are together, she will send them to me by secure mail. Let’s look to
mid-november as the time by which I will have all the required documents
for Cypress. This seems a more organized way. She is going to send me a
postcard to test the address, my address here. Last year she sent a
letter that never arrived, so that will be a big accomplishment, if it
gets here. But isn’t this, also, positive news? Why should we not have
anything but positive news?
Positively …
https://hypobololemaioi.com
http://hypoboloemaioi.durationpress.com
(But do you know what appositive means?)
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Dear favor dear
ะะฐัะฐ: 24 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 18:07
dear zh, can you make any sense from these two attachments from the
local telecom here? one is for broadband (ethernet/neostrada) and the
other for a modem connection. i’m interested either in a permanent modem
connection or 128k ethernet connection. there’s no hurry. i can’t
arrange anything until i have proof or residence and that won’t be for
another week or two. but i thought that you might be able to make more
of the polish than i can (which is zero) as you’ve mentioned that you
sometimes understand the polish on the websites.
missing you
(did you get my morning letter?)
—
ะั: <magee@uni.lodz.pl>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Silence is golden
ะะฐัะฐ: 25 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 11:29
dear zh
silence for my computer is going to have to be golden. Do you have this
terrible cliche in russian, “silence is golden”? I went to the computer
shop yesterday and while I was successful (at least partly) in expanding
my ram to 224 megabytes (when we opened the machine we found memory
chips: 96 + 32 and as Woychek had only 128 chips on hand, he had to
replace the 32 chip which I now have as a souvenir and which reminds me
of bringing home a tooth the dentist had pulled when I was a child. So
now I have 96 + 128 = 224 megabytes of ram and it is my impression that
the linux side of my laptop in particular runs more smoothly, more
responsively. But, no sound. Woychek (yes, we are friends now, or, well,
we spoke for a long time about laptops as he was trying to sell me a new
one or a used one or whatever one he could) and he went into the IBM
diagnostics and I saw myself a readout where the modem and the soundcard
have a conflict on the motherboard itself. It might be able to be fixed,
but there’s no telling how long it might take, and I don’t wish to incur
any further expense. The external soundcard I was looking at and
thinking about buying requires Pentium III and 500 mgz bus speed (my
poor little laptop has only 366 which I thought was so fast!). But, I
was seduced (your favorite word –and it should be, as you yourself
admit, you are extremely easily seduced!–) by the IBM X31 Woychek had
(his own personal laptop) and I immediately consulted the Hungarian shop
in the U.S. where I bought my 600E and they have an A31 (pentium IV, 256
megs ram, cd/cdwriter, 12 or 13 inch screen (small, like the 600E, which
actually now I prefer to the 14-15 inch screens), etc., and for only
(only!) 800 dollars plus 60 dollars shipping. I can’t afford it, but
neither is it so expensive that I can’t dream about it. Hmmm, just a few
months at the parrot school and I could …
No parrot school Zhenya cries!
Not for now. I did yesterday also go to the Dunce School and give them
my preferred days (Weds and Thurs) as it turns out all my classes at the
university are on Mons and Tues. The ideal would be a Mon, Tues, Wed
schedule which would leave me four days of peace and quiet with
occasional trips to Berlin and etc. It is probably not a problem, as
they try to give the foreigners what they want, if we have the courage
to ask. Will I? Also yesterday (yesterday! yesterday! I looked late for
my letter from you and it hadn’t arrived … but I must practice
patience and patience itself is what I counciled Zhenya) I found a nice
used in very good condition for 3 dollars Rough Guide to Cypress travel
book, Rough Guide makes very good travel books, and as Cypress is an
island and not a continent, there are no so many places to go, but those
that are, look marvellous and warm and beautiful and I think of Cypress
of the very best of all the very good ideas which enter the head of
Zhenya under her crown of a crow’s nest. Really, the book is exciting to
page through, though I am always a poor reader of travel books, I think
I will read this one. It makes the place more concrete. Cypress should
not even be a question for us apart from the dates. Yes? Do you agree?
Write me immediately that you agree with your own idea. What could be
easier?
It was so cold last night that I fell asleep reading about 23:00 and
slept burrowed into my blanket until the alarm went off at 6:30 (I’m
training myself for early rising–it’s the most efficient when
teaching). I was reading the memoirs of Mme de La Fayette in French in a
very old very nice French edition that I also found yesterday for 3
dollars. All the used books here cost 3 dollars. I did not buy, however,
the Progress Publishers 6 volume edition of the works of Alexei Tolstoy
for 25 zl. or about 8 dollars. Quite a bargain. But I wanted to consult
with you first. I know this Tolstoy only by the story N. Mandelstam
tells about Osip slapping him (and I’ve concluded that Alexei was a
Stalinist flunkey, and really he looks like it on the cover photograph.
On the other hand, I saw a wonderful serial called “The Sisters” on
Tomsk television, quite epic in scope–something like in Germany the
Berlin Alexanderplatz, by the novelist, Doblin, and made into a film by
Fassbinder). So, what is your opinion about A. Tolstoy. Is it worth
reading? Have you read Alexei Tolstoy? Have you seen “The Sisters”? Of
course, no one can equal your beloved Master and Margarita, but really,
do you think I would find something, anything, there, in the Alexei
Tolstoy? I am rather intrigued about reading the writing of one who has
been accused in the Mandelstam legend of being like the straw that broke
the camels back.
You will think that I return to Poland and I am surrounding myself with
objects and purchases. Really it is not so, and I have in mind economy.
And the contradiction: I need books, and I need my computer. The memory
I wanted to do in Tomsk, and I think it was better to wait till now in
Lodz. The shoes, though, I think I will wait until winter, as these
still fit my feet. To tell you the truth, my empty bookshelves here are
depressing, and I am determined not to be depressed this year! Just as I
have determined not to be idle this year. For idleness, though, I really
am in need of you. I dream of you beside me: Kevin! Get up! What are you
doing! Why aren’t you writing, Mr. Writer! Write! Right now, start
writing!
Unfortunately, it is not always so easy to write. One must feel
disturbed by something, more than disturbed, moved, moved into the
writing, dislodged (in a very profound way, disinhabited) as the only
kind of writing that I know breaks and unseals, ruptures, even,
sometimes, destroys. Maybe I should find another kind of writing. Never,
however, Alexei Tolstoy’s kind. I do think I have found a way to rewrite
a previous essay for the conference in Slovakia, and I have plenty of
time to conceive it. The idea that I can go back to moments in my own
texts and build essays (or, at the least, discursive components) from my
always rather notational system, is encouraging. It’s the starting from
scratch which is such a big problem and energy consuming, draining
creative energy from the poetry, wherever that is (and I don’t know at
the moment).
opal rifts
the one piece of poetry I found in the novel I’ve been reading,
Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos had better be an intellectual novelist,
since he has no ear for the language. So much dialogue and it sounds
forced, all the representions of immigrant accents. But there is
something about the structure that I can see why scholars view the book
as important.
The Cyprus book is lying on the table as I write this: opal rifts.
Sometimes I think I miss the sea. Russian is an ocean-land. Though I
don’t miss the snow. Later it will be very beautiful, but now and the
end of winter are not exactly lovely.
Food! What are you eating! Inventory: bread and cheese, bread and
cheese. Actually one day I made chicken legs with pasta much inferior to
our chicken legs roasted on the wood fire. Another day I made a kind of
spaghetti with ground meat and tomato sauce. Yet another day I made
something I can no longer remember. Yes, yesterday, how could I forget:
macaroni and tomatoes and hardboiled eggs in salad with yoghurt (which I
always use in place of mayonnaise or smetana). This was the best so far,
though none of these will inspire confidence in you that I am capable of
satisfying your infinite and infinitely demanding hunger. (But there is
one whole chicken in the icebox which I will cook tomorrow, and if you
were here, I would give you all the skin!) Such a strange girl, who
prefers the legs and the thighs to the breasts. But this preference is a
very good reason to cook ducks instead of chickens, yes? Really,
seriously, I haven’t gone to the vegetable market yet, and once I do my
diet will improve. There are very good and fresh vegetables here,
especially potatoes. But it is true, that, living alone, I tend not to
cook anything that takes a long time. How simple it would be to add two
carrots, half a beet, one potato to a pan and add them over rice. I must
try to start eating as we were eating at the dacha, or (again) I will
become rather unhappy. Yes, this sounds very good: carrot and beet and
potato. (Maybe even a little canned beef, do you mind?)
My cup of coffee has been empty for a long time. So enough for this
letter. I’ll send you another one tomorrow, and the next day, and the
next day, and eventually you will associate me only with my words, and
forget what I look like, so I will be a big surprise for you by the time
we get to Cypress.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Sun morning thaw
ะะฐัะฐ: 26 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 12:01
dear zh
already it is morning a half hour later than usual though I awoke
actually 5 minutes before the alarm (training, training) just now at 7
am I sitting down to the table, the screen, the coffee, and you. Though
you are hardly there, of course. Where are you? How are you? How is the
first weekend? How many more do we have until Cypress? It is now one
week. What a mess I was this time last week. And what nervousness! The
final straw was taking the 51 instead of the 57 bus only because I was
so tired I misread the numbers on the bus and the numbers are as large
as a billboard sign (do you know what is billboard?) You have no so many
of them in Tomsk. The 51 bus just about this time last week (I was on
the train from Warsaw at exactly this time, arriving in Lodz at 7:30)
took me to a forest that in all my exhaustion looked a little like
Buchenwald. My german neighbor told me that his austrian friend who
taught german here for five years used to walk in this woods looking for
the old train lines from 1941-44 (they are supposed to be still there
buried in the woods). Unfortunate word, buried.
My mind it is warmer today, though. I took my frozen chicken out of the
fridge and it is beginning the slow thaw now on top of said
refrigerator. I don’t think this refrigerator would be large enough if
you were here. I find myself doing this a lot, wondering how you would
think of this flat if it were to be your flat also. Certainly it is
large enough, as other couples and families live in this building, but I
wonder whether it would feel cold to you, not just in temperature.
Nothing is inhabited, the way your flat is, there is simply this and
that left from previous tenants. What is strange is that I know
personally two former tenants of this flat, and the other one, last
year, I hear a lot about, as he was a very old man, Nathan Weinberg
(very Jewish name), in his mid-70s, wandering around Europe teaching. I
know little more about him than that, and the fact that he was, or that
he left, the flat in a shambles. How can one old man do that? Maybe it
was the historical memory of the city itself? This is a memory difficult
for me to access, for obvious reasons of language, cultural reasons,
ethnic-identity reasons (you tell me what it means to have the Jewish
nationality stamped on your passport) and then I wonder whether you
wouldn’t absorb the past here preternaturally, and that it would disturb
you intensely. You are sometimes disturbed by things I cannot predict.
Eating your cookie, that I can predict. If there are three cookies, I
must wait for you to present to me half of the third one. I think you
would rather present to me your laptop than the third cookie, though. It
is boring, here, without you to fight over the food.
At the time it rather irritated me a little, and now I miss it very
much, if you remember, as you remember, we were cooking (funny how I
can’t remember whether you or I were cooking, and this is another of
your secrets for detectives, that you do, in fact, do what is called,
preparing something to eat, though I think I understand now that in your
world for a woman to pretend that she has even the slightest interest in
the kitchen means that she just may as well be imprisoned there, and so
your avowed hatred of pots and pans, though, on the reverse, you always
seem to know what goes where, and how to do everything–long hours of
observation, I know, or patiently waiting for the dish to be finished).
Long parenthesis! Anyway, we were cooking, let’s say we, and you
wouldn’t stop eating everything that was being sliced! This is what I
miss especially right now, last night dinner was worst than boring.
Perogi. And I ate too many. And they weren’t even that tasty. It was
just dinner time and I didn’t want to spend any time in the kitchen, and
one eats in silence (actually, I usually eat to the TV, and almost
always it is the news that is on), and what it is really is kind of a
void, and I am reminded just how depressing the early evenings were last
year, and how silent, and well, you will laugh, but I miss you, and your
company, even as and especially when you devour all the ingredients.
As you can tell, what can you tell. It is rather relaxing to have
company, to be in company, I don’t know if it’s the same as being in one
another’s living space, or having the same living space. I think you
worry sometimes about what you would do if you didn’t have an office to
go to. This has never been a problem for me, as I enjoy (you may have
noticed) long stretches of days and weeks with nowhere to go and nothing
to do, and only then, only then, do I begin to be able to absorb sights
and sounds. Here I imagine you taking long walks, and I think you would
feel safer here than in Tomsk. There would also have to be a dog, of
course, a very big dog. With a big dog, I think you would walk to and
from Warsaw every day, and on weekends, to Krakow. Enough of this, you
might be beginning to lose patience with my idle daydreams of life here
with you, if you were here. But no one that I mention this day dream to
here thinks that it’s absurd or impossible. There are, after all, three
(I can hardly think of them as beds, though I use all three of them
depending on the room I happen to fall asleep in) places to fall asleep.
The hardest one, which of course would be the one that you’d prefer, is
something similar to the “pasha” bed, though it doesn’t have a back rest
to it as in Sveta’s flat. And it isn’t soft. But it is a nice sofa, the
nicest one, and it folds out into a very firm bed, very good for your
back.
Now what. Yesterday. What did I do yesterday? Too much time in front of
the computer? I sent you the texts in Poland looking only for some sense
of comparison between the cost for ethernet (neostrada) and modem
connection, and the price system seemed similar to Russia, very
particular and specific. In the neostrada document, at the end of it,
there are routers and modems (ethernet requires a DSL or ADSL modem) and
I would like to know if these are required, since I already have a
router (actually they have the same model here: I paid 49 dollars for it
in the U.S., and here it is 150 dollars). Ethernet would be nice, as
well as remind me how I really didn’t need modem access from both sides
of my laptop (which is how I ruined the sound on it). You will laugh at
me about this, probably for as long as I have the laptop, but in my
defense I had done the same operation on my Macintosh, and had no
problems, and so I assumed … But everything does work a little bit
better on this small and inexpensive machine, and I really don’t need
more than a permanent dial-up connection, which they advertise here for
99 zl monthly (about 33 dollars according to the current exchange). I
need to stop thinking in dollars as I have only 50 left. When I came to
Poland last year I remember exchanging dollars for zlotys at the
airport: 100 dollars brought me 350 zlotys. In the currency shop where I
bought my euros before coming to Russia this summer the exchange rate
when I first came to Poland was 370 zlotys for 100 dollars. Now, when I
arrived at the airport in Warsaw, the same 100 dollars would have only
brought me 310 zlotys. This is signficant (and I believe long term)
decrease in value. Nations go to war over this kind of problem. We
should never underestimate just how unstable the world is right now. In
the words of the emininent Professor Ickstadt, “Berlin is bankrupt.” The
end of the tale is that my new memory chip with labor cost 300 zlotys.
He would have charged me 200 zlotys but the memory chip he was replacing
was too small, 32 megs. I thought this was fair enough, though I never
have any idea of the “right price” here. When I had a new memory chip
installed in my Macintosh, the computer shop charged me 25 dollars for 5
minutes labor. When I think about it, selling a laptop even in 1999 with
32 megs ram was almost criminal, and yet it was standard practice, I
think. Nowadays, software barely runs with anything under 256 megs. The
further end of this tale, so I do not seem to be rambling, though do you
mind if I do? is that, 400 dollars for machine, about 50 dollars in
software, 100 dollars for expanded memory, and that’s it: for less than
600 dollars I have a fully operating computer for internet access and
word processing. I’m trying to convince you that I do not spend money
unwisely (and you may be just a little more liberal than I am in this
regard).
Liberal can have a lighter meaning than Mssr. Reynolds gave it at the
conference. His “personally, I have nothing against terrorism” still
rings in my ears with a kind of horror, and the horror of fascination,
and it is even worth going to the conference in Slovakia to try to
convince him otherwise, though it was spoken, and not a part of the
writing in his paper. You said that you liked him. Maybe he is likeable.
I am always somewhat shocked when people talk about their being
working-class when as you know that is how I talk in private (but never
in public!). I was very flattered that you said immediately how much
better my English was than his, and he is a scholar from the Center for
European Thought! One thing he said over beer was very true: if you come
from working-class, and move through academic or artist circles, you
never overcome the feeling that you are an imposter, and it’s because
everything in those places tends to be so bourgeois in the West, and the
bourgeois, no matter how much money you have, is always foreign, more
foreign than language. I am rather glad that I didn’t speak to Reynolds
after his night of vodka, sturgeon, banya, and probably banya girls, as
being Anglo-American (they are one and the same) he would in addition to
being terribly hung over, also be guilt-stricken, and I might have said
something meant as a joke that would be interpreted otherwise. But don’t
you think I was wise not to go on the special Siberian treat for
unsuspecting foreigners? The real Russians stay home, yes? I don’t know
whether the vodka and banya tradition is what Anglos would call
“liberal” or “decadent” or “corrupt” (these are all words I can imagine
the righteous religious Americans using), what do you call it? You
seemed more or less amused and not at all against my going, but it did
seem a little like predictable “excess of liberality” which Russians
practice on foreign guests. This would appear to getting more to the
gesture, the hospitality, towards the foreigner, especially in Siberia,
where the guest cannot get drunk enough, or anything else enough. In a
way, this custom reminds me of a more intimate rendition of the carnival
theme that one of Russia’s great academics, Bakhtin, wrote about. That
the carnival tradition has been transferred to the hospitality towards
the guest. I found this in Dosteovsky also, in the “Unfortunate
Incident” story, where the general says upon arriving at his
subordinate’s wedding uninvited: “Welcome the guest.” What is the phrase
in Russian, there must be a kind of formula, linguistically?
Zh, if you like long letters, I can keep writing and writing endlessly,
and if you must know, now, in the quiet of this room, these letters are
soothing to me, and I don’t really need long letters from you in return
if you would rather read, but then again, I am very lonely here without
you, and every word you write me I read first twice, and then usually
once again days later. Still you will notice that often I don’t answer
your questions if you ask any in the letter. This is a mental fault. I
tend to read between the lines, or tonally, and forget the direct
message. Between the lines, you say very nice things, to me, always,
often without even intending to, though you haven’t told me when you
would like me to call you Tuesday, your birthday, doragoya? Do you have
plans? Even with your family? I am thinking I should call you about noon
my time (17:00 your time) if, if, there is a card. That will be my work
tomorrow, Monday, looking for the right phone card. I won’t even begin
to think about the possibility of not being able to call you. Though it
doesn’t help knowing that this has happened before. Why do you make fun
of the Cypress book? It is a beautiful and practical book, very recent,
with lots of information, and I am even ashamed, as I did not know that
Cypress was divided like Germany used to be into a north and south and
you cannot pass between them, is this still true?
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Urgent (and unguent) question
ะะฐัะฐ: 26 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 18:17
dear zh
actually, i have multiple, manifold, many urgent questions:
1) is the correct spelling of her name Galina Petrovna or Galina
Petrova? I don’t have my conference notes here and I need to know
exactly for an acknowledgment I am writing (about her quote of Jean-Luc
Nancy, “the human being is without essence” do you remember?
2) I forget what the second urgent question is.
3) here is a question, though I do not know whether it is urgent: yes,
send me the conference publication as long as my essay is in it, whether
in russian or english? most important, is my essay in the conference
proceedings at all?
4) fourth not so urgent question: do you remember the coffee in the
small cafe in palangas (see, you do not need to add accent mark to the e
in cafe–english took care of that a long time ago)
5) what is the name of your French Shampoo?
6) what are all the other names of your lotions and creams and perfumes?
7) most important and most urgent: do you think that the reason that you
spend your entire month’s salary on the collected works of Mandelstam is
that you were dreaming of the existence of such a poet?
p.s. of all the poets, I would most like to resemble Mandelstam.
k.
Sun, 26 Sep 2004 14:44:44 +0200
Cypress
dear zh
i just read your letter. it is cypress or nothing. one should never
accept compromises. there is a logic to the absolute. we will be
together in cypress or not all. cypress. you understand? there is no
middle ground, no third way. i write to you about money because it
concerns me here, but it (money) is never an object, only means.
instrument. what it takes. cypress, yes, don’t forget?
kisses
Sun, 26 Sep 2004 17:19:25 +0200
Dutch
dear zh
so you want two letters every day from me when my fingers are so sticky
from afternoon sandwich of salmon and bread that how can i write to this
question?
one letter and a half?
really, my fingers are quite sticky from eating right now. and i still
have yet to cook the chicken. today is eating day.
let us be lighter than we are?
laugh, that means (laugh!)
EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY
don’t you believe? do you need long narrative letters? you never write
me about what the heroes in your detective novels are doing.
i think you had better read, Sendimental Education (Flaubert, remember?
the great danish geologist?)
k.
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 02:40:49 +0200
from Morocco to Shanghai
dear zh
i’m up late tonight (already past two in the morning) and i’m afraid of
sleeping and your missing my morning letter, so here is my morning
letter, though if i still manage to wake up in the morning, i’ll write
you then too, if you don’t mind.
two wonderful films on tv tonight, i don’t know what genie of the cinema
is watching over me. the first was based on a british novel by esther
freud, which i highly recommend, and which they just might have at the
british council. set in morocco, spectacular photography, landscapes and
urban scenes, and also a good story, a woman’s story, a young woman (25)
with two small daughters, separated from the father who lives in england
(and is also a poet! not the most interesting part of the film) and what
was, i thought, wonderful, was just the sense of a human story, human
dimensions, with some identification, i think, for me, with the
representation of the language gap. the name of the film is “kinky”
something (from a phrase one of the children makes up). the second film
i only watching fitfully, while reading and doing other things, but it
was set in china and thailand, apparently (in chinese) and ended in
angor wat in cambodia. strange, to hear polish dubbed over the chinese.
i never noticed before how many words in polish are the same as in
russian, and i wouldn’t notice normally, since the overall pronunciation
is different, but with the chinese not making any sense at all, my ears
had to pick out some intelligible sounds. the camerawork very unorthodox
angles, often as if you were lying on a sofa or looking around the
corner of the door. i mean, the angle of the camera was not direct, so
you were always aware, in the scenes i saw, of the contingency of the
view, as when we just see something off to the side, peripheral vision.
i can’t tell you anything about the plot, except that it was about loss,
with some attempt i think to make a larger statement about chinese
culture, ancient history, and the mystery of modernity.
i didn’t watch a good part of it at first because i thought it was a
chinese detective film. so i missed whatever expositional cues (visual)
there would have been, though this intensified my attention to the
photography of the scenes from the film that i did see. these are two of
the best films i’ve seen (reminding of the polish film we saw in
palangas, about the roma gypsies–do you agree?) i mean, do you agree
about the quality of the polish film. such moments remind one of what
the medium is capable of, and just how saturated any viewer is with the
opposite, which i hestitate to call trash, but it is simply surplus, and
boring to boot.
my chicken was a great success to day, cooked in the oven with potatoes,
and i missed your participation. let’s not talk too much about slim
diets, okay? i recommend imaginary tablets, not the ones you were
looking for (and i am confident that you are only joking). i am wearing
shoes and my feet are still cold (do you remember the cold feet idiom?).
tonight a colleague (polish) called, and when i remarked upon the cold
he remembered studying for high school exams for college in the spring
and being so cold in the flat that he studied under covers. apparently
early autumn and late spring cold before the heat (central heat, of
course) is turned on is legendary in poland. i don’t remember my flat
being cold when i arrived at the end of september last year, so maybe
they will turn it on this week. i find myself taking very long hot
showers, just to bring up my body temperature. thanks for your advice
about the heater, but i am too stingy to splurge on something so
practical.
what time to you have to go to work on tuesday?
write me today what time, and i will try to call you in the morning
before you go to work, otherwise i will have to call you quite late in
the evening. i have agreed to help polish colleague with some
translations from about 15:00-17:00, so if i call you in the late
afternoon (instead of the morning) it will be about 23:00 your time. is
that too late, or would you prefer the morning. you had lectures early
in the monday morning in september, and my mind you don’t go to work on
tuesdays until late, unless you have an appointment. i wouldn’t expect
you to spend too much time on your birthday at the office when you don’t
have to teach, and don’t they give you the day off or most of the day
off? but please do write me today which time, morning or evening, is
best for you.
and yes, a copy of the conference publication in russian and in english
would be much appreciated. please send when you can.
everything works so well on my laptop now (except of course for sound)
that i wish i had a permanent internet connection so i could work
online. the expanded memory was more badly needed than i thought.
you will think poorly of me but i am beginning to yawn and i’m going to
take advantage of the post-tv movie fatigue to fall asleep, or go to
sleep. one thing about the cold, it makes you sleep more than normally.
should i wake to my alarm clock tomorrow. right now, that is the great
question. i am too lazy to try to figure out how to turn it off. perhaps
i will set it for a later time. i will write you in the morning though,
when i do get up, so you can expect another letter from me by
mid-afternoon.
it will be interesting what i will write to you though, over coffee, as
nothing will have happened between now and then except sleep. maybe i
will write you about which bed i slept in. the sound of the cars in the
street that will probably wake me up. whether or not i slept in my
socks.
really, i don’t know why you protested so at the dacha when i was
falling asleep in the upstairs that you thought was so cold, as it is
much colder here, and i have fewer blankets. how happy i would be if i
could wake up to you standing above me in your underwear crying at me in
russian to go to bed under a warm blanket. you are rather thoughtful
sometimes. except for when you want to go for a walk. i have some bad
news for you. this is the end of this letter.
k.
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 08:42:43 +0200
the Day before
good morning zh
this letter is being written to you only an hour and a half hour behind
schedule, as i woke up without alarm clock at 7:45 to one more of what
is becoming to seem like a long succession of grey days. cold and grey
days. and i slept in sweater in socks. even writing it makes me feel
uncomfortable. there were no dreams that i can remember to tell you of,
nor did anything especially interesting happening to me while asleep: no
robbery, no fire, no nothing, as sleep is hardly an undiscovered
country. you yourself sleep almost every night, don’t you? isn’t it
pause for thought just how many hours of our life we spend this way, or
it is so obvious that it doesn’t bear mentioning. i do think you would
enjoy the firm bed (we call them firm beds and not hard beds in english,
depending on the needs of the sleeper) with or without me beside you. i
don’t think you would enjoy my habit of rising at 6:30 every morning.
and i know in particular that you do not enjoy alarm clocks.
today and in only a little while i will venture outside and go to the
post office and try to buy a phone card there, and then to the small
shops behind the larger shop (Andre) to buy some fresh fruit and
vegetables. The large shop, Andre, as I mentioned, is closed, so there
is a big empty building outside my bedroom window. do you hear any news?
i almost none whatsoever. tomorrow when the polish colleague comes to
visit, i will ask him to interpret the two handouts regarding prices for
internet, and then, after this week, probably, no it will take longer,
probably not until the end of october, will i arrange for permanent
internet connection. when i have this, would you like to experiment with
real-time messaging software? i have only used it once or twice, but
there is almost a sensation of immediacy like phone call, and we could
arrange by appointment to “chat” once or maybe twice a week. you don’t
need a permanent internet connection to do this, though i am always so
conscious of cost that i cannot really think when connected, especially
here, as the connection is a bit more expensive. times or even one time
during the week when you expect to be at your office and at the computer
without so many tasks would be ideal for half an hour conversation. if
we could do this once or twice a week, in addition to daily emails and
phone calls every two weeks, then we will feel (I hope) as closely in
contact as it is possible to be at this distance.
you did promise me something that you seem to have forgotten about.
where is you CV in english? this we should finish by end of october, and
then in nov and dec you might write some of the addresses of the open
university and even the central european university in budapest. this is
entirely your decision of course, but i understand my role and the
gentle and insistent reminder that contrary to the authoritarian
coordinates of your immediate environment, you are (as you know) someone
who is very well educated, and more than you know, very attractive as an
immigrant (though this is a problem word in english) my point being, as
i repeated many times, is that you are exactly what many institutions
with programs designed for the foreign student are looking for. you
should never underestimate just how valuable is your ease and fluency in
english, and i think you should keep in mind (and keep to heart) the
Elijah-like remark by the russian-australian businessman (or
russian-canadian?) i.e. his “what are you still doing here” comment. and
this you will not care to hear the day before your birthday, but given
your expectation of instability in russia, isn’t it also a little about
responsibility towards your father and mother to think about life, even
a professional life, in a european union country or the u.s.? what if
they lose everything again in another bank crash? enough of this. i
don’t write you this way to alarm you, only to encourage you to
translate your CV and to remind you that you have many accomplishments
and have even led a life of adventure quite unlike many in the west. so,
where is your CV?
neither am i forgetting my proposal of life here and for you with no
demands. i can imagine you feeling comfortable for one or two years with
such a life, if i can imagine you at all agreeable to such an
arrangement (one of necessity due to work restrictions in poland, etc.,
provided they really are as strict as you believe, though we both agree
that getting work here would be, in the realm of logical probability,
more difficult than in e.u. or u.s. even if you were for one or two
years in budapest, and i failed to find a job there, my schedule could
easily be arranged where i would have four days off a week and i could
travel by train to budapest twice a month. we would not be so far apart
as now, and i only mention this at all as central european univ. has
such a good reputation, is translatable in u.s. and europe (the
educational certification and degrees) and and and you are impatient
with speculation and i have written already too much about it. one las
thing though. as i said repeatedly, in my culture there is no stigma
attached to anyone, especially a women, retraining or reorienting
herself at age 40 so your argument that you are too old to change your
life is, unlike your other arguments, entirely false, as true as it may
be in russia. i think you would be surprised just how many universities
include this layer of the society in their educational plans and
programs. i repeat myself again: you have more choices than you can
imagine.
now, on your side, you know that i am prone to imagination, and that
even worse, i am an innocent and idealistic foreigner. i lack the
required cynicism to make one stay put, without moving one inch, to the
right or the left, backwards or forwards, the pessimism of experience
teaching that as long as the walls are still standing, there is no
reason to move or to change. you do not seem to me to be quite as solid
and unmoveable as this, and i have in further defense of my reminding
role that you have in the past considered emigrating to israel and as
you said, your mother urges you to emigrate to canada. neither countries
are probably an option for me, though for one who talks about the many
choices, i should keep in mind also that I have choices too. isn’t this
a cheerful letter the day before your birthday, and your 40th birthday!
If you were here you wouldn’t let me say that without a sour face. by
the way, i enjoyed the tongue you stuck out at me in the mirror of the
hairdresser (in poland, fryzer, or something like that, to english ears
it sounds like going to the freezer to get your hair cut). your facial
expressions are always unpredictable, though always, equally,
expressive. especially when you are preparing to go for a three-hour
walk in the woods. here if you walked for three hours you would probably
cross a border, poland has i think borders with five countries,
lithuania, germany, slovakia, belarussia and czechoslovakia. maybe there
is one more. this is pretty impressive geography for an american, yes?
did i tell you that the driver to novisibirsk dropped me off at the
international terminal? i waited there in an early-morning stupor for
about an hour until i realized that my flight to moscow was not on the
bulletin board. so i walked to the domestic terminal and had to go
through security twice. this was the beginning and i should have known
it then, of a marathon trip where just about everything that could go
wrong did, and the waiters and waitresses did not appear poor to me in
novotel, rather bearers of an attitude one can find in expensive
restaurants in NYC, and it’s a kind of attitude that develops from being
heavily tipped by travelling businessmen on expense accounts. this
attitude cannot stand to be reminded that there are people with vouchers
who do not care to pay 25 dollars for a lunch that anywhere else would
cost 2 dollars. on the other hand, the comparison was instructive, when
you think that at the most expensive, like the japanese restaurant, that
the most we paid was 800-1000 rubles, but for the most part, 200-300
rubles for very good meals and with wine, you get an insight at to just
how inexpensive even the good life in tomsk is, if by good life you
accept my definition of not having to cook more than two or three times
a week. you would enjoy the restaurants here. they also are inexpensive,
small cafes (see, no accent mark!) and there is even a jewish
restaurant, though i have not been there yet. the food is very russian
in character, and once again i am drawn to the idea that you would find
life here quite amenable (pleasurable, a foreign–western-like–country
and culture, not so militarized and strict as russia, but with many
familiar parts and pieces, so you would not feel so very strange.
speaking of alienation-effects, how is tanya doing in boston? have you
heard from her again? this reminds that the one place in the world where
you would feel completely at home is in the u.s. as far as i remember,
there is no pressure to pretend that you are not from another country,
and with fluency in english especially, there are no limits or
restrictions as to what you can do. this reminds one that (and i think
you hear this in my voice sometimes) very positive features about social
culture in the u.s., and maybe this is due in part to the chaos of
everyday life, but really there is no stigma to being from somewhere
else. places like montreal and toronto may be like this too. i think it
is more the urban character of such cities, and the enormous, more than
you can imagine, movement of people from all around the globe through
such cultural (and economic) centers.
has this morning’s letter turned into a lecture? i find i have written
again for almost an hour, which will probably turn into half an hour
once classes start, but on the positive side, you won’t get so many
expressions from me concerning how you should change your life, though,
uhm, your CV, madame?
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 08:51:11 +0200
Re: do not be like that?
dear zh
like what? you do not want me to imagine you in your underwear even if
you were fully dressed? don’t you know that the memory plays tricks, and
remembers reality as it would prefer it to have been, not as it was? so
i remember you in your underwear, and wish you were standing over me in
the room in the middle of the night, so that i might reach for you and
…
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Y menya jest carta dla 50 minute!
ะะฐัะฐ: 27 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 14:11
dear zh,
so choose your time, please very much please, do you wish for me to call
you at 11:00 your time in the morning or 23:00 your time in the evening,
do please indicate to me when you would like for me to dial your number.
do please indicate to me that you like me (once in a while)…
k.
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:46:34 +0200
Y menya jest HEAT!
dear zh
i went to the british council library this afternoon and checked out two
fat books: one of poetry anthology and rushdie’s midnight children,
which all my students know here, so i though i better read it. there
were also two books, very thin, by esther freud there, including “happy
kinky” or something like that, but as they were thin books, i decided to
save them for a later read. i definitely recommend the movie.
tonight i am cooking a cow’s tongue in honor of the tongue you stuck out
at me at the hairdresser’s and in honor of your birthday, since it is
the one item you would not wish to share with me. the chicken is all
gone, alas, and i rather disturbed myself with how i ate the meat off
the bone, without such instruments as knife and fork, but as i am slong
here, who cares? i promise to use knife and fork in your company, though
i do not think you stand on such ceremonies, when you are hungry. this
morning for breakfast i ate cold roasted potatoes, longing for tomsk
potatoes, and you.
p.s. i am hoping you check your email before going to sleep so i write
this and send this, hoping i am also the first to wish you, HAPPY
BIRTHDAY _*OLD*_ WOMAN!
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Birthday attachment
ะะฐัะฐ: 28 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 13:07
dear zh
happy birthday!
(though i know you are studiously avoiding all celebration, and really,
the displaced celebration, with Pavel’s father, for his birthday, that
may be a better way to celebrate it. i recommend, if you have the
chance, to consult with Pavel’s father, about his advice regarding
‘continuing education’ and your interest in working further
professionally with english, in a discrete way, not the announcement of
a plan as such, but as an expression of thoughtfulness, and i think you
would hear some good advice, as this is one person there who i think
respects your qualities and who wishes for you to be happy)
(long birthday parenthesis, and as you can tell, i am never confident
about my own advice, my own life is so haphazard)
i am sending you a poem by paul celan (one of mandelstam’s german
translators) with the not very promising title, Death Fugue) in the
attachment. this is one of a number of poems translated into english
that i have found in the anthology i checked out yesterday from the
british council. this is a very famous poem, and i wonder whether it has
been translated in russian. celan was born paul anschel in romania, and
both his parents died in auschwitz. does the poem depend on this
information. the thought bothers me, that a life is so succinctly
compacted into one such biographical detail. celan also drowned himself
in the seine in 1970. again, is such a detail necessary? or does it only
give a lurid hue to the text. i must think more about these problems.
but i would be very interested in your thoughts/impressions about the
poem sometime, with always, as in this case, the thought of the
possibility of translating it into russian. this depends on your own
subjective will and desire. no one can make you do this, least of all
me. what i am capable of doing, as i have said and written before, that
contrary to your idea of the necessity of philological training, i
deeply believe that the best poetry and the best literature and the best
writing comes from somewhere else, at the very least, ‘out of deep need’
(the title of a small essay by charles reznikoff on poetry) and from an
activity, an interest, at the very least, or commitment, or, let’s call
it dedication, to language. such a commitment is within anyone’s grasp
at any time, whether they are 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years old. there is
no magic formula, and certainly no training. that way, the formal
training way, lies the very threat to the making and habitating of art,
at least the art that i know of as poetry.
no doubt you do not agree with me, and i think this disagreement can be
a very good one and productive one. i am not trying to convince you to
think otherwise. what i would like to try to do sometimes, is remind you
that once, a very long time ago, who knows the details of that day, you
gave your entire month’s salary for an edition of Mandelstam, and to me
this is the example of a pure act which represents so much more than a
purchase, an obtaining of a book, but an expression of wishfulness
towards what Mallarme (and here is need the accent mark on the final e
and there isn’t one in this text editor) called ‘the Book’ which can be
as open or restricted as you choose, even reading detective stories is
an activity with the language, though isn’t it interesting how the plot
and the mental emphasis on plot pushes language to the background,
almost as if plot constructs a kind of mental image, a large picture,
and as long as we have this large picture, as readers, the language is
relatively unimportant. i’ve been thinking about this reading a longish
epical work of fiction, published altogether in 1938 in the u.s., called
appropriately, u.s.a by john dos passos, and the panorama almost depends
on repetition of simple sentences which pile up on one another and
almost exhaust me in their mechanical character.
about reading i have nothing else to report, except that i got a message
from the bookstore in krakow yesterday and my final order amounts to 23
books at 697 zl. this seems rather reasonable, and i am excited about
this first effort to begin rebuilding my library, and really this
involves the prospect of settling down to work on longer and larger
projects. i searched last night for a little while for bookstores in
berlin, but was unable to find one, probably more from the fact that i
wasn’t using the right search terms.
i hope you don’t have any negative thoughts today about aging, as you
are curiously sensitive about this. isn’t it much better (life, that is)
than one’s 20s? at least? i think this next decade will be among the
best years of your life, and that you have a lot to look forward to, and
i hope i am included somewhat in this picture of possibility. as for the
world around us, that is another matter. for the moment, i am happy that
i have books to read, a computer that works, a decent job, and the
prospect of talking to you today (though i hope it is not too late in
your day, as i remember that you teach early in the morning tomorrow). i
will try not to call later than your 23:00.
so, until tonight, doragoya.
p.s. yes i woke up late this morning, 8:15 (the alarm does not work if i
leave it in the next room)
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: appointments
ะะฐัะฐ: 29 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 11:49
dear zh
your voice lingers here after the 2.5 hours last night as almost,
almost, a physical presence. i fell asleep at midnight and did not want
to wake to the alarm this morning, a warm morning, the flat is warm, and
i must leave at 8:30 for a teacher’s meeting at the dunce college at
9:15, then go to the rectorat to give one of the offices my new bank
account number as the number was changed upon entry into e.u., for
whatever reason, then to the institute to try to find out if my contract
is ready, and if my contract is ready, back to the rectorat to another
office to take them a copy of my contract for another document by that
office showing, with the document, that i am a resident at this address
for the duration of the contract, and then, if i am able to obtain this
document and signature, to the city administration office for a
residence seal on my “decicja” from warsaw, the original and extremely
important copy of which is still in my possession, and once this seal is
obtained, to the passport office to give them this decicja with seal so
that my laminated ‘work permit of a definite duration’ (the one which i
had in tomsk and which expires in a few days) may be reissued. so today,
more or less, is a work day, and that means no reading.
this time i have been doing everything myself, and i don’t mind going to
offices waving this or that paper around, mutely, though as i mentioned
i find that more and more (most) people know a little english, more than
they would indicate if i were doing the official document rounds with a
polish colleague.
as for reading, in less than two weeks where, really, i have had only
last friday, saturday, sunday and monday to myself, free of
disturbances, interruptions, etc., i have read most of one 450 page
novel and 500 pages from another novel, both by the same author, j. dos
passos, whom, oddly, i have never read before, and which i now can see
has had a great influence on both the big postmodern novel (writers like
thomas pynchon and john barthes) as well as on the beat novelists like
kerouac. the novels by dos passos pretend to be ‘of the working class’
as that is the ostensible social element represented for the most part
there, in panoramic narrative, but that’s not what really gets
represented, and the effect is more of a parodic rogue’s gallery, and it
is not so difficult to understand from the fiction how the author, who
was well known in the 20s and 30s as a leftist, became very politically
conservative after wwII. the fictional writing (the books i am reading
now) are used and develop from a mode of social and cultural satire, and
all the figures (characters, though i don’t like to use the term
character for all of its misuse in basis literature teaching) are
portrayed as little puppets directed by the writer’s style. far more
difficult to write, i think, is a fictive prose that loses itself in
this or that figure, the subjectivity of that figure, and so the
boundaries around this or that name of what in russian translation is
called “personage” blur, and people begin to merge into one another as
they do in real life, in conversation, in working together, in living
and suffering together. if it sounds like i am thinking about writing
fictively, perhaps i am, i don’t know, i feel very open towards any kind
of writing at the moment, and less and less inclined, even incapable, of
writing in previous ways in which i’ve written before, and this,
combined with the challenge of living in a non-english environment, and
all the impact of not hearing spoken english everyday, will, i know,
change the kind of writing i can make, if i give myself the space in
which to make it.
right now, for now, as now, i am writing you letters, as you joked about
last night, and it is a form of activity with language, in addition to
the very real wish to keep you company and entertain you a little and
send to you every day some writing from me, which as we know of course
is not the voice, not the person, but something off to the side, some
remainder of a voice and body moving through time, and a letter is not
necessarily a fiction, especially as these letters already this week
appear to me as a kind of diary, that i am writing you more or less of
the small events in a day, schedules, appointments (i won’t send you my
role lists!) etc., as one would talk about over dinner, although if we
were really talking over dinner we would be fighting over who got which
portion. i have a new treat: plain yoghurt, lemon, and canned corn. it
makes a kind of illegitimate russian salad, as it looks like mayonnaise,
but is much healthier. i think i might succeed eventually in convincing
you that plain yoghurt is good for you, and that it is not sliwki. that
is what i made for dinner last night after talking with you,
corn-in-lemon-and-yoghurt, and slices of beef tongue with cheese. now i
think you are thinking about staying in tomsk for another 20 years.
for depression, i think your recommendation of the cafe is a good one.
there is a very nice cafe within walking distance where they speak
english, though the menu is in polish, which is understand a little,
though i am at a complete loss with administrative polish as the letter
i rec’d monday about the need of the payroll office for my new bank
account number. but about depression, and cafes, as you yourself say,
you never go to restaurants alone, and i don’t care to either, so maybe
it is more depressing to go to the cafe. my alternative now is a program
of reading, which is why i ordered the books (an email last night
confirming the books have been shipped and will be here in a day or two)
and eventually, some sense of an extended project. there is also the
abstract to work on by the end of the month for the slovakian
conference. now i am not so sure that i want to rework the lenin essay,
which is what my original plan was (as of last week). but i wrote a very
good essay once identifying an “exclusion” in a widely praised new book
about globalization, or was it the beginnings of an essay, which is what
i was thinking recently (last week), that there is a text that i wrote,
and it succeeds in identifying an exclusion, and if the essay does
succeed, what it does is bring up for “inclusion” the historical memory
of the debates about what was called the “national question” in the
years before wwI (actually, 1913, which is one reason why i found
sokurov’s film to be a little bewitching). the difference is that i want
to write an essay for this conference that is not so interventionist or
polemical, returning to the national question, but also in the context
of confusion about events such as in beslan, trying to identify the
abyss, the void, from which such a statement as reynolds’ “personally, i
have nothing against terrorism” comes from, and yet to return to this
essay, mine, extremely sharp and critical and polemical, with more
suppleness and flexibility, so that one does not find oneself repeathing
shibboleths like “proletarian internationalism” which may be a find
thing, but such internationalism comes from workers strikes, and not
poets writing about political philosophy. insofar as i do write about
political philosophy, it is part of a larger program for epical
perspective for this or that future canvas, i do not pretend that i am
either a political theorist or a philosopher, but sometimes writers
coming to this material from another discipline and with other senses of
what can and cannot be said happen on to important perspectives (that it
is the writing coming from outside that can force an “inclusion” and
this is what i imagine my own writing as capable of accomplishing). so
this is a short summary of the work i will try to do in addition to the
teaching work that will begin, very soon, to demand my time, preparation
and etc., all that etcetera, a very handy word to know in english.
what do you think of my decision not to say goodbye to you in any of
these letters, rather simply ending them in mid-thought or mid-sentence.
do you mind?
k.
29 ัะตะฝั.
Tasks update
drastvi, zh,
i’m home at 16:00 after setting out at 8:45 so a full day of i don’t
know what, hardly work, more like waiting, though i did go to the
teacher’s meeting and confirmed that i have 5 classes at the dunce
college, though i won’t know my schedule until tomorrow or friday, but
it had better not be anything other than wed and thurs. the total hours
per week that i get paid for (i just typed paind and that is a happy
mistake) will be 10 and x 15 weeks = 150 hours or 6000 zlotys or,
roughly, 2000 dollars in addition to the 600 dollars per month or 2400
dollars i’ll earn at the university, so i stand (on paper) to earn 4400
dollars for october, november, december and most of january. yes, that
looks like 1100 dollars per month, though with deductions, i don’t
imagine that i’ll see more than 800 dollars per month, though that isn’t
too bad, without parrot school. the difference is being able to start on
the two jobs from the beginning, and i rather like the prospect of
earning almost 9000 dollars this year teaching. with adjustments for
cost of living, it’s probably comparable to 25,000 in the u.s., maybe
more. so maybe i’ll begin to be able to breathe a little. and, of
course, everything always looks a little better in the abstract, on
paper.
no contract signed until monday, which means tues morning next week i’ll
doing my running around to the city administration and passoport office.
i came home to wet and grey outside, my wet clothes still wet, and
nothing ready to eat as i didn’t go to the store last night (it was
raining after our phone call) and it is raining now, so i won’t go out
now, and i don’t feel like doing all the work of cooking the eggplant,
so i’m making (boiling) the rest of the shreds of chicken still clinging
to the bones of the chicken i roasted on sunday, and i’ll put noodles
with that to have a kind of something warm and a little zuppy. as you
may tell from the tone of this letter, i’m also a little depressed,
recognizing that i have no enthusiasm for preparing my syllabi and
already i am bored at the thought of teaching 5 conversation classes,
though these are the easiest. i really have only one or two classes that
i will need to do much reading for, or preparation. but, i fear (and
anticipate) boredom. my books are here. i have a postoffice note so i’ll
go to pick them up in the morning at the same place where the invitation
from russia arrived and where, in the documentary, there are the same
buildings, the same park, still standing, as at the time of the jewish
ghetto. cheerful place.
this morning taking a shower i thought: if zh were here i’d have to
paint this bathroom (dark mildew on ceiling, paint peeling, everything
old) and were you here, i do promise more lights and space heater
(portable heater) and something would have to be done to the kitchen to
make it a more pleasant place, maybe a small table near the window.
right now the view is not very nice, since the store across the street
is empty. it would be a nice place to sit and talk in the morning over
coffee.
my kuri zup is well under way in the kitchen. i’m not going to keep
adding to this letter as i just wanted to write you goodnight in case
you check your email after coming home from Pavel’s father’s
celebration. i hope you had some cognac.
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Broken glasses
ะะฐัะฐ: 30 ัะตะฝััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 12:51
dear zh,
I don’t know how familiar is “drastvi” and whether I should not use it
unless I have known you since childhood, like the “Zhenka” I am still
not allowed to use.
Last night one of those dreams. I was on a tour with a tour group and we
were climbing a steep hill where there were ropes strung across at about
the height of 5 feet for us to hold on to as we were climbing the steep
hill. In the climb, when I reached the top, I realized I had lost my
glasses, but by the time I decided I would return to look for them, it
was getting dark, and we were inside a tremendous palace, or
entertainment arena (many stairs, gamerooms, people–maybe it was Las
Vegas, though I have never been to Las Vegas). I left this Caesar’s
Palace or tried to leave it, and I had to take one circular route after
another, getting more and more lost, further and further from where it
was that I want to get to, and when I finally got out of the building, I
was miles away from the steep hill where my glasses were, among
intersections of cars, traffic, petrol stations, then later in the dream
I had found my glasses but they were an old pair (not the pair that I
broke in Tomsk) with one lens missing. The dream ended in snow on the
hillsides (there was a landscape, a quite beautiful snow-covered
landscape, and earlier in the dream someone in the group had said ‘oh
look at how beautiful the lights are down there’ and when I looked, it
was amazing how high we were on the hill. End of dream. High hill. Snow.
No glasses, or, rather, broken glasses.
Three long phone calls yesterday. Two from American colleagues who both
live in this building, and another from the Polish colleague that I was
helping to translate several of his poems. I am not used to such
conversations though they are better than no conversations at all. I
think it must be difficult for people to be away from their ‘home’
country. The one American has lived here for five years (actually he is
Canadian and Canadian-citizen but he lived and taught in Los Angeles and
graduated from college there as well) and we teach at the same Academy
of Mgt. now. Our conversation was about teaching composition, as that is
what I must teach (two courses) at the Academy (the Dunce College) and
as he is a teacher (former high school teacher in L.A.) he likes to talk
a lot about materials and I think we may even collaborate a little on
our classes this year if the students prove difficult. I have heard him
in conference with students at the institute and he is quite a good
teacher, even better than I am with composition, since I don’t like to
be very specific, and actually I am not very good at telling students to
re-write, which of course they must do at that level. The other American
that called me had just returned from the States today (yesterday) and
sadi again and again how glad he was to be back in Poland after a summer
in Texas, his home state. I was rather surprised that he called me so
soon (in comparison, the only phone calls I made the day I got back were
to you and then to colleagues to find out about the conference) but we
had had several long conversations before as he got me my job at the
Parrot School and sometimes our classes ended at the same time. He is
not a very good teacher at all, and his students don’t care for him, but
as far as I can tell, he is not a bad person in conversation. He returns
to the U.S. at the end of this semester. And yet a third conversation I
had at the institute yesterday, with the American colleague at whose
house I left my printer and other few valuables, and I am going to visit
him this Saturday to ‘pick up my stuff’ as we say in English. So that
was three rather long conversations with Americans yesterday, using
American idioms, American speech rhythms, patterns, vocabulary, and the
overall effect must have an impact on my subconscious, and I am also
reading a long (almost interminable) novel called U.S.A. which is also
full of idiom and as I mentioned yesterday, what I realize now as an
ur-novel for much post-war fiction, I am even reminded of Gunter Grass
(have you ever read The Tin Drum?) when I am reading it.
So the ‘broken glasses’ (things are never what they appear in dreams)
must be about the state of the language in me, of me, about me, my sense
of increasing distance from it, removal from it, even, alienation from
it. Again I feel that I must learn another language (not to replace the
one with the other, that is impossible, as I remembered once more
working with the Polish colleague’s poems–thank goodness they were very
short–all the sedimentation, and the geological figure is appropriate,
that accrues around each word, each phrase, the sense of weight and
awareness of usage, you can only learn this in speech, with speech,
using the language and more than using it, living in the language,
inhabiting it). Language, each one of our languages, is a site of
habitation, an environment, the most sustaining of all the spaces which
surround us. Think of the (subdued) terror (anxiety) with which Tanya
must be living. Most of the fear she is probably not aware of, being
happy for the evident happiness of her son, and children are so flexible
that he will probably be as ‘American’ as a McDonalds hamburger in
several years, but for her the experience must be one of being unable to
breathe some days. Of course it is different if (like yourself) you have
a strong command of the alien language, still, I think you would notice
(and knowing you, be amused by) the gap between your English and the
environment in which it is used there. It is much more than a question
of accent. It is also the expressions on faces, the postures of bodies,
how people are in public spaces, how people speak behind desks and at
services, how people speak on the phone, how people speak to one another
at work. I always remark or repeat the remark always made to me in
Russia and Poland from those who have been to the U.S. and yet who are
not entirely acclimated to the ways there, that the casualness and even
impoliteness (if casualness is viewed as impoliteness) is always a mask
for extreme distance between people, and one should never confuse a
friendly gesture with genuine friendliness. I do this as much as anyone,
and I do not know how many people whose surfaces I pass across and whose
presence (and I experience people always as a demand and weight and
pressure on my consciousness, an interference and disturbance) I
tolerate, and when they are gone, out of my sight and hearing, I never
think of them. I always associate this, in my case, with extreme
isolation of my upbringing (childhood, whatever was good in it spent
reading) and sense of profound estrangement from my immediate
surroundings. I often am convinced that I was as much a foreigner when I
lived in U.S. as now.
Anyway, and anyhow, how, my dear, was your celebration party last night?
Do you have a slight headache? Sometimes I think I would have liked to
known you in your vodka-slugging and cigarette-smoking days (notice I do
not refer to it as your youth) though we would probably have tried to
outdrink and outsmoke one another. There is a certain abandon that comes
with such pasttimes, and they are pasttimes, not habits–that Puritan
word. There is nothing wrong with anything as long as it is done for
pleasure and not addiction, and even addiction is manageable as long as
it doesn’t interfere with the day-to-day demands. When I remember a time
in my life when I drank strong alcohol, I can attribute to this custom
(it was a custom for me, and an addiction that I had for as long as I
wanted to do it, and when it was no longer useful, I stopped
it–actually, I stopped it for economical reasons, and also the shock of
the foreign country–one must be careful and not get very drunk in a
strange place unless you are in a very secure place) but at the time
when I used strong alcohol, this usage permitted me to see things in my
daily life that were harming me, and which I might have convinced myself
otherwise, in a state of perpetual sobriety, were really okay, and I
might have made compromises. As it was, there was enough abandonment
(the ‘leaving oneself’ that comes of departures from the rhythm of the
routine which is almost always imposed by work, by family, by place, and
of course, by the individual who allows themselves to be used this way)
that I was able to change the coordinates by which I lived, for as much
as it felt like being lost then, and abandoned. These are very powerful
experiences, and poetry, when all is said and done, depends on powerful
experiences. Vodka and cigarettes, even, can be a powerful experience as
long as they are not a regular experience, then the effects cease to be
perceived. These remarks are written somewhat under the influence of
several of Benjamin’s essays on experimenting with hashish. And as for
the place where these sentences started, it is very likely that you had
nothing stronger than good dark red Georgian wine last night, though I
think according to my own private social code, that if there is cognac
at a party, one is obliged to taste it.
My books are here, the postal note came yesterday. It is raining and I
have no umbrella. Yesterday at the institute I found some of the
addresses and information I need for requesting the necessary documents
from the necessary offices in the U.S. which we will need in Cypress.
There appears to be plenty of time, especially as you reminded me that
they can’t be over three months old, the date of issue, I assume.
Will you write me a long letter tonight?
That’s not a demand by the way, and maybe this weekend will be a better
time for you to practice your English.
D’you know it is rather difficult, not to say goodbye at the end of a
letter, as I never know quite what to say.
Why should it be the end of the letter. Why shouldn’t I write on and on
about nothing and everything that comes to mind.
It is grey and raining and not as cold as it was before the heat came on
though except for the radiator in this room all the room on my radiators
is now occupied by my laundry which is now in its third day of trying to
dry in the damp and the cold of the late September in Poland which
resembles descriptions in the Dos Passos novel of Paris and the cold and
the wet and the grey there.
Your photograph of you in the green collar or scarf and tweed jacket
with your hair curled and flowing very jewishly is smiling at me from
the desk to the left. You have a very nice smile in this photograph, and
I have in my mind from this summer several images of you smiling more
than you usually allow yourself to smile, great big grins across your
entire face, and of these they appear so natural that I don’t think you
are very aware of them, though I always felt very comfortable and
peaceful in the radiance of such smiles.
But I don’t think you care for me to write to you like this?
So I had better stop and go get my books. Then I will have a lot to
write you about. Don’t be alarmed about the Lenin paper. It’s an
American tradition to imagine the other (and Lenin is not other to you
though what that is, all those statues, I don’t know). But I know it as
a text and neither as a monument, or, worse, the social-structural
disaster in which you grew up. And, as you never tire of commenting, I
am naive (which in English can mean both innocent and ignorant). Naive
foreigner. But can you trust me a little intellectually? That there is
beyond the formulae and ruin of the state system and command economy, a
discourse in this pre-war writings about nationalism that is very
pertinent today because of the war configurations and intensifying
militarization. I have almost no use for anything Lenin wrote after the
revolution, and I don’t even read those texts as authored, but as the
expression of a collective will, a political party which lost its base
after the revolution, and caved in on itself, and which produced a
dictator. This is (to put it briefly) a serious problem. Bourgeois
politics, on the contrary, tends not to produce dictators, when times
are good. When times are bad, that is another story. The American from
Texas said several times yesterday, “things are pretty bad over there”
(meaning in the U.S., jobs, economy, etc.) How different from the news
from Tanya, full of hope of possibility and happiness with how the
children’s school functions and how friendly it is to her son and how
this friendliness is changing his behavior and making him happy and
making him want to do his homework. The immigrant always sees the
positive in comparison to the native, which sees the negative. We cannot
think too much about this contrast. It gets to the point where sometimes
I even cease to believe all my opinions (they are more opinions than
assessments or evaluations) of the U.S. society, since I can’t see it
from the perspective of someone who has suffered the deprivations of the
administered society and the command economy. My sense of wrong is
concrete: the posters about tuburculosis in the hall of the hospital in
Tomsk. This is wrong: tuburculosis was destroyed in Western Europe in
the 19th century. There is no excuse for it in the 20th (now 21st
century). Now I will make a wild surmise: to allow tuburculosis to exist
among the population is a form of terrorizing the society the same as
forced collectivization in the 1930s.
-end stop–(as they say in the proofreading world)
Thu, 30 Sep 2004 18:31:53 +0200
Round midnight
dear zh, this just on the off chance that you check your email ’round
midnight’ for tonight you would have said to me, “you are good cooker”,
as i made the old standard, garlic and onions and eggplant with tomato
compote on rice, now i am struggling against not going to the shop for a
taste of wine, the aftertaste of the dinner is the best since i got back
(must be the garlic)
earlier i was reading about lacan and how the lover’s experience
of the partner is always phantasmic, and i think i will write to you
about this tomorrow morning, both agreeing and disagreeing with it,
remembering you…
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Alternatives
ะะฐัะฐ: 1 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 13:43
dear zh
last night before going to sleep i read your letter and so in a sense
i’ve slept on it (an expression, meaning, more or less, to have been
thinking about) and the virtue about thinking about something rather
than responding immediately is that i’m less inclined to disagree with
you, at least in a superficially positive manner. you have a very fine
sense of the difficulties, even impossibilities, latent in our
situation. but i think it’s possible to disagree with you regarding the
possibility of seeking influence at the embassy here to ease your
citizenship process. this kind of thing is done all the time, and
whether or not it was possible, the outcome would still not affect your
ability to stay in poland, only your ability to travel. finally, i agree
that the prospects of education and/or work here, in poland, are
unlikely, and that you would have to accept a period in your life where
you were dependent on someone, and that thought, i’m afraid, is
unbearable to you, and full of danger. what are your alternatives? what
are our alternatives?
these questions asked this way are the result of ‘sleeping on’ your note
of despair, and i only hope that at this distance our separate notes of
despair rarely coincide, or our letters themselves will become
unbearable, though i want you to understand that your letter last night
is also a very beautiful letter, and I hope that you always write me as
you are feeling, and not how you wish me to feel. what i worry about
more than the dilapidated bathroom (such an ugly shower stall!) is the
absence, for you, of the friends since childhood you have, and
professional friends, even when the parties are boring, i think you
would feel very sharply the isolation that i live in from day to day,
and no two people are ever enough for one another’s company. this
isolative tendency might be adjusted by your taking classes, or entering
new teaching job, where you meet many new people, and make friends. this
advice sounds a little strange to me, as i am trying to sound polish or
russian, or at least a little beyond myself, as such socializing is not
a requirement for me personally, and i am a solitary to the point of it
being almost pathological. for me, it is a condition for reading and
writing. i worry also that i am not a very good companion from day to
day, and i have difficulty paying attention to details.
pathology could well be a lacan term (he’s a deep influence in western
intellectual history). here’s what i read yesterday that made me mention
him: “Lacan’s thesis that ‘there is no sexual relationship’ means
precisely that the structure of the ‘real’ sexual act (of the act with a
flesh-and-blood partner) is already inherently phantasmic–the ‘real’
body of the other serves only as a support for our phantasmatic
projections.” With such sentences, such thoughts, you will be suspicious
about the books that i ordered (they arrived yesterday). what strikes me
right now about this formulation is one, it’s pessimism about the
ability of the human being to even communicate, physically let alone
verbally, with another human being, and two, the absence of the thought
that in being with another, body to body, there is a primary form of
giving of oneself, and this giving and sharing can only take place in
the actual presence, the physical presence, or the other, the partner.
in no way am i trying to deny the phantasmic and the projective nature
of perception, but there is an idealism inherent on the limiting the
thought above to the single person, the single mind/body, the single
psyche. something very profoundly about ‘leaving ourselves’ happens in
the physical life, and i can’t understand it as simply illusory.
the philosopher quoting lacan in the sentence i quoted is from slovenia,
and i like his writing quite a lot. somewhere in the book i was reading
yesterday i am going to try to find a way towards my essay the abstract
for which i need to have by the end of october. you may have understood
my letters so far from here too positively, as i certainly try to be
positive, and there is nothing negative so far, as nothing bad has
happened, and there is for me the pleasure finally of returning to a
teaching position (this is the first time in my teaching, which, as i
remind you, is not so long, my first university job starting in jan.
2000. i taught at cleveland state for one-and-a-half year’s only. then
one year in chita. one year in tomsk, and now my second year in lodz. (i
did teach for three years in my 20s at the university when i was a
graduate student). still, i am one of those who changed their profession
at age 40. now that you mention it, i remember being quite frightened at
the beginning, and there were several years of extremely difficult
struggle. my own particular situation then, seven years ago, i almost
still cannot think about, since by my passivity only i found myself in a
position of dependency, and you are correct, absolutely correct, of
suspecting this, and wanting to avoid it. encouraging dependency in
another is one of the worst forms of domination, and you are extremely
sensitive to domination. what i wanted to say on the positive side, is
that the change in one’s life, my life, didn’t happen quickly, but
gradually, and now i would not have done anything otherwise, though at
the time i felt that i had done nothing but make mistake after mistake
and that even i was a bad person for wanting to change my life. if this
is going to happen, you have to decide that you will accept a level of
uncertainty, and we have a very nice word for this in english, actually
two words: accident and contingency.
you know that i come from a society and a culture which operates on the
principle of the accident, so my advice you will hear (you should hear)
as that from someone who is lonely and who misses you and who wants to
assure you that nothing would be better for you than to be here right
this minute. you have a very important job: to make me work. i think you
would be very good at this, and that you would enjoy it. i am only
kidding just a little. you helped me do very good work this summer, in
between erasing my hard drive (really the computer works perfectly now).
i can imagine very many people in your life saying this to you, but you
have very strong tendencies towards the reminding: what are you doing?
for me, it is partly a question of idleness, but worse, this condition
of being alone debilitates the will, and i am tired of it. i don’t think
we would get in one another’s way, here, and i think it would be
bearable, tolerable (don’t laugh!) for you for a year, maybe two, no
longer. i don’t want to work here longer than that, because i don’t want
to keep teaching conversation and 1st and 2nd year students. there’s the
possibility that this would change here as one or two or three of my
books were published, but i can hardly speculate about that. you know
how fond i am of the idea of continuing to live in europe, east or west.
there is probably more security for a u.s. citizen in the u.s., however.
so these questions, these problems, should, i think, be left open.
though this is probably also difficult for you, for me to say, let’s see
what happens. i wrote you the paragrah the other day about finances only
to assure you that my life here has some logic, and even a little
predictability, and there is no question about my having made the right
decision to come here from Tomsk. and yet there are so many other
questions now without immediate answers, so many problems without
immediate solutions, and my instinct is to argue with you for going to
Cypress, your returning to Russia, my coming to Russia in june (actually
it would be the first week of july if i go to the conference in
slovakia), our coming back here together with you taking a leave of
absence in case there are residence/passport problems, and then we’ll
see what happens.
what
do you
think?
k.
Sun, 3 Oct 2004 17:19:12 +0200
Where’s my Saint Bernhard?
dear zh
this by way of a good night kiss
it took more than two hours for me to go downtown and find a cartridge
for my printer, now my printer works and i am wasting time looking for
teaching materials on the net so i can avoid writing my syllabi which of
course i haven’t started yet (i think i should have started last week)
i was going to cook a turkey breast for dinner, but got lazy and made
almost instant pierogi instead
this evening will be an evening of formatting screens to make syllabus
copies (copies from previous classes for which i found hardly any among
my papers, and of course nothing’s left in my computer, or if it is, i
can’t find it)
so i do deserve to be made fun of (just a little)
i’m also very sleepy (coincidence that i have to get up early tomorrow)
what else can i complain about?
oh, yes, you are not here!
where are you? how are you? do you teach tomorrow. i don’t think so. but
you’ll be a work anyway. send me a syllabus if you have an extra one
lying around, it doesn’t matter what the subject is.
i hope there’s a good movie on tonight (another excuse not to make my
syllabus)
what do you suggest i do in order to organize my life better? it occurs
to me that i am more than a little absent minded.
and no music yet either, only a printer that works, with ink, a
computer, and a tv the volume is not turned up on.
i think i might drive you to distraction should you find yourself living
in the same space with me.
today on the bus i saw a beautiful saint bernard (do you know this kind
of dog?) he looked very happy. nice weather for saint bernhards. (i am
especially fond of the St. Bernhard as i remember reading that they
carry brandy and other strong spirits in flasks attached to their
collars to save wanderers lost in the snow). i should like to have a dog
that carried my cognac around.
what do you say?
(other than see you tomorrow …
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Here goes
ะะฐัะฐ: 4 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 11:00
dear zh
i made an important discovery this morning. the taste of the coffee
exists in exact ratio to the proportion, portion, of sliwki, so, being
at the end of my container (as well as at the end of my rope) i find i
have a stronger tasting cup of coffee. i hope this is not the last of
happy accidents (coincidences) this morning and this day.
this morning, however, i did not wish to wake up, as the alarm went off
at 6:00 (instead of 6:30 as i am trying to allow myself some time to
write you more than one of your signature “hibyes”). still it will not
be a long letter.
i have one syllabus for a seminar, that’s all, finally deciding that i
could not predict what i was going to teach for the conversation or
culture classes until i met with the students and found out whether i’d
had them last year, and if i did (it’s a distinct possibility) for
american culture, i can’t very well teach the same materials.
tonight i will be struggling with a survey of american literature
syllabus, which needs to be more a less predictable, both for myself and
the students. only now i realize that there’s a lot of work i should
have done last week instead of reading for myself, which thought
irritates me. and i still don’t know (and won’t know until this
afternoon) what my schedule is at the dunce college.
so you see i have many reasons for feeling uneasy, since i feel uneasy
when i don’t know where i need to be when, exactly when, it’s called a
schedule. i believe most of the world operates on this principle. also i
must remember to go the rectorat and sign my contract, though if i
forget i can do it tomorrow.
i have no other great news to tell you except that i am wearing this
morning to the job the shirt and trousers i bought in tomsk. they
haven’t fallen apart yet, though i could swear that the trousers have
shrunk in the (machine) laundry.
this is temporary message 0x8ad8fc8 according to the heading on the open
application. hope you have a nice day.
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Re: have a nice day
ะะฐัะฐ: 4 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 11:07
doragoya, the saint bernhard letter was your “evening” letter. i went to
great lengths to sound positive and with a touch of humor which, to be
truthful, i don’t feel, especially this morning. of course i will have a
lot to write about after my classes. i will send you the lists of
students names and report on their reaction to everything i said.
with the letter question you are, as with other things, insatiable. it
is a question of appetite, and i don’t wish to discourage you.
Re: Where’s my Saint Bernhard
Mon, 4 Oct 2004 17:31:07 +0200
dear zh, my saint bernard is here and brought me one beer (warka strong)
(stronger i hope than baltica 4) to revive me. it is a wise st. bernard
to limit me to one bottle as i must work on syllabi tonight. the fault
is not all mine, not just laziness, but as I suspected, many of my
students in both american culture classes are returning students from my
american culture classes last spring, where i taught and extended the
material i had taught in the american culture classes in the fall, which
now, all my notes, xeroxes, etc., are useless, except to those that did
not have me in this class before, though the classes of my two
colleagues with whom they did have classes used much of the same
material. so i have to change the concept, “flip the script” and come up
with something new. my idea is to bookend (inspired by you my smiling
bookend) the century and look at american culture from the present
moment in contrast to the turn of the century. the only problem is that
i have only a few texts so i must suddenly go on a materials hunt for
these two classes (the good news is that they are only 45 minutes long).
the other good news (apart from the fact that my imaginary st. bernard
brought me a bottle of beer) is that my classes at the dunce college are
all scheduled for wednesday except for one class on tuesday so that
means i have a FOUR DAY WEEKEND. that’s not too bad, three days on and
four days off. for 3 days of the week for 15 weeks = 45 days i have to
work this fall until mid january. not bad, not bad. but if you were to
ask me what is american culture right now i would say that it means
shaking your wang dang doodle all night long.
(to paraphrase louis armstrong, if you don’t know what your wang dang
doodle is i can’t tell you)
meanwhile, all my conceptual categories are dissolving into absurdity
(one conversation class had four students and the one after it had 34
students) so i am roasting a turkey breast in the oven which i will
probably eat like a caveman as there is no zhenya here to give me the
reason to use plates and silverware (how civilized we are!) and yes, now
i remember and now i know that those late afternoons when you would
bring me the latest creations from your mother’s kitchen one plate after
another was a version of paradise. don’t flatter yourself though, i
remember how you made sure you had the largest portions. but, for the
laugh, and i badly need to laugh right now, do you remember how on more
than one occasion we ate so much we could barely go for a walk, i mean,
to eat oneself into a state of pain, isn’t that paradise? (i think we
knew at the time that it wouldn’t last, and besides, who do you have now
to share the table with?)
appetite!
(it’s very important)
the trouble is, once you satisfy your appetite, you don’t feel like
submitting to the work regime, and that is what i must do very soon,
like tonight, to satisfy the expectations of my students, who, very
naturally, expect that i have something for them to read. i also have to
write a survey of american literature syllabus tonight, very serious
business, american literature. so maybe i will be up, awake, until very
late. maybe there is another cup of coffee in my near future. but, the
basic fact is, monday tuesday wednesday my life is given to my job, and
the rest of the week, mine mine mine mine! it had better be if i am
going to stay sane. i walked past a shop on the mainstreet called, in
english, simply, “eroticland” and my thoughts were of you, with you, for
you, beside you, over you and under you. so, where are you?
i repeat my thesis: they make us work so that we don’t stay in bed all
the time, and actively, active in bed? it’s counterproductive!
so, shake your wang dang doodle in the long hours of your insomnia
(which, as you’ve noticed, i also, um, shall we say, experience?) and
maybe i’ll write you a cheerful and longer letter tomorrow morning.
depressed? then,
eat something!
drink something!
imagine something!
(missing you)
k.
Top of the morning t’you
Tue, 5 Oct 2004 06:31:04 +0200
dear zh,
this morning i am afraid, if we shared the same living space, would be
one of those mornings when i was (am) incommunicable, irritable, as i
have been up since 4:00 a.m. with Literature Survey Syllabus and i have
just now finished it at 6:30 a.m. my normal waking time. i still have at
least one other organizational text to work on and then to the
university to get the work for next week into the student folders
(maddening organizational annoyances due to the fact that students do
not buy books here, and we have to copy everything or use books that are
in the small institute library). “i am fed up” and i haven’t even eaten
anything for breakfast. it is something that i hope you will understand,
that i have so many small details to attend to (and ones not to small,
as i haven’t the least idea what i will do for tomorrows four classes at
the dunce college, i have some materials from last year, but two of my
classes are returning students, so i must have new materials, which
means i must go to the British Council Library sometime today, or find a
textbook i can use from the Institute Library.) at least there are no
syllabi due tomorrow for these classes, though eventually i will have to
write one. so i will be doing nothing today except ‘getting organized’
and really, consumed. please understand that these nothing notes to you
right now simply reflect the around-the-clock demand on my attention to
get these (total of 11) classes started and then i will be able to relax
again, so, for example, thursday morning you can expect a longer letter
from me, and there might even be some of me in it, able to express
something or feel something. right now i am a teaching automaton. don’t
you have your robot days also? dinner last night at least was
acceptable, roast turkey, cabbage and corn, but even with such dinners,
made very quickly and with little attention in a dirty kitchen, and
eaten just as quickly, i don’t take any time and get little pleasure
from it, kind of like fast food take-out. sleep, though, last night,
from 22:00 to 4:00, so at least i feel a little rested. i worry about
your insomnia, knowing however that you drink very good teas for this
and that you pay close attention to your ‘states’ so i think you will
find a way to get some rest soon. there is more tension and aggravation
at your job than you write to me about? like teaching, it is boring,
though at least so far here i am left along. the secretary at the dunce
college who speaks a little english (enough english for me anyway to get
an idea of where i am supposed to go and when) told me she went to Egypt
for her “honeytrip” this summer. what a lovely word found in the
accident of moment, do not you think so?
k.
p.s. i’ll write again tonight if only to say to you, goodnight …
Admirable
Tue, 5 Oct 2004 18:10:08 +0200
dear zh
it is an empty feeling not to have any emails no matter how brief
waiting for me when i get home as i have just now walked in the door at
almost 18:00 so i hope this letter may reach you yet tonight if you are
sleeping until 10:00 in the morning you may going to bed late as well
and checking your email ’round midnight’ which should operate as
something of a slogan for us, as i will try to write you most nights by
18:00 or 19:00 so that you may have something, a little something, in
the late evening, before falling asleep.
i didn’t really need to get up at 4:00 a.m this morning as i had
finished with all the busy work by 13:30 and had two hours to spare so i
went to a cafe for a capuccino and read a novella by henry james. my
amer. lit. class was very good, went very well, it’s easy now,
introducting the syllabus, though i forget just how easy it is for me to
talk about 20th century (amer) literature like a house i have lived in.
i even read aloud a short story from sherwood anderson who writes in a
kind of relaxed colloquial style and i could hear this american idiom
coming into my voice which it hardly ever has now, the vowels growing
longer, the consonants softer, especially the word endings (what english
has of them). everyone appeared moved at the end of the story, and
seemed very happy at the end of the class. i try too hard to make the
students happy.
now, tomorrow, will be an exercise in unpleasantness, but at least it is
all at once, from 9:00 until 15:30, four classes straight, and at the
dunce college it would be a lot easier if i spoke a little polish, as
the students to not speak english as well as the students at the
institute. tonight i have to come up with some lesson plans, as i can
not depend on simply being conversational, as it is possible at the
institute. i spent 50 dollars on textbooks today, more from the anxiety
of not having enough materials, and foregoing the possibility of
ordering them as i was told i could, and the university paying for them,
as i did not know how long this would take, and i needed something
tomorrow, for tomorrow. so, i spent 50 dollars. though when i went to
sign my institute contract i learned that my salary has been increased
to 2850 zlotys a month, which is almost 1000 dollars at the current rate
of exchange, but it appears that i am now earning something like 800
dollars a month from the institute and another 1600 zlotys at the dunce
college (about 400 dollars). this still doesn’t sound right to me, that
i’m earning about 1250 dollars a month here. i’ll have to wait and see.
it also means i should take my teaching seriously as apparently one is
rewarded here in proportion to the work they do. on the other hand, one
wonders if the propaganda is true, and if poland isn’t an ‘up and
coming’ (expanding) country. my cost of living expenses in comparison
are ridiculously low though food is rather expensive, more expensive
than in russia. i recite these facts once again because partially they
surprise me, and partially i wish to assure you that i am managing
rather well here, and that life is different than if i were teaching in
russia, and if you were here, there would be not so much pressure
economically as we have discussed before (fear of the pressure, etc). we
would have enough money to go to restaurants, that kind of thing. and of
course, always, living simply. you are rather a master of living simply.
and d’you know i rather admire you for that (among many other things).
so, may i sign myself tonight as your busy admirerer?
k.
Re: before go to bed
Tue, 5 Oct 2004 18:13:33 +0200
zh,
but i just wrote you and you went to bed before it arrived! i checked my
email at 17:50 now it is 18:10 and from your email it was sent at 8:00
p.m.? when it should be about 23:00 your time? could you check this
again? when did you send your email (this one) and why does it take so
long to get here?
(missing you)
Off to the dunces
Wed, 6 Oct 2004 04:55:45 +0200
dear zhen, good morning, in the early (for me) a.m. You have already
been up and around for a while, though maybe not, if you are, once in
awhile, able to stay in bed until 10:00 (it is 9:00 in the world where
you are, or, really, where in the world are you?)
typical anxiety dream last night: you were in a meeting with one of your
superiors and the question on the agenda of the meeting was bringing me
to speak or teach at your department/university and for some reason in
the dream i was able to listen to the conversation between you and your
superior (you were not able to hardly speak at all, by the way) and your
superior went on and on in a loud authoritarian (with quite good english
by the way) voice about how undependable a person i was, recalling in
particular the film camera i broke in chita which they still can’t fix
or replace (i don’t remember breaking anyone’s film camera in chita).
you can see the sense of the dream, at least the surface sense, how, in
the eyes of the authorities, i am a worthless person unable to be
trusted with any responsibilities or employment. why i should be in such
a state before a day of classes at the dunce college i don’t know,
unless of course it is the worst students which challenge us. my worst
group is my first group this morning, though as they are a returning
group, it won’t be quite so difficult. today: two returning groups and
two new groups. the expense of the textbooks i bought yesterday seems
superfluous now, a needless expense, and i have half a mind to return
them, but i can also recognize that i need them psychologically for
organizing some kind of 15 week plan for these practical english
courses.
i don’t know how many times i’ve been in this situation in the last
several years, feeling like i’m starting out from the beginning with no
materials, no ideas, no lesson plans, etc., no structure at all, when i
have accumulated a lot of experience at this point and can improvise, i
have access to a xerox machine at the institute 10 minutes away from the
dunce college (i didn’t have this luxury in tomsk and had to pay for
each page i copied), and there is not a great deal of supervision.
hardly any at all, for that matter, which should also contribute to less
anxiety than more, and still, i am anxious, nervous, upset.
so, no, i don’t notice much about the shops, all of them i have seen
before, i haven’t read anything since yesterday afternoon, when, as i’m
sure you might add, i might have been writing you a letter, and i hope
you will understand by now that writing you here, this way, is beginning
to feel the closest to spontaneity, where i am able to recognize and
convey my moods, the ups and downs, more like real life, actual
together-living life, than the formal frame of the handwritten letter,
as lovely a gesture as that is or can be. maybe i am not in the mood
where i am capable of such gestures. this morning, for example, i am
writing you upon first waking, writing to the first cup of coffee, and
the effect is almost therapeutic, i feel better as i write to you, and
less in a panic. yesterday i wrote you after i’d been preparing
materials for a couple of hours, and you might have noticed the
difference. the rhythm is sure to develop. i will try to write you every
morning like this even if you can come to expect at least on some days
not much more than an assessment of the mood for the morning, and then i
will try to write you (on my workdays mon tues wed) when i get home
about 18:00 and other days maybe about this time as well, depending on
my schedule (obviously i have to be at home at in front of the screen).
what i’m trying to say is that we are still establishing a rhythm of
communication. i know for example that i was disappointed yesterday when
i came home and there was no email from you and yet you had sent me one
at 20:00 your time it appeared. so we have to accept this also, such
delays, though i thought email was supposed to be rather instantaneous?
my cup of coffee is empty and i must make another one and i have two
hours to prepare for four classes then i must bathe and breakfast and go
to the institute an hour before classes to make copies. both last night
and the night before i slept fully clothed on the sofa in my office (i
have turned the largest room in my flat into an office with two desks)
and papers are everywhere, and books, laptop on the tabletop, and slept
as well with the light on, not the brightest light, and without blanket.
the effect is like that of an afternoon nap, and though i slept for
almost seven hours, i slept lightly, always aware that i am sleeping, so
that i do not oversleep. tonight i think i will go to the bedroom and
sleep late. there is no better form of nerve-repairing.
with a brief kiss at the door as i fly down the steps …
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Your words
ะะฐัะฐ: 6 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 20:47
dear zh,
any words from you are a delight. i am tired as in dog-tired, teaching
from 9:00 this morning until 15:45 with only 15 mins. between classes
and since i was in the same classroom, i didn’t move, drinking only from
a water bottle that i brought with me, teaching conversation and
compostion. _ya robot_ is the new will smith movie in town and on the
posters and i identify with the title (only “ya” in polish is “ja” in
case you are curious). da.
i am tired.
i feel like ‘tying one on’
where is my st bernard?
i should just go to sleep. the news about the translation is an
important one. i wonder if anyone will read it. i need your help
sometime in contacting the university in chita about obtaining a copy of
the conference publication which published a copy of my essay on
Jonathan Swift into russian there as well, that makes two essays i’ve
written that have been translated into russian. two more and i’ll be
able to publish a small monograph in russia, and in russian translation!
i am curious as to what you think about my ‘thought’ translated into
your native tongue (and mind). (actually, i never forget you are
russian, though by your own account you are a rather unconventional
russian). write me write me when you get the chance. my mind is like a
burst balloon right now, through, done, tired, very tired, talked out.
if you were here i would rest my head on your lap and groan. you would
stroke my hair with your very gentle fingers. then we would go to the
restaurant, and i would have a glass of cold white wine (very refreshing
when one is tired).
now i have to begin all over again and start preparing for next week’s
round of classes. my students are managable at the dunce college, and
there’s still one class that i haven’t met with yet and won’t until next
tuesday. i badly need more teaching materials from the net. i was even
today using some things i downloaded last night and they worked very
well. i can’t depend on textbooks, not even ones that i pay 50 dollars
for. i saw the same edition of the IELTS book you ordered for our
classes in tomsk (with tapes! you are so efficient!) and now, after all
is said and done, are you satisfied with our classes? i saw the book
yesterday and my first thought was that i owe you the tuition as i don’t
think you learned much as you are so fluent in the subject that i don’t
even think you needed a teacher, not really. but it is your habit to be
very thorough. so you were and so here we are. where is your letter?
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Slumber
ะะฐัะฐ: 7 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 13:55
dear zh
this is it, the life of riley. i just now woke up at 9:00 or rather, one
of those mornings when one continues half-awake half-asleep refusing to
get up, listening to the cars in the street below, people going to work.
you write very nice letters when you want to, and do you know that you
are quite a good story teller? it’s interesting, the thief for whom the
documents (themselves quite valuable) was so unsophisticated that he’d
rather throw them away. when i was in chita, tatiana’s office at the
university was broken into, and her passport stolen, and they said that
there was a great trade in stolen documents, and they are worth quite a
lot of money. how do you protect yours? i think you probably carry your
passport with you all the time, from habit? my passport here is always
in the coat (the inside coat) of whatever jacket i’m wearing, and your
story reminds me that perhaps that is not the safest place.
last night i found quite a good (and short, only about 35 pages)
textbook for composition for EFL students (the site was from China or
for Chinese students) and i feel a little more relaxed about my two
composition courses at the dunce college. the important thing is for
them to always have something to do, in class, as well as to give them
weekly writing assignments. these of course i will have to read and
comment on. there are 21 students in one class alone. i haven’t counted
my students yet, but it’s very likely that i have more than 150. the
worst thing, though, when i look for materials on u.k. or u.s. sites,
composition has been taken to the web, students write into the web,
teachers read their work on the web, they read and communicate via
print, and the materials, the teaching materials, are circulated on the
web. if i could do this it would save me countless hours of looking for
materials, and the aggravation of reading student’s handwriting. here,
now, my students tell me that a 24 hour dial-up connection costs 59
zlotys a month, about 15 dollars, comparable to the u.s. and yet the
schools are so much still in the soviet period that they don’t provide
computers (it’s almost criminal how there are so few books and
technological resources provided, almost like an institutional
deliberateness which communicates, until schools privatize, you will
have nothing with which to learn, and of course the burden falls on the
teachers, because we want to teach something, but if we do, we must do
twice the work.
many of my polish colleagues are simply cynical about ‘the powers that
be’ and don’t take too much care about it (sound familiar?) but at least
students here can’t bribe for a mark or exam score. other than that,
there are probably many similarities between the two systems we are
forced to function in, and they seem to create such a passivity.
yesterday, i taught very hard, very active, and very interactive, and i
could see the immersion effect, this element of the language teaching
when the studied language is the only one used in the classroom, and the
students must use all of that language they know in order to understand
and to make themselves understood. in the process, they realize that
they know more of the language and it gives them confidence to use it.
in my first year conversation class, everyone spoke at least once. it
was shocking how many said they intended on moving to the u.k. or the
u.s. and these are students (many of them) who failed the entrance exams
at the state university! the scope of the gap between east and west
europe becomes apparent in such moments, and i don’t think this gap can
be closed logically, economically.
i have something of a cough this morning (more or less from congestion)
but it reminds me that i must take care about my health in terms of diet
and sleep, or i will get sick (and you know how depressed i get when
even the slightest cold interferes with my nervous system). Also, the
doorhandle to my office broke, and right now there’s a pigeon on my
windowsill. What else could go wrong? i should vacuum today, but if i do
i’ll probably never find the small screw that came out of the doorhandle
and which i need to fix it. life is very complex sometimes.
as for online courses, they are like correspondence courses (the one in
english you took from Moscow State University many years ago). be
careful about sending them any money. i imagine open university has some
of these. they would be best for teaching writing. you are very apt with
using new vocabulary i.e. your recent ‘zonked’ though i have never heard
the word george used as you suggested. i was only joking the other day
when i quote from a line from a blues song i’d recently heard, all of
that other dimension of any language exists in the air and climate of
the streets and going back and forth to work in public and hearing
people, the mass of common people, using the language, and they use it
with sometimes a terrible awareness of the sound features, so ‘wang
dang’ for example isolates that nasal ‘ing’ sound that so often is
dropped (neither is it supposed to be nasal) but it is not one of the
sweetest sounds in english. and yet so prevalent, as even in the word,
english. the illogicality you note may be a surface feature, the graphic
(visual) character of the language having been affected by wholesale
absorption of thousands of words from other languages in the 15th and
16th centuries, and the limitation of the 26 letters of the alphabet to
indicate sounds, but what i worry most of all, and i’m reminded of it
constantly in my teaching here, is the ‘washing out’ or ’emptying out’
of english, the simplification and abstraction it must undergo for so
many people from so many countries to be able to use it to communicate
with one another about very precise items, and in the process (and it is
a historical process) the mud disappears from the language, and it is
this mud that poets wallow in, like pigs.
as for your simplicity, yes i do worry about my ability to support your
less-than-simple taste in luxuries, and that is your affair, a
reflection of your needs and wishes, and i don’t think anyone has a
right to comment on another’s penchants. it’s also, perhaps, on your
part, an expression of independence, that you support yourself, and have
succeeded, where especially so many women fail, in avoiding the
emotional and material sacrifice of the ‘family’. this success should
give you every reason never to second-guess, to doubt, anything nice
that yougive yourself, and i am always very happy for you when you
mention that you found a new sweater or other item, and you choose very
attractive kinds of lipstick. my concern is that this independence
depends on your economic independence, and that is what is threatened by
our plans and schemes for trying to make some kind of life together
somewhere other than the places where we are now. this is really the
first time in my life (this very year, and until i teach these courses
several times i will be run ragged organizing and preparing them) i have
a little extra money. the last ten years have been for me an experiment
in just how much poverty someone can suffer without sacrificing their
mental health, and their is nothing so damaging to the mind and spirit
than the humiliation that comes from poverty. there’s nothing special or
noble about it. however, i emerged from this period in my life with an
extremely reduced set of expectations (like being able to listen to
music) and to be able to read from a few books at once. i don’t mention
this to worry you, only to draw attention to the spartan-like conditions
that i have adapted in order not to lose my health. one thing is very
positive: i feel strong and healthy and confident, and know that i teach
competently when not more than competently, that my students are not
disappointed when they come to the classroom, that i do a good job, in
other words, and this is very important for my own self respect, which
has developed and grown in the years since i went abroad.
about self respect, it is not at all “sucking up” to write as you do
about my essay for the toleration conference. rather, it is exciting and
uplifting to hear from you that you read it in russian translation, and
through the translation, obtained a glimpse at the kind of writing i am
capable of. this writing doesn’t come from a void. the best writing
depends on a certain emotional and intellectual stability, and freedom
from fear and anxiety about work and daily living, and i don’t have that
quite yet, i haven’t quite crossed that threshold yet, though i sense
its gradual and eventual approach. i find myself wishing to promise you
that the same person that wrote the essay you recently read has also
written some very beautiful poems in his native language, and i mention
this not to send you to the poems, not to ask you to read them, but to
understand just a little the pressure under which i live, which is not
always a personal or private pressure. some responsibility towards one’s
language and culture is involved, as well as whatever is called
‘historical responsibility.’ i suffer many days from what appears to me
sometimes to represent a falling away from or collapse of earlier
ideals, merely in the struggle to survive without falling miserably into
poverty or having to depend on some external provider or patron. as a
result, i am about mandel’shtam’s age when he died, but in perfect
health, with a clear means of self-support, and an active and curious
(assmiliative) mind, even though i am disturbed and disappointed by my
inability to learn languages very quickly. once i thought i only needed
to be exposed to them to absorb them, and that was very naive. there is
probably no harder mental work than learning another language.
you exist very materially and solidly on this horizon, or threshold, and
i was very moved, touched, yesterday, when you wrote about your
impression of the thought conveyed by the translation of the essay. more
than anything, i need to work, to write, and the more that i am directly
engaged in my writing, the happier and healthier i am, and the better
person i am to be in company with. it’s the being prevented from working
and writing at the level one knows oneself to be capable of which proves
so debilitating to the will, and numbing to mind and spirit.
do you know when you tell a story that your native russian-ness comes
through the detail, the attitude, the perception? the effect is
delightful, and i am reminded very sharply of just how much i enjoy
being near you and speaking with you every day.
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Re: Get UP
ะะฐัะฐ: 7 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 18:06
zhen, now it is my turn to ask where is your letter at 19:00 your time?
where?
On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 14:24:58 +0600
“Lukyanova” <lev@tpu.ru> wrote:
> kevin, dear, it is 9-20 am of your time. is it so difficult to write
> me acouple of morning words on your free morning? GET UP!
>
>
>
>ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Re: get down, get around, get out, get off
ะะฐัะฐ: 7 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 22:15
dear zh, maybe just before you fall asleep or maybe if you are already
asleep, when you wake up, for i have just woken up, after 3 hour nap,
which you will be jealous to hear about, as i was jealous to hear of
your 10:00 a.m. sleep-in, which is better than a break-in, and i am
being reminded at this moment of the double pleasure of the day off, as
not only does the nap remind of the night, but there is one more morning
(or post-sleep) cup of coffee, which i am having now, and how could i
not have a cup of coffee without writing you? it is incredible to
believe that my morning letter only just arrived in your evening, did
you check your email earlier in the day for it? if not, we must
complain to the Postmaster General or Postmaster Global, whichever is
the case for email (unfortunately, there probably isn’t one, only
technical explanations). i have read and read today and cleaned my
kitchen without bothering to shave, which rebellion against the morning
routine feels like the Boer rebellion, though i don’t know why i think
of the Boers, except that there’s a Dutch-English English floating
around the world in the region of southern africa. The concept for my
2nd year American Culture came to me today, the Demon of Analogy,
looking at the two ends of the twentieth-century and discussing
parallels and divergences. i only just realized also today that i need
to emend my Survey syllabus to include the choice of one of three
novels: Gatsby’s The Great Fitzgerald, Rises’ the Sun Also Hemingways,
and William I’s As Faulkner Lay Dying. Simply because suddenly i feel
like reading them again after reading Dos Passos (which now once in a
while i wish i’d bought in tomsk, do you ever go back to that bookstore,
which is not, by the way, a hint for you to buy the book, only to say
that i miss that bookstore). tonight i will be reading from Manhattan
Transfer as I must teach this novel in two weeks and i have only just
now been reading it. (and yes i’ve got to learn to let the students do
more work, instead of feeling like i’ve got to pour over everything and
have all the answers in advance). still, tonight i feel like i’ll do a
search on the internet for anything relevant to dos passos, whose
pre-war writings are rather interesting to me. tomorrow morning i will
go early to the university to check out some books from the library and
hopefully conduct round two of my residency paperwork so i have prove of
residence that i can take to the passport office and then, at the end of
the month, or as soon as i get my card, take out a permanent dial-up
internet account. then life will become a little more bearable. even,
without you, if just for this little while. missing you,
k.
> > On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 14:24:58 +0600
> > “Lukyanova” <lev@tpu.ru> wrote:
> >
> > > kevin, dear, it is 9-20 am of your time. is it so difficult to
- > > write me acouple of morning words on your free morning? GET UP!
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Thick Fog
ะะฐัะฐ: 8 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 11:59
dear zh,
this morning is classic london fog, thick fog, though i hope without
rain, as i must go out in it. yesterday i succeeded in not leaving my
flat at all, not even for drinking water which i am presently out of and
which i will pick up on my way home late this afternoon. it seemed to
rain off and on all day yesterday, and i chose not to risk getting wet
with my congestion cough.
your mere mentioning of how you would like to sleep into 11:00 next year
in poland invites me to play one of my favorite games, imagining how to
arrange the apartment for the two of us. the smallest room next to the
kitchen (both rooms face a small street and are more quiet than the two
rooms that face Marysinska) would be the best room for a bedroom, all
that is in there now is a single bed such as in your bedroom (without
weight machine) and a wardrobe where i keep the vacuum cleaner. the room
that i used last year for work, what i have called before the ‘light’
room because of the furniture (very nice wardrobe where i keep my
clothes, glass-paneled bookcase, desk, and firm sofa which folds out
into a double bed) could be your room, if you liked it, the only problem
now is that there is no door, this is the only room without a door,
though that would not be difficult to rememdy. it’s curious that in the
room that i hardly used last year, what i call the dark room again on
account of the furniture, is the room now where practically i live,
though last night i did finally sleep without being fully clothed in the
small bedroom. i really like the way i have organized this room and i am
sitting in it now, writing to you from a more or less permanent place
for my laptop, which might as well be a desktop pc.
i did some valuable work on my amer. culture syllabus, the one that i
had to change because of the returning students, and after today and
fetching some books from the institute’s library (my first order of
business today) i will have these two classes organized. also i read 125
pages from Manhattan Transfer, which i am beginning to rather like as a
mid-20s novel, and several chapters from one of the new books that i
ordered from the bookstore in krakow. finally, for an hour before going
to bed (so different from falling asleep, and i think this habit would
annoy you, i read on a sofa and fall asleep reading with the lights on
and yet it is a habit very important to me) i read poetry. also i ate
three meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner, as, they say, one is supposed
to eat: very simple supper: slices of cold turkey, rice and cabbage. in
other words, it was an orderly (sane) day and i did not feel exhausted
as on wednesday. one should never overlook the therapy of a 2-3 hour nap
in the middle of the afternoon, and as i am in this mood to pay close
attention to my states of mind, i noticed that i read extremely well
after waking from my nap and a cup of coffee (and writing you, of
course). the idea i had is that i must train myself to take naps on long
days of reading to make the best use of my energy and my time.
now, what are you doing besides working? i must also try to see about
some signatures on documents today, if i have the energy and if it is
not raining. do you have any running around performing errands you would
rather not do and so may choose not to do? will you go to the dacha this
weekend, or is it too cold and wet and out of the question? i didn’t
mention that for three days–my three crazy workdays–the weather was
pure sunlight and warmth, golden autumn, and i don’t think we will see
many more of those days again. my cup of coffee is empty, i haven’t yet
showered, and i must go out into the world to perform errands and
prepare as a responsibility contingent on my position in the world as a
conscientious teacher (i think i would rather choose another role,
though i shouldn’t complain, not on the second day of my four-day
break). do you expect a phone call this sunday, or should we wait until
next sunday? how are you doing in terms of loneliness? i amuse myself
with organizing my life, and keeping busy, and it is easier than last
year, even with the challenge of 11 classes, which i could not have done
last year at this time at all, i would have turned right around and
returned to russia.
please say hello from me to your mother and father and give them my best
wishes.
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Midday
ะะฐัะฐ: 8 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 15:33
dear zh, i find myself back at home about 11:00 for simple reason of
having forgotten my passport without which, of course, there is no
question of getting anything done at the administrative offices even if
i am successful at making myself understood by waving past (and expired)
documents in the air and repeating, in polish, please, please. (i don’t
know how to say “pomageetya” yet). how is your friday almost over if it
isn’t already?
what are you doing?
in the novel i was reading there are representations of badly spoken
french with english “ng” ending in places like ‘loin’ (far) spelt
‘loing’ as in ‘loing time no see.’ i never thought of the relationship
between _loin_ and _long_ before but there probably is one, so many
french words in english, and the nasal sound so difficult to master in
speaking french (and which polish is full of also) turns into the -ing
-ong -eng- etc. sounds in english.
that’s about it for my deep thoughts this morning. it’s back to the
trams and then to the offices (unpleasant day) though the fog burnt off
and it’s actually a nice enough and sunny day for me to change into the
jacket where i forgot my passport.
hope you have time to write me a line today.
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Bio-regeneration
ะะฐัะฐ: 9 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 13:59
Dear zh,
I thought you would be more than a little interested in the news of this
publication posted yesterday or the day before the mailing list the
article from the russian dissident i showed you in palangas and which
you agreed with. The science-research collaboration is one item of
interest, as, at least for me, the inclusion of Prigov as one of the
essayists, and among the number of short reviews i am only including
his, as the post is rather long. I do not know much about this line of
reading and writing, only that there is an artist in the U.S. under
prosecution by the govt. for working with biological materials. I
realize also that we are a long way from the materials of the earth,
minerals and mines and the age of rocks and rock faces, your area of
specialization, but biology, like geology, is, isn’t it, a “life
science”? I thought it might make interesting reading if you have an
interest about a very contemporary concern, and with a russian
connection, as here.
Of course by mentioning such items there is always the suggestion of a
re-orientation, to think about science reflectively, and socially,
instead of only an area of knowledge one applies to teaching and other
functions of an educational institution. I am struggling with this all
the time now in the sphere of culture and the arts. On one level, my
current work (and the news is official, yesterday there was a signed
notice from the dean informing my new salary is monthly 2840
zlotys–which, in addition to my 10 hours a week at the dunce college at
40 zlotys and hour adds up to (about! always about!) 4400 zlotys per
month or (about! always about!) 1000 euros per month. So, for good or
ill, this is a job, and i must treat it like one, which means work
outside the classroom, preparation, and it affects one’s (mine) reading
choices, as, to be prepared, and usually over-prepared, i read all the
materials i choose and so re-encounter issues and perspectives in
American literature and culture and really find myself thinking about
America and what it means to be American more than if i were in the
country and worrying about very American things like the high cost of
health care and impossible high rents for flats.
Yesterday was a numbing contrast to the day previous reading, as i had
to shuffle between offices, not completing my paperwork, for lack of
understanding about a form (there is really no hurry but i want to get
it out of the way) and waiting for availability of internet at the one
computer at the Amer. culture office, two colleagues using the internet
for purposes of time-killing and i was too polite to ask them to stop
using the computer like a television and let me work. finally i was
successful in finding in about an hour’s time the materials i needed for
mon-tue-wed next week, though the amount of teaching materials
especially for TEFL seems endless, and it is one of my goals to compile
a kind of anthology from these materials, so that when i do have to
teach one of these courses, i have everything to hand or on hand (i am
forgetting my own language’s idioms) and the work will be smoother and
less prone to anxiety as it is now.
Almost all of my other reading is restricted to the demands of the
courses, and it is amazing how, in response to this demand, one (me,
myself and I) would rather sleep, as i did this morning, sleeping until
9:00 a.m. and the first detail i took note of was that it was not
raining (i got uncomfortably and coldly wet yesterday evening coming
home on a day when i didn’t even need to be outside and this irritated
me so much that i actually slammed the door when i got home, a rare
incident of real anger for me) and i think i was more irritated at the
fact that as i wrote you earlier in the day, i had changed out of my
leather jacket into my wool jacket and walking back into the midday
warmth i had to face the evening wet chill and if i had kept my leather
jacket on i would hardly have gotten wet and neither would my wool coat
which was quite wet when i got home and water and wool are not the best
companions. on the subject of companions, do you see how your absence
affects my life? even though you refuse to carry an umbrella, preferring
to get wet yourself on many occasions, still you keep apprised of the
weather and you, if you were here, you would not have advised changing
into the wool coat from the leather one, and i would not have gotten so
wet and cold as yesterday evening. forgetting of the passport is another
issue.
when i got home after 18:00 i thought it was too late to write you and i
was in a bad mood so i made a simple supper of rice, peas, eggs, and ham
stirfried in a pan (the eggs hold the rice together) and it made an
acceptable (at least warm) supper. today i will cook the tongue of a
cow. will you make me forego this culinary pleasure when we are at long
last, together? no more tongue of the cow forever? did i mention that i
am doing laundry this morning, as it is not raining, not yet, so there
is small hope that my laundry will dry by monday morning. it is heavily
grey outside, though. today or tomorrow i must buy an ironing board as i
have already bought a very cheap iron which will last probably about one
month. last week i saw in an ad that an ironing board at a store too far
from where i live was on sale for 80 zlotys but i will have to go to the
supermarket close by, if it is not raining, and pay whatever they are
asking, since i do not wish to get on a bus with an ironing board. it
will be comical enough, walking home with one. maybe i will pretend it
is a surfboard. it is not cold enough yet to hide my unironed shirts
under my sweater as now thanks to you i have two sweaters to choose
from.
i wish i could include in this letter some considered thought about
culture and art but my mind is blank as yet having just woken up and
taken my first cup of coffee, so i hope you will accept the book notice
below in the form of a substitute.
finally, you know, we must read together the cypress materials (do you
still have them?) so that i know exactly which documents i need. i am
beginning to worry about time factor, as i have still not rec’d postcard
or letter from my mother and she was supposed to send something at the
beginning of the month to test the address as she seems incapable of
sending a letter here with correct address. i do not suppose it is
impossible but difficult to send the 5 and 10 dollar fees to the offices
which release the documents in the u.s. but i may have to do that, and
it is also possible perhaps that they can fax the documents to me,
though i do not recall if original signatures of the office clerk or
notary are required, and this is why it is important to refer to the
cypress requirements. do you agree?
k.
From Dmitry Bulatov, Kaliningrad Branch of the National Center for
Contemporary Art, Russia:
Dear collegues,
I would like to represent to you the international anthology
“BioMediale. Contemporary Society and Genomic Culture”, the joint
project of the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for
Contemporary Arts (Russia) and the National Publishing House “Yantarny
Skaz” (Russia). At the background of great quantity of popular
scientific literature devoted to the research into genomics this edition
is the first project in Russia aimed at understanding and complex
research of the influence of bio- and genetic technologies on various
components of the contemporary socio-cultural process (information, law,
ethics and philosophy, mythology, mass culture, contemporary art, etc).
One of the most important tasks of the book was to draw readers’
attention to the strategies of contemporary art and to stress their
peculiarities at the general background of cultural reflexions regarding
the development of bio- and genetic technologies. By means of
considering these strategies we intended not only to record the
development of such artistic phenomena as Ars Genetica, Ars Chimaera,
Tissue Culture and Art, but also to work out the notion of perspective
artistic activities aimed at cultural adaptation of the influence of
genomic and close to genomic research on contemporary society.
The anthology (Russian/English, 500 pages, illustrated) is divided into
several theoretical parts, which are supplemented with practical
materials (wet art gallery), short cv, bibliography and webliography.
To popularize the issues of bio- and genetic technologies in
contemporary art the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for
Contemporary Arts (Russia) in cooperation with the National Publishing
House “Yantarny Skaz” (Russia) are going to hold a series of
presentations of the this anthology in Russia and abroad. As a curator
of this project I will be glad to accept interesting proposals and ideas
related to the presentation of the book at museums, universities,
galleries, centres, libraries, etc. I would be delighted, if you could
pass the information about this anthology to critics and art critics,
museums, galleries, libraries, sci-art organisations and archives.
Sincerely Yours,
Dmitry Bulatov
Author and compiler of the anthology, curator of special projects at the
Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Russia)
“BIOMEDIALE. Contemporary Society and Genomic Culture”
Edited and curated by Dmitry Bulatov bulatov{at}ncca.koenig.ru
English-Russian, 27 x 21 cm, 500 pp., 412 ill., 50 col. ill, hardcover.
The National Centre for Contemporary art (Kaliningrad branch, Russia),
The National Publishing House “Yantarny Skaz”: Kaliningrad, 2004
ISBN 5-7406-0853-7
The book is divided into several parts:
– Science, technology and perspectives (the newest trends)
– Society and genomic culture (philosophic and social aspects)
– Art and genomic culture (historical aspects, mass culture)
– Contemporary art and new art strategies (ALife, Ars Genetica, Ars
Chimaera, Tissue culture and Art)
With essays by artists and theorists:
Birgit Richard (Germany), Sven Druehl (Germany), Critical Art Ensemble
(USA), Pavel Tischenko (Russia), Boris Groys (Russia), subRosa (USA),
Svetlana Borinskaja (Russia), Ricardo Dominguez (USA), Steve Wilson
(USA), Eugene Thacker (USA), Roy Ascott (The Great Britain) , Louis Bec
(France), Dmitry Prigov (Russia), Christa Sommerer (Japan), Mark Bedau
(USA), Alan Dorin (Australia), George Gessert (USA), Brandon Ballangee
(USA), Vsevolod Makeev (Russia), Marta de Menezes (Portugal), Valery
Podoroga (Russia), David Kremers (USA), Valery Shumakov (Russia), Adam
Zaretsky (USA), Joe Davis (USA), Eduardo Kac (Brasil), Dmitry Bulatov
(Russia), Ionat Zurr (Australia), Oron Catts (Australia), Melentie
Pandilovsky (Macedonia), Abraham Jorish (Russia).
Among the project participants are:
George Gessert (one of the bio- and genetic art pioneers), David Kremers
(one of the artists working in gene engineering sphere), Joe Davis
(artist working in the sphere of synthetic protein), Christa Sommerer
& Laurent Mignonneau (theorists and practiotioners of
bio-software-art), Luis Bec (one of the outstanding theorists of
Artificial Life), Eduardo Kac (one of the pioneer of the transgenetic
art) and others. The anthology theory core is supplemented with the
parts containing wet art gallery, bio-notes, bibliography and
webloigraphy (information embracing the editions devoted to
the subject), and a glossary.
Published with the assistance of:
The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
Goethe-Institute, St.Petersburg
Institut Francais – Alliance Francaise de Saint-Petersbourg
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
ZKM Center for Art- and Mediatechnology, Karlsruhe
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Harvard Medical
School, Boston
Art&Science collaborations, INC, New York
How to purchase this book:
Requests should be sent to: bulatov{at}ncca.koenig.ru (full info).
Full reference to this book:
“Biomediale. Contemporary Society and Genomic Culture”. Edited and
curated by Dmitry Bulatov. The National Centre for Contemporary art
(Kaliningrad branch, Russia), The National Publishing House “Yantarny
Skaz”: Kaliningrad, 2004. ISBN 5-7406-0853-7
Short Reviews:
“Besides being original, the anthology touches upon transgenic changes,
quite a topical and now even morbid issue, that is morbid not only in
art but in world culture; and if we look further it deals with a broader
and more general problem – new anthropology. There has been little
research, either artistic or cultural-philosophical, in this sphere
before, and all the more in Russia this is a pioneering project.”
Dmitry Prigov, poet, Pushkin Prize winner
Midafternoon
Sat, 9 Oct 2004 16:17:14 +0200
dear zh,
there were two shopping trips, a third was not to be (he never did love
shopping anyway). the first trip was for water where and when (wherefore
means why in romeo & juliette) i realized that water is cheaper here
than in russia as i pay 1.59 zl here for the same quantity, however many
liters it is, and since i always buy two (remember our trips to the
village well?) as that is as many as i can carry, i spend 3.20 zlotys
which is, roughly, more or less, according to current rates of exchange,
one american dollar. if i remember, the same quantity of water was hard
to find for less than 25 rubles in the shops around stepanovka, and
sometimes i paid as much as 29 rubles (never once over 30!) which is,
also, according to the current rates of exchange, about one american
dollar. so, you see, water is half the price as in russia here. is that
not positive news? i am sure that by the savings on drinking water alone
we will have enough for your lotions and lipsticks, leather, cashmere
and silk (“where did you the Armani bag?” she asked me). have you any
idea how incompetent i am in these matters? i am only glad that you have
no use for fur (in fact you may be the only woman in siberia who does
not wear fur in the winter). i should like to get for you your very own
new black leather jacket, as you are quite fetching (that means,
attractive) in the one that is 20 years old that you wear. lipstick and
leather, Armani underwear (does Armani make underwear? what does Armani
make? i think the bag was from a tie someone gave me a long time ago, as
i never throw my Armani bags away) though it is quite possible that
there were Armani items in the surplus brandwear stores near the now
former house of my parents in Florida. as bizarre as life is there, it
is quite possible that i bought a package of radio batteries and they
put it in a surplus Armani bag.
the second trip shopping was to the huge grocery and housewares
hypermarket where i learned that i can buy a smaller ironing board for
46 zlotys and i will not be quite so conspicuous carrying it home. today
i bought food, including an increasingly typical breast of turkey which
is gradually replacing my sunday chicken. i fancy that it is healthier
(without the skin and bones and flavorful fat). another current
indulgence is canned corn (it costs 2.99 zlotys or one dollar per small
can) which as i mentioned i eat with plain yoghurt and lemon. i have
been trying to drink more fluids for my health, mineral water and orange
juice, but there were so many ‘sample girls’ hovering around the juice
shelves and posted with their samples in front of the very juice that i
wished to purchase that i came home without juice, though the mineral
water i am drinking several glasses per day, as i noticed some tendency
towards dehydration on my teaching days. (also i take bottled water to
school now during glass). i am also quite fond of what in my letters i
call cabbage, but it is processed cabbage, rather sour, though i like it
with rice and/or potatoes. strange, you remember how fond i was of
potatoes in tomsk, and now i have only eaten them once, and almost never
buy them. instead, i eat rice, which, also, i imagine as healthier. then
there are things that i buy almost always, red cabbage (already cooked
and prepared), cheese, and bread. very likely, my diet is much as like
the dacha meals we made, only not half as fresh, nor friendly, as i must
eat alone.
did you know that Mandel’shtam’s death papers listed his birthplace as
Warsaw and his nationality, Jew? the system at his death did not want to
admit him into russia, did not want to call him russian, though what
would modern russian poetry be without him? this is from a recent book i
bought from krakow called “the Mandelstam and Der Nister files” (mostly
photocopies of administrative documents for O.M. and the Jewish writer,
Josif Penkasovich. I also recently read, in another book, a statistic
that estimated 85-90% of administrative personnel in the post-civil war
soviet administration were former tsarist-era personnel. but i am a babe
in the woods in these matters, and the bureacratic harshnesses of the
documents put me in a very sympathetic mind towards all your positions
against statism and (let’s be honest) your hatred of the communist
regime and the 20th century history of russia. sometimes i think you are
pessimistic as a result of all that you have personally seen and
experienced, other times i think you feel quite instinctively your
russianness and your language and your (subliminal?) articulateness in
that language. now, what to do with that articulateness? what to do with
what you know and more than know, what you have (and the possession of a
language is a dear possession). that is why i send you articles like the
one this morning, to pique your curiosity (not to give you assignments
or to try to give you a sense of direction). actually, having no
particular direction is extremely important, and i wonder whether i have
wondered in writing to you before about what kind of encounter of place
you might experience were you to come to Poland and to eastern europe
for a long period of time and would you feel more connected to Kafka and
Mandelstam and other jewish writers? the boundaries blur among language
when the literature of this part of the world (which includes russia)
begins to be imagined. as always, i do not construe such imagining as
dry reading, but soaking like a log in the sun the area and aura of a
time and a place. some days i think you would like lodz in particular
because of its age, probably the oldest-looking city in poland (and said
to be one of the ugliest, but i like it).
by the way, i was not imagining you in the room besides the kitchen, as
i know you would soon dig a hole in the wall to reach the refrigerator
in your insomniac sleep walks. i was imagining that room as the bedroom,
which means there is room enough here for us to have two separate rooms
complete with desks, wardrobes, bookshelves and reading chairs, in
addition to a bedroom (which is the smallest room, but what do you need
in a bedroom other than a nice big bed?) the oddest thing is my
doorhandle breaking the other day as i am such a fanatic (obsessive)
about closed doors that i even close the door to my room now, though
there’s nobody in the other rooms. the door is closed now. the closed
door separates me from the other rooms and gives me more space to think.
this is a longstanding habit, and one i have always had to defend. i go
to my room and close the door and no one is supposed to disturb me. of
course, i have hardly ever lived this way. most of the years i was
married i never had my own room. i lived in a loft in cleveland. one big
space. in tomsk i lived in a single small room. so this habit has been
developing here, and i only imagine the resistance to it. but it is the
nicest sense of privacy, and i wonder how you would feel about our
rooms/offices/reading spaces and whether you would feel that i just
wanted to be alone when, reading, doesn’t one finally exist alone that
way, in relation to the book? there is room as i mentioned for a small
table in the kitchen, like the one in your kitchen, and in the hallway,
really a bizarre area of wasted space (the small bedroom should have met
the other room and eliminated this wasted space and made the small
bedroom of course much larger) but there is room also in this hallway
area for another small table with two chairs on top of which i imagine
sometimes nice candles, a tablecloth, a bottle of wine, and us. we would
have to put some pictures on the walls. enough of that for now. the day
has gone so quickly. i didn’t go to the postoffice today for a phone
card hoping that next weekend would be okay as it is the one month
anniversary, and that seemed according to the plan we had discussed, two
calls per month, for pacing … if that’s what it’s called. i am a
little worried about my mood tomorrow, as i may be rather depressed
facing the next three days. it will take a week or two to get into the
rhythm, as i am still rather spoiled after all the time and independence
from drudgery of the summer. and you?
k.
Sat, 9 Oct 2004 19:35:24 +0200
Re: sometimes this box
dear zh, i am answering this right after your letter i downloaded at 19:30 maybe you will read it it in the morning it deserves to be answered the more boxes the better now i have a new address to include to your letters, for your letters, i know how important if only a few words are, they are, important, the words, i am sorry mine did not reach you today, i think of you, i am in the interspace of the day before the day i must work all day (tomorrow) so that monday is not so miserable and it is, teaching always is, i know that, you know that, i have heard you teaching, you feel sorry for your students, i heard that in your voice, we should be as positive as possible, i am feeling tonight, whatever that phrase means, i think it means that i struggle not to forget that i am a poet (please don’t laugh) good night k. On Sat, 9 Oct 2004 17:11:52 +0100 (BST) Evguenya Lukyanova <evguenya_lukyanova@yahoo.com> wrote: > hy, i can not open my rambler box because of some work they do there. > i want to say you good night, my night. my day was long and dull. i do > not know why i feel so exhausted ib the evenings. i did not do much > today, i even did not go shopping as the head of the department asked > me to listen to the report of the post graduate student. there was > nobody in the building except me and one more my colleague. then i > came home, ate a good slice of cabbage pie, and then i went for a > walk, that finished in the store where we usually bought food for > dacha. i boght fetacheese, yogurt and food for the cat. then i watched > tv – three programs simultenously, it is pretty difficult, and my > mother gave me a very good piece of advice – to go to bed from where i > am writing you that i like you and miss you. bye zh > >
Early quiet
Sun, 10 Oct 2004 08:01:50 +0200
dear zh,
coffee. fog. all quiet in the streets (not a car passing by) and quiet
in the block, the flats. and it is only 7:30 in the morning, a
respectably early enough time to get up on a Sunday morning (a car just
passed, someone going to church?) and by my own reckoning i have about
15 hours to prepare for two classes of conversation, one seminar, and
two amer. culture classes. i don’t think this preparation task would be
so difficult if i knew how at all to prepare, but i never know what to
expect, and what is draining, exhausting, is the need to improvise in
the classroom. but no more about classes.
not much has happened since i wrote you yesterday. i read, i slept, i am
awake now, as this email is supposed to confirm. i have almost finished
the 400 page novel that i will teach for the third week of my seminar.
as it turns out, a like this novel quite a lot (the one that in the
bookstore in tomsk) and the reminder is good for me, that the writings
from the u.s. in the early modern period (the 20s and 30s) still have
some surprises, that i haven’t read everything from this period, though
sometimes it feels like i have.
someone is moving around upstairs, i wonder if my coffee machine woke
them up? my computer in contrast to the coffee machine is rather quiet.
Sunday morning is a morning for quiet, don’t you agree? what do you do
on Sunday morning? i hope it is at least one day during the week when
you do not go to work, and if you do go to the office today, don’t tell
me about it, for i will scold you. especially if the weather is cold,
you should stay in bed and read. what new books have you found on the
internet? i wonder if there aren’t more books online in russian than
english due to copyright differences.
my clothes are still drying, as yesterday was neither a warm day nor wet
day, somewhere in between, and generally turning cold. it is warm enough
in my flat for me to wear a short sleeve shirt (the red one). this
morning around 11:00 i will go to the hypermarket and buy an ironing
board. i can hardly wait i am so excited. can’t you tell? strange
expression, we say ‘i can hardly wait’ when we can’t wait, but what does
that mean, that we wait for something to happen, something to arrive?
what else is there besides waiting? what else is there to do? if i say
that i can hardly wait, what should i be doing instead?
if the excitement of the anticipation is such that the intensity of the
feeling (as my extreme wish for an ironing board) affects the perception
of the time and the passing of the time, so that the hours will feel
like years until the store opens and i can walk in the fog or rain to
buy the ironing board, does this mean that i can hardly wait until such
time as today when i have, at last, an ironing board? i think it will be
possible to find other things to do in the interval between now and
then, and i hope that i will be able to concentrate on my reading, and
prevent the visions of ironing board and where to put it, and in which
room to iron, so that i may appear in pressed shirts, when, as you know,
in two or three weeks one will never wish to take off their sweater. of
course, this leads to the question, do i really need an ironing board?
why, then, did i buy an iron?
you see how complicated my life is. i was surprised that my students
last week in conversation class knew the word ‘complicated,’ but not
‘intricate.’ what is intricate? when you isolate these words sometimes,
even i wonder how many definitions i know. i miss your prize dictionary,
quite a good one. intricate is a word i would use all the time as though
i knew it, but asked to say what it meant, i had to use examples, like
designs woven into a tapestry, or wiring in a computer, but, as usual,
my explanations of a word become more complicated, or intricate, than
the word itself (a phenomenon that i recall you observed and commented
on back in the days when i should have made you write more, as it was in
my interest, to emphasize writing instead of conversation skills, as now
it is your writing that i depend on, and i wonder whether you find the
actual writing itself to present difficulties (i wouldn’t think so) or
the continuing problem of what to say, what to write.
this is universal. as you have noticed by now, i often write about
next-to-nothing, content with the activity of putting one sentence after
another, and filling in the space of the wordpad or whatever it is that
one calls the electronic space that one writes into now. the header on
my application that i am writing into now to you reads: tmpmsg.0x982e020
/home/doxa/.sylpheed/tmp (the name of the file and its location) in that
side of the computer you enjoyed watching me erase again and again
during the summer. now everything works very well and i don’t have to
worry about it, except for the schizophrenic effect that the other side
of the computer, with the windows software, is strictly for teaching, so
when i start up that side of the computer, i am greeted with a wave of
nausea, and when i start up this side of the computer, the linux side, i
am always happy and feel that i am escaping the demands of the
schoolwork. i think i must complain about teaching as much as i complain
when i am sick. i hope you noticed how hopeless i am when i have a bad
cold or the flu. today, though, i feel fine, and there’s no excuse for
doing nothing, or doing my own reading, for that matter.
i will, however, write you about 18:00 at the other end of this Sunday.
what are you doing?
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <evguenya_lukyanova@yahoo.com>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: One of these addresses must work!
ะะฐัะฐ: 10 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 15:02
dear zh, i have bad news for you (not really bad but rather amusing) i
was going to try to send you an email from the windows side of the
computer to compensate for the unpleasantness of having to write
something for tomorrows classes when i realized that i don’t have the
password to the account that i set up to send and receive email to/from
you and when i checked for the email password on the linux side (where i
am writing from now) the information is encrypted so i can’t find the
secret 7 digits so until i find the sheet of paper i scribbled the
numbers on, or until i set up another account, i will have to write you
from here, or maybe i should set up a yahoo.com for safe measure?
where is your letter, by the way, it is already 16:00 in your world.
two of my classes are already prepared for, though i still have to write
the syllabus and that is just what i was going to do when i came across
the passwd problem (typical for me). i am not as depressed as i thought
i might be today, but all i have been doing so far is reading, two and a
half hours for a single reading assignment (making lecture notes). no, i
am proceeding rather slowly, and if i am not careful, i will have a lot
of work still to do when evening falls.
what are you doing, by the way, or is your email circling the servers?
(i must remember the absence of a letter does not mean that one has not
been sent)
missing you especially today when i would much rather go for a walk with
you through one of the nearby parks where chestnuts are everywhere
falling to the ground and the leaves are yellowing and falling as all
around you (we are not that far away from each other after all as the
world still looks much the same, only yours is a little colder and more
prone to snow …
k.
At the end
Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:02:13 +0200
dear zh, this at the end of your day hoping you check your mailbox
before going to sleep for a few last words. yes, i was being ironic
about the ironing board, but i am about to go to the store and buy it as
the sun is shining and i have not gone outside yet today. i am halfway
through preparing for tomorrow. tonight is old american classic, the
movie, “Mrs. Robinson” with very young dustin hoffman (american actor,
quite a good one). one of my favorite lines of all time is in this film:
“plastics, the future is plastics” is advice given to the young college
graduate by a business colleague of his father, and it was a rather
prescient piece of advice. thinking of our plastic world. i know you
have a very strong streak of irony, but i wonder sometimes if you forget
that i do to, so i was a little worried that you might take offense at
my kidding about saving on price of water here in poland for lotions and
lipsticks. anyone who lives without an ironing board and who washes her
own clothes is the paragon of simplicity. it’s strange to prepare for
classes. i read (and wrote my syllabus) and i can see as looking at a
photographic negative certain directions of my deeper thought about
american culture developing, but the framework of the course prevents
the thought from developing more sharply, as my notes are not notes to
myself but to the class being introduced to some of these themes for the
first time. but today i have been reading Poe’s Man of the Crowd, a
chapter from a book written in 1924 called Port of New York, and a pulp
fiction chapter from The Postman Always Rings Twice (a great noir film
redone in the 70s or 80s with jack nicholson (you have the very bad film
that he’s in, As Good As It Gets, yes?) I recommend the Postman, even
the one he’s in, if you find yourself going to the video shop on lenin
prospekt. a lot of times i select readings for class based on the
instinct for contrast, here (between the Port and the Postman),
impressionistic utopianism and hard-fisted or pot-boiled disillusionism,
which i’m going to use as poles, opposities, to talk about one end of
the century and the other, panoramic euphoria and face-to-face cynicism.
poe’s story does both, classifying the throng, the mob (set in london
1840) and then focusing in on the figure of the ‘wandering jew’ who is
the stranger in the crowd, demonized, and anonymous, mysterious, and
estranged. this will be my seminar class tomorrow. cheerful stuff. don’t
you wish you’d studied philology instead of rocks? (actually, i rather
admire your study of rocks, and rock-history, and wonder if there isn’t
more there than in these here culture narratives). i’m feeling a little
cynical myself. d’you know they grow splendid juice grapes here? and
pears and apples. must be the climate. when i come back with the ironing
board i still have to read some articles about the internet for my
conversation classes, and i really should read henry james’ daisy miller
one more time, since i have to teach it on tuesday. have you ever read
james in russian (i remember you have the progress publishers edition of
some of his short stories, but i wonder what james would sound like in
russian). maybe like turgenev. i should have brought with me back from
tomsk your copy of tarantino’s pulp fiction, as i could have used some
of it for my city spaces seminar, vis a vis los angeles. at the time,
last summer, i thought it was of too poor a quality of a text, but it
would have gone well with the Postman story. tarantino is very popular
among students here. on the radio i’m listening to a cleveland rap
group, bone, thugs n harmony, which i once heard playing on the radio on
the marashutka in tomsk. strange world. where there is little room left
for stuffed shirts like henry james. sometimes i feel like a lot of
influences, impressions, are rolling over my bow, and it feels quite
good, mentally, when i’m reading, unfortunately, i have to do also
stupid tasks like typing out my roll sheets and they do not even provide
the teachers with lists of the students names here. that is when i feel
most imperialist, and long for the administrative conveniences of the
u.s. university, where everything is printed out from computer, students
names and social security numbers and contact information, here, whoever
decides to attend your class, is in your class. built-in inefficiency,
though i suppose that it has its own logic. i’m still learning what that
logic is. any ideas?
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Good morning
ะะฐัะฐ: 11 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 11:17
dear zh,
this is what my writing is like before coffee. notice the short and
uninspired sentences. i am waiting for the coffee to cook? yes,
percolate. or is boil the better word. in the case of your coffee at the
dacha, yes, the water boils (or almost) and with the coffee in the water
arriving at boiling temperature in the moments before the coffee is
burned the heating water becomes coffee. now i here my increasingly loud
coffee machine announcing that the coffee is ready (the machine plays
tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture) so i will soon return with cup of coffee
and write you long and inspired lines, sentences, words. do you believe
me?
i have nice about 35 minutes to write you and even a little more if i
become inspired. maybe i will drink two cups of coffee. my alarm was set
for 6:00 but i woke at 5:45 and this allowed me to iron my shirt for
today which i did before shower and shave, though i had to move the
ironing board from the bedroom to the room i do not use for any purpose
other than waiting for you to occupy it (don’t worry i will move the
ironing board back to the bedroom before then). there are no lightbulbs
in the bedroom (why does one need light in a room one enters only in the
dark and then only to go to sleep?) though there are other
inconveniences besides not being able to see to iron, like seeing the
time on the alarm clock. do you know that in english the wrinkles on the
face are the same word as wrinkles in a shirt? if i remember, you wish
to avoid this word wrinkles as much as possible, so maybe that is why
you do not take care very much about ironing boards and irons and the
irony of pressed clothes.
all of my work is done for today so that must mean that i am prepared
and then tomorrow i have only two classes, one at the dunce college and
one at the institute, so that should give me energy, not to mention
time, to prepare for the long wednesday. then it will be all over and i
will start over again.
i did eat beef tongue last night for dinner and with potatoes so i would
gladly have shared my potatoes with you, though they cooked too long in
the water, and got a little soggy. also they were tasteless round red
potatoes i bought in the hypermarket. there is an egglplant and yellow
peppers in the fridge and if you were here i am sure you would demand
that i cook this with rice. good idea. i also have breast of turkey
which i think you would like very much. it is my chicken replacement. i
should however cook the ground beef first which i make with macaroni and
tomatoe sauce (and maybe some eggplant) as the ground beef here does not
keep its color for very long, which fact makes me wonder what chemicals
they put into it for the color. do you ever go back to the hypermarket
near your flat, the one where we wanted to buy the cookies and couldn’t
because there was no price?
i finished my work in time to watch “Mrs Robinson” which i have never
seen, and the movie is only about 40 years old. the songs became popular
classics, by simon and garfunkle, almost immediately, and i remember
having the title song, Mrs Robinson, and Scarborough Fair, on what was
called then a 45 (small record with one song on each side which you
played on a record box with built-in speakers). this must have been in
1967 or 1968. so, yes, the movie is almost 40 years old. it would be
interesting to contrast it to the movie about the collective housing
flat we watched, do you remember the year that was made? in the american
film the young college graduate has very successful family (his
graduation present is an italian sports car) and there are many scenes
inside of individual mansions which are called “suburban houses” in the
u.s. the movie is set in los angeles and there are many scenes of the
west coast and even berkeley which was beginning to be known then as a
center of the anti-war movement (when the boy goes to berkeley to look
for his girl the roomclerk renting him a room says, ‘you’re not one of
those outside agitators, are you’? what is interesting is the level of
comfort and wealth projected by the film, and this is the subjectivity
the viewer is made to be inside of, and there is no self-consciousness
about this level of wealth and comfort, it is taken for granted, like
water and air. the story is about parental oppression, with the mother
of the daughter (the girl the boy is in love with) seducing the boy and
then telling the daughter he raped her (which was not regarded then as
serious a crime then as it is today). the daughter is going to marry
somebody else, and then at the last moment the boy breaks up the wedding
and the boy and girl run off together, without, one wonders, their
inheritances, though the boy’s parents do not object to the girl, so
even that is not a problem, at the end of the movie “rebellion” is
contained within the wealthy (bourgeois) world, and the worst thing that
happens is that the italian sports car runs out of gas and the boy and
girl have to run away on a city bus.
this world both does and does not exist anymore. to the extent that it
does exist, it could not imagine itself, its social relations, with such
lack of consciousness of the rest of the society, there would have to be
some gesture of inclusion, of which there is none in the 1967 movie, an
image of a very fat and happy white upper-middle class world, complete
with seductions (rites of passage) amid the transition from education to
career. the search for happiness duplicates the parental world so that
nothing is too much disturbed in the end. but what happens to the alfa
romeo the boy abandons when it runs out of gas? perhaps that is the most
vexing problem of interpretation of the film, and measure of sacrifice.
the italian sports car means nothing to him compared to the girl in her
wedding dress.
well, my interpretation skills are sharpened for todays classes. the
worst thing about teaching is that i am basically not especially
non-communicative but let us say, retiring, or receding, and i would
rather not have to perform in front of a succession of students today
divided across five (really six) classes. this is what is exhausting.
and it does feel like a performance, with the fatigue afterwards. but i
will write you when i get home, probably between 17:00 and 18:00 my
time. did you mention that you have early classes tomorrow? how early
does that mean that you go to bed on such days? by the way, how is your
insomnia? last night i was surprised, i wasn’t sleepy at all at midnight
but i knew it would be a disaster if i stayed up any later, so i made
myself go to bed (when is zhenya saying let’s go to bed and turning off
the lights?) and had no difficulty falling asleep. it is a good sign.
almost as good of a sign as not waking up at 4:00 a.m.
i have to be on the bus by 7:30 and it is 7:10 now (where has the
morning gone?) so i will write you again this evening and look for a
letter from you.
k.
Glee
Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:48:25 +0200
dear zh, oh, i am glad i got a girl to make me smile, and i am smiling,
now, being able to write you, and being home, after a long hard day’s
work. where’s my kiss?
let’s go to the restaurant, are you hungry?
good classes today but i don’t want to write about them. bone thugs n
harmony are on the radio again. sometimes i feel like i’m living in a
suburb of the u.s.
this is an asymmetrical letter.
you tripping on me? hmmm? zonked? i am. and tired. tired and happy.
tonight, daisy miller. what for i want to read no daisy miller.
somebody just rang the doorbell and i thought it might be a neighbor but
he asked me something in polish and i just said, nyeh, nyeh, shook my
head, and said djienkuya.
am i living in a state of studied bliss?
today i feel rather happy, and happy especially to have you to write to,
though honestly, zhen, what do you see in me (am i fishing for nice
things for you to say? you don’t have to answer the question). i hope,
though, sometimes, i do amuse you, and i think you put a premium on
being amused.
or, amazed? no, no amazements today. you would be truly amazed, for
example, if i could speak russian. i think you would faint. but aren’t i
just a little unpredictable in me moods? could you have predicted that i
would come home skippy and want to go to the restaurant with you?
actually these moods can be pretty exhausting if you have to process on
a daily basis the long faces and expressions of despair punctuated by
moments, such as this one, of pure glee. i have no idea why i am so
happy unless it is the fact that the ticket machine on the tram didn’t
work so i got a free ride home.
do your colleagues ever say anything the least bit amusing? have they
drunk all the french cognac. do you have a little bit in your coffee
every morning. that would be the life of riley, cognac with coffee for
breakfast. i think i should write an epic under such conditions.
really, school went quite well today, everything according to plan, with
the interest and mucho participation of my students, though one large
group of largely unfamiliar students i think were rather surprised by a
set of autobiographical essays i taught by an american poet, charles
olson. he would sound great in russian (by the native route he probably
is one of the u.s’ most russian poets).
if you were here you would teach me how to scan texts into the computer.
i never learned how to do this. when you are here i will buy one of the
best scanners and scan books and chapters instead of all this running
around zeroxing and making copies. you will teach me, won’t you?
most of all though, i wish you were here to kiss me and for me to hold
you. would you like that? it’s getting cold outside so now we should
keep each other warm. you are very good at this particular art, the
keeping warm. i am very fond of remembering those last cold nights in
stepanovka.
have you seen any classic movies on tv? i can’t describe the pleasure
for me of seeing this movie i wrote you about, and i really had never
seen it before, and it took me 40 years (the movie was popular when i
was about 7 or 8 years old and my 11 or 12 year old sister was bringing
home simon and garfunkel. hard to overestimate the importance of music
for youngsters. do you have movies like this in your own personal
mythology? movies that were very important, or which now when you watch
them reconstrue an entire (and vanished) time period? was the
collective-housing comedy one of those movies. i am very sorry now that
i made such fun of it, as i think it was a better film than mrs.
robinson.
do you know that i have a great interest in doing film research in
russia? i want to watch everything. i think a great many excellent films
were made in very humble, almost anonymous, circumstances. the
photography work especially. i realize also that there are about 3 or 4
lives (intellectually) that i want to live, and i have only about 40
more years.
are you sure you want to watch your hair get grey with mine? on days
like this i look forward very much to growing older, becoming old, as i
feel old sometimes in the classroom, but communicative, chatty almost,
very sociable, and the great age difference really allows the students
to open up and they relax and have a good time, talking. do i sound odd,
saying that i look forward to being 60 and 70 years old and feisty? full
of energy? days like this give me that hope. though i am not so sure you
care to think about yourself as any older than 14. i think you are
sometimes still (intellectually, emotionally) wearing your italian boots
and tight jeans and driving the boys crazy.
i miss you very much tonight in my mood. do you mind?
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <zhen_l@rambler.ru>; <lev@tpu.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Nine hours sleep
ะะฐัะฐ: 12 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 10:30
dear zh,
as some index of how exhausting mondays are i fell asleep at 21:00 last
night and am only now up at 6:00 (i woke up earlier probably around 4:00
after a dream where i had a car stolen in some rural town and went to
the police where there were three elderly women like out of a walker
evens photography and then the deputy and i were going to walk down the
street where the car was supposed to have been stolen as the thief left
a note so this apparently was something that happened all the time (i
was apparently a visitor) but i woke up before i was able to find my car
so i will have to keep taking the tram and the bus to work.
today my first class does not begin until 12:30 so i have some time this
morning to prepare for tomorrow, but monday is the big hurdle. actually
all three days are almost too much taken together, and i am sure they
will become greater headaches as the semester advances, so please
tolerate my occasional lapses into whimsy and glee. you, however, seem
rather down, as we say, are you? what is going on ‘at the job’ besides
normal aggravations? have you heard any more news (or rumors) about the
salary reduction?
it’s odd to feel blank this morning, as though my teaching were
finished, mentally i want to relax, though i slept for 9 hours last
night, and correspondingly, i imagine that i have hours and hours of
preparation to do when in reality there is probably not so much, for the
dunce college it is just important, as i mentioned, to have activities
planned, and after a few weeks i will accumulate enough materials (i am
never able to do everything i plan) that i won’t have to worry about
xeroxing as much as now.
other than that, i don’t have much news of interest to report. wednesday
evening it is possible that i will go to a music concert, and if i do,
i’ll tell you what it’s like (not classical music). i am tempted to get
a vcr to watch films that i might be able to use for teaching at the
institute, as i have no time to watch them when i’m there. at this point
however, it seems like an indulgence, though they are cheap enough here,
about 100 dollars. but i am afraid of buying something that breaks after
one month. and how did you guess, i was very happy wearing an ironed
shirt yesterday, though when i left in the morning i think the
temperature was near 0 c. and i was uncomfortably cold and should have
been wearing a sweater. the only problem is that the heating in the
buildings is such that one is always over-heated if you dress too warmly
for the bus or tram.
i can’t mention enough how much i look forward to your letters and wish
that you could write more really of nothing (see how i write about
nothing) as the pleasure of reading a few words from you is too soon
ended. this morning i have to read paragraphs students wrote in
composition last week at the dunce college, so you see i would much
rather read any words you have time to write and send to me. i will
write later today, though it might be rather late, my class finishes at
17:30 and i may be at the institute for an hour longer getting materials
together for tomorrow, so that would mean that i won’t be home before
19:00 (your midnight). do you go to work early tomorrow morning?
k.
Late night instead of morning
Tue, 12 Oct 2004 22:55:42 +0200
dear zh,
thank you for the beautiful letter waiting for me when i arrived home
this evening. how difficult it must for you sometimes that i do not read
russian, than i cannot read your thoughts in your native tongue and
heart.
i am writing you at the end of a long day nearing 23:00, my classes for
tomorrow prepared, more or less, and if i don’t wish to go to the
university late in the afternoon to provide materials to the students,
then i must go before morning classes, so i will be up early, perhaps
without time to write you, so i am writing you now, a few words that
will greet you in the morning, whether at work or at home, depending on
how late you are able to sleep in.
no, i haven’t heard from my mother, i don’t know what the problem is. i
am losing what little confidence i had that she will be capable of
helping much where she is. thursday or friday i will make sure that i
have the correct document request forms, and then see if i can’t send
cash, which i doubt, and it is not possible to pay by credit card.
perhaps a phone call would be best, to find out how i can pay what
amount to a minimal cost, i think one place is 10 dollars and another 15
dollars. but the banks here don’t issue private checks, and they don’t
issue private money orders either. if i send the document request form
and the money via my bank separately, they are sure to get lost in the
bureaucracy. perhaps a wire transfer is possible, though that doesn’t
seem likely. strange, nothing could be easier than paying one’s tax
money electronically, but when it comes to a social service, there is
little help available. i will also consult with polish colleagues here
whether there are other options for sending “paper” money, and as i
said, the amounts are so small.
you do sound, among the tenderness of the tone of your letter, a little
depressed, which, for me, and it at least helps me, i always insists on
understanding, for my own case, as boredom, sometimes intense boredom.
if i examined the daily circumstances of my life right now, i would
probably say that i am bored, but i am so concerned with making a living
and building for the next step, or stage, in my life, that i allow
myself to be consumed by details. i am teaching well, whatever that
means, and i am afraid that it means very little. also, for one who
suffers from intensity of boredom, i have no easy advice or solutions.
i will probably get home from the concert tomorrow around midnight, but
if the rest of the day goes according to plan, i should get home around
17:00 and i will write you a letter then, so look for one around 23:00
if you are up that late.
i am going to see if there’s anything worth watching for an hour on tv
and then go to sleep. my alarm is set for 6:00 and i have yet to iron a
shirt for tomorrow. i am going to wear the blue one i bought in tomsk.
there is a url is am sending you that has pictures of siberia in it, if
you are bored and have time at work to look for landscapes of your
homeland (this word is getting to have a terrible connotation in the
u.s. where it is being used for security purposes).
here’s the url:
http://frontiers.loc.gov
maybe there is something interesting there. i understand your feelings
about the brickification of tomsk. have there been more wood house
burnings?
i miss you
k.
Last long day
Wed, 13 Oct 2004 07:01:19 +0200
dear zh,
well, here i am again, half an hour give or take a few minutes, before
7:00, and as my class does not begin until 9:00, unless i decide to go
to the institute first, i have a little more time than usual, though i
feel like i am seeing double this morning, as i did not go to bed until
12:30 and even then, i tossed and turned and did not fall asleep for at
least another hour, perhaps more.
this morning i am in the mood to start looking for a decent job in the
u.s. this wish for some kind of certainty in a world in which one can be
a little certain. here i am never quite certain, always doubting what i
am doing. with the first year students at the dunce college, there are
times when i am not even certain that i am being understood, and i speak
very slowly and repeat my sentences in different forms. it reminds me a
little of some of the classes in tomsk, where at bldg. 7 they sometimes
gave me first year students and then even students whose first (foreign)
language was not english. at the time i accepted it as a polite form of
wishing to humiliate the foreigner and non-native speaker (something
that runs very deep in russia, do you think?) and here (as maybe there
also) it also just seems to be a result of negligence, or lack of
interest. so i also complain. i have too many students.
it helps to have clear intentions of goals: so, i can’t see myself able
to keep doing this for longer than one or two years, then i have to find
myself somewhere teaching something related only to poetry. if i am not
able to do this, i am afraid that i will become increasingly discontent,
unhappy, as i must sound like a malcontent this morning, don’t i have a
job, and not a very demanding one at that, and one even where it appears
that i will be able to save a little of my salary? (how my moods change
you may say).
most of all i think i am disappointed that i didn’t get the full night’s
sleep that i needed. enough complaining.
i watched the better part of a movie last night in french and russian
originally and dubbed into polish. the language-effect reminded me of
watching the german-russian film with you in palangas, one of the better
ones, do you agree? with the exception of crocodile. last night’s movie
was similary sad, though not tragic, no one dies in the end, and it may
even have been about someone whose story is well-known in russia, a
french (communist-sympathizer?) doctor who comes with his wife and child
to the soviet union about the time of the end of wwII and it depicts
their lives, i think near the baltic, perhaps in st. petersburg, under
stalin and later kruschev. eventually the wife is arrested for helping a
young russian man (a swimmer) escape (he swims to a boat in the baltic)
and after many years in prison, after her child is grown, she is
released and at the end of the movie escapes to the french embassy and
then to france with her son. the husband, the doctor, at the end of the
movie, is said to have been able to return to france in 1987 under
gorbochev’s administration. have you ever heard about this case?
the pleasure for me was being able to understand parts of the dialogue
in french as well as in russian, i didn’t exactly understand what
everyone was saying, but neither did i feel disoriented, i more or less
knew where i was through the entire film. it was comforting almost,
after being surrounded by polish which i do not know even the simplest
words of, understanding basic conversations and not feeling lost. it
gave me a sense that both french and russian have at least a physical
presence in my ear, or mind, however basic this beginning is. still, it
feels like a beginning, and at points in the movie, with my earphones
on, i lay on the sofa without watching the film, just listening to the
voices. very soothing.
most of all i wish i could hear you crying softly to me in russian that
it is high time for me to go to bed and to come under the warm covers
where you are
k.
Advice and instructions
Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:03:08 +0200
dear zh,
if what you write is true, both the decision not to hire foreign
teachers as well as the review of the files (though it contradicts the
logic of internationalization and seems unlikely, perhaps it is more of
an administrative scare by the security interests than anything else)
but, if it is true, then it is all the more reason why your leaving tpu
and russia is more and more urgent. last night i received monthly
mailing of news articles from le monde diplomatique, a rather good
newspaper in france, and one of the articles was, “russia retreats into
repression.” so, it is not all rumor perhaps that you hear, though i
would be very careful about rumor, as it also reflects the level, the
very high level, that russian academics have been and continue to be
pressured by various bureaucracies and governmental interests.
there is a further, related, logic. one of my purposes for my paper that
i delivered at the toleration conference was to turn the russian
diaspora back on itself. what i mean by this is that so many talented
intellectuals leave russia for economic reasons, if not for any other
reasons, but when they write, in english, critically of the current
(anti-democratic) developments of russia, if i have the opportunity to
return their critical words back to the country and the language they
have been forced to leave, then i consider that a very successful
turning back of the diaspora, so i am quite pleased, on the behalf of
writers like katja petrovskaya, that her criticism of russia and putin,
written and published in english, were eventually, through the vehicle
of my essay, translated back into russian, where perhaps they have a
power lacking in the english, i don’t know. we are so used to freedom of
speech that we cannot conceive of how easily it is taken away.
there are crucial matters. as crucial, dear, as your own mother’s advice
to you, urging you, soon, to move to canada, to use your bilingual
skill, and change your life. there are many choices, even poland is a
choice. what is important and what i will write again and again is that
you have a choice and you must make it, and i hope that i am part of
this choice making.
about the essay itself, do you have only one copy of the conference
publication. i am supposed to present this paper to my faculty here in
december or january and i would like to have a copy of the conference
publication at that time, but if there is only one copy, then i don’t
want to risk losing it in the mail. if you have two copies, if you send
it by registered mail, so that i have to sign for it (it does not have
to be overnight or rush mail) i would greatly appreciate this.
the democratic-minded majority of russia will have to carry on a big
struggle to open their country to ‘foreigners’ working and living there.
the ruling class would like nothing that to try to isolate their
country, though to do this would be a disaster economically.
just today my dunces were expressing approval at how international
warsaw is becoming, saying how much they like and how exciting it is to
meet asians, africans, other europeans, even americans (though we are
getting rather low on the list). this is the future. it is retrograde
(to use dosteovsky’s word) to try to do otherwise.
i don’t mean to lecture. i had an excellent day. i am sorry to hear
about your not so enjoyable day. all my classes went very well and
apparently i am teaching at the height of my abilities. happy students
saying goodbye with big smiles on their faces and thanking me for the
lesson and all the english i made them speak and write. there is a
terrible evangelical streak in me, how did it get there. i give so much
of myself away this way.
if you were here though, i would still have some left over to give you.
tonight, instead of a concert, we could go to a restaurant. but i will
go to the concert instead, hear loud music, drink 3 or 4 pints, and walk
home about midnight. don’t worry. either for me tonight or for the
future, whatever future that may be.
i hope you have a better day tomorrow.
kisses to you and only for you …
k.
ะั: <km@hypobololemaioi.com>
ะะพะผั: <lev@tpu.ru>; <zhen_l@rambler.ru>
ะขะตะผะฐ: Joy
ะะฐัะฐ: 14 ะพะบััะฑัั 2004 ะณ. 12:41
dear zh,
i have a problem this morning i’m not sure you’ll appreciate: my
familiar and preferred brand of sliwki for my morning coffee was not on
the shelf the last time i went shopping, so i bought something that
looked like cream, 18 percent smetana, and when i tried putting it in my
coffee this morning, the result was little globs, or morsels, of cream
floating in my still too dark coffee, so my cup of coffee this morning
is unpleasantly anomolous.
as it turned out, i didn’t go to the concert last night, didn’t go
anywhere at all except to the hypermarket, where i bought a new shirt
though slightly small (42) (it said large on the package) (so i must
wear either a 43 or 44), two dishcloths for the kitchen (which needs its
weekly cleaning), and a cotton bedsheet for my bedroom bed (i slept on
the sofa in the office, falling asleep reading last night). i expect
already an email from you waiting for me objecting to my not writing you
when i got home last night (don’t you think this is a little extreme,
are there limits to your worrying?) (though it is rather pleasant to
know that you worry about me at all) since, as i said, i didn’t go out
last night, so why should i write you when i got home if i didn’t get
home and rather, stayed at home? wouldn’t the absense of a letter
indicate to you that in fact, i did stay home?
the logic is a little lost on me here, though at this distance, how can
you know for sure whether or not i went out or stayed home? nothing more
dramatic than my colleague calling and saying he was coming down with a
cold, for it is getting cold here, and windy, though there is sun. more
for you to worry about: as i am fond of my ironed shirts, all three days
i went outside in ironed shirt with dark green wool jacket (my
conference coat) and all three times the temperature was near 0,
centigrade, and i was quite frozen, and actually even my hands were
beginning to hurt from the cold, but i was comfortable in my ironed
shirt in the classroom, and i believe that the ironed shirt contributes
significantly to my teaching ability. when i begin to wear sweaters, as
beautiful and warm as my blue sweater is (one of the nicest sweaters i
have had in many, many years, and do you remember who i have to thank
for this very nice sweater?), still, when i begin to bundle up, my
thoughts and speech become progressively slower.
i should begin turning my working thoughts to writing an abstract for
the slovakia conference though do you know that i don’t want to write
about zizek and lenin? right now, i haven’t the slightest interest in
it. in fact, i can’t think right now very well about
inclusions/exclusions, enough to identify a theoretical problem that i
might develop, especially one that no one else already has. that’s part
of the excitement about my work a couple of years ago with a monograph
by v.i. called Resolutions of Summer (written in 1913), that it opened
up a host of questions about nationalism and national identity that a
new and popular book and closed off and banished. the task
intellectually is to remember the debates and issues in the years before
the first world war, because they uncannily resemble our own,
international terrorism was the order of the day for both worlds, and
actually i think there’s a lot more resemblances between the beginnings
and ends of the 20th century than the middle of the century. it might
even be possible to see ww1 and ww2 as a single war, i don’t know.
but i don’t feel like writing about all this right now! and then the
question, what do i feel like writing about? and then the next question,
isn’t this why one writes poetry, that poetry is always about not
knowing what you are writing about but listening to languaga and to your
own beings, wherever and whatever it is at any given moment. it would be
absurd to write an abstract of a poem you were going to write. so by
beginning to even think about writing the abstract, i have to forfeit
the writing i know and care for deeply as poetry. but they don’t pay you
for writing poetry, they pay you for writing abstracts (such a corrupt
world) so abstract to write i must, if i want to build my future (doubts
are beginning about this future). did i tell you that i distrust
discourse, even my own?
though i wonder sometimes if there is a sentence or passage in the
russian translation of the toleration essay that lives inside your
thoughts and ear, something you like, something deeper than the
appearance of being “clever.” (my ruined coffee has emptied on this last
word). let’s change the subject.
last night i also bought envelopes large enough to contain the document
request forms which i am going to try to mail tomorrow, without the fee
but with an explanation that i can send the fee depending on the
preference of the office. perhaps they can bill me. or i can pay by
credit card. but i want to get these forms in the mail, i notice that
you did not answer my question about looking once again at the cypress
materials and agreeing upon what documents and notarized statements we
need. shall we talk about this sunday when i call? when would be the
best time?
write me today i hope and if you do i’ll write you back though you know
that i’ll write you anyway.
it’s time to turn my thoughts to inclusions/exclusions.
joy
k.
Egyptian Stamp
Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:41:20 +0200
dear zh, no, not irritated, more amused. i just heard from my mother,
who called at 16:00, saying she sent a letter with a few photographs of
their new house two weeks ago, so it should arrive this week,
regardless, though, i’m going to send to her the document request forms
and she will forward them with the appropriate processing fee. i should
have them by the end of november or mid-december, and i think we should
behave like optimists, and make plans for going to cypress with or
without documents, but let’s talk about this sunday (when did you want
me to call you — you didn’t answer this question, naughty girl!)
perhaps you are too cold. thursday must be my recovery day, as i was
deep asleep in a nap and i don’t remember any time in the afternoon
after 12:30 so i’ve been sleeping for at least 2 or 3 hours when the
phone woke me up. this is a clue as to how exhausted my mon-tues-wed
schedule makes me.
now for new favor, i ask you, please, when you can, can you look for any
information and especially about english translation of Mandel’shtam’s
Egyptian Stamp? i took a look at the v.i. materials and the other book
and tried to get in the frame of mind of the essay i once wrote near the
theme of inclusion/exclusion and i felt very alienated from the
material, i don’t think my mind is anywhere near political philosophy.
then i read a short essay about Mandel’shtam’s Egyptian Stamp and it
sounds very interesting, and there was a reference to someone’s phD
dissertation on Benjamin and Mandelsh’tam, and i’m going to try to do
something in this direction, something making use of all the reading i’m
doing about ‘city as text’ which is a phrase that occurs in the very
short essay i read before my nap, about Egyptian Stamp. something about
Mandel’shtam (the narrator in this prose text, at least) working with
notion of being a foreigner in one’s own native city. very suggestive.
if i could work on an essay that could find something to write about
both benjamin and mandel’sham, first, it would interest me deeply, and
two, i would need your help with references, looking for sources in
russian, and maybe a few rough translations. would you be interested in
such year-long collaboration, my dear?
k.
On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:22:22 +0400
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:
> i am still working. it is getting very cold outside. they say that
> today is the first winter day in accordance ith folk observations. my
> mind you are irritated a little bit by my worries about you, you even
> did not go to the concert, i see. will you feel better if i do not
> take care about you, sir? have you eaten all your smetana? i like
> fetacheese with my bread and honey in the morning. bye zh
Weight and density
Fri, 15 Oct 2004 08:02:52 +0200
| dear zh, guess what, it is morning, friday morning, and my coffee is almost ready. i am one step ahead of my coffee this morning. it is friday morning. maybe i will have two cups of coffee. maybe i will write you a very long letter. maybe i will write you a very long letter and not even write one sentimental word, as i know you are very critical of sentimentals, though as you know i often forget. the 1812 overture is playing. my coffee is ready. now i will ruin it with moloko. 3.2 percent moloko, so my coffee now looks like mud, though the light is low in my office (why did i never use this room last year?) do you know that i have a dream of an office much like this one (daydream, or revery, from the french). as i write you now i am facing one wall on which there is a large black and white photograph of a theater production in lodz some years ago and the faces of the actors and actresses look shakespearean, very beautiful. the other poster is for the opera production of verdi’s macbeth. to my left are two 7 feet high cabinets for books and papers and there’s room for my printer. irina nick’s photograph of you is also always there. between these cabinets and the table at which i write is one reading chair, and to my left is another desk which i did form in the shape of an L to work at. on the side of this desk on my left is another reading chair (yes, i have two reading chairs) and beside the reading chair is the tv which i can often imagine turning into another more permanent computer station with large lcd screen for multimedia. facing the tv and against the window which looks out on to the street is the sofa which for the last two nights i have fallen asleep on reading, fully clothed, with the reading light on (i often sleep with the light on). with just a pillow, without blankets. so it is warm enough in here i guess. i write about this room because i like the feel of it intellectually, that everytime i walk into the room, as when i am in the room, i feel very good, and begin to trust my intuitions again. intellectual intuitions are extremely important. yesterdays for example, when i saw after an hour or so that i simply could not pursue the zizek-lenin angle, even though there is an important essay there, an inclusion was made after the polemic of an exclusion, but the inclusion itself, being compensatory, is itself insufficient and perhaps even wrong, the re-presentation of the insurrectionary moment of 1917 is not what is being excluded in the original exclusion, it is the problem of nationalism and national identity. where to go with this. the fact is and i will be very honest, when i wrote the first essay i was in the u.s. and in my first university job, and i felt protected, like i could say anything, like i had freedom of speech, though i was only writing for an online discussion group, still, the writing circulated and exerted an effect of sorts, had an influence. i feel much less protected here, since i am (i think i am, often it feels like i am) in an environment that is a little like a u.s. protectorate. i don’t feel like i can write about just anything, though it isn’t like censorship, much more subtle. i could see all this in about an hour yesterday, and in addition i felt that for me to return at this moment to questions pertaining to a political discourse, rather than to a poetics, would be difficult to do, because one needs a lot of confidence to cross these borders to discourses, and i don’t have this confidence, i don’t have this protection, i don’t have this security. so, benjamin-mandelstam. last night i ordered from the u.s. the 3rd volume (there are four now) of the big benjamin books that were always open in my stepanovka flat. the shipping cost was only 4 dollars, and the 40 dollar book was on sale for 25, so it is actually cheaper than i thought to order books from the u.s. shipping costs from england are actually more expensive. i came across a terrible temptation on the webpage (i think i sent it to you once as there was a notice about a book by victor shklovsky there) from a press called dalkey archive, they are offering 70 books in a translation series for 400 dollars, a little less than 6 dollars a book, and with free shipping internationally. probably half of these books i could trade for credit at the bookstore in krakow, but i am still not mentally in a position to think of buying more than one book at a time, and i am just beginning to use the books i recently ordered. but the temptation of the 70 books reminds me of your story of the set of translations your mother bought for your library, and the difficulty she had in obtaining them, as, from what i understood, this set was only for party members. the good old days. there’s not much about mandelstam in english on the net, and i consulted about five different search engines. there seems to be more and more junk on the net, my students have been saying this too. something to do with how the search engines are structured. you might have an english translation in the state university library, you might consult your friend who works there. by the way, i found a url, http://www.tomsk.net/who96/186_1.htm though it looks like its about your beloved Pushkin Library. perhaps you could even consult there? if you could find an english translation of the egyptian stamp, and copy it into the computer and send it to me, that would be one very big help, but what i was also thinking about was something more long term and less concrete, asking you to read the russian “marka” (and to send me a copy of the russian “marka” by email) and i would like to ask you about single words and phrases, fragments, without talking about the “meaning” of the text, apparently the scholar’s essay i was inspired by and which was one of a group of essays from a university in canada with essays about polish and russian literature and film which i was reading yesterday, she has not published a book on mandelstam, and from the quotations in russian in her essay, it did not appear that she knew russian very well. of course, you will laugh, look who’s talking! but here is the item of interest for me, yesterday i did download a large selection of mandelstam’s poetry from http://www.litera.ru:8080/stixiya/authors/mandelshtam/all.html do you know this site? also, while i am referring to my bookmarks, here is another interesting site, http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/mandelshtam which, for whatever obvious though strange historical reason, mandelshtam’s papers are in a library in the u.s., i guess if a govt. kills one of its poets, this means those who live and breathe the language he wrote in no longer have the right to read his manuscripts. wouldn’t it be nice to work with this collection, some day in distant furture, together? a small daydream. but as with the “marka” (what a powerful word in english, they stamp your papers, they stamp your body, they stamp your passport, even in internet there is something called a timestamp, it is a very powerful and suggestive word. what is your response to “marka” in russian? as with all russian words, i am not asking you a direct question. i am not asking you to write me back today, or even tomorrow, with the definition of “marka.” rather i am asking something a little different. i am asking you to carry the russian word “marka” around with you as much or as little as you want, to think about its many meanings, maybe bulgakov uses this word, maybe other russian writers use this word, maybe kafka uses it in german and maybe it has been translated into russian. there is never any end to these possibilities, as there can never be a complete answer. this is the process, though, that single words begin to acquire weight, and density. and this is the way that i like to think with language. why “egyptian stamp” do you think? in your own response, does it make a difference that you have been to cairo, and even to this day you could go to cairo without difficulty? how does the title echo in your thoughts and feelings? again, i am not asking these questions for you to answer like a question about the conference publication (which, i think, you should just bring with you this february) (and i don’t think we should be pessimistic about this february) but for questions to float lightly over your eyes and mind, and those three volumes on your shelf right outside your bedroom door. i read yesterday a reference to a russian edition published i think in the 70s in the u.s. could you write to me the names of the editors of your edition? i wish that i had left behind more books like the cheever stories, which actually i miss a little, as they would be very good for teaching here. the english is polished, and the scenes and situations clear, so it is a very good text for students of english, i was reminded of salinger, who is still popular here, as in russia. for native english writers, i think, cheever’s or salinger’s english lacks depth and resonance, and it is a little frightening to think that it is the ‘easy’ texts with the ‘light’ english which are ideal for spreading english, disseminating english, but these are larger problems than i can cope with. i’m just glad that you found something in english that you liked, and i don’t think you would like either of the novels by faulkner. still, cheever is better than maugham, huxley, galsworthy, etc., all those early 20th century british novelists that time is now forgetting, and i sometimes think they were so popular in the russia you grew up in because they presented such an orderly picture of english social and cultural life, with very little language difficulty, heaviness, or opacity. today do you know is a good day for me to be bitter. it is the birthday of one person in this world i once loved, and for whom i have forfeited the right to call my “son”. still, i remember the birthday, and it makes me upset. the forfeiture happened because i could not afford to make the payments that would give me the legal right to keep contact. again, i have to remind you of five years of sometimes extreme poverty that, just as i was beginning to emerge from it in the u.s., i chose the poverty of russia, and now only in my fourth year abroad am i able to buy a book when i need one. the last time i tried to send him a gift for this day was my first year in russia, and i learned they had moved though this information was not sent to me, nor even my mother (the child’s grandmother) so i interpreted, perhaps wrongly, that the mother no longer wished for there to be communication). i am bitter about the question of the money. how strange are the meanings of some of the words one writes. in the book i wrote when i still lived in the condition of a family, i wrote “a contract to deliver / sold / a child” thinking at the time i was writing about something else, and only now do i realize that i was writing about the circumstances of the child’s birth. personally, though perhaps wrongly, i do not think of this issue in my life (an important issue, a formative issue) as either a mistake or a failure, but as an action which was absolutely necessary for my own life. there is much to remember which i choose not to remember, but i remember the last year together, going out to dinner with the mother and a friend of hers, and i started to say something, i forget what it was, and perhaps it is important that i remember, but (and you will laugh) they corrected my english. at that moment i felt like my life was in danger. this was late october or early november, of that last year. it is one thing to debate the pronunciation of words in a foreign country, because there are, after all, many englishes, but this was a question of education, and the subtext, at the table, that i was somehow inferior, and had for many years been economically inferior, became unbearable for me. so, remembering that time now, i can say that i am very glad that everything has happened as it happened. you cannot change the past. you can only learn from it. so, now you know, i am both extremely sensitive about money and about language, and i never forget an insult. this, i suppose, makes me a bad person. but you yourself (we repeat the reflexive pronoun for emphasis) have spoken very movingly about the experience of humiliation, and i think we can both agree that it is the worst experience, and i think you live your life the way you have so far to negotiate the danger of humiliation. the result is that you do not appear to me to be a proud person (and i say this as someone who suffers from too much pride) but you have learned how to protect yourself, and this is a skill we do not learn from others so much as from our own mistakes. such heavy thoughts. let’s run away to the cave by the river and play house for the day. i love this story from your childhood. you were very brave. k. |
sudden urgent request
Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:50:50 +0200
dear zh
could you send me a copy of my passport if as i hope it’s still in your
computer? i’m going to try to send the document requests to the u.s.
tomorrow? where’s your letter?
i miss you
k.
karta, marka
Sat, 16 Oct 2004 07:49:51 +0200
dear zh,
you mentioned my short note yesterday but did you receive the longer
letter in the morning? this morning’s letter is not so long, but already
i find i must make one qualification, having been reading this morning
an article about Kira Muratova’s Peremena uchasti (Change of Fate in
english), do you know this film? apparently it adapts Maugham’s book by
the same title, though it is a kind of surrealist adaptation, and the
reading of some of the scenes from the film remind me of another russian
film i once saw the title of which i don’t remember, but it likewise was
an adaptation of a Bernard Shaw story or drama, also surrealistic, set
in a country house during the revolution. sound familiar? anyway, this
morning’s reading dictates that i must retract my comments regarding
Maugham and Shaw and Galsworthy and and and, etc., as once more i am
reminded that the russian reading, for that matter any foreign reading,
changes the text being read, and the status of the text is never stable.
for example, i might find Maugham absolutely useless as a writer, but
that doesn’t mean his writings are useless in other contexts. probably
the way i read mandelshtam is completely strange to the way that he’s
read in russia, though i’m not reading him at all right now as my volume
of his translated essays are still in the u.s., and i can only read one
word at a time of the russian texts i downloaded the other day. if you
didn’t get my longer letter yesterday, neither the reference to maugham
nor mandelshtam will make any sense.
naughty girl! i tried calling you last night but as i received an email
from you at about the same time maybe you were online. i called twice to
your cellphone and twice to your homephone. the homephone was busy both
times (across the space of half an hour) and no answer to the cell
phone, which i attributed to the probability that you turned it off so
not to receive calls from work (this was about 22:00 your time) and of
course, you were not expecting my call. i was very happy to have found a
phone card that i wanted to call you right away, and i can call you this
evening if you wish and if you write to me what time, maybe about the
same time, 22:00? that’s 17:00 here. a good time for me. and tell me
which phone to call, cell or home. last time if you remember the
connection was very good to the homephone. do you call it telephone na
domu?
other than that, i have nothing to report, except that i think i will
try monday evening to call the offices in the u.s. to confirm what i
need to send them, though i am a little worried that there will be
complications because i am in a faraway foreign country, and i am
surprised that there are not forms to fill out, typically american, no
standard procedures. my mother said that she needed to obtain a
certified copy of her birth certificate for her drivers license in the
new state, so she has had to write to one such office, with successful
results, so i am confident that she will forward my requests
successfully. again, i would send them directly if there was a way i
could include the processing fee. maybe they will tell me such a way
monday evening, and that will make the process simpler, and it is simple
in the u.s., and i am making it sound more difficult than it is.
you sound tired and what they call in english “stressed” these days,
with little attempt at humor. what is going on at the job? what is going
on at home? perhaps i don’t worry for you enough as i assume that with
the company of your mother and father that you are always in the company
of people who care very deeply for you and who take care of you, though
perhaps you feel that the situation is reversed, and it is you who take
care of them. most of the time though when you come home for work there
is something warm waiting for you to eat, yes? this is not the case
here. my days are sometimes successful in this kind of taking care of
oneself, and sometimes not. usually i cook something and then eat the
leftovers for two or three days. my favorite red cabbage has reappeared
on the hypermarket shelves so that is something of a comfort. what other
comforts are there other than once in a while a good movie on tv, or
even rarer, a good story. which story among the cheever collection did
you like the best? i am teaching ‘the swimmer’ for my american
literature survey class.
this last note reminds me that soon, like today, i must turn my thoughts
to mon-tues-wed classes, not a pleasing prospect. yesterday i had to go
to the institute in the afternoon simply to obtain the text of a story i
am teaching monday, i couldn’t find it on the internet. the good part of
the errand was that they had phone cards at the postoffice next to the
institute, as they were out of them at the neighborhood poczta, so it
was a trip well worth making. once again, when shall i call you dear?
please
do so say
so when, k.
After speaking
Sat, 16 Oct 2004 07:19:47 +0200
dear zh,
i am writing you a quick email just after talking with how different it
is to write! i forget the great difference between the letter and the
phone until hearing your voice. it makes me very happy. yes, you are
positively the most ironic person i have ever met. did you notice that
we could talk all day if we were able? it reminds me of the days in the
dacha. now, right now, i am very much reminded of you, almost as if you
were here.
missing you
very much
k.
Let’s make something together
Sun, 17 Oct 2004 08:10:41 +0200
dear zh,
i tried to delay the inevitable, today, and stayed up watching two
ghoulish (though not gloomy) movies, one from england and the other one
set in chicago, definitely what we call “b” movies (inferior) but with
enough interest and distraction that i watched. them. why. one watches
in distraction, as distraction, a plot: in england, a young girl
infatuated with a boy organizes a party weekend with her bestfriend and
the boy and his friend, and when both boys are attracted to her friend,
she locks them all, including herself, in the bombshelter where they
have gone for the weekend party. one by one everyone dies except
herself. when she is rescued, she blames in on another boy who has
always liked her but whom she hates. she tells first one story, then
another, and under the belief that she is traumatized by her experience,
the police do not investigate her and eventually she tells the true
story to the police psychologist, who, however, does not record it on
tape, so in the end only she knows the true story, one of manipulation,
deceit, and murder. the final scene shows the face of the
murderer-victim being comforted by the police. i rather like the twist
in the plot, that the apparent victim is the real murderer, and there
were moments in the film that resembled a Lars von Trier film (a Dutch
director whose films i recommend if they have them on dvd there). but if
you have already a high opinion of Kira Muratova, then her cinema is
probably much better. “Change of Fate” sounds like an excellent film
from its interpretation. the other film was definitely “b” about a
haunted house in chicago, and ends in a shakespearean death-festival,
only the bad guys die though, who themselves murdered (two boys at
least) a retarded girl who lived in the neighborhood and whom they
buried in the walls of the basement, except the ghost stays in the house
and obsesses first the child and then the father to find her remains and
solve the mystery of her murder. they succeed. it is a actually a good
corrective to watch such a film, as silly as some scenes are, for the
ghost is still a serious topic in literary interpretations, the metaphor
of ghost for talking about the past, and this is one overused word and
idea.
that is a summary of all that i have thought and done since speaking
with you. after our conversation i made a very uninspiring bowl of
pseudo-pierogi, which i need to pledge to myself not to eat as i pledge
to myself not to drink cognac or vodka in the loneliness of my
aloneness. my coffee machine is misbehaving again, and spewing coffee
grains everywhere. i need to clean it, as i probably need to do laundry
today, but i do not feel inspired.
inspired, however, i do feel, by the following idea:
you will notice an attachment. when you open this attachment, you will
find the first sentence of Egyptian Stamp. will you, dear, be so kind to
me as to translate very quickly and without paying too much attention or
taking too much trouble, the sentence, and send it back to me? would you
like to do a sentence a letter like this.
now, my idea is not to produce a translation of Egyptian Stamp, but to
work with a shadow text (i almost wrote ‘ghost’ text) and see what
happens. the essay i read about this text intrigued me, and i am curious
to see what happens if i try to approach it this way. i once owned the
book the english translation appeared in (apparently there is only one
translation), a paperback copy of the 1967 second-printing published by
univ. of princeton press. i think i bought it for 2 dollars. now it is
worth between 10 and 20 dollars. i think i probably sold it for a dollar
or less, when i left ohio, maybe i sold it during the time that i sold
so many of my books, to buy food with, though at that time i most sold
hardbacks. i remember how heavy they were to carry to the bookstore and
how little food i was able to buy in exchange. this is probably one of
my most bitter memory, when one remembers at all. this is ironic, don’t
you think. the russian-language text is available for free on the
internet, but the english translation costs 10-20 dollars. everything
has a price tag in the world that i come from, and it is very well
organized. i forget just how exhausting is this price-tag mentality.
even the dirt on the floor can be bought and sold. i for myself would
like to make a rough approximate translation version of Egyptian Stamp
for my own uses, imagination, etc., and save 10-20 dollars which i would
rather use for telephone cards so you can make fun of the fact that i
know only a few russian words. i don’t mind you making fun of me for
this. and yes, in a way, i even sympathize, zhenya speaking english is a
zhenya without cactus needles, and so what can you poke me with, dear?
do you know that i cherish this cactus aspect of your speech and person?
that is perhaps a secret it would be better to keep to myself, and how
do you know my cactus-aspect if you do not speak russian, but, dear
zhenya, i see it in the expressions of the faces of everyone who has
been poked by the zhenya cactus, they are extremely cautious and show
great respect in speaking with you. perhaps you do not think i show
enough respect. this is a problem with anglo-american manners, as i
said, we have no concept of politeness, and the casual speech is often
accompanied by what might be called brusquenss of manner. russian
people, especially young people, as you know, can be very rude too,
especially to each other, but it is a deliberate (not unconscious,
ingrained) behavior. i am afraid anglo-american brusqueness or
directness is an indelible feature.
enough such thinking for this morning, this is not what i talk about in
my classes, i don’t know what i talk about sometimes, and i am glad that
i do not listen to myself talk.
i really don’t have so very much work to do today, and i should be able
to do other reading besides. i despair over the idea of being able to
write something for the slovakia conference. it is more a mood than
anything else, but at the moment i feel like very close attention to
language and not big ideas and deep thoughts which, if you must know, i
have something of a contempt for, discourse, rhetoric, its
self-importance.
thank you for reminding me that no one has said that i must go to this
conference. maybe i will not. though i don’t think such refusals or,
even, inabilities, put me in the best light. i am still not working hard
enough. writing requires great self-discipline. i have great confidence
in your interest that i work more, as even, perhaps, our welfare depends
on it.
i was also going to write a little about what you referred to as being
afraid, but i don’t have any superficial expressions on hand at the
moment. it has been a rainy night with strong winds in the early
morning. i think there is a great deal to be afraid of, or apprehensive.
i see, from a distance it is true, but i see (strange verb for feeling)
a turn towards the totalitarian in the u.s. and i see what are called
the ‘reality effects’ of this turn in the internet discussions of
writers who live there. many complex forms of internalizing what is
rather new in the social landscape there, more and more social and
administrative control over all aspects of the citizen life, and there
is such a loud-mouth tradition of rebellion, more like a pose really,
but as you know from the soviet experience, for totalitarianism to be
successful, an atmosphere (very suggestive word you used last night) of
hatred, recrimination, accusation must be created. this is what i see
happening there. sometimes i even experience myself as a target in this
regard, as though a fictive person were being created to satisfy needs
brought about by the reality-effect, though this statement of it is
hopelessly abstract. it is true that i dont’ think about it often. and
none of this i think is felt on a day-to-day level, especially by people
such as tania who live ordinary lives. it is the travail of when
someone, anyone, tries to participate in the cultural sphere, that they
become a target for all kinds of projections, and the projections
intensify in a worsening life-world environment, such as seems to be
happening everywhere, but especially sharply in the u.s.
sometimes you think it is a joke when i mention to you that you have a
memoir to write, maybe sometimes not. you are capable of many things
which perhaps you know, though you would never say so directly. it is
impossible to say to another that they have a book to write, though
writers also speak of such a thing as being appointed, or elected, to a
certain kind of writing. if i believe anything, towards you, of you, and
your cactus-aspect, it is that if you were able to enjoy the life of
more pleasure than your work has allowed you since your student days,
that you would simply find yourself involved with literature and writing
in a way of pleasure (not profession, there is no pleasure in that
direction, only duty). never however should you feel that i have what
are called expectations. i have always suffered from a lack of these
regarding my own life. perhaps if i had more expectations, demands, of
myself, i would be more industrious, but i am curiously alienated from
my own writing, and most of the time i believe this estranged relation
is good for the writing. i will stop here writing about writing.
there are responsibilities to attend to for tomorrow’s classes. i will
write you a letter for your evening, and i hope you are able to send
back to me a very rough and spontaneous sentence of english words in
response to the attached sentence of Mandelshtam’s.
please?
k.
Playing
Sun, 17 Oct 2004 08:23:27 +0200
dear zh,
i thought you might appreciate a midmorning letter as i find i am resisting my reading and refusing to remove myself from my computer though i haven’t erased the hard drive yet though i might yet today if i get too bored. i haven’t even started reading for tomorrow yet. but i don’t think i have a lot of work to do. this is a new emailer which i set up to communicate with my students only so you don’t have to worry about answering to it. what should i do today. i think i should eat breakfast and then have another cup of coffee. what are you doing? you had better not be at the office. are you at the office? did you sleep in today? why not? do you like my idea about working with Egyptian Stamp a little at a time. when i write now i am so affected by the computer and its applications that i need some form of close attention to language, even a language i don’t understand. do you know what is strange and do not laugh? i can hear the sounds in the russian words i do not know. this does not mean that i can solve the problem with a dictionary. but there are definite sound values there. and the cyrillic does not puzzle me. this is an advance, a small advance, but an advance. what else do you have to wait for 20 years for. i think you do not like to think about the future. i think i agree with you about this. do you think that i can fill in this screen with words so to give you something about 10 minutes worth of time to read whatever i write? that information is a little dismaying, that you are aware of the time that it takes to read a letter from me, and do my letters only take 10 minutes to read? i think you are trying to get me to work harder in the writing to you, and why not. i amuse myself with different fonts and applications and even difference between windows and linux (without erasing my hard drive, my mind i think i was too frank with you on this matter). what recommendations do you have on any other matters. as i mentioned, i am bored and avoiding my teaching duties. there is always the evening. i want to go for a long walk. actually, this was the very serious content of our conversation last night, i believe you are suffering from being unable to walk for long walks in the parks and along the river. have you thought about walking companion? friends, your mother, anyone, at least for the walk to the river, though also it is getting cold and colder, and i remember walking in january to the river and it wasn’t the same as our walks there this summer. so it is also the change into the winter that is happening to you and saddening you. but it is a serious problem. walking in the city is not the same. why not experiment with skiing this winter? even long-distance cross-country skiing. something like this, maybe even a club. have you thought about joining a club? i am not worried about your lack of social opportunities, as your phone is always ringing. it is the lack of physical experience. i think i suffer from something like the same. i do not even walk into the other rooms in my flat but i am in this one room, the large room, all the time, and last night i did try to go to sleep early, before the two not-so-good movies, and i could not fall asleep in the ‘official’ bed so i returned to the office room, watched the movies, and slept somewhat. i think i was a little saddened after the phone. as i said, the first hour after is usually very hard, the flat very, very quiet, and feelings, sharp feelings, of being alone and of missing. then one goes back to one’s habits. mine are as you have guessed to station myself in front of the computer screen, a book, or at the last option, the tv. but always i am doing all of this even cooking, alone, and it wears on the nerves sometimes. that is what i meant by my developing ear for listening to all sounds, though it is kind of you to suggest that i have a very good reason for listening, after last spring’s break-ins. there is a new person upstairs and they make a lot more noise than the one last year, and many visitors. the flats are very transparent, and you hear almost all the sounds. it does not amuse me. nor amaze. i hope you find your small edition of the “Marka”. did i tell you in the book searching i found listings for a couple of original editions of Mandelstam’s poems, especially the second edition. 3000 dollars. what stranges fates books have. i am not a collector. but curious, yes. hope to hear from you today.
k.
Bohumil Hrabal
Sun, 17 Oct 2004 16:54:23 +0200
dear zh,
more or less so far an uneventful day, and to celebrate the
uneventfulness i am beginning to boil a beef tongue for supper. i think
i had better enjoy the beef tongue while i can as i do not think i will
ever be able to convert you.
laundry today, and the machine worked. i have to remember while i am
writing you to remove the lid from the pot with the tongue coming to a
boil or i will have boiling water boiling over into a boil on my stove.
i downloaded some software for my windows part of the machine, hoping it
will encourage me more to work some more with webdesign as i put a page
up of an essay that (about mandelstam) that i haven’t read for a long
time. i tend to forget what i’ve written.
sometimes i even forget to write. i am not concentrating very well on
schoolwork today, too boring. the clothes are drying. there is sunlight
once in a while.
time to check the stove.
have you noticed that i tend to complain? all i have to do tomorrow is
lead two conversation classes on the subject of film adaptation, tv
series and in general, messages in film; teach another course on NY city
and modernism (for which i have notes from last semester, once i find
them) and then to teach two classes on a short story about jazz music,
talking about the difference between blues, gospel, jazz and hiphop, and
that’s all. not a terrible day. my life could be much, much worse.
what gets to me is the quiet of these days i suppose.
whether or not you like my idea about the “Marka” i don’t know as i
haven’t checked the email box to which you probably replied as you tend
to like to press the reply button, and why shouldn’t you, this address
is too long to memorize. even i forget how to spell it if i don’t use
the url too often.
tonight i will consult the urls you sent me about cypress, and tomorrow
evening i will call the offices in the u.s. i am going to hope that i
can send them the requests directly, but even if i have to send them to
colorado first, we have plenty of time.
tuesday i think i am going to force myself to go to the city
administration. i was just too lazy friday and the weather did not favor
going outside. i like to stay inside in my room as much as possible. it
is rather nice here. i keep saying that. do you believe me yet? today i
spent an hour trying to get my cd player to work, with no success. i
wanted to play some music for my class tomorrow.
what did you do today? did you wish you mother from me my kind regards?
i am sorry i couldn’t speak to her longer yesterday evening, and of
course she was in a hurry to give you the phone. but i wish i could have
just asked her how she was. in u.s. one says Mrs. to mothers, and
grandmothers, but i am not quite sure how to address her, and i am sure
she feels uncomfortable with my addressing her at all. still, it was
pleasant to hear her voice for a moment, and i have many happy
impressions (sense impressions!) of our lounging afternoons in your
flat.
in fact, i have a quote from a czech writer you may enjoy:
“That night I slept alone in the bedroom, cold air streamed in through
the open window, on planks {wait a moment, why am i typing this, i can
cut and paste it} …
“That night I slept alone in the bedroom, cold air streamed in through
the open window, on planks between chairs the sausages and puddings
glittered on their rye straw, right by the bed on long boards lay
cooling the dismembered parts of the pig, the boned and apportioned
hams, the chops and roasting-joints, the shoulders and knees and legs,
all laid out according to Mr Myclik’s orderly system. As I got into bed
I could hear Francin in the kitchen getting up and pouring himself some
lukewarm coffee, taking some dry bread to chew with it, it had been a
tremendous blow-out, all the members of the management board ate
abundantly, only Francin stood there in the kitchen drinking lukewarm
coffee and chewing dry bread with it. I lay in the feather quilt, and
before I fell asleep, I stretched out a hand and touched a shoulder,
then I fingered a joint and went dozing off with my fingers on a
virginal tenderloin, and dreamed of eating a whole pig. When towards
morning I woke, I had such a thirst, I went barefoot to fetch a bottle
of beer, pulled off the stopper and drank greedily, then I lit the lamp,
and holding it in my fingers, I went from one bit of pork to the next,
unable to restrain myself from lighting the primus and slicing off two
lovely lean schnitzels from the leg. I beat them out thin, salted and
peppered them and cooked them in butter in eight minutes flat, all that
time, which seemed to me an eternity, my mouth was watering, that was
what I needed, to eat practically the whole of the two legs, in simple
unbreaded schnitzels sprinkled with lemon juice. I added some water to
the schnitzels, covered the pan with a lid, out of which angry steam
huffed and puffed, and now I laid those schnitzels on a plate and ate
them greedily, as always I got my nightdress spattered, just as I always
spatter my blouse with juice or gravy, because when I eat, I don’t just
eat, I guzzle …”
The writer’s name is Bohumil Hrabal. Maybe he has been translated into
Russian. I saw a film adapted from one of his stories, “Closely Watched
Trains,” many, many years ago, and it was one of those moments when i
became enamored of central europe, whatever my dream of it was.
Time to stop dreaming. I have to try to find my notes from last years
classes hidden in some notebook. I hope you don’t find this letter too
fast to read, nor my tone too light. i am trying to keep up a good mood
for tomorrow.
k.
Our Polish maid would go to the Gvarengy Church to gossip and pray
Sun, 17 Oct 2004 20:05:06 +0200
dear zh,
don’t worry about the words. it is a great help to me and of even
greater interest. thank you for your letters. i have indigestion from
fried potatoes (can you believe it? i made fried potatoes with yellow
peppers, onion and garlic to go with the tongue, which i didn’t cook
long enough, and which was not tender). yes, i felt very good after
speaking with you. do you know that you write very beautifully when you
are feeling sad and sincere (apologies for the sentiment). i am glad you
went for a walk, even if it was through the mud. i will write you
tomorrow morning. please, about these lines from the Marka, if and as
you wish and when you wish, preferable when you are bored and distracted
and have nothing better to do.
k.
Suspense
Mon, 18 Oct 2004 07:17:52 +0200
dear zh,
this morning for one reason or another is feeling like the endless
morning. i can’t seem to find anything, and i made the mistake of
falling asleep last night before putting my books and papers together so
that consumed half an hour already. i could have gotten up at 5:30, i
was awake and looked at the clock in the darkness, then i decided to
listen to the solitary car passing by on the street outside the window,
and before i knew it, it was 6:00, my waking time. schedules, routines.
i have absolutely nothing prepared for the first class, an hour and a
half long, and i don’t know yet what i’ll do to entertain them. maybe an
idea will come to me on the bus.
more details about your walk yesterday? if you tell me the names of some
streets and the general direction, i can follow along a little with you,
though it’s not absolutely necessary. i can imagine, though, that the
conditions of the streets (the mud) are aggravated by all the
construction.
my mind is blank. do you mind? i have been rushing and rushing this
morning and finally now when i am sitting down in front of you (as it
were) (my virtual you) (my addressee) with cup of coffee and according
to my watch, half an hour to give to the writing of a few words, i am
blank, my mind is blank.
i didn’t consult the urls last night, i’d spent so much time on the
internet in the morning that i didn’t feel like looking for addresses,
though i will tonight, which is actually a late afternoon for me. i
should be home by about 16:00 so i’ll write you then, though i won’t
have had time to consult the addresses yet, and tonight also i am going
to call the two bureaus in the u.s., so it is a big and busy day for me.
sometimes i am as if pulled away from thoughts and reflections (this
process is not so rigid as the words sound) reading and half
day-dreaming and i think this is my normal or habitual rhythm, left to
my own thoughts, and most importantly, my own time. as a result, even
the smallest demands seem insurmountable, like obstacles, and it is
difficult to organize one’s time. class preparation is a little like
that. the task itself overwhelms me, and when i actually do it, very
little time is required, but i am exhausted regardless, by the thought
of the task and the imposition that it must be done. perhaps you
experience ‘organizing’ your room a little like that. by the way, i have
nothing against disorderliness, messiness, and rather feel comfortable
in a space where books and clothes are strewn about. the kitchen is
another matter. thank god it has a door that i can close.
i think i am going to have two cups of coffee this morning. i did
succeed yesterday in cleaning my coffee machine, now it plays a very
nice overture by Monteverdi (muted trumpets and organ, as in heaven) and
does not spew coffee grains. did i mention that there was a movie on
last night, though it came on very early, and i missed the first half
hour, but i was distracted for about 90 minutes which was helpful and
oddly restful (not that i worked so hard yesterday but the sense of the
end of the week, or, more properly, the end of my time and the beginning
of class time, almost uninterrupted for three days, is hard, emotionally
and psychologically. what was nice about the movie was that, although it
started in southern california and mexico, there were scene shifts to
berlin and then cairo, and since it was a recent film, some realistic
accuracy. berlin, for example, did not appear to be a very pretty city,
which, by all accounts that i’ve heard, it isn’t. rather, quite chaotic.
cairo of course was presented complete with street festivals and the
strange sounds of the natives, so there was some inevitable exoticism,
but the ‘on-location’ sense was pleasant to view. cairo is a little more
real to me now knowing that you have visited there, and one of my
favorite photographs of you comes from there.
time for second cup of coffee.
i have this strange notion that i can write myself into a state of
enthusiasm for today if i keep writing you, and of course drink one more
cup of coffee. sometimes the crowdedness on the bus to the institute is
enough to make me exhausted, even before i step into the building.
i am waiting for the Monteverdi overture. bubbles of sound from the
boiling water (and it does sound like a trumpet).
have you guessed yet that i do not really care so much for teaching.
maybe i should think about another career. have you noticed that it is
difficult to find something to do in this world?
all my instincts support the perception that work and earning a living
have very little to do with being anywhere in one’s life, towards one’s
life, being alive in general, yet it is all that we ever seem to do, and
it consumes us. i feel sometimes like i am being consumed by a process
over which i have very little control. you will notice that this
contradicts all my assertions about how many choices one has. i had
better not write any more in this direction or i will write myself into
a bad mood.
do you really have to wait now for six more days until you have a free
day in which to go for a long walk? it just occurred to me that this is
true, and that i don’t have so much to complain about, though it may not
be a complaint so much as a note of caution, about working, and about
living in such a way that all one does is work, and i never regard
reading as work, it feels more like a suspension of time, and i like
that feeling very much, the suspension, which, if you must know, is not
exactly the same as, suspense (though, then again, they are not entirely
unrelated).
i’d better go.
k.
Osip
Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:46:35 +0200
dear zh,
i have just completed the three essential operations upon arriving “na
domu”: toilet, change of clothes, and open a beer. Fourth essential
operation: writing you.
it took me almost an hour to get home. i waited 20 minutes for the tram
and no tram, and as others were leaving, i left also and walked to the
bus stop where i managed to just miss the bus so than finally after
another 10 minutes another bus came and then half an hour on the bus
home. the transportation makes me more tired sometimes than the
teaching.
how pleasant it would be to come home and you would greet me by saying,
how was your day, dear? (i think rather you would greet me and say,
what’s for dinner, and i promise you, always, the answer will be, on
such days, restaurant). i have an eggplant that might be cooked for
tonight’s dinner, but i lack the energy to slice it. do you remember the
eggplant you peeled, you were so hungry? i was quite amazed, though i
remember better the time you came to stepanovka for leftovers and there
were none, i’d eaten them. what other reason was there for you to come
over?
some of my students’ hostility to american culture, we were mostly
talking about cinema and music today, took me by surprise, though it
shouldn’t, as everywhere, it is becoming almost a reflex to hate the
u.s. and everything that emanates from it: and really there is some
logic, as one is surrounded here with music and bad movies and so many
advertisements even are in english. myself, oddly, i feel more and more
neutral, even, disinterested, removed. american culture is just a
subject for me, i don’t participate in it and increasingly, i don’t feel
like my own writing has any relationship to it.
by the way, the queen of bees reference is quite interesting. i think
osip (may i call him osip?) is reading from the french (he was
incredibly erudite in french poetry) maybe it’s novalis, i don’t know.
any help you can give me a sentence at a time, always loosely given, so
that it doesn’t feel like a translation, would be a great help to me.
suddenly i line from a popular song here comes to mind (in a
german-english accent): “we’re all living in america – it’s wunderbar”
with of course, heavy irony (sarcasm).
more than help, really, the mandelstam. when you talk about individual
words, in russian, it is like having this lovely dialogue with you in
writing, and i love to listen to anything you have to say about this or
that russian word.
what is interesting is that my emailer doesn’t transcribe your cyrillic
coding, so i have to go back to the document, and figure out which word
you are talking about. actually, it’s quite a good way for me to work
with this or that russian word. obviously, i’m not going to learn to
speak russian this way, but i feel a little closer to you, and your
mind. (you have a quite interesting mind by the way, though i hardly
need to remind you of that).
“me think”? (i don’t trust anyone including myself who says they are
thinking).
i don’t want to give you the impression that my students are hostile.
not at all. skeptical, yes, and its a skepticism i would encourage. that
period in european history where the united states was looked to as a
democratic entity is over, as is democracy, almost, in the u.s. it’s
just a place people go to make money, since they live off the sweat of
the rest of the world there.
but, then, i forget your schoolfriend Tania’s experience, how much her
son likes classes there, how kind are his teachers, but really do you
think she is not stressed? imagine having to learn english from the
beginning! she is under incredible pressure, and i hope you can support
her in some way emotionally. you can be sure that no matter how positive
she sounds, that she is undergoing incredible pressure and even,
unhappiness (being in strange place).
for myself, i have great difficulties imagining myself returning to the
u.s. but i don’t want to stay here longer than another year or two, i am
serious. i hope you want to travel. i think i would like to go to
another country, more in the balkans. maybe. i am just free associating
right now. almost. or, i am getting restless, and you know, i am very
restless.
and smiling, on the way home today, on the bus, remembering your
Estonian friend saying i looked like a noble foreigner. i do not think
this is how you experience me, at least i hope not, but i hope you do
not experience me as someone who is impossible or dull or unfeeling.
about this, please be critical. i have great faults as you know of
gloominess and irritation, and temper. these are serious faults in my
character and i hope they do not make me ugly to you sometimes.
i have to read someone called stephen crane tonight, someone i have not
read in ages and someone i have to specific relation to, so i have to
read and prepare a class on someone i am simply not interested in. this
is a problem. i need to be somewhere that i am using my teaching to
deepen my reading to deepen my writing to deepen my dedication to
poetry. this is an absolutely essential and critical life question for
me now, and the answer to this problem is not at all obvious or
inevitable. i can still fail very terribly in my life.
why do i write like this? osip is an important figure to me for the
reason of the absolute external negation that he underwent. every word
he wrote is important. you are helping me hear a few of these words.
very likely, “Egyptian Stamp” is not a compelling work, not even close
to Kafka. i am not trying to convince you otherwise. but every word is
important to me.
have you ever noticed the transformation of faces that he undergoes?
i guess i am asking you to return with me sometimes from time to time to
those conversations in your office long before i ever dreamed of kissing
you (you didn’t appear to me to be interested in such nonsense, you were
so serious and dry and ironic) when we talked about tolka ravni etc.
(actually if you want a word that describes that version of yourself and
as you appear i think to many who do not know you intimately and
privately, ASPERITY would be a word to pursue in your great big
Websters’ dictionary) and AUSTERE (you are often rather austere) and you
told me then about your grandmother, the one for whom lenin was a devil,
who recited to you and made you remember whole poems of Mandelstam’s.
this is such a cherished story for me. it is better than the cave. it
is, rather, the Cave.
k.
Inkwell
Tue, 19 Oct 2004 07:06:33 +0200
On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:10:08 +0400
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:
> “In the night dream I saw a Chinese who hung small lady___s handbags
> all over himself like a necklace made from hazel-grouses and American
> duel-cuckoo (?) during which the opponents (adversaries) shoot from
> their pistols in to the cabinet with china sets, ink pots and family
> pictures” (canvas in Russian; I do not know if you use canvas as a
> synonym of picture, we do).
In my dream a Chinese had hung like a necklace around his neck tiny
purses made of [hazel-grouses and American cuckoo birds?] while the
duellers’ pistols fire, the gunshots hitting the cabinent, with all
its porcelain cups and plates, ink pots and family photographs.
what do you think is hazel-grouse? or duel-cuckoo? can you try a russian
dictionary on the net? (when you have time and remember and are
interested). i wonder if at this time there was a particular kind of
bird kept as a pet from “america” (i remember a professor once saying
this was a very obscure word and idea culturally and geographically for
o.m.) but a kind of bird that would be familiar to a dweller of upper
middle class residences in pre-1917 st. petersburg.
see, already, just how freighted words are with the time in which they
are written? my first variant is already up-dating the language. pistol
has become handgun by now in the u.s. the the opponents are duellers
(allusion to pushkin? lermontov?) what else were they called in russian?
duelling was rare in the english language, there are not so many words
for it. the duellers always use pistols. gangsters use handguns. o.m.
did write a gangster poem, didn’t he? a necklace is still more or less a
necklace. tiny instead of small occurs to me because of the oddness of
the detail, and did you know that “handbag” always refers to a large
purse? there is another word for the smaller one though i cannot
remember it now. shakespeare’s (polonius in hamlet) “put money in thy
purse” (or is it iago?) is quaint by now, wallet, it has become only a
wallet. if i were wanting a cheap sound effect, “ink pots and family
snapshots” would occur in english, but that would do as much strangeness
as putting handguns into the hands of the duellers, if that’s who the
adversaries are. the ink pot and the snapshot belong to two different
times. if fact, inkwell may be a better word. no, ink pots are better.
all these minutiae, almost below the horizon of visibility for the
reader and the idea of the passage of writing itself, from word to
phrase to sentence.
what is an utterance? even know i do not know. maybe it is a combination
of everything at once.
did you sleep last night? i worry about this only because i know very
well the sensation, and great sense of frustration. there is no
tiredness like this, and it is harmful to the one who cannot sleep. i am
sure you drink teas, but maybe for a while no more coffee than morning
coffee, if you are even drinking coffee right now? i cannot even drink
coffee in the afternoon, or rarely. last night i went to bed at 23:00
and slept till 5:30. i feel rested. and i went to bed rather satisfied.
last night i called the office in the u.s. and both tim in iowa and
rosie in san francisco were quite helpful. this is the american
bureaucratic style: a voice answers the phone and this voice is trained
to say: hi i’m tim can i help you? (often they are monitored by remote
listening devices to make sure they are pleasant to the customers,
though this is probably not the case with the courts, but it is still a
reminder of the ‘customer service’ environment, which, by now, surprises
me). i think i told you how astonished i was in florida when i got on
the bus in the morning and the bus driver said to me, “and how are you
this morning?” with a big smile. it was very important that i did call
the california court, and there are two different documents issued for
domestic and international purposes, so the name and price of the form i
am requesting is different, and i also needed certain identifying
numbers which the clerk gave me, who instantly looked up my records in
the database. actually, this automated aspect is a little frightening,
and again, utterly alien to the world you know and the world where i
work. anyway, the letter to my mother (whom i also called to let her
know to expect the letter in about two weeks and then to forward to the
two addresses with the document processing fee) and then she will try to
send it here. i think i am going to ask her to send a copy both to my
flat address and to my work address. that way one of the copies will get
here.
i also consulted the webpages you sent me and the other document i may
even be able to get here, in warsaw, very similar to notarized affidavit
i needed for my workcard from the american embassy, which takes five
minutes. it’s a standard form with the seal and signature of the
american embassy, which counts for something, i don’t know what. for the
russian form, i think you will need to consult someone in tomsk who
works with marriage services between people from different countries, or
with someone you know who has had to do something similar. my great
concern is that you will have to go to moscow for the document, simply a
notarized form declaring that you are not (already) married. it should
not be that difficult to obtain, but who knows. you may also have to
answer a form with 900 questions as i’ve heard the drivers’ license
requires.
but at least for my understanding, the paperwork is not intimidating,
and we should think about the 3-day special (in u.s. they would call it
“expedited”) waiting period, since the extra cost seems to be only about
100 dollars. that would give us one week to ten days, depending on
whether we are able to go to cypress for two weeks or three weeks
(obviously if you are only able to get a two-week visa we have no choice
but the 3-day choice) and then, or perhaps before then, the question
presents itself, would we feel like separating again, or would you (or
could you) enter poland with me then? this question, especially if you
are not getting much sleep lately, will irritate and annoy you and you
will say it is impossible. maybe, yes. i don’t know. i am only
wondering. would it be possible to get visa from russia to cyprus to
poland? don’t business people travel from one country to another? i am
only unsure of the necessity, as you’ve mentioned before, or returning
to russia if first, you go to cypress, and second, you go to poland.
perhaps you will need to consult the russian embassy first about this.
and i understand this is not a pleasant task. what we need, i think, is
more information about what are our rights of travel once we are
married. i know you have said before, nothing changes, and i am not
disagreeing with you, only i am wondering what kind of arrangement might
be possible, what are the choices, of your getting a visa from to
cypress and to poland, maybe separate visas? in the case of the separate
visa, you would probably have to enter poland from russia, and in that
case, we are back to the plan of your returning to russia for the spring
semester, my coming to tomsk in the summer, and the two of us returning
to poland together, probably the safest plan, but not the most
satisfying, as i do not expect that either of us looks forward to
separating after cypress, and we should worry about the question of
emotional health, yours and mine.
what a headache this last paragraph will give you. i apologize.
(missing you)
k.
Where are you
Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:26:30 +0200
zhenya, dear, where are you? i hope there is a letter from you somewhere
floating in cyberspace waiting to land in my box. or you have had a very
difficult day. perhaps you are already asleep. i wanted to write you a
few words to tell you i am home and that i have survived the second day
of my three-day weekly trial, and tonight i will be up quite late as i
have to read students’ writings they will expect tomorrow, and i’ve put
them off until tonight (serves me right) and then i have to make sure
that i have some kind of lesson plans for the other three classes. maybe
i will be up until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. but i can afford it, as tomorrow
evening i will happily return home. i hope i have not written anything
that may have “put you off” as we say. too many details. at the
postoffice i asked the woman to weigh the envelope with my requests to
the u.s. and there was plenty of postage on them, and so i said
“dzienkuya” and walked away to my classes, the first step in obtaining
the necessary forms completed. i saw nothing about “three months” limit
on the cypress websites, so i am not going to worry about the dates on
the documents. i try to see lodz sometimes through your eyes. it is very
difficult. i think there is great potential for your being lonely here.
but we would have constant internet access and you could correspond with
your many schoolmates and friends, and we will return to russia every
summer no matter where we are. still, there is a lot to lose sleep over.
i think the thought of me worries you sometimes. logic is needed here.
logic, and the determination (desire) to change one’s life. i only ask
you sometimes (beg you, really) not to forget that i am a poet and that
inside i really do look like the person you saw in the corner on the
turkey and pumpkin holiday looking quite desolate, do you know, i am,
basically, desolate. most of the time. though i try to remain cheerful
and positive (cultural conditioning!) or, who knows why. i am also
subject to laughing fits, as you have also observed. come to think of
it, what else have you observed? i’d like to know. also, i do not want
you to think that i do not care about the news that your father has not
been feeling well. i am sorry i have not mentioned it. how is he now? is
that also, perhaps, why you have been losing sleep? he is a very strong
person mentally and physically, but it must be difficult for you,
watching him grow older. when i think of the crises none of them of your
own making that the three of you have survived, it makes my own life
seem very small in comparison, and unchallenged. by the way, i taught a
very good literature class today, i didn’t realize how much i knew about
naturalism, and its contrast with psychological realism. the two stories
i had on the syllabus were kind of like reminders of hollywood movies,
but before hollywood was invented. so i talked a little about where
cinema and the novel (or fiction writing) meet, and really it is quite
amazing to see how much hemingway simply copied stephen crane. i have a
little more interest in this writer now. actually, i am at this point in
my life where i have an interest in all writers, and i really regret not
bringing back with me neither the “manhattan transfer” novel nor robert
lowell’s “notebooks” both of which were staring strangely at me in the
tomsk bookstore. i wonder why they were there? how did they get there?
are they still there? do you ever go back there? those books by moholy
nagy and el lissitsky are extremely valuable. here, a thousand rubles
does not seem so much. both of those books would cost 100 dollars or
more on the internet book market. sometimes i think that’s what i should
have been, a bookstore. i should have been something else. teaching
takes too much out of me. i am too much in that moment, when teaching,
and i know, from the air, the place, the classroom, that i am speaking
and thinking together, even, performing, and the students respond very
deeply here. sometimes i feel like i am retelling them the story of
american literature. it does mean something to me, sometimes. osip
mandelstam is the wild card.
i miss you
k.
Up early instead of late
Wed, 20 Oct 2004 04:23:49 +0200
dear zh, i am up early, too early, 4:00, instead of up late, as i simply
could not, i faded last night, from tiredness, and went to sleep at
22:00, my big mistake being that i should have marked the composition
papers on sunday, which i will do in the future.
i shouldn’t write you a very long letter this morning as i still have a
couple of hours work to do, but i wanted to say that my efforts are not
“enormous” in any other sense than the psychological one, i do not like
to remember times in my life when i have been under someone else’s power
and domination, though to be in this condition, perhaps it is the human
condition. i wonder also if this isn’t sometimes a worry of yours, as
you have been very successful as i have mentioned protecting yourself
against all the power habits of people, and you have an independence
most people do not have at this point in their life (i am sure sometimes
it is why you are consulted by your friends) and i do not want to
threaten this. then of course there is this always being alone, which is
equally exhausting. there seems to be no easy answer. do not think i
have forgotten our conversation at stepanovka and then the walk through
the botanical garden and the sense of hopelessness (without choices)
that day.
heavy thoughts for a morning of “idiotism”. not exactly a parrot, but
something close resembling. i thought the time went rather more quickly
last wednesday, and perhaps that will be so today. yesterday after
preparing for my literature class i left the preparation notes and
handouts at home, and so i had to improvise (have a conversation) and it
was very successful. unfortunately, one cannot do that with practical
english, you must have something for them to do. today we are going to
look at magazine pictures. i think i am what is called in my world,
“underemployed.” but that is a little better than being “unemployed”.
all the -uns you know, they are always in the negative.
are you getting much sleep? i worry about you (and miss you)
k.
Three hours later
Wed, 20 Oct 2004 06:58:45 +0200
zhenya, dear, i’m just about to leave and remembered i forgot to mention
something: translation, and poetry, both, are destroyed by professionals
and specialists. there is always the something-else that cannot be
accounted for, explained, who knows what it is. i only know that your
second variant of the second sentence was real, sharp, acute, the
language took me somewhere, so that i don’t know quite where i am right
now with the variants, and that is what translation is: variant,
variability, variations, as on a keyboard, music, and language, whatever
the language, though i do believe there is more music in yours.
k.
Re: 8 hours later
Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:29:58 +0200
and then, zhen, words from you, dear, when? perhaps tonight? i am home
finally at the end of the end of the day, still in my work clothes,
don’t know how i made it through the day, very hard work. just very
hard. i am all talked out. it is not the teaching i enjoy, and i am
running out of materials, so that means more time spent looking for
materials the school and the curriculum should provide. i have said all
of this already. i am so tired my eyes are burning. tonight i am going
to listen to music, and read poetry, if i can stay awake. but i hope you
are able to “drop a line” as we say, sometime before going to bed. are
you sleeping?
k.
Re: going together to bed
Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:24:39 +0200
dear zhen, i am still writing in the evening but the most cheerful topic
i can think of to write you about is a commerical on tv here: a pretty
woman in a white two piece bathing suit is stepping out of a pool at a
hotel (but what is important is that she is not movie-beautiful, or
model-beautiful, the hollywood type) and she walks past on her way to
her sun chair four men reading magazines, and one man (you would of
course say “malchik” if you were telling your mother about this
commercial) the camera follows, his eyes, and his eyes catch her eyes,
and she smiles, then, well, sort of, frowns, as her eyes move from
his eyes down the length of his body, though the expression is not
disapproval so much as reproval (if you know the difference in your
Webster’s dictionary) and then the camera goes back to the face of the
man, and he shows embarrassment, and places his magazine over the very
visible sign of his attraction, excitement, arousal, and then the woman
looks to the row of four men, a panoramic view, and all four men have
placed their magazines over their aroused members, parts of themselves,
which the woman in the white bathing suit has excited, and then the
flash to the product: FIT (an orange juice). what i enjoy is the shift
in the commercial to the (arguable) view of the woman (is the
question of who made the commercial important?), when the scene is seen
from the woman’s point of view, at least from the point of view of a
woman who recognizes the influence of her swimwear. What i really like
about the close-up on her face as she is drinking the orange juice is
that she has freckles. at this point all i am remembering are your
freckles. freckles, my dear, not wrinkles, and as you can tell by this
whimsical letter, i am missing you all over, everywhere that i am, and
as i am, and now i am, yours …
k.
Re: 8 hours later
Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:24:27 +0200
On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:03:10 +0400
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:
> the best thing is to go to bed. i would recommend to sleep, but you
> are stubborn and i am sure you will spend a lot of time looing for a
> crocodile movie on tv or smth else. by the way, what colour are the
> laces on your new shoes? bye zh
you can be sure i’ll be wearing my black-brown shoes in cypress, the
better to walk you with, my dear …
k.
