Letters from Poland: Feb. – March 2005

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.

portrait by the addressee of the letter writer in endangered habitats

Deep Winter

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 06:49:13 +0100

dear zh,

my first discovery this morning is that i have an unresponsive key on
the keyboard of my laptop, one of those keys that you have to press a
little harder to make an impression on the screen (this happened
eventually on my macintosh also). i don’t know whether this is a
consequence of travel or the cold, though the computer was not exposed
to the cold that much, at least not until the return trip. how was, in
fact, your return trip? i can’t know, don’t know, whether or not you
are home yet, though if not, you will be, or should be, soon, i think,
as it is a little after 6:00 in the morning here and by the time i
send this, near noon. if there is any possibility that you arrived
home to no letter (wait a second, i know the schedule, except you
aren’t flying into novosibirsk, i think, still, you will be arriving
in the morning, so maybe you did arrive to no letter, and if so, i
will hear about it.

i finally went to sleep last night at 18:00, and just waking now, that
means i slept 12 hours. much needed sleep. yesterday was slightly
unreal. simply from tiredness. i didn’t sleep at all on the plane or
the train, which i had to take from warsaw, since the buses to lodz
didn’t start running until 11:20 a.m. on weekdays, and i was reminded
that it was a saturday morning, so i don’t think they were running at
all. so i took a city bus to warsaw centralne, which some day you will
probably know quite well, and caught a train to lodz at 7:35 a.m.
after landing at 6:00 a.m., so the wait was not too bad. i was home by
10:00 a.m. to a very cold flat since i turned down the radiators
before leaving. i tried to sleep a little during the day but couldn’t.
so i did my laundry, which as you know is a great comfort to me, and
this morning all my clothes are clean and dry and ready for the work
week, beginning tomorrow, though i will do nothing today except work
on syllabi, so i guess my work week is beginning today.

i took note on my trip once i arrived just how familiar all the
connections and procedures were, and this was some comfort, and by now
i know my way around this way, landing at the airport, going through
the border control, taking the bus to the train station, getting a
train ticket, taking a bus home, finding my keys to my flat (which,
actually, i did not do until arriving at the door of my block building
where it was freezing cold, and of course i did not remember exactly
where my keys were, and finally someone leaving the building let me in
and i was able to find my keys in the warmth of the hall outside the
door of my flat. now more than ever, once home, i look around and try
to imagine what you think, what you will think, of this flat. i am
glad you like flats on the bottom stories, near the ground. that is
one thing which recommends this flat. that, and the low rent.
actually, i am quite glad to be home, though i think i was overcharged
for a head of brocoli and some potatoes and onions yesterday – it must
be the suntan. i noticed everyone was staring at me on the tram from
the train station also, and it wasn’t the luggage. that look which is
more than a look at the person whose physical characteristics betray
the ability to leave the cold winter land, and it is cold here, and
very deep in snow. where are my winter boots?

you cannot say that you didn’t try to find me winter boots!

yes, i am stubborn, just as stubborn as you. i think we will have a
lot of fun. i can’t wait to show you how to use the washing machine
for your laundry. then, too, i think you will discover how much fun it
is to do laundry. it is a great improvement to washing by hand. i did
not buy a coffee press at the airport, since i did not want one more
thing to carry. now that i am back, i wish i had brought more
souvenirs. i put a little of my olive oil on my brocoli last night. (i
also roasted a chicken and some potatoes, for the comfort after all
our restaurants). i noticed also that the cypress travel book which i
forgot to bring recommends three of the restaurants we ate in: the art
cafe, and the restaurant where you had the king prawns and i had the
sea bream, and the restaurant where you ate the moussaka, the one
where we went the night before we went to Feng’s House, the first
chinese restaurant. however, now that we have learned that your
favorite restaurant is the Chinese restaurant, that will make
decisions very easy in any city. it is a great task in life, to master
the chinese menu, and to know what each of the dishes are. there were
images on the news last night of the chinese new year, and everything
was so colorful that i thought for a moment that we went to the wrong
place, that it is necessary to go where there are no westerners for
the best trip. it was only a passing thought. the new year
celebrations looked more cheerful in china than in the west. it also
seems significant that they have a different new year.

now for my first rebellion. i think i will read to another cup of
coffee until it is time to go to the grocery store (10:00 a.m. on
sundays) and then i will visit briefly my French colleague whose wife
i met at the door of the block building yesterday when i was leaving
to buy my chicken and who invited my to stop by for tea or coffee this
morning, and then when i return to my flat about 13:00, i will check
for a letter from you, and then i will begin to work on my syllabi. at
the very least all i need to do today if design a class lesson for two
writing classes at the dunce college tomorrow. how much do you bet
that this is all that i do today? 12 hours of sleep feels rather nice.
i am beginning to understand why you are fond of 12 hours of sleep.

i miss you.

k.

So where are you?

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 16:30:06 +0100

dear zh,

okay, so you arrive in the afternoon. are you home yet? of course i
have done nothing today, not even visiting, only reading old essays. i
wrote one page and a half of a new essay. i cannot think about
tomorrow, about teaching. i am lonely. very lonely. i do not like
being separated from you. so where are you? are you home yet? if you
are at home, why do you not write me. have you told your mother? if
yes, what does she say? i would rather that you were here. i think i
would like it very much if you were here. so, where are you?

i miss you.

k.

If you were here

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 18:11:38 +0100

dear zh,

if you were here we could watch the (Polish?) version of Doctor
Zhivago, which comes on channel 1 at 20:10. that is what i will be
watching tonight. i am suddenly very tired. i think this is vacation
withdrawal. tomorrow i will start to do everything required of me.
tonight i relax. i do wish you had a good and safe trip, though i am
beginning to worry. where, and how, are you, dear?

i miss you.

k.

Where are you?

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:39:53 +0100

dear zh,

now i am beginning to become just a little worried, though i trust if
there was a significant problem or emergency you would call, yes?
please? i kept looking for an email from you throughout the boring day
(boring because i didn’t even want to look at teaching materials, and
boring because i hadn’t heard from you). i did manage to read about a
hundred pages from The Order of Things (if you have this in russian as
you thought you did it bears reading from, about 10 pages at a time,
and i am actually finding some help there for some inchoate ideas i
have about classicism, which F. writes about). other than that, i
watched a very bad version of Zhivago (they are all bad, but this one
was worse) and then went to bed early, about 22:00. now i am up at
5:30 without a letter from you, without word from you, though i
remember that you had classes this morning, so you must be already at
school, if your flight was not delayed. i can’t imagine you having
trouble re-entering russia, however much they harrass you upon trying
to leave.

of course i am drinking coffee, and of course after sending this i
must turn my thoughts to my lessons today. slips in my mailbox when i
returned indicate that there are books that i ordered waiting at the
local postoffice, so that is another errand i must run today. after
the roast chicken yesterday my cooking is beginning to suffer, and i
can feel the weight of pre-larnaca days returning, since all i wish to
do is go for a walk with you along the sea, even 20 kilometers this
time. there is only snow here, though not as much as where you are? so
write me of the wind and the cold and your trip back and how you are
as soon as you can? i’ll probably check my email in another 4 hours.
can you believe that i can hear the sound of a snow shovel outside my
window in the dark at 5:30 a.m.? poor worker! of course i am in the
warm room with my work to do, and now i am reminded that it is luxury
work, compared to shoveling snow. please can you write me as soon as
you can?

i miss you.

k.

Starting to worry

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:18:19 +0100

dear zh,

you know it is not my nature to worry about anyone but myself, but i
am beginning to be concerned about you, about not hearing from you,
and now i regret that we did not have an emergency plan if something
did go wrong with your trip back, even if it is only a weather delay,
which is what i am hoping for right now. i do not think you are back
in tomsk. and i think also were something seriously wrong, like being
detained, you would call me to let me know – whether or not i could do
anything is another question, and right now, that makes me feel rather
helpless.

i am on my way now to the institute and then to the dunce college and
i should be home about 16:30. i will be hoping for word of you (words
from you) then, promising myself that i will not become seriously
worried until tomorrow morning, if i do not hear from you then,
perhaps i will call your home. at least i can ask your mother, gdye
zhenya? and if she cries at me i will know you haven’t returned.
again, i am assuming it is the weather, and you were delayed one day
in your return. but i really do regret that we did not prepare for
this, not hearing from you makes me feel very uncomfortable. it is the
not knowing, and so one begins to imagine things.

i miss you very much.

kisses.

k.

Great relief

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:33:54 +0100

dear zhen,

i was determined to begin worrying seriously if there was no word from
you this afternoon. i am home at 14:30 as i said i would be. it turns
out that i have my two good groups at the dunce college on mondays,
and the second group, hearing the news last week from my colleague,
presented me with a bottle of champagne. it is tempting, tempting.
tomorrow i must (at 14:00) give the text of my toleration paper at the
faculty meeting for my department. i should drink the champagne in the
morning, in true russian style. a colleague (phD candidate in the
british dept. whom i like a great deal saw me today and remarked on
how great i looked, so i told him the news and he was quite
congradulatory, warmly and sincerely, polish style. it made me feel
good and welcome. tomorrow i will (should have) more news. of course
as soon as possible i will try to put you in touch with someone in the
russian philology, hopefully in a couple of weeks. has anyone
commented on your appearance? my mind you looked very rested and
contented when i left. by the way, i could have stayed with you
another hour. i got to the airport too early, and there was nothing to
do but read. did i tell you the plane was practically empty? i had all
three seats to myself. i read the european edition of the wall street
journal, a conservative american business paper, and it scared me
somewhat, the hardening of language, but you would be amused to hear
of the pro-putin (pro neo-liberalism) line in the business paper.
america, it appears, wants to buy oil from russia. though i think they
would rather steal it. i am kind of in the groove now, with my first
two classes out of the way, none tomorrow, two on wednesday at the
institute and two and the dunce college (i will be tired wednesday
evenings) and the balance on thursday, three classes i think at the
institute, and then my french lesson. this will be my schedule. i
don’t think it will be too bad. did you miss your monday classes? were
you delayed? i am anxious to know more details of your trip, though
above all, i am terribly happy you are home and that you are all
right. i really do miss you. it is strange to be alone again, and i do
not like it much. i remember once in a while i actually made you
laugh, about as many times as i made you cry. now, in retrospect, it
seems easier to admit that both of us were struggling against the need
to be separated again, that at least is what affects me here, what i
can feel finally, back here. emotions are always catching up with me,
as though i feel them in retrospect, after i have passed through the
experience.

looking forward to your letter, and with kisses.

k.

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 13:17:41 +0300
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

> kevin, dear, i am here at last. i will write you later today. sorry
> to make you worry across your nature. i am ok. how is your working
> day? bye zh
>
>

A toast

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:01:43 +0100

dear zh,

yes, you are right, i decided not to wait, especially when i saw that
the champagne was russian champagne, so tonight is a champagne night,
to which i shall drink toasts to you, and perhaps write you a bubbly
letter in the late evening. i also decided not to wait until your
letter arrived, as that might require too long a wait. so why not
write you now? what about? well, i am about to take off my palangas
sweater and put on my tomsk grey sweater (the one i taught you english
in, which has become a house sweater now). so please excuse me for a
moment while i change sweaters.

the sweaters are changed, and i am lighter. this grey sweater is too
stretched-out to wear in public.

i shall have to think up a toast before the end of this letter, which
means that it may be a rather long letter. i do not think that you
will complain.

my canadian-american (he has dual citizenship-unfair!) stopped by with
student compositions from the class he substited for me last week. he
has the flu and did not stay long, though long enough to congratulate
me. it is strange to feel this sense of context here, much stronger
than in russia, though to be fair, i was in different places those two
years.

so, i will toast to fairness, especially yours, my dear, your fair
skin. which i miss.

i had a thought earlier today, on the tram home, something i wanted to
say to you, but you weren’t there, and now my thoughts have turned to
a book i began to read, though i thought of you then too, since it is
by a writer, a woman writer, Simone de Beauvoir, visiting America, in
1947, and writing about the cities and the landscapes. i think it is
the kind of book you would like. there might even be a russian
translation. in english the title is “America Day by Day” and it is a
journal of a four-month trip she made there, and very nicely written.

so you see i am neither reading for my classes nor for my essays.
though i am thinking now about writing an essay about three strangely
unrelated books: de Beauvoir’s travel memoir, Laura Riding’s
“Anarchism is not enough” and Gertrude Stein’s memoir of World War II,
“Wars I Have Seen”. I would like to arrive at some sort of strange
thesis for a conference in june in Poland. for the moment, i don’t
know if i am that imaginative. the essay i have to write this month
and in march feels forced already, about something i don’t believe in.
this is an incredibly big and bad danger, especially when writing with
my left hand (prose writing). but i think i am in this “miltonic”
period now, which you may remember i mentioned, when he wrote with his
left hand. only i have to do it to survive.

someone is either screaming outside or it is a cat. i kind of miss the
cypress cats.

my books arrived from cracow and already i want to order more. they
help me to think, even only perusing them, which for now is all the
time i have, but i am beginning to be impressed by my eclecticism: the
nekrasov translation looks simply bizarre, which is the stuff of
poetry.

the stuff of my stomach, however, tonight, is cold tongue from
yesterdays supper, and roasted potatoes. lately i have a craving for
potatoes.

and champagne, russian champagne. actually, the champagne is not very
strong, only 10 percent, so i don’t think it will do me much harm.

why not write you listening to satie?

you see, it is very good to hear from you, though for now i have only
a few words from you. maybe there will be a letter waiting when i
finish this one.

my classes went well today, i had enough energy. maybe it is the
vitamins. i take them every day.

how on earth, though, will i write these essays? only if i had nothing
else to do. you remember how long it took me to write in tomsk. i am
not the kind of person who can write in between other tasks. i have to
write the same sentence over and over again.

this music by satie is always soothing. i have known it for many
years: piano.

though not as cloudy as the piano music i played in larnaca. messaien.
there was a reference to darius milhaud by de beauvoir in her memoir,
and i remember listening to a lot of milhaud once. i have gone through
periods of my life when i listened to music all the time, then through
periods of complete silence. when i was very young, still an
undergraduate, i would buy nonesuch recordings of contemporary music,
names of composers i have almost forgotten: I can hardly remember any
of them now.

i think that is why i was very happy to find a recording by a composer
named Xenakis, the music reminded me of something, sounds i would
listen to for hour without understanding, very much like my experience
of poetry.

actually this champagne is not very good at all. i don’t think it was
made in moscow. it is too sweet and without enough carbonation, if
that is what it is called. also i do not have champagne glasses, which
is a great pity when one is drinking champagne.

i am very happy with the thought of your eventual presence here. every
day i think of how to change the rooms. i think there is more than
enough room for us. last night there was a very contemporary film on
just before i went to bed about young Poles and the boy and girl were
eating breakfast (toast!) on a small table in the small kitchen, just
like the small table in your kitchen, though my kitchen is not as nice
as yours, it is about the same size. it can be a friendly place in the
morning over coffee and toast (and once a week, a soft-boiled egg,
though i forgot to get the egg cups in larnaca).

and i still like very much the idea of arranging for a door to be put
in the room that will be yours, for a little privacy, the ability to
be by oneself. that is so very important. as important as having the
freedom not to be by oneself.

i ordered a book that arrived today that even though it is in english
i think you will like it very much: The Collected Stories of Anzia
Yezierska. The introduction begins: “She was a misfit all her life.
Throughout the years she saw herself standing on the street with her
nose pressed against the bakery window: hungry and shut out. No matter
what happened, she felt marginal.” At least it’s a lot better than
feeling like margarine!

Biography: Anzia Yezierska was born in a village in the Russian part
of Poland. She died in 1970.

I became very interested in the “immigration” story last semester,
when i found myself teaching the three great origin stories of
America: the frontier, slavery, and immigration. in addition to the
writings, immense, about the cities there, i could read this material
for the rest of my life. you remember that i mentioned that i felt
that i was becoming ever more involved with ‘the myth of America’ from
the distance i am living in and hope to be able to continue living in.
or from. somehow it makes the reading more exciting, urgent, even
tasty, and it is possible to taste books.
sometimes i feel like there is a great book inside me when i have the
excitement of wandering through my budding library, and other times i
feel like i am tired and would like to sleep for a long time. i have
to work very hard on not being overwhelmed by my teaching this
semester.

there is also, you know, a terrific genealogy of writers, women and
men, across the jewish nexus, from russian-poland, like your mothers
blood-parents (there is a very real story there in itself, their death
during the war during her childhood, and with them, the passing of the
Polish past), those russian jewish writers who migrated to israel,
those who remained in russia, those who wrote in english, from
america, two of my favorite american poets, reznikoff and louis
zukofsky, share this history. i don’t think it is a genealogy that can
ever be disentangled, but certainly there is a great amount of
translation to be done, and i like these small volumes, not
compendiums, like the small volume, Annihilation, by Piotr Szewc, from
an American press which i like very much, Dalkey Archive.

i am afraid that there will always be books arriving by mail. they are
like christmas packages. and they make me think. which is always a
good thing. as you know, i am not a very nice person when i am not
thinking.

what else do you have to do with your life except read? what do you
think? well, we can read and walk. i have nothing against 10
kilometers a day, though 20-30 km seems to be more your style.

there are always the mountains.

i miss you. now. tonight.

kisses.

k.

p.s. do you know that i found our long walks very good occasions to
think about what i wanted to write?

Tuesday work day

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 07:02:37 +0100

dear zh,

my alarm went off an hour early and that is fine i guess as i went to
bed an hour early as well. today i can no longer ignore the
inevitable: classes tomorrow and thursday. two are over, and there are
seven more. i think i will devote tuesdays to class preparation and
organization, so that i have nothing to do on fridays, saturdays,
sundays (leaving monday morning for preparation for the afternoon
classes). if i can enforce this schedule, make myself follow it, i
will be much happier, than always doing things at the last minute. i
might have written my syllabi sunday, for example, that i need for
tomorrow, which would have made today a little more enjoyable, but i
have to give to myself at least the benefit of the doubt both saturday
and sunday were floating days upon the return to larnaca. do you feel
anything similar? i mean, disassociation from your surroundings?
everything feels very far away from me, and i feel like i am speaking
across a great distance to people. last night, my neighbor, a german
colleague, visited, for too long, as he always does, and by the time
he left at 21:30 i was exhausted and tried to listen to a web radio
broadcast from france about an american jazz musician, only there were
too many words, and not enough music, and i gave up at 23:00 and
that’s when i went to bed. i guess that’s an hour early, though i
don’t know what schedule or habit i’m referring to. maybe i woke up
too early this morning. i admit to a little nervousness about
presenting my toleration paper today, since incomprehension disturbs
me, and that is for the most part what i can expect. if i can direct
the discussion afterwards to the issues of marginality in the arts,
spontaneous and chance operations in composition, whether filming or
music or writing, and perhaps even the conceptual space between
“image” and “sign” – then everything will go well. maybe i will have
time to write about it tonight, it depends on how much work i can get
done this morning. the two headaches i am not thinking about yet
appear to be on thursdays: what looks like a very large academic
writing class, and a conversation class with the same group as in the
fall, which means that i have to come up very quickly with new
materials, new ideas. in the land of no textbooks, this is an
irritation, to say the least. i will have to spend too much time on
the internet, looking for materials.

so, how am i doing – do i sound as usual, complaining about my work
load and schedule and general prevention from paying any attention to
poetry, my own or anyone else’s? this seems to be the pattern. any
suggestions? advice? recommendations?

if you were here i am not so sure i would want to go for a long walk
in the snow, though my neighbor did bring a book in english about the
city of lodz with many nice photographs, including one of the marysin
station which still stands from which the deportations to the camps
were made. nearby there is a very large forest park that you can
almost get lost in. the forest is only about 10-15 minutes walk from
here, so i think this will be a favorite place for us to explore.

i can write, i miss you, which articulates a declarative form, or,
missing you, which, without the pronoun, shifts the statement towards
a continuing present condition: which do you prefer? (probably both).

so: missing you, i miss you …

k.

Yes I did it

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 16:34:08 +0100

dear zh,

the paper is over, and it went well, i think, there were many
questions, a long discussion, and i began to feel quite ignorant of
russian culture, russian literary specificity, so i was very aware of
the boundary crossing, trespassing even, one can never think enough
about this. the prose, my prose, is dense, writtenness, and i had
trouble speaking the paper, and nerves too. agnieszka seemed very
pleased, and in two saturdays i am to have lunch with jadwiga, who
mentioned before cypress her willingness to look into the possibility
of your teaching on the russian faculty, so i will ask her to do so at
the lunch not this saturday, but next saturday. i shall have to
overcome my shyness, and i think sometimes i am more than shy, i am
mortified, especially at the thought of my own existence. you are very
nice to say you miss me both emotionally and physically, because i
feel sometimes like i am deteriorating physically, falling apart, or
disintegrating. maybe it is the cold. maybe it is too much coffee.
maybe it is just a certain stupidness i suffer from, and i am
certainly capable of being quite dull and stupid, unfeeling. numb.
yes, it is the cold, and it is the nerves after having to read the
paper in front of ten of my colleagues. full attendance of the
faculty. my writing is on another plane than my daily existence, and
profoundly, profoundly, the words do not belong to me, i do not live
them, they are not mine, though you saw me write them, do you
remember. i hope so very much that you observe me writing many more.
but i don’t think they will ever belong to me, it is sensation of
alienation, estrangement, distance, great distance, from the life in
language that one dreams. the daily life of the teacher is so meager
in comparison, and i hope sometimes that you excuse the worst aspects
of my morbid and bitter character as the feeling through of this
separation between the circumstances of the daily life, the job, the
survival, and the world of language and thought that one dreams. your
long letter gave me great pleasure, i read it four times. i like your
writing very much. when you can, if you can write me such letters once
in a while, i wish you know how much pleasure they give me. the
smallest details. i enjoy hearing about your mother and father. i
enjoy hearing about your daily rhythms (with the exception of the
englification, of course). do you know that i even miss your bothering
about me, worrying about me, am i worth the trouble? do you know that
i agree with you that i lack confidence? it is very deep. i don’t know
why. sometimes it is productive. sometimes it hurts. sometimes i am
embarrassed and ashamed, and i don’t know why. sometimes i am very
forceful in my writing, and i don’t know where the words come from,
but books have always been this great other country. i sincerely hope
that i do not do them discredit. the books, i mean. maybe you do not
care for such reflections. it is not depression, just moodiness, the
blues, we say, after the strain on my nerves this afternoon, after the
public appearance, performance.

now i will look forward to a few words from you, dear.

k.

I can’t find you

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:40:59 +0100

dear zh,

i can’t find the images from the australians’ website and i wanted to
look at the picture of you translating. you may think this is a silly
request, and yes, it is, since silly also has the sense of fondness,
and i am (was) fond of that picture, there are too many files in my
computer. how easily pictures get lost there. can you send me the url
when you can? is the webpage with the picture of you translating still
online? by the way, where is your letter? (i’m waiting for it).

a little lonely tonight.

k.

Winds woke me up this morning

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 06:30:28 +0100

dear zh,

my alarm was set for 6:30. i remember. i set it myself. going to bed
last night at 11:30, but i was awake at 5:00, and lay awake, alone,
for an hour, now i am at my laptop at 6:00, and i think i will try to
make this my morning schedule, hopefully not lying awake for an hour,
thinking, and thinking too much, though it is better, i’m sure you’d
agree, than lying awake for hours before falling asleep, if sleep ever
does arrive in such circumstances, which i believe you know, or have
known. it is not a bad idea to write you for half an hour every
morning, before i do anything else, even showering, that morning
routine before one goes out to face the world. in my case, today, it
is a class at 8:30, at the institute, and i am not sure whether i will
know any of the students, though they will be third-year students, so
even if i have not had them in a class before, they will know of me, i
will not be a stranger to them. then there is a two hour break, which
in the future i think i will use for my office hours, and then i go to
the dunce college to teach two first-year classes of less talented
students, as i have mentioned many times before. as usual, already the
trend is beginning, is scraped together enough material for lesson
plans for tomorrow, but after tomorrow, i will have to begin again,
and this is what is so time consuming, and when one has the same
students, you can repeat your lessons. more work, more work.

speaking of work, i saved the pictures of you from the australian
site. i like the picture where your hands are on your hips, looking
towards the forest, it looks like you are thinking about a 30 km walk
in the afternoon. in the picture with the maps you look more serious
than usual. is that your public face? i think that you probably smile
more in class, and i have once overhead your voice, teaching, and it
was a very nice voice, matter-of-fact without being authoritarian.
thank you also for you longer-than-usual letter last night, i didn’t
know that i was supposed to send you a good night letter, but i will
try. my mood is not always for the best in the late evening. thank you
also, also, for the res publica announcement. i actually know of
springer (the online publication associated with the call for papers).
it is a very good intellectual magazine published in germany. i may
try to send one or two essay from a manuscript, essays that i wrote in
russia my first year. i certainly do not have time to write anything
by the end of july, though if i could write on the theme of respect i
would write about how walter benjamin writes about, perhaps can even
be said to ‘see’ workers and working people. they (we) (me, myself and
I) are never entirely a political category in his writings, but
neither sentimentalized portraits. it is a condition of friendliness
that i always read in his writings whenever ‘proletarians’ appear
there, whether they are walking through a gallery, or participating in
a mock trial. the problem is that these proletarians are visible, on
the horizon of his thought, and writing, only because they have been
politicized. there is no such thing as a passive proletariat. without
the politicization, they are simply a seething mass of working people
divided from one another in many, many mutually harmful ways. walter
benjamin is the only writer i know at least who writes in prose
(reznikoff and zukofsky would be examples in poetry) who actually
respect proletarians. unfortunately, ‘respect’ is a word like any
other, the more you use it, the more it begins to empty, and the
reverse-meanings start to show through. what would be more oppressive
than having to respect anywhere and always, whatever is superior,
above? “the authorities”. i do not think, for example, that i have
practiced much respect in my life. maybe more in my writing than
anywhere else. ‘respect’ too easily slides into ‘humiliation’ (a word
you have used before, and i remember our conversation very well, in
your dacha, and you were very sensitive to its meaning then).

if you ever do not write me because you feel that it takes too much
time, writing in english, please do not worry about the sentences or
the words themselves. i rather like the opposite effect, when you are
writing very quickly and i can feel sometimes the movement of the
russian language, and your being there (yes, one IS in a language)
just as i am hopelessly in english, within english, even trapped in it
sometimes, or caught up in it, these are the currents and flows of
signs and bits and pieces of words that circulate around me, and so
when you write me quickly, though i worry when you write me too late
at night, even though i know you didn’t have to get up this morning
and go anywhere, when you write such a letter as last night, the words
tell me a little about where you are and how you are feeling, and i
know you will visit luba today and have something nice to eat and
drink.

it is 6:27 and i must conform to the demands of the work day.

i miss you, very.

k.

Wet snow turning into pools

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:40:19 +0100

dear zh,

it is one of those terrible days today, warm enough to thaw the ice
and snow, and warm enough to rain, but i had my umbrella, still though
with a few sniffles and cough once in a while, it is unavoidable, with
such weather. my classes went very well this morning, and i like my
students for my third year seminar (last year this semester they were
as dull as ditchwater!) though i may have designed too ambitious of a
seminar for them, too many novels. then my two classes in the
afternoon at the dunce college went very well also – i know all the
students, and we did exercises. they are both first year groups, and
actually even cooperative, though sometimes i am sure they do not
understand what i am saying. when i am feeling good, like today, i
teach very demonstratively, repeating key phrases, asking questions,
walking up and down the room, praising students. it is a very good
feeling. now, tomorrow, i have four classes, all at the institute:
long day! two in the same subject though, american culture, one
conversation class, and one academic writing class. i should be able
to bluff my way through the academic writing and conversation class
without a lot of preparation tonight, so maybe i will have the chance
to read a little. time is more and more of the essence (very
important) and i have to make sure that i give myself time on weekends
to write the essay for the conference in april, though more and more i
am hoping they will not accept my abstract, though that is unlikely.
that means i have to write it! and the subject no longer interests me!
i don’t even remember what i was thinking about! actually, this is a
lot like what writing poetry is like. this is long enough letter for
one who writes me only a paragraph though believe me i am not
complaining, it’s just that i’m hungry for news from you, words from
you, signs from you. in other words, i enjoy very much getting an
email from you, thank you very much. since i am schedule-oriented this
semester, i think i will try to write you every morning for half an
hour, in the evening for half an hour, and when i come home for 15
minutes or until i must make supper. do you have a regular bedtime?
obviously, i can’t wait until my bedtime to write you since you will
be already asleep then. even it is already 21:30 in your land so
really, i should write you about 19:00 or even 18:00? i should be able
to do this for the evening letter. i guess this also means that this
is my evening letter. does that mean that i won’t get another letter
from you tonight? especially if you spent the evening with luba. maybe
you will write me before you go to sleep. of course, there is no harm
either in your writing me as soon as you wake up, either. don’t you
agree? i am very efficient in organizing your time! enough chat. i
miss you, rather, do you know?

kisses …

k.

Wet snow turning into pools

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:40:19 +0100

My first long Thursday

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 06:44:01 +0100

dear zh,

here i am again at the keyboard and again in the morning, first thing
in the morning, though i have showered and shaved this morning first,
what used to be called ablution in english, i don’t know if it still
is, and i don’t know what else my cup of coffee is called except a cup
of coffee, though very nice not to have to go out in search of it,
this cup of coffee.

ture to my intentions, last night i read for myself only and began
yawning at 22:00 which made sense, since i had to get up at 5:30 this
morning, since i have to get to the institute at 8:00 to make some
copies before class, and of course i needed to allow 30 minutes from
my early morning to write to you, though you do not think that i write
you enough in this time, perhaps it is even a time frame. i don’t even
remember when i began writing this letter, perhaps it was four minutes
ago. i think i can be a little more flexible with such time.

have you found out yet why they give you so many classes this
semester? is there a logic, or is it just bad luck? i won’t know until
after today whether my luck is good or bad, regarding the students,
the class size, etc. yesterday was a good sign. i am hoping for a good
semester, and yet, to be truthful, i woke this morning in a kind of
panic, about us and the very real and practicaly us, meaning getting
you here. it is just panic, or better, anxiety, but i am reminded now
that i have a new cause for anxiety, and as always, i question my
actions, my action in this case having been to decide to stay here and
teach here. then again, even last night, reading, my reading is
directed towards something i am going to write, and something i am
going to write that you might say is job related, for a conference,
acting on this belief that i have to engage in this activity to
resemble what is called “active” as a teacher. still, to calm my own
anxieties, please allow me to say that we must keep in mind all the
alternatives we discussed in larnaca. that seems a broad enough
beginning, one that may help me not to worry about when i will next
see you every day, wanting to see you every day, now instead i worry
every day about when i will next see you and for how long.

it looks warmer outside, yesterday as i mentioned was a great snow
melt, and rivers of water everywhere to walk through. i am glad i am
still in my old shoes, which, still, are watertight.

the strange thing about reading such as the reading i did last night
for a couple of hours (after, of course, ordering some more books) is
that i am reading for something, though i can’t quite say what it is,
so it is directed reading, though i can’t quite say by what i am being
directed, and this troubles me. i am used to reading for myself and
for myself only. this other reading reminds me why i hated school, and
to be honest, i always hated studying poetry at the university,
always. at the time, i was just trying to avoid having to go to work,
to have to go somewhere where i couldn’t read at all. i think now that
i have always been most afraid of finding myself in situations where i
am unable to read, and then you find yourself in a situation where you
are reading either for your classes or for writing which addresses a
professional context (the profession of literature). in both cases,
creativity is lost. i need to be extremely conscious of this, since
the compromise, or negotiation, can be extremely harmful, and i am
capable of doing this to myself, harming my creative capacities, and
really, for reading for one’s own writing, you have to read first for
pleasure, and second for sense of project, but one that is often very
wide and expanding, across all kinds of books, other poetry, history,
philosophy, even crazy things that come one’s way, even over the
internet. so that there’s an element of chance to the gathering of
these materials that get re-shaped some way, and research is just the
opposite of this, even such limited research as i am able to do, which
is little more than background reading.

background to what? contemporary and modern poetry? even that category
bores me when it is stated. and yet if i have written anything, i have
written contemporary poetry situated between conceptions of the modern
and the post-modern. sometimes i think i have done this, but there are
also many times, most of the time, actually, when i forget that i have
written anything at all. this is quite a dead space to inhabit. this
may be the greatest problem i am struggling with right now, in
addition to my anxiety about my ability to arrange for you getting
here, and being able to work here. do you think it is helpful to write
about one’s anxieties? it is a little different than complaining. i
feel this need to try to identify and make more objective, more
concrete, more real, just what is not only troubling me, but
preventing me from having more confidence and purposefulness, so first
of all, i don’t let myself down into these wide sweeps of boredom and
idleness, like being stopped or stuck or stalled in a car. it is such
a great feeling to be mentally and verbally active (this is the
positive thing about a good class, that you feel yourself moving
through a social space verbally and communicating) and yet there are
all these limits, resistances, boundaries, circumscriptions.

well, how is this for writing for half an hour? thank you for
reminding me that doubt and uncertainty are productive, and really
they are, for writing, for the best writing, which never knows itself
as such, and this is exactly the kind of writing that i am not doing
right now, quite the opposite, even a kind of writing which demands of
the writer a confidence in what one knows, and i have always taken as
a motto (slogan) a line like, “I have had to learn the simplest things
last” (words of an american poet who wrote half a century ago) and
sometimes it seems i am trying to do the opposite, to forget the
simplest things which i have given so much of my life to learning how
to write. it is the old truth. there is no substitute for writing
itself. it is an activity far beyond where and what one is at any
given moment. the idea, any idea, is amazingly stubborn and refuses to
be articulated. every sentence is shaped by the context for which it
written. i can’t believe i have to teach academic writing this
semester!

you will write me at least one letter today?

i miss you.

with kisses.

k.

My folder is empty!

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 05:18:41 -0500 (EST

dear zh,

i have just a few minutes betw classes but i checked my email to see if
there was a message from you and no message yet! please write me! soon!
i’ll be in class for the next four and a half hours (sigh). i’ll write you
when i get home (after my french lesson which i hope doesn’t happen) so
maybe you won’t hear from me until late in your evening. i miss you.

k.

me again

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 06:38:36 -0500

dear zh,

i see you still haven’t written me and my folder is still empty. i
dismissed my class early and have 15 minutes before my next class. the
academic writing class is too large: more than 25 students. the
conversation class promised to be even larger, maybe 30 students. now is
the time when i realize how much work i will have to do outside of class
to prepare for these classes, 9 in all, between the two colleges? when
will i ever have time for my own reading and writing? you have heard all
of this before. i simply forget, from time to time, what is involved, and
then when i am faced with the concrete instance (the students) i am
dragged back to my awareness of just how hard i do work, teaching,
teaching, teaching.

wouldn’t you like to hear anything about anything else? is there anything
else in my life? i think you are working too much today, that is why you
are not writing, though it is already 18:00 in your ice land. where are
you? what are you doing? where are you going? home (i hope).

kisses.

k.

My folder is still empty!

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:21:01 -0500

dear zh

it is a few minutes before my last class this afternoon. so far so good. i
suppose. in fact i have to leave in two minutes. i just thought i’d remind
you that you haven’t written me yet, and it’s already 19:30 in your part
of the world. are you still at work? how was your day? what are you having
for dinner? what time will you go to bed? will you wash your hair? will
you read a book? will you watch TV? will you take a walk? will you talk
with your mother or father? will you write to me and ask me to shut up?

kisses

k

this is what i sound like in the early evening after a long day

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:07:48 +0100

dear zh,

who has not written me all day

now i am writing you my evening letter. do you know what i suddenly
missed today? your laughter. i have great need of your laughter this
evening. everything looks very depressing, late or mid-winter weather,
or whatever. it is the kind of weather where one does not feel
optimistic, though i just read the introductory pages of a very
interesting book: by a russian-born theorist of new media and cinema:
his name is Lev Manovich. he writes of studying computer programming
in moscow in 1975 and writing computer programs for two years without
ever seeing a computer. they would write the programs and turn them in
for marking and their programs would be corrected down to the missing
semi-colons. sounds like russia, doesn’t it?

meanwhile, in poland, i realize i am in danger of being overextended
again. moments of panic. too many directions at once. sensations of
chaos, both current and impending, and the ever-present fatigue
factor. maybe it is the weather. maybe it is whatever. that is why i
would like to hear your laughter, though most of the time when you
laugh you are laughing at me. that would be okay too. i have good
reason to be tired this evening. it was a long day. in the morning
perhaps i will feel differently, though one day, just one day, with a
little sunlight would be nice also.

this is my goodnight letter, do you like it? do you forgive me for not
writing more? i am simply tired, and alone, and tired of your being so
very far away.

kisses.

k.

first free morning

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 06:45:30 +0100

dear zh,

what a lovely gift your letter was last night.

i very much need such letters, maybe not every night, but yesterday in
particular was a very hard day, though it was just the first day, that
last day of the week, when i shall have four classes to teach, and in
them two new groups. as usual, the students here are incredibly
polite, and friendly towards the foreigner, and i felt very badly
especially for the academic writing group, since i had almost nothing
prepared for them, no syllabus, nothing, and it was my own fault. they
were naturally curious about how much they were expected to write for
the class, and i couldn’t tell them. my experience has been that if i
ask them to write too much, they will write nothing.

last night i had the last piece of my chicken, which lasted me for
three meals, and i still have the bones to make soup with today: so, 4
meals from a single chicken. i had a bowl of kasha, and a bowl of
beets with yoghurt. i am eating rather healthy right now, and in
smaller portions. the over-eating comes from depression. that in
particular i suffered from last semester, i think, and i don’t feel
depressed right now, especially after seeing you, instead, i feel
rather alert and engaged and active: all very good signs for getting
work done, and not becoming overwhelmed by my tasks.

i think we are a couple of worker bees. did you study bees at
university? drones are the male bees, yes? the longer i live in poland
i see the logic of the drone, the enormous surrounding systems, the
total power of the West (europe and u.s.) and the crushing need to
work, work, work so as not to be crushed. they crush us, don’t they,
the people who live in the West? the ones that come from the Western
World. yesterday one of my first years students said, “it is about
speed, isn’t it?”

these moments of brilliance and truth almost make me weep. do you know
that contrary to my irritability that i am often near tears? maybe it
is a compensation. now i feel very bad about my moments of
irritability in cypress. we both know very well, though, about our own
flaws of character, and i am just very happy that you seem to be able
to endure them (my character flaws) without making me feel bad about
them. i will try always to reciprocate. i have no wish for you to be
any other way than you are. don’t you think though, that we are both
rather moody? maybe that is the result of being worker bees.

i would guess, also, that the motive for your new schedule and
additional work and the field work this summer is professional
jealousy over your english conference to cypress? aren’t you among
colleagues whom you have know since your student years, and colleagues
who knew and worked with your father? can’t you talk with them? what
are their perceptions about the changing climate? the social and
political climate? should i come to tomsk this summer, how will your
field trip affect your schedule, and will we be able to see one
another very much? will you still be able to go to your dacha for a
month? these are impossible questions to answer right now, i know, so
i apologize in advance for asking them. there is always the
alternative of trying to get you here by june or july. we need always
to be discussing this, or at least to be thinking about this. really
what else is there to think about?

maybe this is not much of a letter for the morning. i am going to
rebel a little against the work that i feel that i have to do for the
essay i must write, and continue reading the lev manovich book, which
really i need to use for another essay i need to write, so it is not
that much of a luxury, to read a book i enjoy, and it is enjoyable,
very clearly written, very clearly thought, in contrast to a lot of
literary criticism that i have been reading lately.

i will write you of course an evening letter, who knows, maybe one in
the afternoon? what is your preference?

kisses.

k.

Re: first free morning

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:19:59 +0100

dear zh,

i forgot to tell you that i lost my gloves yesterday. now after
reading for two hours i need to got to the store to get some groceries
and the gloves will be missed since i have to hold the plastic bags in
my hands on the walk home through the slush and snow.

two nice hours of reading though, so far, luxury? i don’t know. we
have another word, “reprieve.” maybe there will be free warm bread at
the supermarket.

i miss you.

k.

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:09:29 +0300
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

> afternoon and evening letters are welcome. for those who are
> absolutely idle this morning i wish some luxury of idleness in the
> rest of the day and do not accuse me of not wirting to you, i have
> written to you (see above) bye zh

where do the hours go

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:06:20 +0100

dear zh,

i have just looked up from reading since returning from the store with
water for coffee, two oranges, two apples, vegetables to put into my
chicken soup, and a loaf of bread that was not warm, this was this
morning, before 10:00 a.m., and already it is 15:00, and i have only
been reading, reading while the time is passing, reading for my essay,
and writing a few notes. it’s the notes that consume the time, though
i can see, in my reading, the soundness of an original proposition,
the abstract for the conference in april, so i feel better, less
panicky, less anxiety. how was your day? is it over yet? this is just
a note. i am going to shower and shave, finally, start my soup, make a
cup of coffee, and read a little more from loos’ benjamin, trying to
find some passages countering myth in the conception of historical
time, which i badly need for my essay, i have been reading all about
myth the past few hours, a book called ‘call me ishmael’, about
melville’s novel, moby dick, and myth, myth, myth – what is myth.
ritual and repetition, the promise of return and renewal, some deep
superstitiousness, but i have to find bigger and better words for
this, would that one could write essays like letters, then perhaps
thought would not sound so formulaic. what, anyway, is the alternative
to myth? what, exactly, is demystification? certainly it cannot be w.
benjamin’s ‘messianic time.’ (is there, really, any conception of
historical time, any imagination of historical time, that is not
shaped by myth?)

hugs and kisses in the afternoon …

k.

darling i’ve finished the vegetables

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 16:24:12 +0100

dear zh,

this is what one says to another from the kitchen to the next room,
not questions about w. benjamin’s messianic time. i have also showered
and shaved, and i feel very lightheaded at the moment, maybe it’s the
onions, maybe it’s the memory of your very lovely, very fair, skin and
self, yourself just out of the shower, and coming to bed. the orange,
the one orange of the two that i’ve eaten so far, was not equal to the
cyprus oranges, either. those will just have to be a memory, for the
moment. do you still miss me?

kisses

k.

now i have to wait for everything to cook

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:23:37 +0100

zhen, dear,

everything is in the pot: cabbage, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, leeks
and a few other polish items i haven’t an idea what to call. i just
thought you’d like to know. it will probably take more than an hour,
perhaps an hour and a half. i’ll write you after i’ve eaten, to tell
you about the taste. do i remember hearing you say that your
opposition to soup was negotiable? i am especially proud that this
evening represents my fourth meal from a single chicken. that is what
they used to call husbandry! (or was it ‘the frugal gourmet’?) i am
still lightheaded with memory-thoughts of you. what did you have for
dinner? have you taken your bath yet? when will you go to bed? bye.

kisses

k.

signing off broadcast for this friday night

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:27:58 +0100

dear zh,

this will be my last message tonight as it is quickly approaching your
bedtime if you haven’t already gone to bed since you probably have
classes tomorrow or at least paperwork. i hope you had something nice
for dinner, though whatever you had, it’s probably digested by now,
unless you ate later than i did. my soup turned out very well, and it
appears that i have enough for tomorrow and sunday. very frugal. i
will probably be sick of it by sunday. i can boil some potatoes or
make some rice to go with it tomorrow. the last of my kilogram of
potatoes with which i began the week need to be eaten tomorrow or
sunday. of course you cannot assist me in completing this task.
(sigh). today i solved a great mystery. do you ever use white pepper
for seasoning? i have a package, and from time to time i use it, as
seasoning, as well as, from time to time, i noticed that my dish,
whatever i prepared, tasted moldy, as though i had left the plate it
was served on in stagnant water. this happened a number of times, and
i attributed the effect to poor dishwashing habits (which i suffer
from). well, today, before putting the white pepper into the soup, i
smelled it, and it was the white pepper! it smelled terribly! moldy or
musty or just bad, if pepper can go bad. i never connected the moldy
smelling pepper with the moldy tasting dishes. don’t you think this is
a good solution to a mystery? good night. i wish i was sleeping beside
you.

kisses and squeezes

k.

slept late

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 09:41:06 +0100

dear zh,

if you think i have forgotten about you, dear zhenya, you are very
wrong.

if you think, however, that i have slept late on a saturday morning,
you are quite right.

i went to bed late after watching a couple of hours of terrible
television, since i simply couldn’t read any more. if i had more
self-discipline, i would have written. i should have written.

now i am drinking coffee, on a morning where there is some light, not
exactly sunlight, but enough light to make me feel better than worse.

there is snow falling once again, and the lightbulb on my lamp in my
study just burned out, you know that experience don’t you? you turn on
the lamp and there is a click and a flash and no more lightbulb.

i have a single desklamp which i move from room to room to read by.
yesterday i read all day in between writing you whimsical emails in
your future room. already i miss this room. maybe you will let me read
in it once in a while. actually that is where i slept, overslept, last
night, sleeping there for the first time, actually, i first fell
asleep on the sofa in my study, fully clothed, as i tend to do when i
am reading, writing, thinking, i just put my book down and go to
sleep, though sometimes i forget to put the book down, though i almost
never forget to turn off the tv. it is pure loneliness that sends me
to the tv, for the sound of human voices, and a little english, even
if it is dubbed over.

i have been having a lot of ‘deep memories’ yesterday while reading,
sensory impressions, even this morning going to the kitchen i walked
right into the snow and light of my last years in iowa, living in a
farmhouse. if you only knew how most of the time i live far outside
all memory, this is a feature of living in foreign countries, the
external stimulus does not resemble anything you have ever known, so
you do not have ‘deep memories’ or ‘physical-sensation’ memories. the
architecture of lodz, for example, or russia, so unlike the u.s., that
i never remember buildings or houses i once lived in. or people i once
knew.

the dangerous feature of the essay i am trying to write is that it
includes reference to a poet whose poetry was one of my introductions
to poetry, very simply when i was first beginning to read seriously,
at the age of 19-20, first years of college (i went to a dunce college
call in the u.s., community college) (that is one reason why i can
teach at a dunce college here) i subscribed to something called the
book-of-the-month-club though you didn’t have to buy a book every
month, but i remember buying and reading then the pair of books
translated by Gregory Rabassa, Autumn of the Patriarch and One Hundred
Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the Selected Poems by
Robert Lowell. All three books had a great effect on me. I must have
read One Hundred Years of Solitude several times. The poems also i
read again and again, trying to understand, since i had almost no
background in poetry apart from my classes, then, at community
college. in such classes we would read from anthologies very bad
poems, though you could say the general aesthetic was much the one
that had determined many of the poems in the one book that i had
bought from the book-of-the-month club.

psychologists would call this a compensatory memory, since i began by
remembering (this morning’s sensation memory, the light in the
kitchen, the farmhouse in iowa) and displacing that (not wishing to
remember that, not wishing to write about that) i write about the book
of poems where i am trying to write about just one poem in that book,
but i keep remembering when i first read this poem, which was 30 years
ago, and reading it now, i am reminded how many times i must have read
it then, and i must confront memories of my reading that i no longer
remember. in other words, it’s an uncomfortable process, and makes me
want to go to the dentist.

or drink another cup of coffee, or drink a bottle of wine today. the
champagne was a week ago. well, almost a week.

most of the time i feel, there is nothing to remember, but that too is
very harmful for writing, since writing, really, when you are writing,
you are like this open room with the windows and doors blowing open
and everything entering, super-imposed on one another, changing
shapes, whispering – and this includes a lot of pain.

and yet it is truly a magical process, and you feel in such moments as
one falling into a well, falling into the psyche, and alert to the
element of chance that has mostly constructed you, and all you know,
which i am always willing to admit is very little. when the windows
and doors are closed, then you remember nothing, not even anything you
have ever read, and that is when at least i feel most undone, most
incapable of doing anything (and yet i have done – written – more than
many!)

this is a dilemma that will face me every day of my life until my very
last day which i hope is very far away. you will often hear me talk
about it, especially on long walks.

sometimes i do not like the idea of your going from one job to
another, from russia to poland, and wish that you could simply read
for a time, relax for a time, open your windows and doors for a time,
even sleep day in and day out for a time, Brodsky wrote that wonderful
poem with all the sleep in it. well, i thought it was wonderful when i
read it in translation my third year of college. i heard the poet read
in russian and bought a copy of his poems in translation, and
understood them even less than the poems i had bought the year before
from the book-of-the-month club.

just how concretely we are formed by our environment still surprises
me. i can see know just how much i was influenced by the place where i
grew up and where there was absolutely nothing, no bookstores except
supermarket-style, though i did find a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses
in one of them my first year of college, and the difficulty of this
novel had the virtue of making me feel a little dissatisfied with
easier books, though if i tried to list all the books that i read
then, what a task of memory that would be. i would read in the
community college library for hours and hours. nothing seemed so far
away and remote and inaccessible as a university.

some time or other, within a very few years, i became terribly bored.

maybe i have never recovered from this boredom. or maybe for only
short periods of my life. do you know something? most of the time and
most of the world, both in the u.s. and now abroad, resembles the
first environment in the lack of culture, if that is the word for it.
culture is of course too big and too vague of a word. it is more the
experience of absence, or stillness, or even, severe abstraction. so
that i always feel like i am working only with ideas, and not life,
not the sensory. this is the worst thing when you read a poem to write
about it, any poem. it loses its life.

these are good thoughts to have on a day preparatory to reading.

i felt rather bad last night after finally getting your letter which
you wrote so early in the morning, 3:00 a.m.? i had given up hoping to
hear from you, not thinking that you might have gone to bed early.
i’ll try to write you a longer, more reflective letter in my early
evening, something to send to you before your midnight. then through
the day as i think of you when i am doing simple things around the
flat (cooking is the big event, and today i don’t need to cook, since
i have enough soup and bread to last me through the day) i will send
you silly messages. you know, of course, i can be quite silly. this is
fondness, and i never have these moods when i am alone, as now.

i miss you.

k.

just after your call

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 13:30:59 +0100

dear zh,

and of course here are a few words, my few words, right after
speaking, writing into that silence that is always strange, after
speaking, wanting to keep speaking, and having you not here to speak
to, though of course you aren’t really here either, on the phone,
though closer than by email, which is what this is, and so writing is
already further removed. these are things that we already know.
writing about them, does that do any good?

well, it’s better to write about small but important things, such as,
i am wondering what you will have for dinner, when you get home, so
don’t forget to write me about it. unless i go to the supermarket, i
won’t have anything to write you about. that will be my big event of
the day. seriously, i can’t always represent my reading, since part of
reading is not really knowing what you are reading, or thinking, and
that is another problem with writing essays, since they require you to
know what you are writing about. so, really, i don’t like it. i deeply
don’t like it. yet i can recognize the necessity. maybe it is part of
the panic that i feel on the borders of my quiet days, and these are
quiet days, and i should greet them and respect them for that, the
time that i have to read and write, though i don’t feel that i am
reading or writing about anything that i am deeply interested in.

only the book by the media theorist, the writer who was born and
studied in russia, interested me. i should keep reading in this
direction. what is interest? when you don’t pay attention to the pages
you are reading. there’s more involved. for the moment, i am content
to recognize and accept my fate as a drone, if that’s what they’re
called. of course there’s more involved than only that, and it’s not
even fair, to myself, to propose a definition for the space where i am
writing now, maybe it is like writing drafts, versions, you write in a
direction, and maybe in a year or two, after the cumulation of a set
of directions, i will know better the direction in which i am writing.

maybe.

thanks for calling.

i’ll write again in a few hours.

i hope for a letter from you as well, in case you don’t know this.

kisses.

k.

i thought you might like to know

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:58:13 +0100

dear zh,

in addition to eating one of the two oranges i bought yesterday, i
have also eaten one of the two apples. only now does it occur to me
that i bought them in pairs, though i am pairless, without you. i have
a very nice memory of dripping orange juice with you in our hotel
room, such nice oranges.

i made good progess on my conference paper today, almost five complete
pages, and i really only need about 15. i should also, for my benefit,
remember that they are only conference papers, and not literary
essays, though maybe the drafts, the beginnings, of such.

yes i will write a longer letter after i eat supper, which is on the
stove right now, and which amounts only to a few more (the last)
potatoes added to yesterday’s soup, though i think when the soup is
ready i will add yoghurt to it for the sake of difference from
yesterday.

but what will i have to write about in two hours? you must be prepared
for eventless details, the only event that approaches is eating the
same soup that i wrote to you about yesterday. nothing new will happen
in two hours.

of course, i never write to you about cleaning the coffee machine,
wiping the floorboards of dust, opening or closing the door on my way
out, looking for my keys, putting one book on top of another, shutting
down my computer (i use the standby and never, now, completely turn
off my computer, or else i would have to reset the clock, as you
noticed in cyprus).

no, i did not know that cyprus stands for copper. so i have learned
something substantial today. reading is rather insubstantial, did i
mention that? though i like very much the feeling lost.

with kisses

k.

saturday evening details

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 18:22:22 +0100

dear zh,

here is my eventless evening letter. i have read some more and entered
some more quotations into my conference paper, but it is satisfying
headway and i can relax a little. i already have something of a feel
for the entire paper. against monumentality, but at the same time
trying to find forms of what i call “mutual reinforcements” for an
integrative perspective (synthesis) towards the past and past works of
art. i am no scholar. i think sometimes i am simply trying to think
about poetry that i’ve written. what is it? where does it belong? i
ate supper, and one too many bowls of soup, but the potatoes i put in
the soup to reinforce it were too tempting, and i ate them all. now i
should really go to the store if only for the exercise. if i do go, i
will need to shave, which i was hoping to delay until tomorrow. you
see the momentous decsions that i face every day. i can’t emphasize
this enough: i sit in a room all day, often lying on the couch,
reading with a pencil in one hand to underline, and from time to time
i get up to go to my computer to write. that is the sum of my
activity, and probably will be until i get tired of writing or forget
how to. i am an extemely uninteresting person to be around. i get into
problems when i try to make myself interesting. very likely our future
long walks will the be the great events of mature years. never have i
walked so far as when i walk with you. and you will probably insist on
such walks at least once a day, though i will try to reduce them to
two or three times a week, depending on the weather. it is a pleasant
disagreement to look forward to. now, for the disagreement as to who
gets the last orange and who gets the last apple – that we will have
to wait and see about. at least for oranges, we should always try to
have more than we need. i am going to shave and go to the store now. i
am hoping there is a letter from you waiting for me when i send this.
if not, i’ll check later, long after you will have already gone to
bed. already i am sad about the approaching monday, and it is only
early saturday evening!

i miss you.

hugs and kisses.

k.

are you still awake

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 20:03:49 +0100

dear zh,

the last hour was so full of events that i can hardly contain my
excitement to write to you about them, and then there is the thought
that you might be already asleep and by the time you wake up the
events will have lost their urgency, even, i dare say, their pungency.

last things first, just before taking off my outdoor sweater i dropped
my glasses on the floor and they are on my face now (i can’t see
without them) and yes, they are loose, the fall loosened the frames,
though the lenses did not fall out of the frames, as i originally
feared. i did succeed in taking off my sweater, and for the moment i
have deferred putting on my house sweater, though it is cold outside,
there is sufficient heat inside.

at the store the cashier asked me a question and of course i could
only shrug my shoulders and pretend that i wasn’t interested in
anything she had to ask, which is one of my two responses, the other
one is to say “tak, tak” no matter what the question. at least it’s
better than saying “nyeh, nyeh”.

i bought some office supplies, paper, post-its, (oh, i forgot the
staples which i badly need) and even large (c-4) envelopes for
manuscripts in case i ever figure out how to buy international
coupons, a bottle of wine (very important office supply) and
dirt-dissolving solution for my shower drain.

for food, i bought a tongue for tomorrow (the uplifting beef tongue i
now always make on sundays), two small packages of smoked salmon, a
loaf of soft white bread, two cartons of coffee cream, coffee, two
cannisters of yoghurt (why do we not call plastic containers, cans?) –
okay – two containers of yoghurt, and six eggs.

now i must put them away, and then i will either read or write, hoping
of course, for a few words from you some time, miscreant?

i miss you anyway.

until tomorrow …

k.

at long last the sunlight and blue sky

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 08:26:29 +0100

dear zh,

hard to believe but it’s true, not only am i awake an hour earlier
than yesterday, there is a clear blue sky and sun today, on a field of
white.

now what do i do with this great event? the first blue sky since
cyprus.

it calls for a day of rest, which sunday means, in english, in
russian, i believe, it means day of resurrection?

of what, when what, towards what, that’s what. all those parts of
language that fill in for the words.

we would go for a walk if you were here. we could go for a walk. the
pigeons are sounding like lovers again.

instead i will read and watch the sun pass across the sky. already i
want to try to conserve it, the sunlight, keep it from declining, keep
it from turning into yet another grey day.

to be able to live within this sunday for longer than the single day
apportioned to it. even if the sun shines tomorrow, it won’t be today,
i have to work tomorrow, i have to speak tomorrow, i have to teach
tomorrow.

these compulsions, and underneath, restlessness, and uncertainty. i
sent a proposal for a paper to a conference in the u.s. next december,
at the end of 2005. i drew it out of a manuscript, at least most of
it, though i don’t think it even addresses the panel topic proposed. i
only proposed what i thought i could write about, which actually meant
that i wanted to problematize the proposal.

before writing it, i started browsing through the few books of
contemporary poetry that i have, and realized another form of
impoverishment, just how few books i have by contemporary poets, even
poets i have at one time met, i don’t even have a copy of the book i
proposed writing about.

this is starting to trouble me, tire me, when i am reminded, or
reminded in a curious way, such as last night, simply reading around
in a few anthologies and this sensation of hunger.

now i think those are lovers’ moans coming from upstairs, instead of
pigeons. have you ever noticed how much pigeons sound like love
making? now i feel very selfish, if it is pigeons, i hope they go
away, and if they are lovers, i hope they do not make love all day,
but go out somewhere for breakfast.

there are sorrowful and sad books lying all around my room. it is too
dark in this room. the curtains are heavy and dark, the wood is dark,
i think i will read in the beige room, your room, the room where i
should have slept last night (i slept in this dark room instead, on
the sofa again). my bedroom is too cold to sleep in for the moment.

should i do laundry today? it is tempting, with the sunlight. i never
do laundry before 9:30 or 10:00, out of consideration for my
neighbors. laundry never sounds like making love.

you see i keep returning to a certain theme, circularly. you may
conclude from this circular reference that i miss you, it’s not hard
to imagine how we would respond to such a beautiful morning.

i will be very happy when i receive a letter from you this morning.

kisses.

k.

dust motes

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 12:18:42 +0100

two hours have passed, my dear zhenya, since i last looked for a
letter from you. in that time i have had to run my small load of
laundry through two cycles, as it is an epic struggle to day to get
the water to drain, and in the meantime, while negotiating with the
washing machine, which involves mopping the bathroom floor, oddly, due
to the periodic malfunctions of my washing machine, my bathroom floor
is one of the cleanest spaces in the flat, but, as i was saying, in
the meantime, i emptied my vacuum cleaner bag! a cloth bag, not
disposable, so i suddenly had memories of my mother cleaning out the
vacuum cleaner when i was a child, the design of the vacuum cleaner is
that old, and years of dust in a cloth bag is not a pretty sight nor
substance, and one that i hope to spare you, poor child of the land of
brooms and handwashing (there is some sense to the more basic
methods). now my flat is fairly well vacuumed, inspired by the wash of
sunlight everywhere which of course exposed the layers of dust on the
rugs, on the baseboards, behind the chairs, on the chairs, everywhere,
as a matter of fact. i even found one cobweb on the window sill just
behind where my head way lying last night. i felt a little like that
old lady in Dickens Great Expectations, months that seemed like years
of dust. now i am happily at the end of my domestic labors, the
laundry is almost (almost!) done, the sun is still out, the sky is
crystal blue, and i think it’s about time to put my tongue to boil on
the stove, though i haven’t cleaned the kitchen yet – a different
order of disorder reigns there.

how are you, dear, and have you written me yet? or is today a sleeping
(restoration) day?

i miss you.

k.

already there are clouds in the sky

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 12:51:45 +0100

dear zh,

could you do a small favor for me? this evening could you look up
“lubbers” in you Websters and send me the entire definition? this word
occurs in two texts i am reading and i only know it as “land-lubbers”
something like a colloquialism for people who live on the land used by
people who live on or by the sea.

“clubbers” are people who go to clubs, of course.

“clobber” means to really beat someone up.

there is not “lub” in english though there is “lob” (to throw or toss)

yes, you are right, i am running out of things to write to you about,
though my tongue is on the stove.

kisses …

k.

the hours are passing with only one letter from you

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:48:57 +0100

dear zh,

it is already 14:30. the day is going too quickly. i just finished
reading the first chapter of one of the books i bought in cypress,
about dada and surrealist movement in paris and berlin, the
information so basic i could have written it myself, there wasn’t a
single sentence that told me anything that i didn’t already know, and
this written by an ‘associate professor’ at a university in ontario. i
bought the book because it had chapters on writers i read: henri
lefebvre, bakhtin (still putting in an appearance, have you read
anything by this very illustrious countryman of yours?) agnes heller
(whom i have not read) and dorothy smith (whom i have not read). i
can’t find their books. who else is treated (summarized) in the book:
yes, the situationists (they are for people who don’t like lenin). i
didn’t know the debord had been a student of lefebvre. these are
random items to you i know filtered across my alternately now cloudy
and sunny day, right now there is very nice sunlight in the room, i
pulled back my curtains, which we also call drapes, and there is light
even in my dark and somber study. pray tell, dear, where is your
letter? i have received only one! i hope you will enjoy these fridays
and saturdays and sundays when i write you innumerable (well, they can
still be counted, i am exaggerating) messages across the day,
meanwhile looking for yours. have you looked up “lubbers” yet? no, it
is not a lispish pronunciation of lovers. or maybe they say it that
way in english. the absolutely most hilarious thing i have read is the
first page in an early book by someone who is today a very famous
literary critic in the u.s., writing about the name of a car in a poem
called “Tudor” in brackets no less she writes: “[pun on two door]” as
if that meant anything. one forgets the immense stupidity from which
the world is constructed, until, of course, one tries to negotiate
with that world. i have a lot of patience today and i am letting my
beef tongue cook for a long time, which make it more tender. last
week’s tongue was very fatty, i had to scrape off what is called the
“scum” several times from the boiling water, and this week’s tongue
there is no scum at all, no fatty froth, so i have great hopes for
this sunday dinner, which will include rice and the rest of my beets
with yoghurt, and mineral water. no wine today. i am strictly
rationing myself this semester. wine only once a week. maybe twice a
week when i have too much work to do. i saw a very funny movie last
night, which came on late, after midnight. the plot’s not worth
telling you about, but it was nice to just relax for an hour and a
half. i forget to do that sometimes. and you? have you any plans for
sunday evening which for you is already beginning? you haven’t told me
yet what you had for supper last night. okay, i am waiting. the last
thing that i know you ate what potato pancakes which you couldn’t call
pancakes because they weren’t thin, so you called them chops. i like
that: potato chops. much better than potato chips.

kisses.

k.

RoboShark!

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 16:50:13 +0100

dear zh,

curious, the pleasure i feel today, even knowing that tomorrow the
first thing when i wake up i don’t have to teach, that my two classes
begin at 12:30, so i can prepare them in the morning, come home in the
early afternoon, go to the small shops to grocery shop, then read for
wednesday’s classes, nothing to do on tuesday, except meet in the late
afternoon with a student that i’ve been helping with some
translations, though tuesday will be given to preparation, as will
wednesday evening, then the crush on thursday, and then, if i am true
to my intentions, from thursday evening to sunday evening: my own
reading and writing. this is the ideal, though i need to start
worrying about the academic writing class which will give me the
biggest headache. later, later. not tonight. by the way, do you like
all these messages? i notice that you do not answer every one. loud
voices outside, somebody’s arguing. curious, also, the uplift in mood
that the vacuuming gave me, the flat is very clean now, and the air
even seems to be cleaner. most of this is the effect of the sunlight,
though. the sun! i forget what it’s like here. we were spoiled in
cyprus, don’t you think? i ate my last orange today, that’s why i need
to go to the small shops tomorrow. i ate dinner early, since the
tongue was done, very much to my satisfaction, and eating, just now, i
watched half an hour of a nature show (do you remember the coincidence
that in tomsk we watched the same nature show on in the early morning
before classes before we even met each other? do you remember such
things?) and the feature of this nature show was: RoboShark. a shark
robot simulater swam through pacific atolls filming the habits of
tiger sharks, whale sharks, white sharks, hammerhead sharks, bull
sharks, etc., and the photography was quite nice. i didn’t know that
sharks ate turtles. or albotrosses. so today hasn’t been a total loss,
despite the stupid chapter on the surrealists. today has in fact as i
may have mentioned already, been replete with sunlight. did i forget
to mention the blue sky?

what are you doing now, my dear? getting ready for bed? i’ll try to
write you once more, though i dare not hope there’s a letter waiting
for me. do you know that in my email program when i check for the mail
and there’s no mail in the box i get a message which reads,
“QUITTING”. how i hate this message! i check too many times a day for
a message from you. maybe you should forward automatically all the
junk email you get. at least i wouldn’t get the QUITTING sign. by the
way, how is your progress on the “lubbers” definition. i’m waiting …

i miss you, do you know?

hugs and kisses

k.

now it is evening and i have closed my curtains

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:44:19 +0100

dear zh,

all i have been doing since i last wrote you two hours ago has been to
be reading (what tense is that?) – i have been reading – that is all i
have been doing – and suddenly it is dark, and i’m not sure whether or
not there will be sunlight tomorrow, and the uncertainty bothers me,
for some reason, i would like to be able to believe that there will be
sunlight, even if i do have to teach a little, and turn my thoughts to
the week’s teaching, and prepare, organize, and – what is the last
order of logic – prepare, organize, and instruct! yes, instruct! that
is what we both must do, are you prepared? are you organized? will you
instruct? (i’ve been reading about the third reich). sometime or other
you must elaborate on what you mean by the deteriorating situation in
your country. what do you think might be the logic in the alarmist
atmosphere as communicate by the mass media – aren’t they govt.
channels anyway? but i don’t want you to write about anything that
makes you uncomfortable, it’s just that i’m curious.

this should be a longer letter, but, will you sympathize with me if it
is not? after reading, i feel like someone who has been taking a long
bath and has just come up for air, and so i am more gasping than
grasping, if that makes sense. myth, the masses, the image-space, and
tradition, cult and ritual. these are some of the items i am trying to
assemble from a book, a critique, or is it a commentary – do i
remember the difference – a critique opens the interpreted work to the
present, commentary monumentalizes it in the past – according to the
author i am reading – and why i find this particular book helpful is,
one, it was written and published in finland, though written in
english, the english is still brittle, and by a younger intellectual,
and you can sense this search for confidence in the writing, the
articulation, the thought, more and more i don’t trust thought that
expresses itself too smoothly. so i am learning a lot from this book,
because it is closer to my own halting efforts to think, in critical
prose, than many professorial performances.

now i am going to sign off for the night, hoping that my flurry of
messages today compensate for the lack of a long evening letter. you
will agree that it is important to have something to write about, and
i have nothing more important to write about.

actually, there is an entire layer of things i would like to say to
you intimately, if you were here, in the same room or near, in the
next room, but they – what i want to say – the words – do not lend
themselves easily to writing. i think i am still under influence of
this morning’s pigeons.

i miss you.

until tomorrow. with

a very long kiss goodnight.

k.

slightly later than planned start today

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 07:03:01 +0100

dear zh,

we are back to grey skies here. to be fair, it is early morning, an
hour later than i had planned, but i lay in bed for an hour waiting
for the light, the daylight. i didn’t want to get up in the dark this
morning. while watching about an hour of a movie based on a novel by
stephanie zwieg, about a young german-jewish girl in nairobi during
wwII (the movie was in german dubbed in polish, so i can’t say i
understoody that much) i began to do a little preparation for today’s
classes, so at least i am not starting the day blankly, such blankness
always makes me anxious. ach, that rhymes. i rec’d confirmation email
for my abstract to the conference in u.s., and will know in a few
weeks whether or not it will be accepted. i did not submit a
‘rigorous’ or strict abstract, and i rather expect that the proposal
won’t be accepted. i would just as soon that it not be. if it is
accepted, i will have to write a more complex essay than the ones that
i am planning to write for conferences in poland. conference papers,
not essays, i keep reminding myself. so as not to get lost in them. at
least it is something different, and i have a greater interest in my
reading now, and in trying to put together a working library, limited
by availability of books, and the perpetual attractiveness of the
surprise, the tangent, what you are not looking for. that is the
danger of writing directively, you know what you are looking for.
there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s just that i
personally find it boring. the truth is that i am looking for some
kind of direction, re-direction, now, and i am trying to use my
reading to find my way. it is just as possible that i will be
unsuccessful, and simply write a series of uninteresting pieces of
critical prose. i am copying less than i usually do into my notebook,
and though i keep a notebook, i don’t keep one as i once did, and this
bothers me too sometimes. i used to copy, write, note, scribble,
sketch, everything into a notebook, sometimes i kept several
simultaneously. now i write things into the computer, or sometimes a
notebook, sometimes simply in the margins of the books, or on
post-its. there’s no system to it, and i don’t seem to write as much
as i once did. again, i attribute it to the ‘silence’ of living in a
foreign place.

when will you get home this evening. i thought it might comfort you to
know that i woke up at the same time as you had to get up this
morning, that we are in some kind of shared space of mutual demands on
our energy, time, attention – whatever it is called when we must do
something we would rather not do – isn’t that what teaching is? what
is the difficulty with the englification project you were working on
yesterday? is it anything that i can help you with? the “lubbers”
definition helped, as i do not have access to a good dictionary here,
there are abridged college ones at the institute library, and the
internet tends to give very reduced definitions, without a lot of
etymology. i don’t know yet whether or not i will be able to include
attention to this word yet in my essay, if i do, i will write about it
as “colloquial ornament” (which i am critical of). maybe i am trying
to think about poetry in a way that i have never thought about it
before, with more deliberation, from a renewed perspective, and as i
mentioned, mostly i think i want to write in such a way and on such
topics that it contributes to thought, if it can be called thought,
about my own poetry. perhaps it is a good time to think about what i
have done in the past. more and more when i return to work that i’ve
written it looks strange to me.

“absolutely strange”? perhaps not. don’t forget that sometimes when i
write you i try to entertain you, and exaggerate.

i need to drag myself to the shower and shave since i haven’t done
this for two days, and i am beginning to feel like someone stranded on
a deserted isle, or a beachcomber (someone who hangs around the beach
without doing anything purposeful except walking in the sun and
sleeping in the sun).

i’ll check my email around 11:30 before going to my classes, and i’ll
try to write you a short note then, otherwise, i will be home at 16:00
and write you then, okay?

i hope that your monday is mildly interesting, it is supposed to be -5
below the Zero here today. it does look cold outside already. and i as
yet am still without gloves.

i miss you.

k.

breaking news

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 09:54:25 +0100

dear zh,

in the middle of preparing my lessons for this morning i realized that
i forgot to tell you that yesterday while i was vacuuming i found
behind the sofa in your room my missing sock which drove me to
distraction while i was packing for cyprus because i do not have that
many socks, but i found it too late in the morning to include it in
the laundry. i did however also find this morning a number of missing
paper clips, so i don’t need to buy any more of these for the moment,
though i am still without staples, and this is a disadvantage.

i thought you would be interested to learn of these very important
details in my daily life. and yours, my dear?

what will you eat for lunch?

i miss you.

k.

p.s. i realize also now that my slippers are far too large (size 46).

brief message informing you that i have run out of time

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:19:10 +0100

dear zh,

i should have finished 15 minutes ago and then i would have had more
time to write you now before i must go to the dunce college i need to
leave at noon at the latest and i haven’t showered or shaved or even
eaten anything or even taken a vitamin – or did i? – now i forget –
how i forget – so i will say only hello, hello, hello have you ever
eaten jello?

i’ll write you later this afternoon …

with hugs and kisses

k.

tak mama tak

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:38:45 +0100

dear zh,

i just saw two things one funny and one nice on tv while i was
watching for 15 minutes after arriving home and sauteering in fry pan
the last of my tongue with rice and pea which made a very tasty dish
and which if you were here i might even have shared if you asked me
very nicely. on the talk show was Zygmunt Bauman, much older than i’d
imagined, a sociologist who teaches in england, but something of the
eminence grise of Polish intellegentsia, such a kind face, white hair,
sensitive eyes and voice, i hope that i look like this and sound like
this in 40 years. that is your responsibility, to help me age
gracefully. at least in 30 years i want to be more thoughtful than i
am now. the funny thing was a commercial where a Polish man picks up
the phone and it is his mother and he gives the phone to his parrot
that keeps repeating, “tak mama tak” for hours. i was reminded of the
parrots and parakeets you saw and liked in cyprus. this is also a
story i have heard from my Polish colleagues, how Polish mothers are
famous for their hours and hours on the phone asking about the vacuum
cleaner bag, the paper clips, whether or not the stove’s been cleaned,
and the shower drain.

my classes went well to okay, the students seemed tired, or maybe i
had too much work for them to do. i should be able to use my monday
morning preparations for my wednesday classes also. that would be a
great help. they are more or less the same classes, though my
wednesday students are slower, duller. tonight i think i will write my
syllabus for the academic writing class on thursday. the sun came back
out, very nice light coming home, but it is cold, very cold, so cold
that the small shops with the oranges and tangerines were all but
closed. i’ll have to go in the morning. i think what i just ate was my
supper, so there’s not a whole lot to look forward to for the rest of
the evening. you will have eaten by now, and what, may i ask, were you
served for supper tonight, dear?

you should hear from me once more this evening, unless you write and
say that you are going to bed immediately.

hugs and kisses.

k.

slow going

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:15:30 +0100

dear zh,

as in gathering together a random set of materials for the academic
writing course that i fished off the internet last week. the buffalo
is ranging overhead. playing beethoven doesn’t help. have you ever
noticed how often windows programs “hang” (freeze?). i just had to
reboot my computer and noticed the time. already 18:00. i checked my
email. no letter from zhenya. don’t you wish to write me a letter as
soon as you arrive home? by my calculations, you have been home at
least for two hours, more or less, hopefully more. i still have no
idea what you had for supper. don’t you sometimes have a craving for a
beer? i just drank a cup of coffee. that should keep me up until 3
a.m. it’s the old story, i don’t know and won’t know how much
preparation i need to do until i have several weeks worth of classes,
then things will sort of even out. meanwhile, not much has happened in
my life since i saw the parrot talking on the phone. i removed my
plastic ruler from my appointment book, which i needed to consult for
due dates of essays for the academic writing course. this is a very
funny Polish trait, anything due in the future is always due in the
future, vaguely sometime not now. or not soon. once i tried to assign
students topics and dates for reports and they didn’t see any logic
beyond assigning for two weeks ahead. as one student said, ‘how can we
know what we’ll being doing in a month? there might be a holiday or a
rector’s day.’ moments like that, i realize how militarized i am. more
or less, hopefully less than more. now you will please excuse the
brevity of this letter since i am irritated by the academic writing
materials (can’t you tell?) (even writing betrays tone of voice). i
feel like reading and reading for myself only, and i have to wait
until thursday. actually, i cheated, and read for an hour from an
essay on walter benjamin after i wrote you at 16:30 to which you have
yet to respond, though, i admit, there’s not really much to respond
to. i wish there was an orange in my kitchen. i wish there was zhenya
in her beige room, where i’ve been sleeping lately. right now there
are pillows and a blanket on the sofa in the beige room, do you mind?

with kisses …

k.

white & grey & grey & white are finally overtaking me

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 07:46:16 +0100

dear zh,

it must be the fog, if that’s what it is, more like an ocean of white
and grey outside my window, or wall of white and grey, maybe that
means it will snow today, the drop in the temperature making hard ice
everywhere, you know this landscape better than i do. there’s some
relief in the experience of variability, apart from my schedule, the
goal of 6:30, for which i set my alarm at 5:30, i have woken up at
9:00, 8:00 and this morning, 7:00 – positive variability, don’t you
think? at the very least, it’s apparent that i don’t have to get up at
the same time every day, which is one of the things that drove me into
the ground last semester.

unfortunately, there are print-outs for my academic writing class
everywhere to the right of me (where my other desk is) and yes, i did
manage to write the syllabus, more or less, and yes, you are write,
nobody pays attention to it. part of the process of nobody paying much
attention to anything. i suppose they would (whoever ‘they’ are) is i
simply stopped going to any of my classes, which is always wish for
me. a slight wish, or half-formed wish, an idle wish, a furtive wish.
what is wish? mostly the opposite of what one has to do? you seem to
be adapting to the new schedule, though i worry for you a little,
knowing, just a little, the listlessness of the students where you
are. my best classes in tomsk, as i’ve mentioned before, were with the
faculty, both in your department and the one where you took classes
with tim the cop. i had only several students (really one small group)
who were halfway motivated. there were of course one or two
exceptional students, and they seemed to come from far away
(kurgistan, those regions).

i am thinking of the morning class you described. don’t you think
sometimes that you are seeing the long-term effects, in person, of all
the uncertainty, social disintegration, and to use a very popular
word, “contingency” in a world where – who can say where? the
difficulties are not only extraordinary, they keep intensifying. which
means, i think, getting worse, here, instead, or maybe not, there is
some improvement, but general disorder seems to be the way the
institution itself copes with poverty (lack of resources) and
uncertainty (no jobs or few jobs or oversees jobs). i wonder that many
of the students can even manage to get out of bed in such
circumstances, which doesn’t make your morning classes any easier. at
least you present factual material. i very much dislike sometimes the
subjective edges of the material (cultural, language, “mentality” –
though i wince when students use this word) and really, this exhausts
me, the subjectivity these materials carry or bear. it is far more
than merely literature.

speaking of which, i get to read for a little, this morning, for
tomorrow morning’s seminar, which i am sure the students will be in a
little bit of shock, given the difficulty of the material i’ve chosen.
i’m still not used to my schedule. i have to remember that i have two
classes at the dunce college as well, and then wednesday night i will
probably be too tired to prepare much for thursday. so the few hours
or free time are deceptive. if there ever are such hours as reading
is. sometimes. thought. to be. free. i would like to just have
separate folders with lesson plans and textbooks for each class, so
that all i had to do was present the material, instead of both
creating the material, and then trying to persuade with it, the ideas
in it, trying to articulate them, it is a form of persuasion. i warned
you that today the white and grey is like a wall, so i have a mood of
more gloom than usual, i think it is from all the academic writing
materials on my desk.

i’ll write again in a few hours.

missing you…(on the first day of march)

k.

there is sunlight and snow and clouds now

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 12:27:04 +0100

dear zh,

i have been reading for the past two and a half hours and now i am all
disheveled and dreamy, for the moment, reorient, reorient! there are
still student rolls and email addresses! i have no text yet for
tomorrow’s summarizing task! no, i was only reading, submerged
(tomorrow morning i will talk to my seminar and their complaints about
the difficulty of the novel we are reading i will talk to them about
immersion, and it is not their fault, no one teaches them to read that
way). so i have been immersed in the imagination of american history
in the 19th century for the past two and a half hours, william
faulkner is such an author using elizabethan words that even now i
find words i have no idea what they mean, like “faisance.” i laughed
at one part of a sentence imagining my student’s reading it: “the
portmanteau on his pommel.” still, it is language which designates a
material, social reality, and part of my thinking for the course is to
talk about how the world itself has vanished, the world that is being
described, we don’t really even know what a field of cotton looks like
anymore, let alone livery for horses, etc. this helps to make the
writing difficult. i suppose it is much the same as reading russian
novels from the 19th century though – wait a minute – there’s a
fascinating contrast, the extent, the measure, to which the material
social reality (even the linguistic reality) has not changed
altogether that much in russia in the past 150 years, or maybe that is
my fantasy. the pig pen upwind from your dacha, how different is that
from the village of 150 years ago?

now it is back to another kind of reading, two essays that i’ve used
for two classes previously, and i should have notes somewhere – i only
need to refresh my memory – but then i always have fresh thoughts,
fresh impressions, and i make different notes, that, also, is what is
‘too much’ about teaching. so you will excuse me for the note in place
of a letter, i am only ‘checking in’ as they say, to say hi, and hope
that your day has been passing tolerably and that soon if not already
you are on your way home.

i miss you.

k.

there is still a little sunlight left in this day

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 15:53:23 +0100

dear zh,

i finished the essays i need to teach thurs and found my notes, and
realize also that i have assembled a 50-page handout for my academic
writing class, so that takes care of three out of four classes on
thurs. the conversation class, if i don’t worry about it just a
little, won’t take care of itself, but then again, for this class, i
almost don’t care if the students even bother to come or not. i am
tired of teaching conversation. i am tired of conversation. i am
tired, period (just a little). i probably just ate what will be my
supper today: eggs fried with corn and yoghurt. i doesn’t sound that
fantastic since the only thing that was left in my fridge. now i must
make a short trip to the institute, for a one-hour meeting and to make
some copies for tomorrow, then i will be back, should be back, about
19:00 or a little before, so i will try to write you a good night note
then. strange, though i know it so well, to think that for you it is
already 21:00 or almost within a few minutes of that and you are
already turning your thoughts to sleep. what do you have to do
tomorrow? don’t answer, more of the same! thought it is that, isn’t
it, paralyzing sameness most of the time, and the effort to please
(really, i think i go to so much work to please my students, as though
i were seeking an apology for myself, i can’t quite figure this logic
out). the good news is that there are only almost exactly 48 hours
left in my teaching week: the last class is over at 16:00 on thursday.
then i will read, read, read for three days and a half. and write you,
of course, do you have any requests? whimsy? foolishness? morbidity?
gloom? i can do what is called a “smorgesborg” if you wish …

i miss you

(and with a kiss)

k.

Re: there is still a little sunlight left in this day

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 20:18:10 +0100

dear zh,

you are probably asleep by now, especially if you have to get up early
in the morning, you should be asleep. i am just now home, at 20:00,
after meeting with a student about some poetry translations, we meet
for two hours each month, and then i tried to use the copy machine for
an hour, or i should say, it took me an hour to do 10 minutes worth of
copying, due to the machine that kept breaking down – in the land of
no textbooks the copy machines often do not work. so i am home half an
hour later than i indicated earlier today. we have an expression in
english, “cut me some slack.” though i appreciate your waiting for
letters, as i am often waiting for letters from you. i am sorry you
had to go to bed without a goodnight kiss, though we both admit the
virtual ones are far from being satisfactory. as for the yoghurt, i
only add it at the last moment, and it gives lightness of slight cream
and cheese effect to the dish. i eat about 6 pints of yoghurt a week.
it is my small attempt to stay healthy. right now i feel like going to
the chinese restaurant, as it has been some hours since i ate, and i
am hungry again, and there is nothing in the flat to snack on, unless
i make some kasha, which is not very inspiring. well, i will send this
now to you, though you most likely won’t read it until the morning,
but at least you will know that i was thinking about you…

k.

(sigh)

Wed, 2 Mar 2005 07:37:36 +0100

dear zh,

it must be getting about time for the time to change, do you think? my
alarm went off this morning at 5:30 and i lay in bed for an hour
hoping against hope that i didn’t have to get up this morning, so i
rose with the sunrise, literally, and it was 6:30. now it is 7:07 to
be exact. how remorselessly the time flies. but time doesn’t fly. that
is a fossilized figure of speech. time marches. time shatters. time
stops. my time hasn’t stopped, unfortunately, and neither has my
watch, or, for that matter, the clock on my computer. now it is 7:08.
i think i will leave the flat this morning at 7:45. i have showered
and shaved, organized my papers and one very important book, the book
i am going to teach from today, and i have dressed. all but my shoes,
that are waiting faithfully near the door, where there is a chair,
since i have the habit of sitting on the chair went i put on my shoes.
i believe you put on your shoes standing up. do you think this is a
great difference between us? one, i mean, that will prevent our mutual
sympathies and understandings? or is it the terror of the thought of
yoghurt with your eggs? (neither of which you eat, i believe, though
you do wear shoes). the yoghurt is a habit that started in Poland. it
keeps me away from cheese and cream. my cooking is not very inspired
during the teaching week. i have got myself in a real condition, as we
say, even when i am not doing anything between monday and thursday,
whenever i have a spare moment, i stop and ask myself, what SHOULD i
be doing. why am i doing this to myself? this is too great of a
question for even me to answer, so i guess it is what we call a
rhetorical question. i notice you were not very impressed by my
philoso-pedagogical comments on your students in tomsk. maybe there is
nothing much to say. i was trying to be sympathetic at the time, but
really, i can’t know the particularity of the pressures you undergo.
mine, by comparison, might appear very slight. my greatest difficulty,
anxiety, obstacle – whatever – is simply that i wish for being able to
think aloud, and to be asked searching questions, so that i might
think about literature, and this doesn’t happen, not in the classroom.
maybe it never happens in any classroom. maybe i have something to
learn from the students, for whom it is a form and a form only, and
one to be endured with the greatest passive resistance possible.
there’s a lot of boredom in that direction, unfortunately. do you
notice how often i use this adverb, unfortunately?

guess what was on tv last night at 23:10? Fahrenheit 9/11. i fell
asleep while watching it.

real politics is never anywhere near mediated politics, you write
about ‘deterioration’ but you do not talk about the content of the
broadcasts. do you only listen to the one radio station? or is it less
a matter of specific events that cumulation, like snow is said to
accumulate (or money).

i ask this because the artists from moscow that i heard in berlin did
talk about a ‘state of emergency’ (travel restrictions, and other new
measures to immobilize the population) and this was thought then, at
the conference, to be an overstatement.

on the other hand, i have absolutely no information about what is
going on in the u.s., and even less, what is going on in Poland. this
is a kind of blissful not-knowing, sometimes, and at other times, it
doesn’t feel like detachment at all, but separation, estrangement,
even, isolation. except the news as it is news is always profoundly
empty, repetitive, more like noise, punctuated by the shock of this or
that event, which shock quickly is forgotten, like tidal waves in
indonesia.

at no other time in my life can i remember such sequestration, and
ironically, at the same time, i can detect new currents of interest
and concentration on writing, literature, as though it required some
form of disengagement. in berlin, at the conference, where the topic
was explicitly politics and the approximation of the political by art,
i was reminded more than exposed to anything new, like i was looking
at a piece of art (hearing discussions) that i had already heard
before, though the material and in some cases the approaches, were
new. in other words, i did hear different circumstances because i was
hearing about the thoughts and experiences of people who live in other
countries, whether England or Finland or Russia. at the same time,
nothing in their expressed understanding of the present time impressed
me as new, rather, it was familiar, the idea, the conceptual frame,
for much of the discussions, was familiar. so maybe i was a little
disappointed. it a much larger sense, i can recognize that i operate,
function (live) in a kind of incubation (to use a word you used
recently) or call it protection, or call it removal, or call it
isolation. one or any of these words are more or less accurate to
describe how i feel.

now i am beginning to feel that in an hour i will be greeting a small
number of students who will express their inability to read the text i
have assigned to them, so instead of talking about the ideas, or at
least talking about my idea about the imagination of history, and in
this case this morning, projection, empathy (which is close to meaning
to sympathy, but not exactly, though both involve some form of
identification between reader and narrative) but instead of being able
to talk about this, i will have to identify the main characters, which
ones live in the past and which ones live in the present, and for an
“activity” ask the students to list items they would use as props if
they were going to make a movie of the scene we are reading about.
maybe i will do this first as a kind of ice-breaker. i should always
remember that i am teaching in a bi-lingual/bi-cultural situation, if
even that much. this much, that much, how much.

“that much”

yes, i miss you, “that much”
(as much as you may choose to imagine)

i am very sorry about your waiting for the letter last night. do you
know that i often feel the same way myself, that often i check my mail
there is no word from you, or only very few words. that seems to be
the “state of exception” we are in for the moment.

i really must go now.

(with a kiss)

k.

5 down 4 to go

Wed, 2 Mar 2005 16:27:14 +0100

dear zh,

no messages from you? but i wrote you a long letter this morning!
(maybe too long). i’ve been at work all day and am just now home, i
hear the buffalo upstairs has just arrived home as well, key in the
long, heavy tread across the floor. i am still (almost) in my teaching
clothes, only the jeans have changed. a chicken will go into the oven
this evening, maybe sooner, i suddenly had a wish for something warm
and substantial for supper. five classes have been taught, four more
to go. by this time tomorrow my head will have turned to jelly, or
jello. i have a busy social schedule this weekend. dinner thursday at
the chinese restaurant (which i did not go to last night) with three
colleagues. lunch with jadwiga and several american colleagues
saturday (when i hope i will have the opportunity to inquire further
about her contacts with the russian faculty) and then dinner saturday
with an american colleague and some polish friends of his that i’ve
met before. on the positive side, there will be something to write to
you about, though of course, in most social situations, almost nothing
of great interest gets said. come to think of it, not much gets said
in my letters either. or maybe once in a while, what do you think? do
i ever write anything to you worth thinking about? do i ever write
anything to you that is worth remembering? most of the time i have the
impression that i am trying to sound cheerful and positive to you, or
that i am trying to convince myself that i am, actually, cheerful and
positive. that is always the time when one wonders if not just the
exact opposite is true. my seminar, though small, was a good meeting
today, i have never had these students before. many of them (there
were only five) even took notes!

i will be able to write you a goodnight letter tonight. when do you go
to bed? what do you have to do tomorrow? i was quite amused by my
falling asleep over Fahrenheit 9/11. watching it again, it was quite
boring.

all you get is a brief hug, miscreant, for not writing me (though you
are probably very busy, especially right now, at 21:30 …

(okay, a small kiss …)

k.

worrisome footnote

Wed, 2 Mar 2005 16:36:13 +0100

dear zh,

i just read this morning’s email and learned that my abstract for the
PASE conference in first week of april has been accepted, they
recommend no more than 2500 words. at 250 words per page, that means
10 pages! i have to write 10 pages! (i have already written 4 1/2. ten
times 250 equals 2500 doesn’t it? that doesn’t seem like so many
words. the toleration conference essay was longer, i think. just a
moment, i’ll check. wherever it is in my computer. yes, that essay was
3689 words long. so i only have to write 1000 less words. i think i
can do that in a month. don’t you?

i miss you.

k.

as i eat you sleep

Wed, 2 Mar 2005 18:36:16 +0100

dear zh,

this is rather strange, you are getting ready to go to bed unless you
are not already there and sleeping, and my chicken is fresh out of the
oven, rice and corn warming on the stove, to which i added drippings
of the roasted chicken and some olive oil from cypress, which has a
very good taste by the way, thank you.

this is your goodnight kiss.

(i hope you are in the middle of a long letter to me)

even if you are not, i won’t
take back my goodnight kiss.

k.

varieties of control

Thu, 3 Mar 2005 07:24:52 +0100

dear zh,

not a very cheerful subject line this morning, yes? just yesterday the
american colleague who is returning to the u.s. for a semester and
then returning here and who keeps up with the news said he had read of
demonstrations in belarus against taxes, and that there had been a
number of demonstrations across russia about the same issue. i am not
suggesting a cause and effect relationship, but one of general
atmosphere of uncertainty and the almost near certainty of clumsy
administrative control mechanisms such as the one you apparently have
just experienced. what is amazing is that the faculty and university
employees just don’t walk out. (to walk out means to strike, or stop
work, to protest). the difficult of being in a cycle of expanding
powers, increasing control (and from all perspectives this is also
happening in the u.s.) is that it is impossible for the individual to
see outside of the sphere where the power is being exerted. so, the
direct experience, lines of communication are cut, and i would assume,
your university account eliminated? your lev@tpu.ru. what is slightly
comic, is that if i remember your colleagues use you as the technical
facilitator for many inter-departmental matters which are communicated
electronically, so this may mean less work for you. i hope that it
does. how are you supposed to work without email? the stupidity of the
glavni corpus is astounding, and yet typical, don’t you think? if this
happened at a western university either in europe or u.s. there would
be flood of protesting emails, letters, maximum visibility of the
clamp down. instead, the old traditions prevail, and chances are no
one will hear about it, as no one on the staff has the freedom or
feels they have the freedom to make it public, and yet i imagine if
this does continue, that enough people working at the university write
to friends and colleagues in the western world, and news will leak out
in some form or another, if the punitive measure continues. stranger
still, i recently gathered about 50 pages of writing help materials
for my academic writing course from different websites, and i could
see, from sites in australia, canada, u.s., europe (even hungary) that
the technical phenomenon, the electronic communications, had been
assimilated by the universities, students, faculty and staff trained
to communicate online, and use this resource for teaching (for better
or worse) and this means of course a global exposure, at the very
least, and radical ease of communication and exchange of information
across borders. this is apparently what is causing the glavni corpus
such discomfort, and of course you have probably thought of the
possibility that the directive originates from pressure from somewhere
else other than the administrators of the university. the experience
is surprisingly basic, though, isn’t it? one day you can connect to
the internet, the next day you can’t.

i think i am prepared for today’s rush of classes. (i just remembered
to take my vitamin). actually, i attribute to these vitamins my
improved mood towards the teaching in general, though yesterday
morning there was a moment of a dark cloud. i am probably doing too
much work on/for the classes right now, but experience has taught me
that if i begin strongly, then that makes the course easier in the
middle and towards the end. i even had a couple of hours to read for
my own pleasure last night, and went to bed at 22:30, which means that
i am, or should be, rested. we will see. i am just as sure that i will
come home exhausted. then again, i have nothing to do tonight except
read.

i enjoyed, despite the alarming news, your letter last night. when you
are upset, you are quite descriptive. is it all possible to translate
what the gypsy woman said?

no gypsies accost me in the streets of lodz, though yesterday there
was a man begging for money right outside the entrance to the dunce
college. i thought about asking him to substitute for my classes. i am
sure he could have done just as good a job.

now i am going to say goodbye for the morning. today is the longest of
the long days, you know, so i won’t be able to write you until around
19:00. partly i want to say, look for my letter at midnight, but then
if you must work on friday early you should be asleep by then. there
is nothing i can possible write that is worth making you stay up later
than you should. do you have to teach on saturdays? they have a very
good phrase in labor relations in english, “slow down.” that is when
the workers on purpose stop working at the fast pace, and deliberately
reduce the pace of their production. i don’t think in your case that
it is a bad principle to practice. don’t you agree? i recommend that
you begin to think about the possibility of giving to yourself two-day
weekends. already i can anticipate your response. this, strangely too,
somewhat saddens me this morning. you do need to work less, Evgenia.

(with kisses)

k.

Re: varieties of control

Thu, 3 Mar 2005 10:17:40 -0500 (EST

dear zh,

but what do you suspect is the motive behind the investigations? there is
an englification process, but at the same time effort to punish those who
know and study and communicate in English? it either doesn’t make sense,
or there are two competing “tendencies” in the glavni corpus. maybe there
is going to be a palace coup. i am wondering whether you remember one of
our conversations during the spring of my tomsk teaching year. do you
remember that i suggested that it was not unimaginable that those who knew
English and traveled back and forth to English-speaking countries could
become victims of a “purge”? it is entirely logical given the
institutional history of the university and the surrounding social
structures, do you think? what about the administrator who traveled to
u.s. and brought back the idea that there should be no drinking alcohol in
public?

i am not going now to drink alcohol but only to eat chinese food with two
of my colleagues. my great worry is that i have only a 50 zloty bill and
this is too big for the simple restaurant, so i must get it changed.

i’ll write you later tonight, dear.

kisses.

k.

back from the chinese restaurant

Thu, 3 Mar 2005 18:23:04 +0100

dear zh,

mood! the weekend is here, two weeks of teaching are finished, and i
just had a good feed at the chinese restaurnat, pierogi vietamiski
which i probably won’t have again, and kurczac specialne, which i will
most definitely have again. two helping of cabbage, and i let the rice
pass uneaten. why, you might ask, would i eat chicken at a restaurant
when i have chicken in my fridge? very easy answer. kurczak is the
word i can pronounce. kuri grill! (not exactly). where are you? how
are you? why must you teach tomorrow? must you teach saturday? will
you follow my advice? have you any idea what it feels like, the
pressure that i must feel, knowing you are waiting for my letter, so
what words can i write to satisfy you? what words can i possibly have
to amuse you? i think it is enough to say that i am happy the weekend
is here and tonight i am going to read and not worry about my 2500
word essay which i need to write by the end of the month. my books
from cracow are here, and i will retrieve them tomorrow. there’s
something else, there must be something else. yes, my gloves, i found
(have) my gloves. someone put them on the sill of the window in the
hall of the institute, and nobody took them. very nice ending to a
potentially tragic story: me with my cold hands. now i have no more
cold hands. my flat is also very warm tonight. did i tell you that i
was going to read? maybe i will have a letter from you to read, though
it is too much to hope for, but, maybe, while you are waiting for my
goodnight kiss, you are writing me too. are you? something else
happened today, but i cannot remember it. i woke up. i wrote you. i
went to school. i taught. i came home. i went out again. i ate kurczak
specialne. i came home. i am writing you. that about covers it. i did
think of 1) self-expression 2) self-exposure 3) self-examination as
key points by which to frame my discussion of two essays for my
american culture class. i was rather proud of this improvisation. my
conversation class had a very good time, and i gave my academic
writing class a lot of work to do. yes, i am teaching, no, i mean, i
had a good day teaching, now i am perhaps just a little tired. i think
i will fall asleep reading. should i fall asleep waiting for a letter
from you?

with big kisses tonight
on the night when there
is no class to teach to
morrow morrow morrow more

k

slow start to the morning

Fri, 4 Mar 2005 08:44:22 +0100

dear zh,

as you may have guessed by now, i have slept late, since i went to bed
rather late, reading half of a 400 page novel that isn’t worth
reading, though it is packed with culture and history, and so ideal
for the classroom. woe to the writer who writes for the classroom.

i did an very interesting thing last night. i watched parts of my
digital videos, and realized that i “photograph” entirely by fragment.
there are some lovely photographs of you, your hand on a glass, your
eyes, fragments of voice, its haltingness, searching for just the
right word (which i like so very much in your conversation, your
exactness, and the sense of weight that you give to your words, and
just how much you like to talk – most of the time). the other skill of
course is knowing when to be silent (and i include myself as a
practicioner of this skill, since sometimes it is just better to say
nothing and let the time pass).

to take out my camera i needed to open my camera bag and there found
your soap, which fragrance is filling the room right now, so i have a
small impression of your presence, as in my closet, there are your two
shirts, which i come across from time to time in search of a matching
sock. a little, just a little, of you, in the room, in the flat, here,
and the feeling is quite warm, made pointed by absence.

but as i know you are not sentimental, i will not continue on this
theme. perhaps “purge” is not the best word. perhaps “to fall into
disfavor” is more accurate of the process which seems to have been
initiated somewhere. or “backlash” (reaction against). the bureaucracy
promotes english first, then tries to punish those who threaten to
cross linguistic and cultural borders, i.e., the crime of travel in
the western (english-speaking) world. so that those who have
professional contacts with english-speaking foreigners, if they are
not directly punished, must work in an atmosphere of fear. it is a
familiar solution to the need to control and underpaid and overworked
academic staff, don’t you think? but have you really lost your
lev@tpu.ru address? what about all those grants and etc. your
department was having you write?

can you imagine a broad democratic movement of protest sweeping across
russia in reaction against all the forms of the old ways of solving
problems?

on this point, one is called to consider the effect of different
social and political traditions, since, at least to my uninformed
person, it is easier to imagine such a thing happening in the u.s.
where it has happened before.

sometimes i am even tempted to think, there never was a revolution in
russia, only words, and terror. maybe everything happened too
suddenly, too violently, maybe the chasm between rich and poor was too
wide.

Art does not lie, even if it doesn’t tell the truth directly. the art
of the 20s in russia is pure in its utopian content, and bold in its
search for forms, and you can see the impact and dream of a better
society in the works of this period, and this has always conferred
legitimacy to the overthrow that happened then, the terrible change
that was born (the irish poet Yeats has a line, ‘all changed, changed
utterly, a terrible beauty is born’).

but one true line i wrote in my tomsk paper, which was actually a
quote: the distance to the past is inviolable. which means, i think,
that there is no possibility of access to this past. it is
irretrievable. and what is worse, the very rapid and sudden
degeneration of the attempt at utopia (so that perhaps there were only
3 or 4 years of actual political freedom in russia) collapsed back
into the authoritarian rule of the 19th century, which, for all the
words, all the ostensible institutional reform, this is the form of
rule in the 21st.

there seems to be one obvious truth in history: all institutions, no
matter how much power they try to exert, fall. this will happen in the
u.s. also, but it is possible in a very different way. why? the
flexibility of the institutions that passed through the civil rights
movement in the 1960s, which was really a mass democracy movement.
there has never been a mass democracy movement in russia, never.

these are few and halting notes. i am always aware that i ‘see things
feelingly’ (intuitively) but your recent experience has made me rather
serious at moments, beyond the distraction of teaching. also, viewing
fragments of your person-image last night on the television monitor.

i miss you.

k.

early afternoon light

Fri, 4 Mar 2005 13:28:17 +0100

dear zh,

an eventful day: first your call, then i went to the post office and
retrieved my most recent book order from cracow, then two more books
came from a polish university book, a very good (the best so far)
polish book for beginners, and a book on the subject of the seminar i
am teaching, but curiously, and at this stage, insterestingly,
pro-American (the theme is the representation of American history in
post-war novels). i am reminded by the identification with the u.s.
empire as a powerful tendency in Polish intellectual (academic) life.
it makes me feel just a little oppressed. i have also been reading
from the biography of a poet whose work i have a lot of liking for,
again, for the importance of history in the writing, and at a glance i
am reminded how chaotic the creative life can be sometimes, and often
at the expense (sacrifice) of others. i have certainly undergone a
minor version of such chaos, and so much of my life seems now to
attempt to compensate for the indulgence in disorder, and i find
myself growing markedly more severe and rigid, even in my habits,
which include reading habits. i hope i never become a moralist. i
never have been one, not in my writing, and i am too conscientious
sometimes. especially in the daily life, teaching, this is apparent,
and it hurts my writing, harms thinking, and you find yourself
obedient to the wheel of routine, which is, mostly, what the delivery
of education is. this is my paragraph or paraphrase of thought for the
early afternoon. fridays are tragic days. they pass too quickly.

i miss you.

k.

100+24

Fri, 4 Mar 2005 15:45:03 +0100

dear zh,

what an odd coincidence. today when my two packages of books arrived
in putting them on the three shelves in my study i suddenly faced the
problem that there were too many books for the three shelves, so i
moved the books from libraries to another case, and the foreign
language books (polish, french, russian, german) to the bookcase in
your room, and when i counted the books, there were 100. just now i am
reading of a period of research by Charles Olson for Herman Melville’s
original library, and it turns out that he was able to find 124
volumes that belonged to Melville’s library, hunting through
bookstores, meeting with descendants of the great 19th century writer
(American’s Tolstoy) and etc. just the coincidence that i had counted
my books, and then this number appearing, has put me in mind of a
project, that, when the number of my books reaches 124, i will write a
collage/quotation/critical work based on these texts, and only these
texts. the problem is the artificial limit: one cannot contain a range
of references with any amount of books. there’s the idea of the play
with number, and its arbitrary (chance) character. maybe i have been
reading too many bibliographies. some of the books shouldn’t count,
since they are for teaching. so, for example, on the first of the
three shelves, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paul Auster’s Mr. Vertigo, and
E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate shouldn’t count, since they are
teaching books, as is the misplaced Polish translation of Thomas
Berger’s Little Big Man (the book i was reading last night, in an
English version from the library) (maly wielki czlowiek), and yet
there is crossover from teaching, represented by the two books by
Polish academics, Zygmunt Mazur’s The Representation of History in
Post-war American Fiction (which is the title of my seminar, which i
created before finding this title in a catalogue of a Polish
university press), and newly published book by a colleague in my dept,
Grzegorz Kosc’s Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grand
Masters. Then i have a volume of Polish translations of Robert Lowell
with the English poems on face pages with interesting typos, a strange
volume (i like strange volumes) called Interpreting America: Russian
and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought, a study of East
European architecture called, simply, East European Modernism, which
demonstrates a political line close to Mazur’s, a volume of
translations with facing Polish by Tadeusz Rozewicz, a volume of
Polish translations of Gunnadij Aigi’s Russian poetry, a volume of
conference essays called Borderlines: Studies in Literature in Film
(including essays on Mandelstam and Vertov, very suggestive to me), a
fascinating book that arrived today: The Hybrid in the Limen
(theoretical treatment of what is called Environmental Theater in
Poland and England), Piotr Szewc’s Annihilation (a holocaust fiction,
somewhat akin to Jacov Lind’s Soul of Wood which you may remember i
bought for one cypress pound), Marco d’Eramo’s Pig and the Skyscraper
(about Chicago) and Norman Klein’s The History of Forgetting (about
Los Angeles), Simone de Beauvoir’s American Day by Day and Anzia
Yezierska’s How I Found America (these books belong elsewhere, beside
other books, though for the moment i associate them with the
discourse-books about L.A. and Chicago – germinations of a future
course), another copy of Beloved (we have only one copy in the library
so i bought another one for my student’s to use), that awful volume of
short stories i read in cypress, The Penguin Book, another teaching
book, then several anthologies/magazines that have writing of mine
published in them, and my only copy of Recent Events, and five books
by Charles Olson (one of them a library borrowing). well, those are
the contents of one shelf. i won’t bore you with the other two
shelves, at least right now. but you can see my problem: how to
separate the reading i do for teaching and the reading i must do for
my own writing. there are about 24 books arriving from the u.s., so
when they do arrive i will have come close to my 124. another problem
is that i have a strong desire to read Louis Zukofsky, and i have only
two poems of his, so i may need to buy a copy of his long poem and
collected short poems, and once again i want to reread his study of
shakespeare (as a kind of counter to the use of shakespeare by
melville – the difference is between mythmaking and historical
materialism), and more than ever i miss the two volumes of Charles
Reznikoff’s Testimony (mentioned in Charles Olson’s letters to Cid
Corman, and an essential document in any interpretive reading of the
American “proposition”). so you see i may either exceed my 124 limit
(i cannot, this must be a limit) or i must get rid of some of the
marginal books which i procured with an eye to their marginality:
Catherine Cameron’s Dialectics in the Arts (a very suggestive title
but a disappointing study of contemporary experimental music in the
u.s.) or the collection of conference papers on Percy Shelley. my
volume of Walt Whitman in Russian i will keep though i wonder if i
will ever be able to read it. by the way, in case you are interested,
your volume of The Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories i am taking
care of for you rests between Emmanuel Levinas’ Nine Talmudic Readings
and the Mandelstam and ‘Der Nister’ files. do you mind? maybe i will
not consider the Hebrew Short Stories as one of the 124 since it is
your book and belongs on your bookshelf in your room. why aren’t you
in there, by the way. the beige room is rather empty without you.

k.

brief goodnight kiss

Fri, 4 Mar 2005 18:32:49 +0100

dear zh,

i write with the unease that you are perhaps waiting for this letter.
i tried to buy a card to call russia with today but they only had the
same one that i have not been able to use. i have been reading all
afternoon, darkness has fallen, with only one lamp on, and now i must
go to the supermarket for the weekend foods and a bottle of wine to
take to the lunch tomorrow. i am a little regretful of the drain on my
energy the visit will consume. when night falls now i feel a loss of
energy, attention, definitely i like waking up in the morning and
reading during the day. at night something else begins to happen, as
though i cannot see so well. i just remembered i forgot to take my
vitamin today. it was nice, though, beginning the day with the however
distant sound of your voice.

until tomorrow …

k.

Temporalities

Sat, 5 Mar 2005 09:12:26 +0100

dear zh,

i don’t know why the word announcing the arrival of this letter means
something different from time. (different from/different than is one
linguistic debate i became aware of in Tomsk). temporal experience,
temporal saturation. i don’t know what they mean. do you have a
distinction in russian between time-as-idea and the experience of
time, even, the subjectivity of time? very simply, i thought it was
much later than it was, and turning on my laptop, i find that it is
8:20, so that i am not late in writing you, though i have been awake
for a while, since daylight, reading, without even coffee. the book
must be pretty good, you might say, especially if i delay not only
writing you, but even my morning coffee. the book is a biography and
it makes me think about time. not to mention the infinite varieties of
experience. does the book i am reading lead me to any further
understanding of anything? does any book do this? one problem i become
aware of reading about what is called “a life” is that poetry
(writing, but especially poetry) doesn’t emerge from the real-life
circumstances, accidents, contingencies, environments, in a direct
way, the indirectness and screening (layers of interpretation) seem
inevitable and natural. do we learn anything useful about a piece of
writing by reading about a reconstructed version of the circumstances
surrounding the writing of it? one reads, that’s to say, i read,
because of a certain mythical aura surrounding the life of the poet
i’m reading, at the same time that myth of the life, the poet, the
person, appears to be of the type of model and paradigm no longer
applicable, for we do, after all, live in a time of the paradigm
shift. that is almost common knowledge, though i only just learned it
about 5 years ago. there’s even the intuition that this myth of the
life as it was lived by this poet, the one whose life i am reading
about, may even have contributed to his ‘destruction’ (early death by
cancer, if you consider 60 to be an early death, and, nearing 50, i am
inclined to consider it so). reading from the myth of the life, there
is the palpable threat of insecurity, of being overwhelmed by the
myth, whether it is the myth of the Father or the myth of the Poet.
it’s difficult to imagine the biography of a woman writing at the same
time, or even at this time: the life would be far too ordinary,
eventless, “distributed.” that applies to all the marginalized. we
distribute ourselves. i distribute myself by teaching (and reading the
biography of the Myth of the Poet one is reminded just how
distracting, just how much of an irritant, teaching is, and how
stifling the academic model is, and just how much time one needs in
order to gestate, dream, write). i’ve mentioned those experiences,
those days given to vagrancy, vacancy, where the space separating
words and dreams is what we call liminal, fluid, like reaching across
a very wet space, one that permits you to forget yourself, whoever or
whatever it is that you either think you are or what the power that
surrounds you as shaped into a definition for yourself – definition
insofar as we act according to imaginary dictates, even when they are
only habits, routines, and schedules, that very insidious form of time
control, though control, creativity control. so i woke up this
morning, almost literally, into the middle of the book i am reading,
and into the middle of the Myth of the Poet, and i want to consider
the other side, the reverse, or inverse, of the Myth of the Poet, as
something more like the pure temporality of poetry itself, and the
effacement of the life. how do we practice effacement? is it the
allusion in the book i am reading to another writer’s “toiling in
obscurity as a freshman composition teacher” which makes me first
reflect on the particular bias of the biographer, and then the general
social view (anyone teaching this way after the age of 30 is a loser,
and i come from a society of winners and losers), and then finally the
memory of the productive obscurity of my Cleveland years, that it was
then that i could concentrate on poetry because i was so far away from
any official forms of it, and protected from all forms of social
contact with others writing it, this experience the very antithesis of
the terms of writing proposed as exemplar in the Myth of the Poet.

what does “a life in obscurity” mean to you? who come from such a
vastly different world and experience, even though i think we both
know the meaning of the experience of time, the temporality i am
talking about and the experience, something that might be called a
field of perception, such as when you are walking for a very long
distance, you are physically moving through space, and at the same
time the memory of that period of your life when you mapped, when you
crossed 30 kilometers a day, what i have always understood from you as
one of the most interesting periods of your life, one of active
physical and intellectual engagement, activity, so that any walking in
the present and the pleasure of it derives both from the experience of
the moment and the memory of the past?

that question doesn’t have much to do with “life in obscurity.” there
are determinants operating beneath such a conception that i can’t
quite say what they are yet, but it is a kind of view of writing and
poetry from the top down, an institutional perspective, and if we
reject that perspective, what other equivalent terms are there?

the practice of humility? the acceptance of the condition of
precariousness? the refusal to compete? (if one refuses to compete for
recognition, in the world i come from, one is said to ‘drop out of
sight’ or ‘disappear’). one example that comes to mind right now is a
writer named Djuna Barnes, not a prolific writer, but one whose
writing has a secure place in our understanding of modernism in
English, and to my recollection of the few details of her life, she
lived for several decades in a hotel in New York, in touch with no
one, perhaps not even writing. Olive Moore, a British writer, wrote
four novels and then disappeared without a trace. there are other
examples. they are hardly myths, unless there is a Myth of the
Disappeared.

and is there a middle ground? how, i am trying to ask, does one live
one’s life for one’s reading and writing without harming others. one
of the most amusing details from the Myth of the Poet i am reading
this weekend is his use of his wife to hold the day job, menial jobs,
like working in a school for children, and they lived off her
earnings, and though eventually his writing led to teaching and other
forms of support, there was still this condition of dependency,
economic dependency, which reminds me of a period of my life when i
did not exactly _not_ work, but my job was not ambitious enough, and i
was abused for this lack of ambition, for this weakness, by my
partner. that is a very good word for someone you share your life
with, since to share your live means to share your contingencies,
economic fate, not to mention moods, illusions, etc. i know and
recognize that i live completely within the orbit, the sphere of
influence, of the writing i have done, and the desire to write – and
endless and impossible to satisfy desire, and one that is often
accompanied by severe extremes of moods, self-absorption, withdrawal –
upon which is superimposed a memory of past disorders, to which this
morning’s temporality of dishevelment, waking up reading without
coffee, without the routine that i follow before going to teach
(showering, shaving, dressing), reminds me, and reminded, i wonder
where disorder would leave me were i to submit to its demands once
again? the thought of not teaching, not working, is simply not a
choice, a being able to recognize this limitation – confinement – the
strictness of the regime, as harmful as it is to creativity, how to
work within it, so as not to try to either ignore its influence (which
extends even to the experience of time) or attempt to master it (no
one can master the regime of an external power) – this seems to be the
task of the moment, if i do not want to become miserable. suddenly
this word, the power of the will, returns, and perhaps that is where
my bookmark, metaphorically, is placed in the book of the Myth of the
Poet that i am reading, that there is never any completion to this
cycle, that one never finally enacts the Power of the Will enough or
once and for all. that every turn in our life we are faced with the
potential for defeat, and the subsiding of all that we have
accomplished into memory only, which for my relationship to writing
would be like your being confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk even
to the nearby store. can you imagine a worse condition? blindness
would be preferable, don’t you think?

this is a basic enough expression, isn’t it?

There is no resting place. There is only the movement among turns and
returns of (for writing) words, and we are never where we think we
are.

I hope this morning’s letter isn’t too long or elliptical. If you were
here, it would probably take the form of a long monologue.

Do you sometimes imagine when I do not write that I miss you that I am
implying that either I do miss you or that, reading, I forget about
you? Isn’t it much easier to cope with this problem in writing to one
another than, for example, the forgetfullness that can happen when two
people live in close proximity, in the same space, and yet reading
takes one so very far away, to very remote centers, spaces, places –
imaginary – and yet no less real and lived for that.

k.

surplus celebration

Sun, 6 Mar 2005 10:51:28 +0100

dear zh,

i haven’t figured out yet what i or others were celebrating yesterday,
but it lasted for more than 12 hours, and included, if i can recall in
the order in which they were eaten:

party snacks (olives, sausages, chips)
roast pork
cabbage and carrots in very tasty melange
potatoes
two slices of cheese cake

for lunch, and then, for dinner

hors d’ouevres
soup
pancakes with spinach and cheese in tomatoe sauce
(i ate three)
two different varieties of desert

and more glasses of wine than i can remember. i am not hungover (no
headache) and exhausted and stuffed to the gills, as we say.
hospitality Polish-style in two different homes. now, how to return
the hospitality?

i hope you will understand the fact that, given the circumstances of
my indulgences yesterday, i am as yet incapable of holding together a
single thought, so i will send you this greeting with the promise of
writing you this evening and in the hope that you may call again
sometime today. we need to celebrate International Womens’ Day, don’t
we?

i miss you.

k.

rush kiss

Sun, 6 Mar 2005 18:56:39 +0100

dear zh,

i just read your letters. i am very sorry i did not know you had to
get up so early in the morning. i have been sort of aware of the
passing time but i have been doing the task i most dislike, looking at
my own poetry, and i am almost done, when i thought to check my mail,
thinking you would be up until about 1:00 a.m. i myself feel a little
depression coming with the thought of classes tomorrow, but they are
only two, and then i don’t have to do anything more until wednesday.
my application will not be a successful one. i will try to explain to
you the reasons why eventually, but as you know, i have real problems
with confidence and the ability to assert myself, even if it only
means a letter of recommendation. i hope this will change in time, it
must. now i wish you a good night’s sleep, and i wish you also to know
that i miss you very much.

k.

sea of cold soft white

Mon, 7 Mar 2005 07:10:21 +0100

dear zh,

i am awake and up and around at more or less the time i should be this
morning, waking up into the daylight, and the view outside, snow and
more snow, though i consulted the tv in vain, there are no school
closings. outside there are brave souls trooping through the snow. i
am awake and uninspired by my school tasks for today’s classes, what
else is new? at least you have a holiday, tomorrow. for all i know,
there could be holiday here, but, as we both agree, since neither of
us have classes on tuesday, it is not much of a holiday even if there
is one. for International Womens Day i would imagine that all your
colleagues take you out to dinner at your favorite restaurant,
especially those colleagues for whom you do so many translations. but
this is not the case, is it? you never describe your englification
projects. i don’t think you should worry yourself about translating
the sokurov interview, maybe just remember to keep a copy. all art is
becoming political, now. i need some kind of new perspective. or,
fresh perspective, we say. there are days when the position that i
occupy, i mean the daily one, the attitude towards one’s work
(writing) is, at best, tenuous, which means uncertain. doubtful. that
is the result of all the hours given to yesterday’s application
letter, which, in sum, simply amounts to an expression of apology for
not being assertive, aggressive, about my writing, as i am hardly even
able to conceive of it as an object. such a letter reminds me of the
mystery of my relation to my writing. the effect is not pleasant, and
the snow outside, this morning, wants to send me even further inside,
withdrawn, so today all my nerves will be spent in trying to occupy
the time of two classes in one and a half hour periods and with the
most basic of all basic materials. i think i am bored to tears, as we
say. now, in retrospect, i can say that saturday was a wasted day.
worse, it caused me to waste a good part of friday and sunday. so one
valuable weekend is lost. i did read 300 pages of a novel and 300
pages of a biography, so i was not entirely idle. it feels more like
my wheels are spinning in the snow.

here is a kiss your your afternoon from my morning.

k.

Shneefall

Mon, 7 Mar 2005 17:16:46 +0100

dear zh,

the amount and continuing steady snowfall is the great event of the
day as it makes walking hard and slow and already my good pair of
trousers are in the laundry as i was splashed too many times by
passing cars

not that the snow is melting there’s just so much of it that the snow
turns to slush under the tires of the cars and for the first time that
i can remember i have seen snow plows treading up and down streets
including mine

my classes were pleasant i think due to the change occasioned by the
heavy snow though attendance was higher than usual the students seemed
more attentive and cooperative (what else is there to think about on a
day when the snow piles against windows in drifts and all that you can
see outside is mounds of white?)

my cup of coffee is now resting comfortably beside me and there are
chicken bones in water on the stove coming to a boil from which i will
make chicken soup tonight, chicken and noodles, though i have already
eaten a little the first time today, bread in the chicken drippings at
the bottom of the frying pan that the chicken remains have been
resting in since Friday

i am listening to beethoven’s 4th quartet, always pleasant, actually
more so, it gives energy, in a different and more structured – just
interrupted by a phone call about the meeting time for the make-up
american literature exams three of which i need to grade tonight

which meant that after my classes at the dunce college i had to go to
the institute to retrieve two thick anthologies for answers that i did
not know the answers to, and i am not even sure i would pass the exam
if i had to

now i am going to send this with the promise to send you as well a
goodnight kiss unless you write me with the information that you are
going to bed early in which case as this letter arrives and 22:15 your
time you will have to settle for a hug? is this letter a hug?

okay, then, a kiss for you too …

k.

this morning is an early and still thoroughly snow-white morning

Tue, 8 Mar 2005 06:22:22 +0100

dear zh,

who was last night a very guiet zh which means you are living up to
your initials or close, close, sh, sh, we say to mean quiet, and i
know zh is not sh, i’m not confusing you with someone else!

only to say, to suggest, to intimate, that, as you sometimes, though
not too often, i hope, as you, last night, i consulted my email many
times, never to find a message from you, from which disappointment i
concluded that you either went to bed very early, lost or depleted
your internet card, went visiting, or forgot about me – all of which i
can understand, though i would rather you didn’t forget about me

though i could understand – your forgetting – in the middle of my
recent attack of lack of self-confidence, last night two colleague,
both Polish, called, with questions, about the meeting tomorrow, now
today, and i was reminded just how easy are communications with them,
daily practical communications, in comparison with a visitor from an
American university, who is all superiority and pretense, which more
and more i associate with the nature of the institutions there, and
which again gives me occasion to reflect on the eventual impact on my
psyche were i actually to have a teaching job there

a job, that is, that carried any more import and significance than the
low jobs, the poor jobs, there are no other kind in Russia i know, as
you know, but when people are given the high jobs, they think of
themselves as very high, and this is a danger in the region of poetry,
and all jobs in poetry are very political in the u.s., they are almost
like appointments, political appointments, and there is more to this
than i even let on to you, it is part of the world that i could not
tolerate, and you are not right, when you say, as in Cypress, that you
worry that i am trying to tolerate the thought of it now for you

no, all my thoughts and dreams and intentions are always for me, there
has always been this selfishness, and there are other dreams, other
wishes, about an eventual public, published, life for my work, at
least in the last years of my life, which, i remind you, are very far
away, i hope you are not disappointed, and i don’t think you are

disappointed, with that thought, or any thought, yet, about me? i
understood from your letter that you thought attacks of lack of
confidence are good, did i understand you? i can’t distinguish these
attacks from self-criticism, doubt, uncertainty, suspicion, and the
counter, the opposite, the reverse effect, of knowing very well what
that world is like, power, power, power, and murderous abstraction.

the rewards are such (medical care and dental care!) that you can
forget that your soul is on sale. there is the market in every
ellipsis in every sentence written. there is the market in every book,
on the cover and in-between in every book. and yet the alternative,
such as the space i am in now, is so contingent, so unpredictable, and
grinding in its demands (though i put myself to this grind and create
it as well, i don’t try to deceive myself by attributing the grinding
routine and theft of my time to the system only, i know i collaborate
in this process)

so where does this leave any question, any problem, i don’t know, i
only know how much i would like to hear from you once in a while, it
doesn’t have to be every day, a line from Mandelshtam, paraphrased or
evoked, it doesn’t have to be translated, you are too exact (and
exacting – very interesting semantic gap here) about the equivalent
between languages, where just the shadows suffice sometimes, no, the
shadows, the outlines, the silhouettes, are all we have. i heard one
of your academics say this about Pushkin once, “it is all we have”

whether or not it is true, it is a beautiful expression of poverty,
one that comes from poverty, which is a condition of poetry

where is my Mandelshtam? one line at chosen at random once in a while,
obeying no pattern, no schedule, no time frame, just a surprise and
like all surprises, delightful, unpredictable, that would be like a
kiss from you, if and whenever you might care to, the line or two of
Mandelshtam’s, i mean, from you …

k.

p.s. HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

where every line of poetry happens to me what

Tue, 8 Mar 2005 15:19:08 +0100

dear zh,

i found today at the bookstore the mandelstam in russian and polish
that i once thought i had waited too long to buy apparently it
disappeared only for a short while

what English can you find for the two lines in the attachment?

thank you for the birthday gift. i need it.

(kisses)

k.

goodnight kiss

Tue, 8 Mar 2005 18:31:51 +0100

dear zh,

do you know it is vaguely depressing to kiss you goodnight at 18:22? i
am reminded just how far away we are from one another. tonight’s the
last night of leisure, not even, two day crush ahead, already my head
is full of forgotten copies, and the lurking sensation, fret: what
will i do with this class, what will i do with that class? today i
turned in all my grades for the institute from last semester, almost
140 in all (ridiculous). i do have less students this semester, maybe
70 or a few more. the faces blur. i have been reading william faulner
all day and preparing a few notes for my class tomorrow, i have a lot
of problems with this nobel-prize winning novelist, but many aspects
(glimpse) of american folk culture glimmer through, beyond all the
myth-making, and it gives real pleasure. these glimpses, and the long
sentences. it is possible to take great pleasure in winding syntax, no
matter what they are saying. i am too often now aware of the big
picture, beyond the representation, and also, reading, just reading,
makes me want to keep reading, instead of preparing classes, or even
thinking about them, and besides, it is snowing so much, and it makes
me forgetful, as, for example, this afternoon, i was at the faculty,
to turn in the exams i’d grades and turn in last semester’s grades,
and i left 15 minutes before a colleague was to give a presentation,
as i was totally disoriented, hardly knowing even where i was,
everything looked strange and unfamiliar. i hope my absence will be
forgiven. it was strange, because of the snow, wet drifts of blowing
snow, and a lot of people weren’t there (i’m hoping they decided to
postpone the talk). i also suffered from ambiguity about Intl. Women’s
Day (they were selling flowers on the sidewalks, at the same time, the
academics seem sensitive about recalling the soviet period – and
nobody else mentioned it, but the very lack of mention made me
uncomfortable. i am glad you received so many presents. it is a
reminder of how much you are of assistance to others, aiding and
abetting, we say (playfully).

and so here is a playful kiss (goodnight).

k.

efficiently this morning

Wed, 9 Mar 2005 06:41:49 +0100

dear zh,

the day, which is still not very long in being one, a day, began with
my alarm going off at 5:30, inside the glass cabinet, which mutes the
sound, as though i am listening to it from very far away, though this
did not prevent me from rising, and turning it off, and returning to
bed, where i lay for 15 more minutes, listening to the soft sound of a
snow shovel outside my window, for there are even higher drifts of
snow now,

and somehow the getting up from bed was inspired by the sound of the
snow shovel, only i had to wait for too long for the water to get hot
in the shower, and somehow, in the process of routine events, my
coffee became cold, sitting and waiting for me while i was dressing,
so the result is that only 35 minutes after rising from the warmth of
my bed into the early blue morning light,

i am showered and shaved, dressed, coffeed, and my books and papers
are in my case, or bag, or whatever it is that it is called: i don’t
even know the english word any more for what i carry my books in,
though on a plane it would be called a “carry on” – but it is not a
bag or case or satchel or briefcase – what is it? what do i carry my
books and papers in? it is the same one that i had with me in cypress,
what do you call it in Russian?

so, stik is not verse or line of verse but spider? stikni is verse,
isn’t it? what is the word in russian for a line of poetry? do you
think there is possibility of word play here? stik/stikni? perhaps not
so much the spider as the web the spider weaves? joint? niche? crack
in the wall?

there is more here than we may think. here is a word or words for
something that is disappearing from modern interiors: cracks in walls,
holes in wood walls – they are still part of the house interior, the
room, the interior space, in your world, now i am remembering the
house of gypsies? the family your father first gave the puppy you
rescued to, and i am only remembering your description of the living
space, but that would be one with such “joint” such holes such cracks
in the walls (unless instead we are imagining the space, the upper
space, where two walls meet and where the spider might weave its web,
what is that called? i don’t know the building word. maybe it is
“joint” i think that would be the word where two planes, two surfaces,
met, even two pieces of wood, two beams of wood, at right angles,
though i do not know the difference between a left and right angle, do
you?

spiders build webs in both places, the crack or crevice or hole in the
wall, and the space where two walls meet, also in windows and in
window sills. poetry changes as the places in which we live change. in
19th century poems there are casements, those enormous windows, depth
windows, where you could literally sit in the window, i think the
child in Jane Eyre’s, what was that novel by Jane Eyre, she hides in
the casement of the window, and windows like that are not common in
the houses we live in any more, why can’t i remember any more the
novel by Jane Eyre and does it matter?

what houses, what spaces, what places, have you been in lately where
you noticed a spider? webs? cobwebs? did they make you think about
poetry?

could you read the cyrillic in the text i sent you? it’s cyrillic in
windows, a very different keyboard than on the unix side, which is
almost a phonetic pattern, but switching the keyboard is not so easy,
though i may try it the next time i type in a line or two of cyrillic.

this my latest distraction is simply a wish to use my new Mandelshtam
book, it’s really quite nice, published in the early 1980s, facing
Polish and Russian, of course all the words on both pages look very
strange to me, though it’s not a bad idea to type out a few words in
another language now and then, do you agree?

i am never asking you for a literal or exact translation, only your
responses to the words, your associations.

and now i must disassociate myself for the length of the day,
scheduled to return at 16:00, at which time i will have the unpleasant
task of preparing for tomorrow’s classes, made simpler by the fact
that i have taught two of them before, and another one is a
conversation class, so really all i have to worry about is the
academic writing class, so i should not complain,

though still i will, i wish you were here.

(kisses)

k.

i don’t blame you for not writing

Wed, 9 Mar 2005 05:57:51 -0500 (EST

dear zh,

i have a few minutes between institute and dunce college so i thought i’d
check to see if there were a few words from you but of course i wrote you
this morning that i wouldn’t be home until 16:00

i hope your day is passing fair (mine is, or what there is of it, or has
been of it, so far)

now i am off to 3 hours of hopelessness

i miss you

k

i hear or i listen (am hearing or listening) to something or other (another

Wed, 9 Mar 2005 16:45:12 +0100

dear zh,

two more lines from the same stanza. is it stanza that is stikni?
don’t cry at me for my poor russian, nor for the cup of coffee on my
table. though some sun at last at least appeared today there has still
been more snow, more snow since i’ve seen since lithuania, and the
wind was blowing so strongly as i turned the corner to my building
that i was bent over into it and hardly moving for a moment. i think i
should like to turn into a frozen statue at some other time, thank
you.

i am writing you now though a bit later than i thought and hoping for
return words from you and maybe even a little associative english for
the two new lines since my classes lasted until almost 16:00. i did
something successful, i split a large class into two smaller groups,
meeting for half the class time, and they liked it very much at the
dunce college, and were very cooperative, even playful. it is becoming
known there that i make the students work hard. why? though, why? what
drives me this way? what makes me teach this way?

meanwhile, at the institute, i am teaching a brilliant seminar about
history, representation, the crisis of representation, narrative,
memory and time in language and there’s nobody, almost literally
nobody, to listen, only four students this morning, though i hardly
blame them, the novel is difficult, and remote from their own
experience, we are in deep winter, and the class starts at 8:30. oh
well. please do write me if and when and soon as you can and send me a
kiss with your words?

i miss you.

k.

you won’t appreciate my humor

Wed, 9 Mar 2005 16:49:06 +0100

dear zh,

i have high hopes for this one since there are the most miles
separating the principles.

that doesn’t mean i want to keep the distance, as we say, only people
tend to get tired of me up close.

what do you think?
what do you expect?
on such windy and white blowing days
does it matter?

On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 14:59:32 +0300
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

> hi, your hopelessness is nothing in comparison with my despair in
> front of the englification program i have to write. but instead i am
>
> going to go home after three classes and before three tomorrow.
>
> i was too busy even to read your letter (which i have read now) but
> i had minutes to check if there is one. you see, i am very strict
> about your letters.
>
> by the way, my best congratulations with one month anniversary of
> you fourth or fifth marriage. i expected to be invited somewhere but
> i see you are too busy, but it is a good tradition to celebrate the
> anniversaries in the restaurants. i’ll write you later today. bye zh
>
I hear graphite at last in the last

Wed, 9 Mar 2005 18:42:30 +0100

dear zh,

you deserve a longer goodnight kiss but, yes, i am in the middle of
getting ready for a very long day, though i am hoping to be done in
two and a half hours so i can simply read. for the mandelstam please
remember i am only interested in your associations, don’t feel like
you have to go to the english dictionary. i am not interested in
translation – only the collision, if that is even what it is …

who has time to correspond?

(kisses)

k.
i am awake now and moving around purposively

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 06:48:12 +0100

dear zh,

this is really going to trouble me if i can remember, and i think i
remember, beginning to write to you yesterday at 6:22 a.m. this
morning it is 6.22 a.m. though i really sat down to the laptop with
coffee in hand at 6:20. it’s the precise exactitude, though i didn’t
have to wait as long for the water in the shower to heat up, and
perhaps that’s the difference: yesterday i lay in bed for 20 minutes
after the alarm went off, and this morning i lay in bed for 30
minutes, but the water was warm sooner, and so i find myself, showered
and shaved, fully dressed except for my shoes and watch (i can’t type
on the keyboard with the watch on) with cup of coffee that i may turn
into two this morning (i had time for a second cup yesterday but
didn’t think of it until after i arrived at the institute and realized
i was 20 minutes early and had nothing to do except drink a cup of
coffee) though at this point, honestly, i am undecided as to whether i
will take that extra 15 minutes before leaving my warm flat to go out
into the snow (the wind appears to have died down) and to the
institute to lecture, to summarize, to perform, to humor, to instruct,
to act, in other words, as a cipher in a system. there’s no pleasure
in it, most of the times, yesterday at the dunce college was not bad,
and i can’t say that i mind having only 4 students one week in a
seminar, and 5 the next week. they are dull. everyone is dull. i am
dull. that’s why i am trying to send you a line or two out of my new
Mandelshtam, it’s just a pleasure to open the nice book, and take some
lines from it, and if you can give me any English translative (not
englification translations) it will help me more than you know, though
i agree with you, we are more in the condition of casting words in
each other’s direction to reassure one another that we are really
doing fine when all indications are such that the reverse should be
true: at least the atmosphere suggested by the directives from the
glavni corpus appear to have settled into the dust of someone’s desk
drawer, have they?

there was one highlight, one moment of pleasure, yesterday evening. of
course, when i finished preparing, it was 21:30, and i read for half
an hour, and started falling asleep (my head feels so thick lately!)
and that’s why at least i did achieve a full night’s sleep,
22:00-5:30, but earlier in the evening, i added some white grapes from
which i cut in half and took out the seeds (as you would do for a
fruit salad) and added them to yoghurt, and it made what tasted,
according to my spartan regime, almost a desert, and certainly
nutritious (which reminds me if i do go into the kitchen once more to
make another cup of coffee, i will take one of my last remaining
vitamins). the incentive for today, the reason for making it through
the day (do you realize that for the most part that is what we do – we
don’t enjoy life or enjoy being alive – we just manage to satisfy the
institutional expectations, so that we don’t get expended – that’s all
– no wonder your favorite expression is “i’m still alive” (i wonder
sometimes about myself) but, back to my incentive, as you know, at the
end of the day today, i have three days to myself, three days where i
don’t have to lead a class in whatever futility of the moment. now for
my second cup of coffee.

i think i just put too much coffee in the cannister where the water
drips. we shall see. if i did, there will be a mess, an overflow of
grounds, coffee grounds, which i only enjoy the sight of in the coffee
you make in the open pan on the wood fire in your dacha. sometimes i
think that is the only real coffee. everything else is a poor
substitute. this is a fine time to think of your dacha. warm days,
cows in the paths, raspberries, flower gardens, fresh peas – all i can
see outside is a sea of white and cold, and in my room, books i need
to read. the sounds are more or less normal coming from the kitchen.
excuse me again for another moment.

do i even want this second cup of coffee? will it make my first period
students any less grumpy because they don’t like the classroom (a
phonetics lab, bad lighting, no windows – it is like a tomb, and they
have to sit too far away from one another, individuated at stations
complete with headphones). it’s rather depressing for me also, but
that’s that and i can’t do anything about it. in fact, i don’t think
that i even have any cheerful words to give to you this morning, apart
from the certaintly that tonight i will have a second helping of
grapes with yoghurt, and tomorrow morning i will go to the supermarket
because there will be nothing in my fridge. as for the essay that’s
needed for the first week of april, i am reaching the point where i
don’t have an excuse, i must write it this weekend and the next. we’ll
see. and you? what are your plans for the weekend? don’t tell me you
are going to the office!

(kisses)

k.

fragile vase in hands which can

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:12:49 -0500 (EST

dear zh,

if only you knew how many broken vases weigh on my conscience.

the day is done, the students dispersed, my performance over.

now it is to home and to books and to the essay i must write.

the news that you must spend the weekend in your office is bad.

I miss you. it is you that I miss. you, I, miss. miss you, I.

Ya tibya something or other (what is the Russian word for “miss”?

k.

home! Domu

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:10:25 +0100

dear zh,

it was cold again coming home and snowing so (so!) i stopped by the
shop and brought home with me a bottle of sweet but potent wine which
i hope will send me to bed by 22:00 so i can wake up into the morning
and start writing my essay.

this afternoon after classes i listened to the audio recording of a
taped reading by the American poet who wrote the line, “I have had to
learn the simplest things last” and fell into the depth of the voice,
the most pleasant sensation i have had for some time.

it is always good to be reminded of the vocal character of poetry.
beyond all our texts in all our written languages. i was simply very
happy listening to the voice.

simple question: stik, stiki? spider and stanza? am i imagining
things? write to me in russian for once in a long while, you know i
rather like the sound of that language. especially in your whispery
self-deprecating (wry) voice.

which i miss, yes, though, if you were here, i’d have to share my
wine!

kisses

k.

page 460 of the maximus poems

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:42:36 +0100

Lost from the loss of her dragger heisted
on the back side of Salt Island full fall tide flowing
all waste and vessels drifting
far out from the neighboring shore their painters long
for the tide’s rise and fall not this full harbor and
plunging ocean
in on the land boxes racing
left by the trawler departing
at midnight in toward the shore like moon’s scudding
or roads riding on top of hills high enough
to be up against sky the earth
is only round when water
fills up ocean to the
top

Charles Olson
1910-1970

Second try

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:45:30 +0100

no, i will never write the essay
the words in the shape of a thought
the thought in the shape of knowing
something, anything, this thing or
that or another, knowing it to do or
mean or resemble or … already it is
boring, all thought is boring, it isn’t
there, in the words for it, the words
fake thought, discourse fakes thought,
the concept, that comes from somewhere
the image-concept, that is all I remember

ps, zhen, can you add to this? (don’t punctuate your sentences)

spider bee slate splash of moonlight walk, work, walk

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:48:47 +0100

dear ZH,

see how easy it is?

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:35:28 +0300
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

> Hi, I am glad that you are glad and in good mood, my mind, before
> long weekend without any urgent tasks except the paper you will
> delay to write to the next weekend. So while I will teach four
> classes from early morning till 4 pm, you will put grapes into your
> yogurt and enjoy yourself like a real bursjhua (I do not know the
> spelling of this French word).
> where words spider, bee, slate, moonlight splashes, walker, etc are
> mixed in very nice and poetic (again) disorder, but the order of the
>
> words make such thin net that reminds me very fragile vases which
> weigh you conscience sometimes. I am really at a loss with these few
>
> and write in a very interesting language. Do you know that I am
> tired to complete dull. I have to sleep, and I hope to find good
> night words from you, if not, then to find them in the morning. I
> miss you (in the proper meaning of this strange word). Bye zh
>
>

it can snow all weekend if it wants to

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:11:30 +0100

dear zh,

it is snowing now, snow on top of more snow, and i am just out of bed
after falling asleep at 21:00 – eleven hours, so that gives you some
indication of the exhaustion of my nerves after nine classes. and you
joke cruelly, my dear, when you suggest that i won’t write my essay
this weekend. can i be brilliant on demand, or does the conference
deadline stifle me, suffocate me? this is what i will find out. today
i do not think i am going to work at the computer – something changes
in my relation to my writing voice when i write only, solely, into
this particular machine, first, there is the posture, direct sitting
as in an office (do you know that is one reason why i teach? i can sit
on a chair, sit on the table, walk around, etc., and it is my space,
my room, much better than when i have worked in an office, which i
have always hated) and this particular laptop, the motor is beginning
to make a lot of noise, too much noise, so that’s all i think about,
all that i hear. though i still very much like the keyboard itself
better than the macintosh keyboard, the feel of the keys, their
pressure. how nice coffee tastes on a morning when i don’t have to go
to work, and -well- you know what i must do. the writing itself is not
hard, it is trying to imagine the audience for which the paper will be
written, an audience i cannot assume will know much about charles
olson. it is strange how little i know about his work, though i have
read from the maximus poems for many years, and i was introduced to
his essays when i was 20 years old. so this poet has been in my sphere
of awareness of poetry almost as long as i have been reading poetry.
this is what should surface in any prose that i write, this weekend or
next, already there is noise overhead. i wish i could write nights.
maybe this is what i will try this weekend. writing late into the
night. i need an attack of nerves, when the nerves are tensed, not
exhausted, as what happens with teaching, though do you know, it is
not the preparation, nor the response of the students, which exhausts
me, which depletes me, it is my wish to please them, so they do not
regret coming to the classroom. isn’t this ridiculous? there are more
than one quite ridiculous sides to my character? i am sure you know
them all already, as you have a keen appreciation of the ridiculous.
Kataev, with a little Gogol on the side. could you please when you
have a moment tell me a story from Kataev?

i miss you (and your conversation)

k.

Third try

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:25:05 +0100

the words are not
the shape of your
thought, i think,

as your thoght-in-
thoughts are shape-
less and free while

the words are built
from letters, and
letters are taken

from a very straight
line called alphabet
that keeps the letters

strickt
that small children must
learn before they learn

how to read. how old were
you when you learnt your
alphabet if you ever learnt
one? two? three? how many

and who was he, that child
learning the English alphabet
by record, recording, there
was a record played for me

I remember the singing words
the song of the letters in
a small room, casement windows
the record player was a box

the record would play,
repeatedly play, and I would
perform, repeat, reciting

the letters aloud, singing
in a child’s voices the child’s
play with sounds and signs

now, i will write the essay
the words in the shape of a thought
the thought in the shape of knowing

something, anything, this thing or
that or another, knowing it to do or
mean or seem though it isn’t there,

in the words for it, the words
fake thought, discourse fakes thought,
the concept, that comes from somewhere
from reading, and repeating the reading

Re: spider bee slate splash of moonlight walk, work, walk

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:32:48 +0100

Vase

spider bee slate
splash of light
at night, walk

work, walk, lunar
we leave in the
goodness of night

where words spider
bee, slate, moonlight
splashes, walker, etc

are mixed in nice
and poetic (again)
disorder, the order

such thin net that
weigh you
sometimes
at a loss with these
few

can you open the attached html page

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 09:13:22 +0100

dear zh,

just a small distraction this morning, can you read it? i am still
trying to find a way to cross Russian and English across the internet.
i hope you do not have too much work to do today. I haven’t even
started yet, obviously.

with a light kiss in the blowing snow …

k.

there is no message from you and it is your 22:00

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:18:12 +0100

dear zh,

i have just now looked up from writing my essay and realize the time
has passed and the day is almost done, and noticed likewise just how
freezing cold the flat was, so i gave 15 minutes to the windows,
stuffing them with paper from the boxes my books from Cracow arrive
in, and already i can tell the difference in temperature (my feet are
not so cold). my typescript is a mass of fresh ink marks on several
pages, in addition to reading in this book and that, and i can’t tell
right now if i am trying to restore or destroy the two works of
literature that i’m writing about. i haven’t shaved yet today, and if
i am going to eat today, i have to shave before going to the
supermarket, the only problem is that the wind is blowing very, very
hard, and i am sure that it is quite cold, freezing, outside, so i may
go through the day today with only slices of bread and some beet
spread. i think i will take a hot shower anyway, and once again,
writing you, i remember that i didn’t take my vitamin yet today. this
is all the writing you get for now, until you send some Mandelstam
English my way, or something or other to distract me from this essay.

(kiss)

k.

this snow is really something though this morning is quiet the wind

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 07:08:38 +0100

dear zh,

to illustrate a curious case in point. just how difficult, if not
impossible, to reverse word order in english. how much easier to
reverse the letter order in a word in a typo. i have made four typos
already in this letter, in these few sentences, though of course i
correct them, as a matter of habit, fatal fastidiousness!

i went to bed last night again early, i don’t think i even made it to
22:00, and without wine. without supper for that matter, except
earlier for two slices of bread with olive oil (cypress olive oil).
for dessert i had grapes and an apple diced into yoghurt, simple
pleasure, one forgets how nice fruit and yoghurt complement each
other.

now i hear noises again upstairs. i think we keep the same morning
hours, the neighbor and i. strangely, i absolutely never hear a sound
from my next door neighbor, the couple who live on the other side of
the wall from which i am writing you. that is why i conclude that the
neighbor upstairs is an especially loud neighbor, and Polish flats are
notoriously paper-thin in their construction.

today i have to look forward from receiving from you my Ulica text of
Mandelstam’s that i sent you yesterday, please? there’s no rush, and i
am not asking for a direct translation! syntax, connections, are
especially unimportant. just a few words here and there, if you can,
dear. if you are too busy for a few lines of poetry, that is a problem
that must be solved. i admit, there seems to be very little that is at
all lyrical about the administration of englification, which, more and
more, resembles, by your account, an administrative fantasy
constructed on the basis of directives and policy protocols.

as for my own fantasies about being able to write critical prose, that
is all that i worked on yesterday, and it is always a good sign when i
lose consciousness of the passage of time, but the going is slow, and
i am not confident in my own ideas, which is to say, i am not
confident in my prejudices, and you have to be prejudiced, because
prejudice gives you an angle, and once again, i am trying to write in
such a way that offends no one, and states only the obvious. which is,
of course, thoroughly boring.

meanwhile, the prejudices swirl under the surface, and there is the
accompanying delight in reading about what i am not writing about,
very fragmentary poems in the Maximus book, through which, or by
which, or in front of which, i recognize my practice of writing from
my notebooks, keeping notebooks based on reading when i was reading in
such a way as i was looking for proof that the emotions i once felt
had been written about before, and after i was able to find that proof
(it took a number of years) then of course one gets tired of the form
and begins to suspect the validity of the emotions.

i don’t know if this is true: form exhausts emotion. or, form depletes
emotion. for poetry, you need this tensor, these nerve endings, of
feeling, though the words are inadequate–emotion, feeling, etc.–but
it is about nerves (not nervousness) and time, the experience of time
(which is why one should always be critical of boredom, the experience
of dead time and the longing for shock, or worse, the willingness to
be merely entertained.

now i am reading in a different way, and quite often, i don’t know
what i am looking for, reading wildly, or reading blindly, and i know
that a lot doesn’t go into my notebooks, and to be fair, i don’t like
copying things into my notebook the way that i used to. these are only
aspects of writing one way or another. i know also by now that i’m not
entirely happy with writing into the computer space, there is no voice
in it. it is all type.

there is a curious emotion i feel in front of texts in another
language. i am looking at something i cannot hear. and yet i can
recognize the shape, whether it is the fragmentary forms of Aygi or
the “chockablocks” of Mandelshtam. and there is always this reminder
of the small bits and pieces, z or na or nad, that hold these poems
together, as one would hold together in English, with English, with
the prepositions, the articles, etc. : elements of absolute emptiness.

this is enough about poetry for now, though i warn you, it is really
the only subject that i care to talk about. i am profoundly
uninterested in anything else, and even the political i understand as
a subcategory of the poetic, though i could never defend this in
prose. there is something rather alarming about the sentence, the very
form of the sentence and how it makes us say what we are able to say
in a sentence.

by the way, i was both amused and a little offended by your
“wisecrack” about leaning the alphabet a couple of emails ago. as i
remember, i was rather precocious in learning to read, and then i
thought, the difference is that when we were about the same ages,
childhood, childhood, you were learning TWO alphabets, and for that
early experience i am quite envious, there is no substitute for it,
and as i’ve said before, you have this (and much more i am sure) to be
grateful for towards your parents. i hope you can find the shirt for
your father today.

now it is to the books, and waiting for a message from you.

i should say good morning, though such are the terms of our distance
that you are already a few minutes into the afternoon.

k.

special request arriving

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 09:50:57 +0100

dear zh,

when you have a moment, today or tomorrow, can you look through my
“remains” in your flat and see if i left any papers there, are there
any writings there? or did i leave behind only a few odds and ends of
books? if there are any papers remaining, could you tell me what they
are?

(kisses)

k.

it is not stopping snowing

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 16:58:38 +0100

dear zh,

i don’t know if this
is your goodnight kiss
but if it is, you will
be amused to learn that
i have reached 1500 words
of my allotted 2500 words
and they are beginning to
sound appropriately pompous

poetry, as you know, or
as you might guess, or wish
(do you wish to know?) is
not about stating what it
knows, but finding out about
whether or not it can know
and for how long and in what
way, means, method, medium
(i don’t know!) all i know
is that writing this essay
i am pretending to know what
i don’t need to know or what
i could care less whether or
not i know (do you know?)

yes, it is time to get into
a good humor about crossing
borders, languages, cultures
(kiss)

k.

p.s. i don’t think i am going
to have any supper tonight
even though i am now wearing
my palangas sweater in an effort
to convince myself to go out
in the heavier and thickening
snow – last night i laughed
(only a little) when a scooter
(small motorcycle) pulled up
below to deliver pizza to some
one in this building (driving
a motor scooter in the snow
with warm pizza in the snow)
?

now it is a quiet and cold field of white outside the window

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 07:38:45 +0100

dear zh,

and my coffee is not as hot as it might be. i tarried too long
elsewhere. and is that all of the Mandelshtam i get from you? a rush
of a sidelong reference? pit, don’t you think he means he lives in a
pit (and it’s true, isn’t it, that the pit his corpse was thrown into
was a mass grave – and there are no remains?) and about the loyalty,
is that conveyed in one word, and if so, what are your associations?
some days i feel like Ulica Marysinska is my street, and will be, for
quite a while, a lot of people perished laboring like subhumans once
on and near this street, and in the city it belongs to, a quarter of a
million are documented as having been liquidated, which impresses me
sometimes as an omen of the future. one forgets this urgency, forfeits
this urgency, because it is not the mode of operation of the
educational institution, quite the opposite, everything is going to be
just fine. we can convince ourselves of that, it is a choice, just as
one chooses to be blind. i don’t think of Mandelshtam as blind. i am
very interested in his words, every word he ever wrote. i’m in one of
those “grafting” periods, like these lines from the book i’m writing
about, lines about the author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville: “The man
made a mess of things.” “He had to be wild or he was nothing in
particular.” “He had to go fast, like an American, or he was all
torpor.” “He was homeless in his land, his society, his self.” any one
of these i would gladly accept as an epithet, or curse. you can’t say
that i haven’t warned you, and i continue to warn you, the lower
depths i occupy, have always occupied, except for a few years, once.
apparently you have either a strong sense of adventure, or a good
sense of humor (i think both). why do i feel this way this morning? it
must be the aftereffect of too much essay writing. really, it is quite
ridiculous. you didn’t mention whether you liked the Charles Olson
poem. didn’t you once want to be a philologist? the good news is
that’s not necessary to read a poem, quite the opposite. if you like,
i can send you more, short poems, like postcards. you can’t expect
long and flowing letters from me every day. last night i read and
reread my essay looking for signs of intelligence and even if only
life in the sentences, and couldn’t find any, although the writing
itself is totally acceptable for the time and space where i am. this
is one of those days when i feel surrounded by the death of poetry and
the triumph of its murderer, philology. fortunately, walter benjamin
was its enemy, and i have a lot of his books to remind me that there
is a way out of the dilemma. also, there was another poetry contest
that appeared yesterday on the announcement list i subscribe to, and
the reader is a poet i knew when i was a student, so i will send a
small manuscript there by April 30, and that gives me something to
hope for, some small hope to hang on for. i never heard from the press
that we sent the manuscript to from Russia, which is typical of the
small presses. what’s funny is that the “prize” presses ask for
manuscripts 48-64 pages in length, which is hardly a poem, let alone a
book, and at this rate, it must mean that i have written about 20
books of poetry. i forget this, the standards of the world, which are
not my standards. if i had only one or two books published, then that
would make possible some form of contact with people, readers, i
understood as a note of caution (not directed at me, but i am
interpreting) when i wrote to the eminent writer about providing an
opinion of my work and he responded affirmatively, but not
enthusiastically, which bothered me, so i let the matter go, didn’t
follow through on it, that is, i didn’t use his name in the
application, just as i let the application go this week after spending
all day writing a letter of application, which i realized at the end
of this letter that i was writing to myself trying to remember who i
was and what i had written and published (signficantly, when i wrote
to the eminent writer, i didn’t ask for a letter of recommendation,
and if you recall the old joke, this is exactly what is needed for
obtaining a full-time teaching position, not only do you need to be
publicly active, you need to have written support, and the only form
of written support i have is good for a foreign teaching job, like
this one, or an adjunct composition (part time) job in the u.s., which
i know enough now to say that it would make me miserable, and i know
how to make others (you) miserable if i am so. when all is said and
done, i think i am humorously estranged here, but not miserable,
except when the snow is really blowing hard. so, i need to publish a
couple of books of poetry, write a few essays, speak at a couple of
conferences, and? and? the one item i am in terror of, meeting people,
and what is the custom in that land, seeking written support. i have
always hated this, and always avoided this. i have hated it since i
was a student. what does one have to do? what does one have to write?
in order to be able to have medical and retirement benefits? so, that
is why i say, one should never lose sight of the pit. don’t worry,
we’ll get you to Poland. you are accustomed by now to my moments of
panic? did i wake up this morning into a moment of panic? i went to
bed last night feeling rather bewildered and dull, not amused at my
‘critical prose’ which is all pose. i have to be careful about this.
anything of and about and near Mandelshtam is very helpful and useful
for me, please remember. i have probably alarmed you enough for one
morning. i’ll try not to continue this note in letters later today. at
7:30 in the morning on a Sunday morning there is sound of huge snow
plow outside, so why isn’t someone hammering and sawing in the
building? where are the construction workers? doesn’t anyone need new
cabinets? i think it is time for a second cup of coffee.

kisses

k.

p.s. please also write me if you are feeling any worse and i will try
to amuse you as much as i can. what kind of cold is it? last night i
went to the supermarket in the wet and falling snow and could feel
myself falling into such a condition, which i don’t like, the cold
that comes of being cold. no scratchy throat yet, though, and no
coughing, just a bit of sunday morning anxiety.

snowing now once more and not lightly

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:20:14 +0100

dear zh,

i guess this is your goodnight kiss. my nerves are a little strained,
and i am drinking coffee which will probably keep me up too late,
since i have to start in on tomorrow’s classes tomorrow morning (this
is a promise i made to myself, to give myself three full days off,
though if i counted thursday night, it would mean i should start
preparing on sunday evening), at least i don’t have to teach in the
early morning. my nerves are strained because of the writing, today,
the development of the essay, one thing seemed to follow another, and
now i have a mess of notes in my notebook which i will begin working
into the essay next weekend. i got started on this essay as a matter
of intuition, if you care for the story.

last year, early summer, in june, two of my colleagues attended a
conference in Maine (U.S.) that i had announced at a faculty meeting,
i think they went because a famous critic, Marjorie Perloff, was on
the bill as one of the speakers, and one of my colleagues had taken a
class with her once at a university in California, and she had even
read his PhD dissertation, and the other, as it turns out, in a newly
published book of his on the American poet, Robert Lowell (for whom
Brodsky wrote an elegy) references an early book of hers on Lowell and
other of her essays, but at this conference, as my chair, Agnieszka,
told me, when i came back from Tomsk in Sept., my colleague who
presented a paper on Lowell and Pound (one of the American great
modernists) he was challenged quite strongly, or, i might even say,
attacked, or humiliated. when Agnieszka told me the story, she said
she thought it was good for him, and knowing how women think just a
little, at least in the limited sense of her role, which means, it’s
good for you to take a licking, i thought it was more important than
that, and i had this intuition, at the time a vague memory of dates,
that both Lowell and the patron saint of American poetry, Charles
Olson, had started publishing with a couple of years of one another,
and i had an even vaguer memory of a poem called “The Quaker Graveyard
in Nantucket” (by Lowell) and i know very well Olson’s first book, an
essay on Herman Melville, “Call Me Ishmael” (i wrote a paper on
Olson’s treatment of the influence of Shakespeare on Melville when an
undergraduate), and proceeding on this intuition of proximity, and an
instinctive distaste for fashion (Lowell was once the major and Olson
the minor, now Olson is the major and Lowell the minor) – as a matter
of fact i despise these distinctions – so the essay for this
conference started out as a determination to link the two poets
together on the basis of these two works, and the problem is that i
don’t read Lowell anymore, and what a problem that turned out to be,
you may even remember at that bookstore in Tomsk there was a book of
poetry that i kept looking through with you standing next to me, that
was a book of poems by Lowell that i couldn’t bring myself to buy, and
i buy almost anything in English in Russia, even John Reed! anyway,
that book was called Notebook, and not a book that i ever read much
of, and i really didn’t like it when i looked at in Tomsk, you may
even recall my making fun of one or two lines in the book when we were
in the bookstore, well, one of the books in the Institute’s library
here is the same edition of Lowell i bought through the
book-of-the-month club when i was still in community college, just
beginning to read poetry, and returning to this book, i realized,
recognized, remembered, just how much and how closely i had read these
poems then, not understanding a single one of them, but very much
liking the strong line, and i have to recognize now, the influence of
this line on my poetry, even some of my most mature poetry.

that’s kind of where i started, and with a feeling of sinking dread,
gloom, because i don’t like recognizing this influence, it’s rather
embarrassing, and it also reminds me of just how old-fashioned i am by
sensibility, and the essay was, even up to yesterday, proceeding with
this dread in the margins, and i was making something half-smart
half-stupid and generally oppressed out of the subject, determined to
link Lowell and Olson positively or negatively, and i was leaning on
the negative, their use of literary myth, when, this morning, reading,
wouldn’t you say this sounded like a direct relation?

Lowell:

Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?

Olson:

I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance

in the stanza following Lowell’s question there is a “death-lance”
carving up a whale, which is the “boarding knife, a two-edge
instrument four feet long three inches wide, used in whaling to cut
the blubber from the body of a whale” (from Olson’s essay)

don’t you see, in the passage from Olson’s poem, he is correcting
Lowell’s “poetically” calling the boarding knife a “death-lance”
(which it literally was, in the passage from Olson’s essay, it was
used to kill another man on the ship) so he, Olson, is speaking
directly to Robert Lowell in the passage i’m quoting, and this
passage? guess what it is. the very first lines of Olson’s magnum
opus, his great work, the Maximus Poems.

this morning, i wasn’t prepared for the revelation of the depth of
this relation, and my instinct as a writer is that it is “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket” which SPURS the writing of “Call Me Ishmael,”
since so much writing is made necessary by the counter-thrust and
counter-push, hatred even, certainly antagonism, which is the relation
i am on to, and at this point, in some of the letters i have (not
many, Olson wrote a lot) and in the biographical materials, there is
almost no mention of Lowell. this in itself is telling, suggestive.
not that it’s like trying to hide an influence, the concept of the
relation i have in mind is something different. how creation,
generation, doesn’t happen in a void, that it requires disagreement,
and worse, FALSE FORMS. even my Polish colleague who wrote the book on
Lowell writes about this “Quaker Graveyard” as a formal failure. but
it’s the misrecognition of the FALSE FORM as the TRUE (you wouldn’t
believe how famous the “Quaker Graveyard” poem was once, and how many
professors wrote about it) which spurs, drives, ignites, motivates,
the Tiger’s Leap of the Imagination.

i don’t know how much of this i will be able to get into my paper over
the next couple of weekends, but my theorization, the last thing i was
working on when you called, sounds like this:

In the way of method, I would say that I am committed to the potential
of ‘singular temporalities’ in the experience of poetry and poetics.
This is a temporalization achieved by reconstructing singular moments
or events in literary history. This temporalization (the opposite of
the eternal time of the work of art) does not depend on the facticity
of the document, though neither does it ignore the document nor the
socio-political outside of poetry and poetics and the unstable time in
which they exist, and this time is always the present time. We also
imagine and project relations and associations, in the effort to
construct temporary standstills in which are constellated unexpected
correspondences.

aren’t you glad that i’m not giving this paper in Tomsk? you’d have to
go hide somewhere. come to think of it, where’s my Mandelshtam?

(kisses)

k.

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 15:43:13 +0300
“zhenya lukyanova” <zhen_l@rambler.ru> wrote:

> hi again. it is 18-12 and i have just finished my moonlight cooking
> (i am not sure that you have the same meaning of word cook in your
> show that we have this, like these programs i have just finished).
> it is getting dark, and i think the best thing is to go home.
> tomorrow i have my first class, then a class in the evening and in
> the daytime i have two meetings at the same time. one meeting (which
> i will miss [in other meaning of this very used word]) is of our
> chair where we have integration into the world educational space. do
> you know that now it to develop joint master degree programs. there
> are special items in the reports. the other meeting (which is
> obligatory to me) is in build. 7 where i will pretend englification
> development. kevin, please, take me away from this mad house. i am
> afraid that the rest of my life i will develop englification
> everywhere. actually it is not very bbad, as i will always find a
> place in a mad house, ie food and shelter.
> well, instead of writing you, i called you. so good bye for now. i
> am waiting for a letter from you soon, as soon as possible. and
> speaking about essay you are writing and counting th words, did you
> ever count the words in your letters you write? i think you are
> perfect letter-writer, as well as essay writer and essay-looser.
> what do you think? zh
>
>

the sun is shining already on thick layers of snow

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 07:13:23 +0100

dear zh,

it must be nearing the time of the clock change? i thought i had
overslept and very likely i have, since, if i had risen at 5:30, when
my alarm went off, i would have half an hour to write you, then five
hours to prepare for my three hours of classes today, as it stands, i
don’t think i’ll have more than four hours, though usually it takes me
less than two hours to prepare, but i always am a poor judge of time
in this business.

my next door neighbor wasted more than an hour of my time last night,
though i was able to confirm from him several holidays that are fast
approaching, which according to my calculations, means next thursday
(at least half that day, which means 3 classes) and the following
monday definitely, the 24th and the 28th, off, for Easter and Good
Friday (huge holidays here) then May 2nd and 3rd (the 3rd is a
Tuesday, unfortunately) and finally Thursday, May 26. this is good
news, something to look forward to, and helps with my mood.

i didn’t realize that i had a stretch of days off when the world will
come full stop during the Easter break and before the conference, and
i practically finished my essay yesterday, bringing it a few words
over the required 2500. this is a good sign: finishing before the
deadline. maybe these things, essays, are easier to write than i
thought. i have to revise my abstract for the media conference, which
is on June 2-3, so that means I will probably be able to leave for
Tomsk by June 10 or June 17 (though last year i had to participate in
finals, i think we should try for a June, July, August invitation,
with plans to come to Poland together the first week of August, at
which time, as i mentioned, i will do with you (we will do together)
the residency process, which takes 4-6 weeks here. the alternative, if
travel to russia is too expensive, would be for you to come to Poland
in July, with a three-month visa: july, august, september, which means
i had better start finding out about the invitation i need to send
you, which will probably result in a visit by me to the Polish embassy
in Warsaw.

that is a lot to think about. let’s not try to worry about it. i
really would like to visit with your parents this summer, i think they
would appreciate this. i am sure they worry just a little about what
is going to happen. you never talk about this. one good thing about
your coming to Poland in July is that the summer is lovely here, and
we could go to Warsaw often, and take long walks here (no
lime-disease) and in general enjoy one another’s company, fixing up
the flat, as i’ve talked about it before, and having nice meals from
fresh local fruit and vegetables. this would give you a good first
impression of Poland, whereas, if you coming with me in August, we
will have only about 6 weeks before the crush is on again, and i
become an English-teaching automaton. what are your thoughts about
these alternatives?

kisses

k.

ready to hit the ski slopes

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 10:05:44 +0100

hi dear,

i thought you’d be amused to know that it’s 10:00 a.m. in my world and
my two classes are prepared, which means that it took me
two-and-a-half hours to mark papers and put together two lesson plans
to keep students occupied. this gives me a free hour to warm up some
turkey soup i made yesterday with potatoes and leeks, then i will take
a long hot shower and shave and go the dunce college probably to find
out that there are no classes today, though the sun is shining and i
hear cars passing by, so my guess is that there will be classes. if
there are, i think i’ll try to remember to pick up my last two month’s
salary, which doesn’t amount to much, but provides a reminder why i
bother with this school at all. i hope you are having a nice day, and
think of me once in a while between englification protocols.

(kisses)

k.

goodnight kiss

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 19:17:54 +0100

dear zhen,

if this arrives after you have fallen asleep, please forgive, i’m
working on this essay and lost track of the time. i fell in the snow
today, the melting ice. wet, cold, i came home, ate quickly, and
started working, i thought it was 18:00, and it’s an hour and a half
later, and i am afraid you have been waiting for word from me, when
all my words were being written somewhere else.

will you accept a contrite kiss goodnight?

k.

starting late this morning

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 08:36:10 +0100

dear zh,

except for a few last single words, phrases, here and there, i
finished my essay last night, late, the essay 500 words over the
conference limit, though there are quotations that i can omit in the
presentation, the symmetry is somewhat interesting to me, the “Ark”
essay last summer, about 3500 words, this one 3000 words, and they
share, as separate as their subjects are, some connections, what i am
hoping, though it is too early to tell, is that there is an organicism
here, under the surface of the pretext of this or that presentation,
that i am actually trying to think about something, though that point
at which thought dissolves into discourse disturbs me, for the essay
is a discursive event, or object, i can see that i have to think now
about the difference between those two, event and object. i am also
tired in the “finished with that” sense, and can’t concentrate on
teaching, and i have to go to the institute in the early afternoon,
for a faculty meeting and meetings with two students, and i won’t get
home until after you’ve gone to bed, and since i didn’t go to bed
myself until late, i will be too tired in the evening to do much about
tomorrow’s classes, let alone thursdays. it reminds me of what a
strict schedule i keep, and any departure from it gets me into
trouble. this is all that i can write this morning, and the next time
i write you, your day will be over and you will be sleeping. this is a
very strange space, between the movement of thought and language, and
then we look around at the room where we live, and have to be recalled
to who and where we are. that’s anyway how i feel after i finish
writing something, even if it is only an essay.

(kisses)

k.

are you already asleep

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:29:25 +0100

dear zh,

i’m home as i warned you, at 19:30, but in a little better mood than
this morning, and i only hope that you get this tonight. i think i
have enough material for classes tomorrow. i don’t feel like doing
anything tonight. i think i will go to sleep early, maybe wake up
early, and then i have two hours to prepare for my afternoon classes.
i didn’t fall in the snow today, that’s one accomplishment. i like the
idea of you eating cakes. they are a good get-away from the
englification process. i really miss you tonight, earlier, i had an
hour, so i went to the restaurant, and had tortellini and two glasses
of wine. it helped me get through the meetings. i did nothing today
but meet, meet, meet. i believe you know the feeling. i’m sorry for
such a short letter, i’ll write a long one in the morning.

hugs and kisses

k.

waking up into the blue of the morning light

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:38:52 +0100

dear zh,

already the day was arriving, in increments, accumulations of layers
of light, when the alarm went off, at 5:30, though i remained once
again for about half an hour unmoving, even with my eyes closed,
though i could not help but be aware of the light, the very fact that
there was light, and what for the first time appeared to me as heavy
or dense light, that is one way of seeing winter light, which has so
few variations, contrasts, tones. the coffee tastes good this morning.
in last night’s letter you wrote, “i am tasty.” yes, you are, more
than coffee, but you are not here, so i must have coffee. this morning
i am going to talk about the difference between history and myth to
dullards. maybe it is the fact that it is an early morning class. why
should i care? should i? then to the dunce college, and then, this
afternoon, instead of coming home, i should go to the institute to
prepare clips from a couple of videos, but i think i will probably be
too lazy, and come home instead. this week i think i might buy a vcr,
which i really need for teaching, but i’m not fond of the idea of
spending 100 dollars for something i have no use for. that means i
will go and look at the prices this weekend, and decide not to buy
one. the video library at the institue is very convenient, as they
close at 15:30, but unoccupied classrooms generally aren’t available
until after 16:00. these problems can’t be very interesting to you,
and yet, part of the bizarre nature of daily life together is that
such problems are exactly what two people talk about, and i wonder
sometimes if it isn’t what writing should write about. the momentous –
the one incident of moment – that has happened to me yet this morning
is the burning out of the lightbulb in the beige room, which, when i
did wake up, i read for half and hour, looking for some passages that
i need to quote from for this morning’s class, and when i went to turn
on the reading lamp, the bulb burnt out, with a pop, and that always
unnerves me, just a little, and i had to read for half an hour under
an overhead light, which i don’t like for reading, the light too far
away, so i read about 10 pages from a book, underling 10 passages that
i would quote from in class this morning, and then, falling, turning
the light off, since i had begun reading in the dark (now i remember,
i woke up at 4:00 a.m., having gone to bed at 20:00 last night) and
when i turned off the light before the 5:30 alarm had gone off, i saw
the light that i began this letter writing about, which, in a circular
sense, brings me back to the present topic, how in day-to-day or
day-within-day life the smallest details are the substance, the
material from which conversation between two people is made, i hope
you don’t mind. impossible to be accountable for one’s reading, even
to oneself (as if there were, in reading, and writing, “one” self). so
there’s always only a version, an interpretation made in passing, as
momentary as the change in the density of light on a winter morning.

my first thoughts this morning, at least the ones that i am aware of,
were of how much i would like with you to go walking, only not here,
and definitely not this morning, in the wet melting snow, but to go
away for a week at a time, the span of time coming soon, the easter
weekend, to go to the mountains, to walk for several days, there, in
mountains, to practice this kind of getting away, from everything, and
to be able to live in such a way, where one can simply get in a car
(or even take train or bus) and walk, though walk is hardly the word
for it, hike, march, i don’t know, i am sure there are many words for
such walking in Russian.

can you think of one or two to tell me of?

kisses

k.

rather tasty though not as tasty as you

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:34:31 +0100

dear zh,

home at last at 18:30 though i cheated, i stopped by the chinese
restaurant after picking up your package at the poczta, and i ordered
wolowina po chinsku (vowovina po xinsku), beef with chinese
vegetables, very tasty, and now i feel in rather positive mood, and i
don’t believe i have too much preparing to do for tomorrow, only to
read several short essays, write two essay topics as assignment, and
read a play which i assigned to my conversation class, and then what
else, there must be something else. i went to the institute for an
hour and a half after the dunce college to queue two passages from
videos to show to my two american culture classes tomorrow, an hour
and a half spent for 30 minutes of viewing in class. i had to find the
passages, which meant forwarding and rewinding through several tapes.
from you package, and i am following your instructions, i have not
opened it, but i can guess that you have a very good memory for my
exclamations of interest when in bookstores. i think we are going to
be great friends. there are so many bookstores and mountains i want to
visit with you. let’s go into this night with that nice thought. i
miss you

with kisses

k.

are you feeling any better

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 06:30:27 +0100

dear zh,

i am curious: what are you afraid of that makes you teach when you are
sick. i am a great one to talk, as i never miss classes either (it
simply creates more headaches) but you are in a place where you have
taught many years, you know the ropes, as they say, and you know
others that can substitute for you – so why punish yourself by making
yourself speak all day when your throat hurts and you are losing your
voice?

do you have a holiday nearing as i do? anytime in april? i assume it
is still cold in tomsk. here, everything is melting and running and
ugly and treacherous to walk through. today i am taking a cabbage to
school for my conversation class. what i won’t do for variety and a
laugh.

last night at the supermarket i bought a new brand of coffee, and i am
sick of my spring sweater (the one i bought here). today i will wear
no sweater at all, only the shirt that i bought in cypress. i am
preparing myself for spring. as i have only one sweater for warm
weather, and one pair of trousers, i get tired of my clothes once in a
while, and yet it is the last thing that i care to spend money on. i
did not buy the vcr, not yet.

this is a “check-in” letter without thought, i need to go to the
institute early this morning to make sure i know how to operate the
video equipment in an unfamiliar room. the sun is starting to come
out. i think it will be a warm and sunny day. i’ll be home no later
than 17:00 and i will write to you then. i will also be looking
forward to a letter from you.

your package remains unopened.

kiss.es

k.

thursday is over

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 16:49:35 +0100

dear zh,

no letters from you as yet, today. i wonder if you are feeling well,
worried that you are not feeling well, or if you are very busy, which
is not good for you, if you are not feeling well. maybe i did not
write you enough this morning. it was off to the institute, though i
was successful with the technology (full screen effect in a special
viewing room, not just a vcr monitor). still, it is like showing
images from Mars. trying to explain that it is not Mars, but recent
history (American history) is quite a task, and my nerves are
exhuasted from it. i am going to go into abeyance this evening,
vegetable state. that does not mean that i do not hope to hear from
you, nor that i will not write you again, this evening, especially if
you write me a few words. what special herb potion is that that
restores a lost voice?

kisses

k.

Johannes Bobrowski 1917-1965

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:36:10 +0100

THE VOLGA TOWNS

The stretch of wall.
Towers. The slope of the bank. Once
the wooden bridge broke. Tartar fires moved
through the plains. Night came talking,
a wandering friar with a straggly
beard. The mornings
leapt up, the cisterns
stood full of blood.

Walk about on the stone.
Here in the glassy noon
Minin raised his hand
to shade his eyes. Then shouts
flew up, towards the water, Stenka’s
arrival – the Siberians walk
on the bank, up to their waists
in the undergrowth, their
forests follow them.

There
I heard
a human mouth calling:
Come into your house
through the bricked-up door,
fling open the windows
against the sea of light.

p.s. just looking in this book of translations into English from
German of a poet i have never read before. he was a german prisoner of
war in russia. this poem seemed rather lovely, and i thought you might
enjoy it.

Restlessness

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 18:21:07 +0100

dear zh,

i am sitting around here in the dark getting dark and i know this
mood, it is the aftermath of the intensity of the essay, the
concentration, you notice i haven’t sent you the essay yet, the
sentences more supple than the tomsk essay, all the same, i can feel
this strength of the essay growing in me, not the academic essay, but
the essay, itself, the sentence, and interpretation, bold leaps into
literature, you don’t know how much i wish to be bold, and i live the
meekest of lives, begging my students almost to listen to me, and like
me. sometimes it is humiliating. or it is the tension. from such
meekness, then i go into writing with the opposite force. now only i
feel the subsiding, like the tide subsiding, low tide, not high tide,
high tide was last weekend, when i lost track of the hours, god to
work like this every day, what i would not be capable of, and it makes
me happy to think of you thinking of me this way, that it would not
make you happy for me to write strongly, but more important, it would
satisfy you. don’t ask me what i mean by such being satisfied, though
i think you are suspicious of laziness. there is no substitute,
though, for the mental concentration. it is not always even as though
writing with the left hand, though that is what i am convinced that
the period of my life i am in now, is the one of the writing with my
left hand. maybe it is preparing for a ferocious old age, even
blindness, but returning to poetry and prophecy in old age, after the
intellectual period, which is the one i feel that i am entering now.
everything i have ever written appears to me very youthful. i don’t
even know what that word means to me any more. my students resemble
little children. please excuse the rambling thoughts. tonight would be
a good night for the restaurant, a shared bottle of wine, then home to
one or two glasses of good cognac, so you could listen to me talk
until 3:00 a.m.

i miss you

k.

epiphany

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 18:58:54 +0100

“Most of the awful book, and I would not, but I insist
on this book to be.”

yes, love.

k.

still despairing somewhat

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 06:52:22 +0100

dear zh,

i went to bed early last night, unlike you i am able to sleep, and
woke up at about 6:00, lay in bed for half an hour, and now i am up
and drinking coffee and writing you, which is better than lying in bed
with my thoughts, which are not concrete, only a broad feeling of
despair, again, it is this aftermath of having just a small measure of
energy, of having just had a small measure of energy, and then the
energy vanishes, or it does not vanish so much as it is depleted, by
the round of classes this week, and i taught a lot this week, the
materials i presented, for my seminar wednesday, Myth and History as
parallel fields of reference, two dramatic scripts for my conversation
class, an intense hour and a half presentation on parenthetical
documentation and i realize just how stupid, abysmally stupid, is the
system here, since they gave two groups, one group is majoring in
literature and culture, and the other linguistics and teaching
methodology, and there are two separate documentation models for both
groups (MLA and APA), just bloody stupid as the English say, and then
i taught two classes screening passages from Eyes on the Prize and i
could detect this undercurrent, among some, of racism from the
students (Poles in general are said to be quite racist, by my Polish
colleagues, it comes from the homogeneity of the society, and the
general reactionary influence of Catholicism), and with these comments
i can feel mysef chafing, that i am in a restricted, or constricted,
situation, context, and it is stifling me, but then again that is more
or less the story of my life, wherever i am, i feel stifled,
prevented, held back or kept back, from thinking and expressing my
thought, so that it doesn’t develop, and my creative energies, don’t
develop as they might, and are forced into these energy-depleting
sidepaths of focus. end of complaint.

one last example of Polish (societal) stupidity: last night outside my
block building the street from the rain and the melting snow flooded
to a depth of about three feet, and car after car after car started to
try to go through it, then stopped, and several times cars became
stuck, the motor quit, and the owners had to push the car out of the
water. no police came to cordon off the street. it is like when the
buses break down and no other bus is radioed to come to pick up the
passengers. at such moments this other country and culture is
completely opaque to me. i can’t understand the structured negligence.
end of complaint.

it is cathartic, though, to wake up and write you this way. hopefully
this negative mood will soon pass.

i miss you.

k.

the rain has melted away all the snow

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 13:58:05 +0100

dear zh,

i am back from going to the british council library and the american
corner library (still needing to return the two books i took with me
to cypress) and then i went to the computer center to authorize moving
my email account to a new server, on the way back i got caught in a
big downpour of rain, though fortunately i had my umbrella. still, it
was cold, and uncomfortable, standing in the pouring rain under my
umbrella for 15 minutes, so when i got off the tram i bought a big
chicken which is currently roasting in the oven. i’m going to add rice
to it in a little while to make roast chicken and rice, a strange
variation on chicken & rice. i also have a cabbage to cook. i am
hoping this will improve my mood. the conference program for the April
conference came and it looks like a big bore, though there are a
couple of people from universities in ireland, so maybe they will
offer me a job (joke). but, in truth, that is where the jobs are,
through conferences, meeting (and impressing) people, though most of
my life i have been more successful insulting people. i think this
will be a dramatic essay to read though. i am going to try recording
it in my computer, and practicing the delivering, so i can make a
dramatic presentation. some of the sentences i really like. now,
however, i have to get a revised abstract for a conference the first
week of june, also in lodz, since the original abstract was based on a
book (mandelstam’s) which hasn’t arrived yet from the u.s. i am going
to propose an abstract on vertov and benjamin, maybe, all this morning
i was racking my brains for an “in” to the subject, image,
representation, time, history – all too big. i need a problem, so now
i am reading around, trying to find the problem. the big problem is
the dematerialization of the referent, so it is not entirely accurate
to call poems objects any more, but i don’t know how to develop this,
and it really doesn’t excite me. i need some other kind of problem. i
need something that’s missing from somewhere. but i don’t know how to
find this, and i need to find it pretty quickly, by this weekend and
next. then, after the conference the first week of april, i will have
about two months to write the other essay if the abstract is accepted.
wish me luck. is this a good enough letter for you?

i miss you

k.

something else for my frazzled nerves

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:13:51 +0100

dear zh,

i was just pouring in a cup of hot water into the chicken and to add
the rice and a drop of the hot water fell on the oven glass and
shattered it (there are two layers of glass to the oven, the outside
pane is still okay) still, i assume that the oven is now rendered
useless, and i will either have to replace the glass, the oven door,
or the oven itself. my chicken is now cooking on top of the stove in
the roasting pan which i just bought and which now i won’t be able to
use for awhile. no more roasted potatoes, either. i am a bit piqued.
this is not a propitious day.

kisses

k.

early evening kiss goodnight

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 15:52:49 +0100

dear zh,

finally i am emerging from my funk (mood) and without much success for
what i was trying to fix, though i spend almost an entire day trying
to fix it (typical). the result is that i have several email clients
that work with the new server the university provides, but my favorite
one, the one that i send you messages via the hypobololemaioi.server
(why the address is @hypobololemaioi.com) doesn’t work, though it is
supposed to support the kind of server the university has changed to.
end of story. as usual, i thought (i tend to think) while doing
routine and mundane operational tasks, and i think the abstract i need
to write will be about efforts in media or conflict in media (film,
language, staying with my announced topic area of verbal and visual
culture) to show production processes in the representation, though i
don’t even really believe in the term, representation, any more. i’d
like to write about dziga vertov in this respect, and compare him to
the poet i just wrote about, when he writing about kinetics and energy
discharge etc. it sounds a lot like some of vertov’s writings. the
“textbook” which i thought would provide me with a direction for the
“media” essay begins with vertov, so i can use that as an up-to-date
reference, in addition to an essay, very positive, on vertov by a
polish scholar in a small conference publication i bought several
months ago from cracow: yes, that is the abstract i will revise,
perhaps tomorrow: charles olson and dziga vertov: what is the
difference between “projective” and “projector” (kinetic and kinok).
funny thing about this poet, olson. as i mentioned, i have read this
poet since i was 20 years old, he was very popular with a teacher i
had at new college (where i took my b.a.) in florida, and then also a
reference point when i went to graduate school at iowa (one of my
professors had written a book about him) and in my own poems i have
one short poem dedicated to him, but it is only really know that the
poems really begin to echo in my head, that i really begin to sense
the shape of the mind in the work, the same kind of sensation i get
when i read mandelstam’s critical prose in english translation. this
process really hasn’t happened to me from a lot of source, as i am
rather narrow-minded this way, or strict. certainly i am not eclectic.
so i think i have the beginning of the abstract that i seemed so
depressed about when you called. i am feeling a little better right
now. i hope you are too.

kisses

k.

(thank you again for calling, you really do introduce a note of levity
in a dark day, maybe because i feel real worry from you, and so many
of my moods and sullenness and non-communicativeness is due to purely
personal piques and boredom and not wanting to do this or not wanting
to do that – my character is as bad as yours – remember!)

sending this in my sleep

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 03:37:16 +0100

dear zh,

regardez (on guard?)

there in this way of the way to the time of the writing into the way of
the time of the way to the writing is this the writing it’s better than
any other and i have stayed up too late tonight trying to fix something
and nothing and everything and this is not a letter this is writing to
myself when i should be sleeping and i should be, i should be sleeping
now, tomorrow will be the compensation for staying up to unusual hours
and i have no one to blame but – byt – that typo that appeared in a
letter the two or three days previous, and i can hardly keep my eyes
open though there is at least the compensation that i didn’t stay up all
night watching a terrible movie

p.s.
i’ll write again when i wake up

bright and beautiful the first day of spring appears

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:55:51 +0100

dear zh,

an unexpected morning, clear blue skies and sunlight, i had almost
forgotten what it looked like. this after four and a half hours of
sleep. how can anybody (anybody’s body) sleep in sunlight? so i am
drinking a cup of coffee that might be warmer, i don’t know why. as it
turned out, i read your letter very late last night, so i woke up with
your voice in my ear, almost, wanting to try to answer some of your
questions, and of course i don’t know anything more or less than i’ve
known before. (maybe i put too much cream in the coffee, that happens
sometimes).

july would be ideal for you to come here. i don’t “need” to go to russia
this summer, i think we will find ourselves going to russia quite often
in the future. i don’t think it would be a bad idea to simply plan on
your coming here in the first or second week of july. the advantage is
that we can begin the residency process, together, early, in case there
are any difficulties. about work, your working, i mean, no one has said
anything to me yet, nor have i been able to ask directly, though i talk
about you all the time and it is obvious that you will soon be here (if
this sounds lapidary, then, so it is). part of my ‘ambition to be
brilliant’ (participating in conferences, etc.) is to advertise what an
indispensable faculty member i am, but i am just as capable of making
people feel threatened, even when i go to great lengths not to insult
anyone.

i should be less abstract. among Poles, as in Russia, everything is done
here (especially jobs) through layers of obligations, and though two of
my higher-ranking colleagues have volunteered to try to help you, it is
my feeling that they will try to do this in a way that will not expose
them to a “debt” – so i think it would be best not to put them in the
position that they must “deliver” a job, or an invitation. this is very
different from the world i come from, where social relations are
contractual, and i want to preserve the possibility of your teaching
here eventually, perhaps as early as the spring semester next year, if
not before.

more than i can guess, so many students study Russian here. i noticed at
the dunce college that all the Russian teachers were Polish graduate
students, Magisters (working on their MA’s). there are also many private
schools, language schools, and i don’t think that, once you are here,
even if you arrive with a visitor’s visa, after the three-month period,
you will probably be able to work. that sound’s logical, though i am
sure for you, far from likely, and you must be very worried about the
possibility of ‘economic dependency.’

this is a lot to write about after such a day as yesterday. i am one to
worry about an essay and whether i am interested in writing it or not.
when it comes to mine (or yours) work fate (for that is what it is –
work fate) i cannot say that i worry too much. we won’t suffer next year
even if you don’t work, i make at least that much money, and you can’t
say that you don’t need a year off – i have done this before, sometimes
even at great personal hardship, and that time – those periods when i
have not submitted to the work fate – have always been the best periods
in my life. why can’t we think about it this way, instead of the other
way, which is to worry darkly about it.

i do not intend to suggest that i am not aware that you are making a
great change in your life, and as you have always supported yourself,
and supported (mutually) your mother and father as well, it must seem
rather thoughtless of me to say, don’t worry. in the case of emergency,
there is always the u.s., so that is why i think one year here is worth
the risk. these words are trying to answer your questions yesterday.
probably they are not very successful. but shouldn’t it be reassuring,
the more intangible factors, such as my participation in a Polish
conference in two weeks, writing an essay for another, an abstract
submitted to a prestigous conference in the u.s. (i haven’t heard from
them yet). i guess this kind of work is my way of trying to reassure you
that i am not entirely passive (though passivity is the best possible
creative state – unfortunately, such passivity also introduces a great
deal of chaos in one’s life). so i am trying to be the opposite of
passive, without being entirely active.

maybe that is the cause(s) behind yesterday’s mania, spending all day
trying to get just a few computer programs to work a little better. on
the one hand, i did not succeed, but every day given over entirely to
the programs in the laptop make me feel more comfortable when i am
working there, and even though i use my notebook, the ink and paper one,
i also write more than i ever have into the laptop, into the machine,
and i cannot ignore it’s daily importance in my mental life, nor the
work that i can and cannot accomplish. it is important to feel
comfortable in front of the screen, and this is impossible when programs
do not work. four and a half hours after barely being able to connect a
sentence, i am assembling them again, and i hope one or two of my
sentences are enjoyed by you this morning.

kisses.

k.

p.s.

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 09:03:51 +0100

dear zh,

as a follow-up to my follow-up (so they say, you “follow-up” when you
answer someone’s question, i think after sending you the first letter,
written upon first waking, my words are hopelessly abstract, and very
likely will inspire you to worry even more. it is true that some days i
feel very much on the edge of chaos (one such day was yesterday, and
maybe that is what you heard in my voice). on such days, it is a very
good antidote to sit in front of the machine and try to make it work
better. i am under no terrible deadline. i have thursday, friday,
saturday and sunday and monday (five days at the end of the week) to
write 200 words. i have absolutely nothing to complain about, except my
personal belief in my martyrdom to poetry, which i promise you that you
will soon become very irritated by. whenever i feel close to chaos, i
think of mandelstam, and that brings me back to earth somewhat. i am
also quite capable of squandering entire days, wasting vast stretches of
time, when i am between projects. thank you for your words about your
belief in my writing. it is unnecessary to qualify it with “but i do not
understand it.” neither do i understand the language you speak and
which, to a large extent, you are. so we have more in common here than
we might think. how is this by way of a “p.s.”?

(with one more kiss)

k.

fragment of a line

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:36:32 +0100

dear zh,

i am going to venture out into daylight while there is still some
left. lying on my desk next to me was the last book i was reading
yesterday morning before entering the “blue” hours, and on the page it
was resting face down on, i read:

” … now he only waited to be liquidated with, somewhere inside him,
the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time,” and directly following
this quotation from a film made many years ago, which is really about
“throwness,” the commentary reads:

“His present was contingent and it was the memory of the past that
haunted him.” Rather unremarkable, as far as commentary goes, which is
never very far, and i think i can recognize now, as far as one is ever
able to recognize, the genesis of a “funk,” in that the very book i am
reading for direction, to give me direction, for an abstract i badly
need to write, fails me at exactly that threshold when i need it most,
this particular book being one that i have been relying on heavily
lately, partly because it is written by a young finnish intellectual,
so there is this cultural dissonance, and the english is awkward, in a
useful way, suggestive way, to me, but i came up empty on this
chapter, the section on film, which i have been putting off reading
until a couple of days ago, much to my disappointment, as i am
disappointed with the book on new media, only because it is a
textbook, and not provocative, and i don’t quite realize, yet, what
vertov is doing there, except as a kind of authenticity factor, maybe.
like i said yesterday, my mind feels like mud lately, these last few
days, so i think i am going to go outside and see if i can find any
mud for these shoes that are definitely destroyed, i don’t think they
have more than another week or two left, and definitely, before the
conference, i will buy a new pair. i know that you don’t believe me,
but the determination should give you something to laugh at,

at least until i write you again after i return home. i hope you are
having a nice late afternoon and early evening.

kisses.

k.

My Great Sunday Adventure

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:28:26 +0100

dear zh,

my great sunday adventure is over. i went to the grocery store. i made
this change in plans once i was outside and saw that i could see my
breath, and my hands (without gloves) and my hair (still wet from the
shower) began to freeze. by the time i made it to the corner (about 10
minutes walk) there were light snowflakes in the air. so i went to the
supermarket, and bought some peanuts, which i never buy. i’m not sure
that i’ll be able to adjust to this departure from predictability. i am
eating some of the peanuts right now (they are salted). i noticed
pistachios (of our tomsk days) are quite expensive here. i just dropped
a peanut on the floor (one of the dangers of eating peanuts). have you
noticed? of course, because it is sunday, i also bought a beef tongue,
which is in the pot beginning to boil right now. i also bought a big
cannister of shaving cream, a new toothbrush, and hair gel – so it was a
big haul. i spent almost 100 zlotys. i am also eating some slices of
incredibly fresh bread (it’s always a good sign when the baker is
returning to the kitchen with a rack of empty bread trays. i haven’t
brought myself to the point of the man in cypress we saw pressing with
his bare hands all the breakfast buns to see which one was fresh, and
they do provide plastic gloves to pick up the bread, but there is still
this lingering european reluctance to put the bread in plastic. i think
i know why. i didn’t know what fresh bread was until i left the u.s.
someday we will have to have a lunch of velveeta cheesespread, bologna
and wonder bread, and you will know the secret of America. i should
talk. i am eating salt peanuts and fresh bread.

about Polish embassy requirements, try to remember that i am a temporary
and quite legal work resident, so i believe an invitation from me should
be enough. i think it will be pretty much the same process as when you
arrange for the invitation for me to Russia. i just have to find out
(soon) which offices to go to. i have the obvious handicap of not
knowing any Polish, so this inhibits me somewhat. but after Easter i
will try to start trying to try to find out more. how’s that for
determination? i am glad that you wanted to sleep all day today, since
it was really too cold to go for a very long walk. i don’t think the
dogs would agree with me though. they were everywhere.

(kisses)

k.

my early evening is rapidly arriving

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:33:04 +0100

dear zh,

i am about ready to listen to either “sophisticated lady” or “i can’t
get started” by charles mingus, and writing you from the linux side of
my box, so, even though i wasn’t successful in fully adapting the
email client designed by a japanese programmer which i like very much
for the feature of the external editor, and in linux the external
editor i use is called “nedit” which is very, very nice, my idea of
what a page looks like in my mind, and the print is very clear, exact,
precise, but i can’t use this email client anymore apparently at least
until i upgrade to gtk+2.4 (i use a paltry gtk+2.2) so i will have to
send my emails to the discussion list in the u.s. in which i
participate from another email client. last night i downloaded the
same email program that this message (and all my messages to you) are
written in, but, alas, it is for windows, and as i told you in tomsk,
and this is something that would sound very strange to all those
russian boys making cheap copies of everything digital on the planet,
the very russian boys you expressed such fondness for, admiring their
ingenuity, (driven by necessity), anyway, to send an email from a
windows program among the technological elite is much the same as
professing to prefer Mark Twain to Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Blok to
Mandelstam, or Bloch to Benjamin, for that matter, though the analogy
is becoming attenuated. you will notice that i try to include useful
words for your burgeoning vocabulary. you can’t know what i mean, but
really, this nedit application (a text editor, of all the lowly
things!) is the best page ever for writing in, and i have never found
a substitute in windows programming. that is the upshot of my efforts
over the past few days, and last night, as i was saying, i downloaded
the same email client for windows, and the “openssl” installed in a
matter of seconds, so obviously there are mysteries i don’t understand
about this other side of my box. i was able to figure out that when i
was compiling the program, the makefiles were pointing the
configuration to this dreadful invention called pkgconfig
(package-configuration) which is so screwed up that i never use it,
and use the command line instead, to install packages, but that
screwed up program was the source of information my configuration file
was point to (directing the installing to) so no matter what i did, i
couldn’t get it pointing to my actual openssl program. what is
openssl? well, it begins with typing “https” instead of “http” when
you want to access a url, and it involves added security, which, to
date, i continue to practice total disinterest in, but, it’s not a bad
idea, for example, you and i, we could easily send pgp encrypted
emails to one another, and we would be the only ones to have the
decryption key (it must get a little more involved for people who
participate in email discussion lists). anyway, this is what i have
been up to yesterday and today, in addition to fine-tuning the sound
in my linux side, and i am very happy with the sound results. now if
only i could play dvds and make digital video on this 400 dollar
box….

(i’ll write you again tonight if you wish, let me know how late you
are staying up)

(kisses)

k.

Yes, As A Look Springs To Its Face

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 19:30:03 +0100

as earth, light and grass illustrate the meadow,
there’s a natural grace I hope for
that unknowing a poem may show
having its life in a field of rapture,

a book made full of days (pages),
a ready effort full of all places then
that may be because I have loved them
part-song of companions
and of those unknown, alike in soul.

For them may there be a special green
and flowering of life in these words–
eager to be read, taken, yielded to.

Yes, though I conceive the mind’s measure
and wrest doctrine from old lore,
it’s to win particular hearts,
to stir an abiding affection for this music,
as if a host of readers will join the Beloved

ready to dance with me, it’s for the
unthinking
ready thing I’m writing these poems.

Robert Dunce, 1960

awake before the alarm and rested

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 05:49:16 +0100

dear zhen,

this morning i address you as “zhen” and not “zh” – do you mind? i am
fully rested. i went to bed last night at 21:00 and am just now up, a
few minutes before my 5:30 alarm. my coffee is securely beside me, my
morning cup of coffee, without which life would not be life, and the
morning’s tasks are ahead of me: grading dunce-college compositions, and
looking through my computer and elsewhere for materials for today’s two
lessons: one composition and one conversation class. today, March 21,
supposed to be a traditional “spring” day off for students, so i am
hoping that very few of my students come to class today, though they
will probably disappoint me, and appear.

i never thought of my letters to you as english practice for you (the
“reading” you refer to) and i am afraid they are rather casual
expressions, though perhaps the importance of the casual expression is
not emphasized enough in communication. there is most definitely
communication between us when i do not send you a letter, wouldn’t you
agree? i know a very good method to use to get you to call me. now,
after all the headache of the new applications in the computer have
passed (something that should have taken me no longer than an hour took
me an entire day) though in the end i wound up cleaning up my computer
(i did this some yesterday, in addition to merely (merely!) reading
poetry with no direction at all in mind, no purpose, no essay, which is
how poetry should always be read – spring cleaning of my laptop, you
might say, moving a lot of files to a storage disk, and programs that i
don’t use. i now have a lot more room in my computer, though for what?
text files don’t occupy that much space on a hard drive.

when you arrive here in july i will lose my greatest source of text
generation, so i will have to begin some different form of writing than
these momentary meditations on just about everything and nothing which
you call my letters to you. i tell my students that as their writing
develops that there develops as well an inner voice, a writing voice,
somewhat different than the daily self (this old distinction between the
ego-centered voice and the de-centered subjectivity of writing) but i
don’t believe it sometimes. there was in the 60s and 70s a french
cultural theorist and philosophe who advanced the idea that as
individuals in our always social instance we find ourselves in
determinate though conceptually elusive relations of power enforced by
discourses, from which it is very difficult to separate ourselves from,
which can lead in the direction of the idea of another “philosophe” that
there is no outside, socially or historically speaking, there is only
the mediating (and endlessly constructing and unconstructing) language,
discourse, power. so much for casual expression. all communication is a
form of command. he says good morning with a click of heels, and
clicking his mouse, sends the message and closes the program, turning
back to an empty and quiet room, in the blue light of morning, in bare
feet.

(kisses)

k.

Re: Yes, As A Look Springs To Its Face

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:07:28 +0100

dear zh,

is not the essence of the “old” russia? the elderly professor teaches
his granddaughter’s class, the very granddaughter he has left in the
morning peacefully sleeping?

you have no idea how this sounds utterly and completely foreign to an
American, for whom there must be something wrong with this picture: why
do they teach the same subject? why do they teach in the same
university? why do they live in the same flat? how they must hate one
another! (this is the american culturation/socialization process).

the russian ‘foreignness’ is yes, they live and work together, and they
even like and respect one another, and are capable of small acts of
generosity with no motive for compensation … life, in other words, in
a non-contractual world, in which the memory of hardship and suffering
is tangible, concrete and immediate.

i like your story very much. about the poem i sent you, only now, only
reading now, do i recognize this poem as the “preface” of one of my
books, Works & Days, both the poet who wrote ‘the look to the face’ and
Works & Days were operating (writing) on the principle of the Bolt of
Melody. it was very strange last night to recognize this poem, reading
from an early volume of poems called The Opening of the Field which
again, i have had for many years, and once again, i remembered writing
an essay in university on the famous poem that immediate follows the one
that i sent you: in this memory, of writing about the famous poem how
many years ago, more than twenty years, many other concrete sensory
impressions returned as well, so there entire mood of the time was
evoked, if only for a moment, and i came into contact with the very
material process by which one is influenced (it is never abstract) and
for a moment last night, before going to bed early, i was reminded of
the integral organicism of the poetic process. but i sent the poem to
you for the music, and i am glad you enjoyed it.

(kisses)

k.

24 hour interval

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 07:11:12 +0100

dear zh,

yesterday was merely a matter of the circumstance that i left my flat at
11:30 and didn’t return home until after 21:00 as i had gone to a film
some other of my colleagues had arranged at a local theater to be
screened for their students, the title of the film was “Bowling for
Columbine” and about american culture, after a fashion. i was going to
send you an email in the middle of the afternoon when i stopped by the
institute to return a book, but another of my colleagues was using the
internet, so i had to trust to the possibility that you would assume
that i was simply having a long day. now i have a day free, as most of
my Tuesdays are supposed to be, but usually they are taken up with
faculty meetings, which means having to leave the flat. today i do not
have to leave the flat, except to walk down the street to get a haircut
and buy some drinking water.

your comments about letters and writing and reading them remind me also
of the problems of those letters written privately though they are
really written for public and posterity (many writers do this,
especially after they become well known) and this produces a different
kind of letter than mandelstam, for example, writing from somewhere in
siberia, “i’m still alive.” i don’t read and i have never read very many
letters between authors, though i am fond of journals (Kafka’s diary,
for example) where there is a conflict being experienced about the very
proposition of writing. this is something that it is too easy to forget.
that for the greatest of writers the writing does not happen easily, and
is instead a matter of struggle and deep unhappiness with the medium,
and a corresponding inability to adjust to the outside world, the
so-called reading public, the contemporary moment that one writes in. i
have only two volumes of letters on my shelf, both of them by the poet
Charles Olson, one volume of letters to a young editor who was launching
a magazine and the poet is instructing him (about poetry, and in a very
different way than one learns about poetry in school) and the other
volume, from Olson to Frances Bolderoff, an intellectual woman (not
something easy to be in the 1940s) who wrote Olson as soon as she had
read his first book, and they became very close over a period of years,
lovers, and collaborators, though Olson was married at the time, and
this painful distance of separation motivates many of the letters of the
middle period – and sometimes i guess that Olson was purposely keeping
Bolderoff at a distance, because their letters are full of work and
reading – intellectual life – instead of cooking, cleaning and doing the
dishes, which is the essence of the day-to-day life. not very poetic.

other than that, i can’t remember reading another volume of letters for
a long time, and certainly now email changes this in some ways, i
conduct a very public correspondence on a listserv at the university of
buffalo, but there are various layers of distance structured into this
dissemination mechanism, so that it does allow one to influence and be
influenced by one’s contemporaries, as well as to keep informed of the
latest publications, but someone (like mandelstam) could easily starve
in full public view, and it would only elicit messages of regret written
from citadels (towers) of immense cultural and economic capital. the
very hard lesson i learned when i lived in california is that you can
meet such very powerful writers, but they will destroy you in a second
if you threaten their authority.

so i don’t know what kind of correspondence, what kind of letter
writing, happens nowadays, there are also blogs which i don’t read, not
for lack of interest, only for lack of the permanent internet
connection. is this also a form of letter writing? it all takes place in
an extremely public sphere. what is the essence of the private? does it
even exist any more? do i need to send you emails with pgp encryption to
feel that our communication is private? or is an email much the same as
a cell phone conversation that people everywhere demonstrate such
ability to conduct in public. i am even alarmed by my own voice on my
home phone, and i am the only one hearing it!

i think we are at the end of the era of the letters of the writer.
though of course maybe it is different in russia. also, i used to think
there were urgent things to say to others, but now i have a more complex
and sophisticated view of how ideas are transmitted – always
peripherally, always from the corner of one’s perception – so i can’t
imagine trying to show someone or teaching someone like the poets of an
earlier generation did. just as i can never imagine myself feeling
comfortable “visiting” people, other people who write, and pretending to
be the face behind the signature. that is a world of illusion and
pretense. unfortunately, it also makes life much more difficult, since
you can write the greatest poetry in the world and no one cares whether
or not you are alive or dead (at least in the u.s.) i am more confident
about doing a good job teaching here as a well of building some form of
secure space, though that, also, may be an illusion.

your account of the birthday party for your father from your colleagues
reminds me of your own lines about the butterflies pinned in a box, the
workers at a typical russian university. the vanishing world. everything
must become contingent, subject to chance, most of all, precious human
lives.

(kisses)

k.

a somewhat wasted day

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 18:12:02 +0100

dear zh,

well, this well-intentioned day was wasted. i took it into my mind to
give myself a birthday present and this present was to be a permanent
connection to the internet so this morning i looked up two services in
lodz and went to both of them: the first one (a small private company
which provides ethernet connection) does not service the area where i
live, and the second company i went to, telekomunikacja polska, my phone
company, cannot give me a permanent connection without a letter of
authorization from the university. i did manage to get my hair cut, and
i bought three large bottles of drinking water which i use for making
coffee: that is the extent of the difference between when i woke up this
morning and wrote you and as i am writing you now. there was, on the
positive side, a bit of spring fever on my part, as i simply enjoyed
walking a very long ways in the city streets in full sunlight and rather
(almost) warm temperatures. so i think i really spent the day walking in
the sunlight, using the search for an internet connection as a pretext.
i feel almost as though i have been at the beach all day. now it is hard
to concentrate on classes tomorrow. i hope nobody comes. i always hope
nobody comes. i did have a good class last week, but i don’t know if i
am capable of another exciting lecture tomorrow. then, after tomorrow,
there will be almost an entire week off. by the time i have to go back
to classes, i will have a lot of work waiting for me, student papers,
presentations, the conference, etc., so i am already getting tired from
thinking about it all. tonight i will spend the evening reading and
preparing some notes for tomorrow’s class. what will you be doing, or,
rather, i should ask, what have you been doing, as it is almost 23:00
your time.

(kisses)

i miss you

k.

a few words in a few minutes

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 07:25:31 +0100

dear zh,

i am writing you just a few minutes before i have to leave as i
overslept, or, more accurately, lay in bed, enjoying the light and the
warmth, today i think i will even venture out without a sweater.

my lateness does not prevent me from drinking my cup of coffee, which
i am doing now, in addition to writing you not much at all except for
the acknowledgment of the daily routine, up early, off to the
institute and then to the dunce college, hoping against hope that my
students take the day off.

from you letter last night i didn’t understand when you would have
your computer back, but i’m hoping that you are able to check your
mail at the university sometime today. and what will you find? only
words from me, that’s all, the barest sign that i am, as you, still
alive, going through the motions anyway, it’s not only the material
sometimes that i have to teach that is boring, most of the students
are also boring. this very useful word, to “stifle” – that is how i
feel on such mornings. chances are, i will leave the seminar with the
opposite sensation, at least i did last week, it was a good class, and
then when i went to the dunce college, all my positive energy
dissipated.

but, after today, i have three days off in addition to an additional
two days plus an extra day, which makes SIX days OFF.

that should give me a good mood today, don’t you think? shouldn’t it?
shouldn’t i even go somewhere? if i were adventurous, i would wander
around Warsaw, and perhaps i will on a moment’s notice. though the
museums i doubt about their being open on the holiday weekend, and i
am rather saving them for when you are here.

about that small detail, i think next tuesday i will go to the office
where i do my paper work for work residency and ask them for advice
about where to go, maybe it is even possible to arrange for their
invitation through that office, though it is possible that they will
send me somewhere in warsaw. it is also possible that they will say
they have no idea. and it is also possible that they will say all i
need to do is send you a letter of invitation with a notarized seal.
the third choice is my guess about all you need. we will soon find
out, it would be ideal if you could being the visa application by
early to mid-May, and plan on arriving here the first week of July. we
would have a very quiet 6-8 weeks together before classes, before
doing anything, and we could go to Warsaw and Krakow and you could
begin to get an idea of the strange new country you are in, will be
in, will be here, very soon (only three months!) now i must go fulfill
the task that is the reason for my being here in the first place.

kisses

k.

the holiday is here

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 07:46:35 +0100

dear zh,

i feel foggy this morning and i didn’t even have any wine last night and
have not had (wine) since the weekend, foggy, or groggy, if one can be
“hung over” from sleep, or the muted excitement of days off, mitigated
by the awareness that i must work, write, at least that abstract, and to
add to the combination, i was informed yesterday that my books from the
u.s. have arrived, including my mandelstam, the critical prose, so i can
write the essay based on the original abstract if i want, only i don’t
think there’s an essay there any more that i want to write.

what on earth is wrong with your laptop? you hardly ever use it, at
least in the way that many people use their laptops, for high speed
video gaming, digital video, etc., you only use it as a word processor,
less than 1 percent of its resources, so i can’t imagine what is wrong
with it. did i tell you that, inquiring finally about a permanent
internet connection to my flat, i found out that i need a letter from a
telekominikacja polska representative that works for the university, so
far this is a phantom person, as no one can tell me where this office or
officer is. the problem is that my telephone number does not belong to
me. it is an exasperation. if i kept account of all the times i access
the internet for teaching materials since there is absolutely no
coordination between the university and textbooks or anything of the
kind, but if i continue with this train of though i will complain more
than i should. there are, after all, compensatory holidays.

the other day, i don’t know, yesterday or the day before, the days blur
in a way sometimes, i was also thinking (counting) (calculating) just
how many days i have off in the year, half of june, july, august, and
september and 3-4 weeks in mid-january to mid-february: this is four or
a little more months each year, so i am only working 8 months. this felt
comforting, this thought, as i tend to lose perspective at this time of
the year.

we should make a promise to one another not to worry about anything.
that is probably as impossible as any other kind of promise, but it
impresses me anyway as an important, if not necessary strategy, and
maybe i am getting closer and closer to accepting pure contingency
(chance) into my life, and to stop thinking there is another choice.
there are certain factors that make me feel very restless. it is this
basic problem: i want more. i want better students. i want to be
published. i want more time. i want more books. i want to write more. i
want to work on my writing all the time.

so what is wrong with this wanting more? right now, i am bothered
because i want my hard disks to spin down as they are supposed to after
several minutes. it makes the machine more quiet (ah, they just spinned
down). i can type for hours into the quiet machine, there is only the
slight sound of it’s breathing, very slight sound. sometimes i am very
fond of this 400 dollar box. i have a perverse wish to find out just how
much i am capable of doing with it, and what is funny is that all the
current software is designed for very powerful computers: for example,
lately (for my birthday) i have the wish to add a cd-rw writer and dvd
reader (i fully recognize the infeasability of making dvds on a 1999
machine, and i wouldn’t know where to begin with) and when i go to the
shops, the products they have require 400 megabyte installation space,
and 800 megaherz buses (mine is only half that). yours is probably 1.3
or 1.5 gigaherz, or whatever they call it. what is interesting is that
on the internet i find that such products for my machine exist, for
350-450 megaherz buses, and using on 75 megabytes for installation, the
only problem is that these products are considered “old” and even here,
in Poland, they are unavailable. this is the built-in obsolesence (the
market makes products become out of date faster than they need to) to
computers, when people generally could get by with a lot less. my wish
is really to use this little machine until it runs down, which i have
read happens after several years, and the truth is, i am very fond of
the keyboard, the touch of the keys, and i like them much better than my
macintosh. i did, however, learn on the internet that there is an apple
macintosh dealer in warsaw. if you are really so unhappy with your asus,
i would recommend keeping all the documentation, and trading it in for
another model like an apple when you get to poland, or, as you mentioned
before, selling it before you leave. if you choose the latter option,
you should be able to get about 70 percent of its original value, but
this is always a big headache. also, i think i have become very
conservative about such things, and one should use something until it no
longer runs.

i have to remember this when i am in the computer shop and surrounded by
fast new laptops. what would i use it for? i think what i miss most of
all is the ability to use powerpoint in classroom presentations, and
instead of buying a new laptop, i should buy a small projector, and
regardless of the expense, it would make my life incredibly easier, as i
could prepare a number of presentations at home, on the laptop, then
take the laptop and projector to school, and project my notes and images
for lectures on american culture, composition, even using visual prompts
for conversation, what else do i teach, yes, occasional seminars way
above my students understanding of english.

in terms of wanting, since i am writing about wanting this morning, and
how foggy it can make one’s head, i also want a second cup of coffee, so
you will have to excuse me for a moment.

now the coffee is cooking, though we don’t say cooking, we say brewing.
we can only say cooking for pots and pans on the stove, and we never say
cooker, though that is what you always say, delighting, i think, in the
deliberate mistake.

last night i wanted (needed) that adobe acrobat with the editor since i
am trying to prepare a manuscript to mail by April 7 and the only
technique i have with my present software is to convert the existing pdf
file into html, then say the html as a text file, from which all
formatting is lost, so it will take me hours, days, to do something that
even if i had microsoft word 2000 would take less than a minute. for the
preparation of manuscripts these are two items that make minutes turn
into many hours: acrobat editor and msword 2000. the big problem is that
when i am formatting line by line a poetry manuscript, there is the
temptation (because the manuscripts are so old) to rewrite them, which
is impossible at this distance (of time, since the original writing).
and yet the presses i am sending to have very set page limits so i have
to be careful about the use of page, the appearance of the page – it is
all a lot of work.

on the positive side, i think when in a few years my books start
appearing, i will not only enjoy the sensation of the book in print, and
i didn’t like this when i published two books 10 years ago, but i will
also recognized them as finally finished objects. maybe. i am very
divided on this issue, and in the purest interpretation, no poet should
yield to the temptation to publish his or her books in their lifetime.
many of the greatest poets left behind only manuscripts, because they
were so involved with the invisible processes of their work. maybe. as i
said, i am very divided on this issue. when i first tried to enter the
poetry culture in the u.s. ten years ago, i don’t think that i
understood then just how market-influenced it had become, and we are in
the hyper-accelerated phase now of pure ephemerality, and this, i need
to be extremely cognizant of, and sometimes i don’t think that i can
without have the geographical distance that i have now.

so back to my abstract: last night, reading an obscure essay on Dziga
Vertov by Wraclaw Osadnik:

“Another discussion on Vertov’s ontological principles of cinema
concentrated on the nature of poetry in comparison with film. Vertov
confessed that: ‘I am a writer of cinema. I am a film poet. But instead
of writing on paper, I write on the film strip.’ For Vertov a poem was
like a painting; in its ability to make us sense an ultimate, non
composite reality. Spontaneity, especially in the art of poetry would
mean truth derived from a set of values. The value of any work of art
would be revealed mainly through its intimacy. Represented images,
especially filmic images, would find their relationships more actively
and deeply in the realm of an inner form through which external reality
is perceived. This philosophical point of view was adopted by Vertov in
the analysis of Mayakovskii’s poetry. Vertov was fascinated by
Mayakovskii’s syllabic meter and, among his papers in the Moscow
archive, there is a ‘deconstructed’ poem of Mayakovskii and a sketch for
a movie based on it.”

i guess i am fasinated by this ‘sketch’ and it’s possible resemblance
(distorted similitude) to what the american poet i have been reading
again, charles olson, was trying to do with the idea of projective
verse, the idea being to bring olson and vertov together in an essay
where the line and the camera angle and associated, and screen and page.
maybe it is the having to concede to the low english-level (or
inevitable second-language problem) and teach the story, the plot, the
narrative, that drives me deeper into its antithesis: the aesthetics of
experimental film and what was once called the “projective” in poetry
half a century ago, though the element of the filmic, and especially the
visual experience of the kind of film vertov was making in the 20s,
omitted, due to the distance, etc. that anyway is the abstract i think i
am going to write this weekend.

i hope i have given you enough words to read for your early afternoon.

i miss you (you, and without you, your words).

k.

today is the grey day of the abstract

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 07:28:21 +0100

dear zh,

today’s a spectacularly grey, grey, grey day, a good day for writing
an abstract that i don’t want to write, though i think i have my
bearings. yesterday another birthday present came, my books, my last
few remaining books, sent by my mother, and i felt rather bad, half of
them i didn’t even need, books that i picked up on the sale shelf at
the local bookstore the summer i was in florida, like russian short
stories in russian, but there was a very nice dictionary, russian
dictionary (alongside a very bad one and heavy, a hardback, that i
will probably try to trade for credit for a few zlotys, but the good
one, do you know it? it is by Katzner, very large print, a very nice
book someone gave me in exchange for a few English lessons when i was
in tomsk, which seems like forever ago, that year.

and i am also rather pleased with myself, for another birthday present
i found the cd writer (and dvd player) that goes with my machine, the
specifications from the manufacturer say that it is for a pentium II
and only reguires 75 megabytes to install, and they have this in a
store (sklep computorowy) that i found on the internet in warsaw, and
when i looked up the address on my warsaw map, i saw that the street
this store is on is only one or two blocks from the train station, so
tomorrow i am going to go to warsaw so that i can finally write cds on
this little laptop. what is the purpose of writing cds? storage, for
one thing, when i am finally able to download more files from the
internet (permanent internet connection) and two, something that i
have thought about doing but haven’t even begun to, to start working
with collage texts by scanning pages from books through a scanner (i
know you know how to do this very well) and working with them visually
– this is about the only way i can work with multiple languages – i
think there are a lot of possibilities.

i am listening to Shostakovich’s trio for fortepiano opus 67 right
now, do you know it? i found it on a cd with some piece by mendelsohn
for only 22 zlotys (many cds cost 50-60 zlotys here) and i once
listened to this often many years ago, and it is a real pleasure to be
able to listen to it again. there are a lot of folk quotations in this
composition, and it reminds me very much of a less primitive charles
ives, in his quartets, where he does much the same thing with american
folk quotations.

today i have all day to work on my abstract, and the only problem is
that it is less and less about “media” and more and more about
“poetry” but what i am going to try to do is insist that a key element
in the poetry of the poet Charles Olson is the visual approach to the
material, not “breath” which is a displacement, maybe, i am unsure
about this, but that passage i sent you by the Polish critic quoting
from Vertov (who was born Daniel Kaufman by the way) (and his brother
was his cameraman, Michael Kaufman) about the syllable in Mayakovsky.
what does media have to do with this? maybe i can say something like
this: to the extent that we ignore (as i have found one essay by a
poet-critic who does this) cross-media or inter-media references, in
other words, using film to talk about poetry, or poetry to talk about
film, or any of the other arts, and the more we locate anyone’s poetry
solely within the practice of that particular medium, then we are
tempted to succumb to this notion of “progress” in the arts, and to
write this way, in my essay, would be to write counter to the notion
that classicism, romanticism, avant-gardism, etc., represent separate
catagories, when they are merely descriptive categories, but the
“belated romanticism” olson is characterized as representing, at least
in his theory of poetry, which he suggestively, though i don’t believe
exhaustively, called “projectivism” (i like this term very much with
the connotation of the projector – the machine, and the machine for
olson was a simple typewrite, and i found this line in his poetry last
night: “and the whirring of whose wings / blots out the rattle of / my
machine”

And the whirring of whose wings
blots out the rattle of
my machine

so, at least i have a direction to write in, or, something to write
about.

you, dear, still haven’t told me what’s wrong with your machine. what
is the diagnosis?

i hope for at least one letter from you today while you are at the
office. and, do you know, a phone call on my birthday would be rather
pleasant.

i miss you.

k.

out of bed late again

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:02:25 +0100

dear zhen

i am late with this letter for no better reason that i am up late
having stayed in bed for a long while, almost three hours, after first
waking up.

now i am finishing my first cup of coffee and suffering from the
aftereffects of indolence, which includes not only sleep, but lying in
bed, not even reading, just listening to the birds and the automobiles
in the street outside the window. i suppose i should add that the
morning is warm enough to open one of the windows, which i did, and
thus the interest in the noises, sounds, outside.

it is definitely a change in climate when one can open a window, don’t
you agree? though i think i remember that you sleep with a window open
even in the coldest weather.

one of life’s small luxuries which took me many hours to contrive: i
am listening to music while writing you. i had a hard drive erasing
day yesterday, which helped me reduce the filespace in my computer by
half, and now there is the mixed pleasure of using old programs for
the first time, like this Nedit text editor, though it’s too much and
of too little interest to go into for the moment.

you have probably guessed that i am not going to warsaw today. this
was a decision i made in bed. i couldn’t pull myself out of it. or
drag myself from it.

now i am making a second cup of coffee. you see that my life is as
eventful as yours, together we shall make a very boring couple, which
is quite fine with me, though i do look forward to the long walks.

whenever i have something new to write, i have extreme strategies to
avoid doing it. i think i am one of those writers who work very hard
at avoiding writing. it creates a kind of tension, so that one does
begin to write, there is the feeling of overcoming the tension of the
strong resistances.

i have mentioned this before, but i don’t always like the way i write
when i write into the machine, and that’s why i am always searching
for a new interface (why i keep trying different applications, and
periodically erase my hard drive – it is the equivalent of throwing
old and useless papers away).

there is always this wish to start fresh, from scratch, from the white
page, to begin all over again, and i notice more and more that i don’t
read texts which i download from the internet. maybe i would if i had
a bigger screen.

but i like this editor the best of all, the text editor that i use to
write you letters. what will happen when you are finally here and
there are no more letters to write? i have a funny feeling that you
will insist that my first act every morning will be to write you a
good morning message, even if i can print it and hand it to you.

it is true that we sometimes express ourselves better in writing than
in speaking. unfortunately, at a certain age, one either writes or
says: my back hurts.

i think i will send this letter to you right now as i am a little
afraid that, since you were under the impression that i was going to
warsaw in the morning, you have been waiting for the letter you asked
me to write before leaving, and now, of course, since i have not left,
and stayed in bed for too long, half the morning as a matter of fact,
you may have already decided that i forgot about you, and about your
wish that i write you before leaving.

do you sometimes think i am so thoughtless? no, easier to conclude, he
decided to sleep, or not sleeping, he couldn’t get out of bed, even to
write to me a few words. well, here are a few words, i hope you don’t
mind them arriving rather late.

kisses

(and will i speak to you tomorrow?

k.

now i am awake so you can call whenever you wish

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 09:16:12 +0200

dearest zhenya,

this morning has fog and as a result just the kind of light, soft
light, that i like very much, on this the closest i will ever get to
divine harmony: my birthday, the day before easter sunday, daylight
savings time, quiet everywhere in the catholic country, thick fog and
soft light, warm air, and two books with pictures and your letter
beside them beside me, which is almost as good as having you yourself
here, beside me.

your letter reminds me of the writing you would do for our meetings
with Olga, do you remember? i think you, as do i, relate differently
to the machine, and it is quite comical to say this, as i have spent
the better part of the past two days reconfiguring my machine, to the
point where i am pleased: 20 percent free space on the windows
partition; 35 percent free space on the root partition of the linux
program. before i was coming close to both partitions being full. one
way to clean your computer is to erase the hard drive. most of the
newly installed programs seem to work better, as for example, this
mail program, which, try as i might, and i think i spent almost a day
trying to, i couldn’t get the mailer to configure to ssl, which is the
new university server here. after the re-install, however, it works
fine.

today i should write my abstract or not at all. i have nothing else to
do except clean the kitchen. i think i needed these last few days of
pure abstraction, staring at the computer screen. i can recognize the
need for distraction, abstraction, sometimes, as simply an expression
of rest, as well as the challenge of seeing just what it is possible
to do with a cheap black box that even the computer technician at a
store for notebooks laughed at and said that it wasn’t worth 200
dollars. of course, he was trying to sell me a lapto for 5500 zlotys.
it is the same thing as in russia, once they find out you are an
american, they think you have more money than you know what to do
with.

my ambitions for this machine are very simple: scanner for documents
and images that fall my way from the antiquariat bookstores here,
especially anything having to do with the lost past of futurism
between the wars; digital camera for snapshotting street scenes; the
ability to write cds so i can begin experimenting with making some
alternative media, beginning with just word and image, collages,
assemblages, but things that could – ideally – be printed in larger
than book form, the kind of thing you would see in a gallery. what i
will dream of for my mid-50s is a sound studio and the capacity to
work with moving image (digital video). what i really want to be doing
in five to ten years time is making digital installations which
combine all forms of projection, projectivism (and this is really the
key to the essay i have it in my mind to write, the abstract that i
need to write today and tomorrow.

i have two books, one by kia lindroos from finland, and one by sigrid
weigel from germany, and they both use this concept of the image-space
from walter benjamin (the chagall book reminds me of his fondness for
paul klee, if you like chagall you will like klee, they both paint a
kind of primitive magic realism) so that instead of a reading, instead
of simply reading one’s work, one’s writing, a range of forms of
projection, projecting the work, into an image-space, installation,
where the “reader” does not sit there passively listening to the voice
of the poet but walks through, passes through, the image-space, in and
out of the voice, or voices, i have never thought that many of my
texts were written for my own voice (this stupid idea in creative
writing of finding your own voice – nothing is more disaster for the
poet) no, you have to learn how to throw your voice – throwness,
heidegger, i am glad that i understand this one word from the
philosopher, as it keeps turning up everywhere i look.

so these are some thoughts from which i try to recover the impression
of squandered (really wasted) hours configuring (nice word for
erasing) and starting anew.

i like very much your expression in the letter about the nail in the
head of conscientiousness – and that’s what it is! a nail in the head,
they call it scruples, of strong sense of guilt, as, for example, how
will the englification process survive without you! but it will have
to, i think you should just come here, as quickly as possible, first
week of july, and everything will start from there. but i have such
bad habits, really i am quite distracted from the every day, but
instead of apologizing for these habits, i invite you to share them:
they include,

indolence, indolence and more indolence
idleness whenever one is not being indolent
indigence also, though always allowing for the extravagance
(i like to imagine passing through strange places looking for your
skin creams) what else, besides indolence, idleness and indigence?
sudden bursts of unexpected energy, though i do wish to develop the
habit of herbal teas and yoga exercises (at least a few of them) long
walks in the fog, and wandering among museums, whenever and wherever
we can find them. those are a few habits more important than a clean
kitchen, or a made bed – i take great encouragement from the mess of
your desk at your office – the essence of Zhenya – messiness – the key
to all thought, whoever finishes a book, that is study. something else
is required for the reader for whom words are paint.

thank you, dear, for the reminders about painting. did i ever read to
you or show you a copy of my Filonov poem? we will look for the other
Filonov book the next time we return to Russia together.

now all i have to do is wait for your call.

kisses.

k.

the bright and warm day after

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:38:30 +0200

dear zhen,

i slept late again. it bothers me a little to know that you are only
able to receive a letter from me in a certain period of time, and i
think also maybe you were getting used to my work schedule, when i
would write you before going to the institute, and now, on my holiday
schedule, i’m sure you notice the time lag. i wake up and drift in and
out of sleep, and only gradually drag myself from bed. last night was
an accomplishment, i slept in the bedroom, the room we’ll turn into
the bedroom when you arrive. it is a nice room, does not face the
street as the other two rooms, so it is rather quiet, with a smaller
window, so the light is not so strong. unfortunately, the view is not
very nice, an empty grocery store that went out of business.

yesterday was a day of success: i wrote my (500!) word abstract, and
sent it to the conference organizers. i won’t start writing it,
however, until i hear from them in mid-April. no use wasting time and
effort on something until i know that there is a demand for it. now i
have to start thinking about a conference for which there should be an
abstract by june 30, somewhere else in Poland than in lodz, so i feel
a little self-conscious about applying. maybe i will and maybe i
won’t.

yesterday was a day of coincidence that won’t happen for a very long
while: Easter Sunday, my birthday, and daylight savings time all on
the same day. i hardly paid any attention to it, other than washing
the “lace” curtains, which was very successful, only now i realize
after washing them that i should wash the windows before hanging the
curtains again. maybe next weekend. for now, the newly washed curtains
are resting on my ironing board, very white, for such old things. what
else did i do yesterday, i read poetry until midnight, then watched a
movie, then went to bed. that was my birthday. i also ordered about 70
dollars of books from cracow (all poetry) for my birthday (you see i
am very indulgent about buying myself books). i am only just now
beginning to be able to hear poetry, in English, again, and who knows,
perhaps in time i will be able to take up a renewed interest in my
own.

the space in this application for writing to you is just about full,
so i will send this now with the agreement to write you again today if
you tell me how long you will be in the office. it’s very simple: when
you get this letter, write me back about how much longer you will be
at the university, and i will write you before you leave, if you wish.

and a kiss?

k.

p.s. if forgot to mention that my mother did call early yesterday
evening. she mentioned that she is going to have heart surgery soon,
for an aortorial valve that is closing, though she downplayed the
seriousnessness, perhaps it is a routine operation. she said that she
has known about this for several years, it is something that appeared
in an “ekg” exam. she did not seem upset about it. other than that
news, which was apparently only news to me, nothing else has changed.
i talked to my nephew for a few minutes, who was visiting, and he
sounded as dull as his mother (my sister). i wonder whether you will
ever meet these people. strange, to share both a history (what is
inadequately called family) and the disjunction of geographical
distance and the separation process of years – as i mentioned, often
we go for months without communicating – which i can hardly imagine
for you and your mother and father. i don’t think it is possible to
make a “russian” and “american” comparison here, as my interpretation
of what is sometimes called the ‘family bond’ has always been remote
and removed. still, one always operates under the illusion that people
do not age, and of course they do, and maybe it is my the fact of my
birthday yesterday, but i think i am entering a time when people begin
to disappear, complicated by the fact that i always live as though
they have already disappeared. i think now i must have spent too much
time reading alone in my room when i was growing up, as that is the
only thing i seem to know how to do. (i warn you!)

Yesterday’s abstract

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:55:49 +0200

dear zh,

i thought i would send you the abstract i wrote yesterday since it
includes (prominently features!) a russian filmmaker i am sure you are
not fond of, though did i mention, his birth name was Daniel Kaufman,
though people develop into more than their names. i wonder about the
availability in any format, video or dvd, of parts from if not the
entire, 1929 Man With A Movie Camera. do you think when you have the
moment you could see what is on the russian internet about this film?
such a request, may suggest, perhaps, that i am eager to ask you to
help me as my Russian researcher, something we may try to do here, in
the main library, where there are many Russian books. i am most
interested in the poetry and film writings, and which i only suggest
now as all the important work there is to do, good sound writing work,
cultural work, which i hope you take an interest in helping me with
from time to time, providing you have a good opinion of my writing.

kisses

k.

my last holiday day and at last a long-worded morning

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 09:20:17 +0200

dear zh,

i overslept again, or went back to sleep, and now i am not asleep,
obviously, unless i am sleepwriting, which has never been a habit of
mine, like sleepwalking: where would i walk? yesterday, in the late
afternoon, i did uncharacteristically take a rather long walk in
search of a bottle of wine, since all the stores were closed, and i
did not want to go to the minimart shop across the street, whose
prices are too high and whose selection is uninteresting, i walked
here and there enjoying the sunlight at a late hour, after 18:00, and
lo and behold i came across a small shop which i sometimes go to when
i get off the number 1 or number 6 trams (how familiar you will become
with these and the number 3 tram by this summer). i was surprised to
find this shop open, but open it was, on a day when everything,
absolutely everything, was closed. i was even surprised that it was
legal to sell alcohol, though passing by two minimarts, including the
one across the street, i noticed, probably because all the pubs in the
neighborhood were closed, groups of 5 or 6 men standing around
drinking beer and talking. it is quite legal to at least drink beer in
public here, and i sometimes see (though rather rarely) someone
walking down the main street (Piotrkowska) with a bottle of beer in
hand. has this changed yet, in tomsk? i remember your saying there was
going to be an effort to stop drinking in public especially by
students there. anyway, i returned home with a bottle of “po-sladke”
red wine, which was so low in alcohol content, 10 percent, that i
drank the entire bottle and felt nothing but a little sleepy, so i
watch a movie and went to bed. in between the early evening and my
late bedtime, however, i worked on the same manuscript we sent from
russia – do you remember when that was? was that last summer or the
year before? it seems like a rather long time since we sent out that
manuscript, and i never heard from the publisher, a small press in
ohio, perhaps they ran out of money, or are waiting on a grant. so i
am going to send the manuscript out again, to the press for which the
poet reading is someone i studied with at the university. when my
books from the u.s. came, among there were the last three copies of
this book when i published it with a small (practically non-existent,
anyway) press in san francisco, and when i had converted this book,
which i had a copy of during the year in tomsk, i though i had made a
“fair” copy, but in the conversion of the file from pdf to html then
to text and finally to doc format, i found a number of corruptions,
especially in the use of italics, some words missing, a text editors
dream, so now with the original copy of the book before me, i am able,
as much as my patience allows, to restore all the original features,
so that the manuscript, this manuscript, is the same as the book
published in 1994. what a time that was, you would hardly believe.
letters of congratulations from famous poets, crowded attendance at my
reading from the book when it was published, promise, promise, promise
of a hopeful and productive future. i think at the time i actually
even myself believed that i was on the threshold of escape from the
circumstances of my birth and childhood, the enforced and accepted
anonymity, the conviction that it is always someone else and not
yourself that has something to say, a contribution to make to culture
and history, etc., for a very brief moment i thought i was going to
escape this social destiny of nothingness, the status and value of
nothing, which is of course the actual sphere which all contemporary
cultural production is consigned to, only, to be fair, i don’t think
at the time, when this first book first appeared, that i had any idea
of what actual pain and suffering were, so, after more than 10 years,
and much experience in the pain and suffering department, now i am
ready for the book to try to exist again. it’s about time for a
paragraph break, don’t you think, or, at least, another cup of coffee.
why on earth do i feel so conversation this morning, it must be
because it it the last day, the very last day, of my vacation!

new cup of coffee. it is strange for this dark room of dark furniture
to have so much light in the mid-morning, my curtains remain on the
ironing board, next week, maybe, i will wash the windows (i need
window soap). yesterday i amused myself, while washing three loads of
laundry, doing the dishes, and sweeping the floors, of
imagining/planning changes to the flat when you arrive. we will either
move the sofa that folds out into a bed presently used as a sofa in
your room, which, as you remember, is the beige room (my room is the
walnut room, very dark furniture), into the bedroom, or we will buy
what is called a poster bed (they are popular here, i see them
everwhere, the headboard and the baseboard often are made of iron or
wood, and assemble into a bed frame, for which we will have to buy a
mattress, usually there are two: a base mattress and one that goes on
top of it, the only problem is, that this kind of bed tends to be
rather soft, and you need a firm bed for your back, so maybe you will
prefer the sofa. we could move the sofa in my room into your room, and
the single bed in the bedroom now into my room, where i could convert
it, with pillows, into a kind of sofa (read mostly lying down anyway),
and the sofa that folds out into the double bed presently in your room
into the bedroom, if it fits through the door. the structure of this
sentence resembles the action of moving this and that piece of
furniture around in the rooms in a day. we will also have to find a
small kitchen table to go in the window of the kitchen where we can
have morning coffee and rolls and watch people walking to the bus stop
and watch them watch us as they walk by (actually you will probably
want some longer curtains in this kitchen window) and a table and
standing lamp for the corner in the hall separating your room from the
bedroom, which will be our dining table. we will also need a full
length mirror, which i think we can put in the hall on the wall
opposite the large open wardrobe, that is not the name for it, but
that is the only thing i can think of to call it, what do you call the
piece of furniture against the wall just inside the outside door on
which you hang your coats and place your shoes? i have a very big one,
and it would be nice on the empty wall opposite to put a mirror on the
wall there, and find a small cabinet table for your creams and lotions
and make-up (the things you need and which i have seen you use at your
own flat, at the mirror and the small cabinet-table next to the door).
the bathroom is on the other side of the wall on which we will put the
mirror, so it is not a inconvenient place to keep your cosmetics. i am
afraid there is not much space in the bathroom, which is not even as a
large as the bathroom in the hotel in cypress, and there is a washing
machine in there!

imagine how your life is soon to change, zhenya, no more washing by
hand, and the washing machine works most of the time, and i will teach
you how to listen for noticing when the water is not going to drain by
itself, and you have to place the hose level with the floor and empty
it into a mop bucket. this is one of my greatest pleasures in life.
unfortunately, yesterday, except for one cycle, the washing machine
did not need my assistance. i think we will also buy some more rugs
for the hall and the kitchen, since i have a good vacuum cleaner a
former tenant left. we will have two months to make the flat as
comfortable as possible, including arranging for a door to be put on
your room. i know i have mentioned all of these things before, but
they become more important to me as July draws nearer. also, i want to
convince you that the flat is quite comfortable for two, many couples
and even some families live in these flats in this building, and at
125 dollars a month it is a good price even for Tomsk. how can one
ever worry about their life when they only pay 125 dollars a month for
rent? that is why i can say to you, don’t worry about money, and plan
on bringing only what you imagine you need for security in case of
emergency travel, and a few luxuries such as you think you may wish to
buy once in a while. apart from books, i am very bad on luxury
purchases, and you notice i don’t shop much, not even for shoes. i
think it would concern your mother and father greatly if you brought
too much money with you. of course you will feel a little dependent,
but Poland being Poland and Poles being Poles, sooner than later you
will have teaching jobs, probably within six months. as i mentioned,
right now the greatest difficulty is that you are, in case you haven’t
noticed, in Russia, and it is difficult to arrange things from a
distance, even if it would be more practical. everyone does everything
in person here, and even if you are offered something more permanent
in way of teaching at the university, and need to return to Russia, we
will probably (i am planning on it) go to Russia (Tomsk) together at
least for a month if not longer next summer, so that is what may
happen then. none of this i think is worth worrying about. we may have
to be a little budget conscious next year, but i don’t think very
much. maybe i will not be able to buy as many books as i have been.
that is no great problem, as i have plenty to read right now.

do any of these sentences make you feel a little better about July? i
hope so. i can only think of the good things, even if they involve
morning exercises, herbal tea, and long walks in the woods.

kisses for now, and maybe you will write me a long letter yourself
today!

k.

Wojeoda?

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 11:32:04 +0200

dear zh,

looking for some old paper to make some draft copies on from my
printer i found my residency application papers and all the papers are
headed, approved by, WOJEWODA LODZKI, which i know as the passport
office, isn’t this WOJEWODA the word you were saying you saw on the
website? if it is, then all i need to do is go to the passport office
where i know the officers and obtain a letter of invitation for you,
or at least, at the very least, i know where to go, and it is the same
place i always go. don’t you think this is a hopeful sign?

kisses

k.

now it all starts all over again

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 06:33:47 +0200

in truth, it is not a happy morning, as i have two classes at the
dunce college this afternoon, though we are still in our last day of
the holiday at the institute. i think i will feel like a zombie today
and tomorrow? what did i accomplish during my vacation? i am afraid to
ask. there is a manuscript, however, ready to mail, on my desk, and i
wrote a 500 word conference abstract, those were the two demands
weighing heavily, though in truth, under pressure, i should have been
able to do both in a single day, but i am not working under pressure
lately, rather working rather indolently, deliberately, i hope it is
only a sign of the change in season.

the warmth and light does have an effect, everything, for example,
including the curtains, and dishtowels, everything, has been
laundered. i do not have one dirty pair of socks, and in fact i bought
two new pair of socks and the supermarket yesterday. that it why it is
called a supermarket. you can buy a pair of socks while you are
shopping for salmon. once i bought salmon at this supermarket and it
had obviously been frozen, as it smoked and smelled too much when i
fried it, but yesterday, i could tell, the salmon was fresh, so i
bought two dzwonki (steaks, i think) of losos, salmon, and i was not
disappointed, it was the best dinner i have had for a while, even
without lemon, simply salmon and rice. when available, i promise to
make this dish quite often, as it is one of my favorites, and quite
healthy.

speaking of health, last night was a night of severely crampling in my
lower legs, this happens once in a while, but rarely both legs, and
more than once, first, in the middle of the night, and then, waking
up, again an “attack” which, though the word cramping doesn’t sound
strong enough, it is a sharp enough pain to make me almost cry out,
some kind of contraction of muscles in my aging legs. i wonder what
would happen if i tried running every day as i sometimes have a vague
wish to do.

my cup of coffee is almost empty, and i must prepare for two classes,
searching for materials for a lesson today, and hope against hope that
no students show up. is it April yet?

kisses

k.

a few minutes message in the few remaining minutes before leaving for the number 1 tramline

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:59:43 +0200

dear zh,

according to my calculations i have a few minutes before showering and
shaving and dressing and venturing out into the sunlight where there
is the sound of cars and trucks and other sundry conveyances but from
my kitchen window there does not seem to be a significant stream of
people so i am wondering how many students i will have in my dunce
school classes.

neither have i any letter from you? is the network down? when did you
say your own laptop would be returned to you? i miss the late night
letter you have been in the habit of writing, and the reverse effect
is that i won’t write you this evening (late afternoon) when i return
home as you will have been long home and perhaps even in bed. no use
in a letter sitting and waiting on the server. you can continue to
expect letters from me in the early morning, though i did set my alarm
up to 6:00 a.m. since i noticed, at 5:30, it was still dark now, and i
don’t enjoy waking up in the dark, though i do enjoy making myself get
up early. the days seem longer.

well, i have spent the better part of this morning since i wrote you
last preparing for today’s classes, which means mostly in addition to
marking some compositions, organizing my papers and copies and looking
for materials that i can use today that i haven’t used before. i think
now i am going to have a sandwich and then my obligatory ablutions
prior to trying to find a tram, the number 1 line is the line that i
take to the dunce college, and it only takes 10 mintues after a 10
minute walk.

interesting, isn’t it? oh, this life of teaching!

kisses

k.

video peregrinations (not sure what the second word means

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 07:01:51 +0200

dear zh,

your worst longest or longest worst–i forget which word is supposed
to go before which–perhaps it is not the best combination: your
longest and worst day, yes, that’s better, in case you forgot, both
about the problem of the order of adjective in english, and yesterday,
which, as i was beginning to write, your longest and worst day is
over, and mine is only just now beginning. actually, it began
yesterday afternoon, when i went to the institute and discovered that
my colleague, a graduate student, who has a copy of the video on my
syllabus to show two of my classes today, apparently forgot to leave
it in the faculty room, and when i came home and tried to call him,
there was no answer, so i was facing the prospect of classes today
with students who have not read anything for discussion, and no film
as i had promised them, coming back from break, so i called a neighbor
and learned that there is a pretty big video rental store nearby, only
10 minutes walk, so i went there, this was about 18:00, and yes, it
was a big and modern store, but no Smoke, no Dym, so i returned home,
tried to call the graduate student, still no answer, so i made the
mistake of thinking i might find a copy at another of this store’s
establishments–the store, of all things, is called Beverly Hills
Video and DVD, and i noticed just how many of the items were in dvd
format, so i guess it is not wise to have only a vcr, if one has even
one of those, which i do not–so i went to the other store, more or
less on a tram line with which i was familiar, but half an hour away,
and went i got off the tram it was finally getting dark, about 19:00,
and walk and walk as i might, and did, i couldn’t find the address or
the store anywhere, and wound up walking about one and a half
kilometers, my legs still hurting from the cramping last night, and
returned home at 21:00, without first, however, returning to the
original store, and checking out two other substitutes, Thelma and
Louise and Wim Wenders’ Million Dollar Hotel. i should have done this
to begin with, and i would have been home by 18:00. as it was, i lost
three hours, and still had some assignments to mark, since the class
is meeting today, fortunately, and typically for the students here,
out of a class of 26, only 10 had turned in their assignments, which
were only a page in length, so, despite two cups of coffee after
22:00, i was finished by 12:30 a.m. and by 13:00 i was asleep, which
fact makes me wonder about the force of habit, since two cups of
coffee were not enough to keep me awake. it also makes me wonder
whether there is any caffeine in the coffee i drink. the positive
outcome of all this is that i have something to show my classes today,
and i now have a video rental card for movies most of which are junk
but it is still a distraction, now i only need a combination vcr and
dvd player, or at least a vcr, since we can watch the dvds on
computer, even my laptop will, after saturday, i hope, have this
capability. finally, one of the very eminent poets of the old school
died yesterday or the evening before, as a young writer he was a
correspondent of many volumes of letters with the poet i have written
about recently, and am currently re-reading, Charles Olson. his
protoge was Robert Creeley, about 75 years old (he was born the same
year as my mother) and on the listserv i subscribe to now there is a
demonstration of the inadequacy of public words, which reveal more
about their writers and their poses than any sense of loss. how easy
it is to forget that the very reason one writes poetry is from a
recognition of the failure of speech to express anything of any
moment. i noticed this last night anyway, and it’s worth remembering,
since we rely so heavily on this medium to keep each other company.
with any luck, tomorrow morning i will learn how dificult or not it
will be to bring you here into the same three dimensional space,
where, on such mornings, i am not the most pleasant person to know.
did you go to bed early last night? i hope so. may i hope also for a
letter from you today?

kisses.

k.

are you still there

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:42:38 +0200

hey zhay? you still there? i thought i would write a few lines hoping
that you might be at the office late and would check your mail, if
not, you’ll get two messages in the morning, this one timestamped by
my euphoria on a thursday afternoon four more or less successful
classes out of the way, and tomorrow morning, the big discovery, or
fact finding trip, to Wojawoda Lodzki to find out what i need to do to
get you here. you might call tomorrow, then, an auspicious day, though
i’m uncertain as to the meaning of auspicious, could you look it up?
you will bring your Websters to Poland, won’t you, dear? (though i
married you for your Mandelstam). (only joking!) (i told you i was in
a good mood). i showed two different movies today, Thelma and Louise
in the morning, and Smoke in the afternoon, it turned out that my
colleague had placed his copy of Smoke in my mailbox in the
Secretariat, where i forgot to look, so it was my fault, and
yesterday’s hectic trajectory crosstown to the video shops was all a
misunderstanding on my part–typical–though i now have a video rental
card, for our amusement (did i mention that i have a 21 inch
television compliments of Hotel University Lodzki? it makes a good
movie monitor. i even watch my digital video footage on it. i feel
like a good movie tonight, though i don’t have a vcr yet, so it will
have to wait. you wouldn’t believe how bright the sunlight has been
the last two days. what a difference it makes in one’s mood.

happily yours with kisses,

k.

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