4.02.04

nacha kino

dear zhen

well here i am again writing you here in this space whatever it is you
are at work again, the office? wednesday morning, yours, vache.

vacha.

well you can see i am writing now to you at night full of thoughts or
words or both? are they the same?

well you can see now that i am here, that i am “home” (where i live)

the train arrived in fog. how familiar, warsaw, and the train to lodz.
rain and light snow, melting snow everywhere, very warm here. it is
very warm here.

are you “there” ?

well you can see that i am writing you, and i am glad that we did not
call, for the saving of future calls.

in an emergency, there is a need to call. if you did not call, that
means there was no emergency. if i did not call, that means there was
no emergency. emergency, for me? me? (i have u.s.a. passport!)

we crossed the border around midnight, the border guards, from poland,
when they saw my passport, wearing military clothes, said, with great
emphasis, U.S.A.! (like i was a god). the travelling companions then
took great interest in me (until then i spoke in russian, and with my
hat, looked russian, i think they were afraid of me?) and the
traveller from litva, from klaipeda, gave to me picture with amber in
it of sea shore (not naked woman) or, are all sea shores women without
clothes? i do not know, after watching my video of the baltic this
evening …

but one traveller was from litva and spoke very good russian, his
daughter lives in washington (though first he said chicago, but
“washington” is the city of great name now, like moscow once was, for
those who live in the ‘buffer zones’) and the other, from small
village in poland, very broken english, but when he learned i was from
U.S.A. from polish soldier-borderguard, he was all questions, for over
more than hour. he graduated from high school in 1996 and he said
there was no many good english teachers, though he speak very well
english me.

“doch”

i remember doch, and the gift of a picture of the baltic with amber in
it. the traveller from litva gave to both of us “presents” (he said it
in english) and then like pure litva, when the three of us, after we
left the train, were going to the elevator, he said to me, again, in
english, “first” …

you know that slavic beauty, ‘your first’ …

now i am home in poland, thinking of slavic beauty politeness …

U.S.A.!

do you think that i am so very U.S.A.? i do not think so, but i am not
so very confident in my ability to know what i am.

what my passport says, that i am. acute pain now, remembering you
looking at your passport (the ‘fifth’).

now you see i am very so much alone, and write to you alone.

i am so very much alone now.

the phone just rang. is it you? this has happened before. the
‘russian’ phone card.

it is too late for you to call, and you know that i said that i did
not think you should call, though you said you would try to call, if
you could find a card. but you should not call, you should wait until
the weekend, yes?

we should wait, yes?

maybe you will call me this saturday or sunday, you know that i will
call you feb. 15 (day before classes begin).

the photography from palangas on the tv screen is very beautiful,
muted colors, more snow falling. i walked around vilnius on monday,
climbing the hill, with the old fort. the photography is what we call
“uninspired.” not like the images on the baltic sea. of the baltic
sea. they are very mysterious to me. i am now in unknown world.

i am now in unknown.

i am now.

i am missing you.

you are very warm.

person. you are.

bye.

04.02.04

seascapes

dear zhen

we should get used to, should we, interruptions, disconnections. it
will be a long five months. perhaps you think the 15th too far away.
do you? it did not feel very good to end your call on this
informational note. but then, how many people have before been able to
write each other every day, and it helps that now i know you do not
read my letters, so i will not write very long ones, though you also
said that you tell lies, do you?

i am drinking first cup of coffee this morning to the background sound
of sanding in the hallway, the painters have begun their morning’s
work. they do not wear ‘breathing masks’ and the air is full of dust
from the sanded paint. it cannot be very healthy for their lungs.

this morning as i said i will buy a small portable cd player and look
for one or two cds by the estonian composer i mentioned, arvo part.
you might look to see if you can find any of his music in tomsk. it is
music with much space in it.

the traveller on the train from poland was returning from vilnius
also, his first trip. he said that riga is also very beautiful, and
like vilnius, smaller than warsaw. talinin also, so these three
cities, talinin, riga and vilnius, perhaps they may represent for us
cities to dream about visiting. as i said to you this morning, vilnius
was wonderful to walk around monday afternoon, and really i felt that
no matter which direction i turned, i could not get lost, and some of
the streets are extremely of another century, before the modern one.

when i was waiting at the train station, after dark, about two hours,
reading at the far end of the station near the arrival and departure
charts, i sat next to two old women speaking in russian about train
schedules, and i understood them to be ‘sellers’ though of what i do
not know, maybe flowers, they both had very large bags with them, and
then a train to a nearby town came, and they left. in fact, i heard
quite a lot of russian in the train station, and i wonder if this was
your impression also, though when you were there i was there with you
and we perhaps do not pay so much attention upon our surroundings when
there is someone to talk to.

the trip to the sea was a very good idea and you should take full
responsibility for it.

after watching the images of the sea, the seascapes, i am sorry now
that i could not walk longer with you, as i was very cold, as you may
rememember. viewing the images, i wished i had been able to walk more
than two hours at a time. the snow is quite beautiful to look at, as
is the sea.

snow and sea, they even mean something a little different to me now in
english, after this visit to the baltic in winter.

last night, i found myself wishing to travel even farther north in the
winter with you sometime, perhaps in ukraine? the warsaw-kiev express
arrived at the same time as my train to lodz when i was in warsaw.
also i saw in the morning there was a train from warsaw to st.
petersburg, so as you suggested, this may be a very good idea for
travelling to russia in june.

we have a lot of time for writing now, though sincerely, if long
letters are too much for the time you are in your office, i will write
shorter ones. i am eager to continue working with zabolotsky, and
kharms. only a line or two at a time. perhaps this weekend. it will
take me a day or two to adjust to the sound of the painters, their
‘gavarit, gavarit’ and their radio, very loud, american pop music and
polish commercials among the sound of sanding, sanding.

suddenly this occurs to me as very strange, a trip to the sea in the
winter when the sand is sheeted in snow and ice, and when i return,
the sanding of old paint replaces the word for what there was not
beside the sea in litva.

the images, apart from the appearing of one or two figures, are
distinguished by a study of two or three horizontal planes (snowshore
and sky and sea, or sky and sea–horizon, threshold area, space) upon
which color appears from time to time, green boat, blue fishbox.

these images mean something deep and strong to me, like studies for a
kind of poetry that i have not yet written. this is such an important
idea for writing, that one works with studies, culminating process in
sustained work, after the paramaters have been identified. as i talked
about in palangas, the camera is becoming for me a form of journal,
which i ‘read’ or ‘view’ for what i am thinking about, as more and
more i feel that i am thinking visually, where there is a space that
is not so much important what is the language surrounding the object
being viewed.

i hope you do not mind these thoughts this morning, after your call.

bye

05.02.04

satet foment

dear zhen

today (this morning) (and late this morning) (it appears i have slept past 9:00 a.m.) (am i used now to our time-rhythm in palangas) (alarm at 8:30, breakfast at 10:00?) anyway, beyond the parentheses, today (you will remember that i began by writing you, “today”) (and i even know this word in russian!) today, as i was saying, it is quiet, no painters, no sanding, no radio, so i slept, and now, making my morning coffee, i am reminded how much more i prefer to have coffee with you in the morning, though it does not have to be only morning, as we also drink coffee in afternoon, after long walks. yesterday in the evening my doorbell rang and i answered to be presented with package of spaghetti bolognese mix made by knorr which says “gratis” on it, which means free. here, for promocja, workers go door to door giving away free products. so i must be living in post-socialist country, where it is still safe for young women to go door to door in the evening with products to advertise. this would be impossible in a city in the u.s. but social commentary is rather boring, don’t you think? “safe” is also a relative term. when i went to the shopping center yesterday morning i was impressed once again of the method of the ‘undercover’ bus police, who board the bus in everyday clothes, pretend to be passengers, and then suddenly flash their identity cards and go person to person checking to see if they have a bus ticket. my thought yesterday was that such practices in social space represent something like an internalization of state terror. when i lived in new york, the new jersey metro police also travelled for random passenger checks, but they always wore uniforms. maybe there is little difference. and maybe ‘state terror’ is too strong a word.

i did not buy a music player, as the prices were higher than i had imagined. and now it is quiet in my flat, so i would not have needed the music anyway. neither could i find any recordings by arvo part. but i did go to some bookstores, which i did not do at all in the fall, and in the afternoon i wrote a little, and i am sending you what i wrote in the attachment. there are some polish words in it, because i am reading a polish translation of a french novel. you will ask me how can i read polish when i do not know polish? “very slowly” is the answer. now i am very interested in the very slowly. to read and to write one word at a time without the sentence ever forming remind me of my visual record of litva, splashes of color against various fields of white, though snow is never entirely totally white. there is a strong longing in me to write something very long (a book) very slowly, working with many words whose meanings i do not know. the book of kharms’ poems is open beside me, but every time i read some of the very short poems i feel like i am riding a very bumpy bus or train. he is a poet of superlatives and also comic rhymes? the poetry seems very external and performative to me. but the level of the russian is much more accessible, like spoken word poetry. everyday conversation.

maybe to take responsibility for litva is too strong an expression. what i meant is that you had a very good idea, you acted on that idea, and the result was two weeks of time together for us and even though there was more cold and snow than you expected, the days there were very good, were they not? my idea was for you to come here, and i do not think you would have rested here. although there is no snow here. it is about 10 degrees c. but the city is very dark, old buildings, but painted with scrawls and scrawls with hooligan slogans. i was very much impressed by this when i first came back here tuesday morning. maybe it is not so safe to go door to door with spaghetti sauce promotions. maybe there is no choice in the matter. always there is no choice in the matter. when i went to the market, tuesday, i bought package of ground beef and an onion, and i have pasta, but no tomato mix, now thanks to the surprise promotion, i know what i will make for dinner tonight. i am reminding you of how uneventful my life is now, painters sanding in the hallway, and in the evening, free packages of spaghetti sauce. these are perfect conditions for either writing poetry or doing nothing, both activities at which as you know i am very skilled. yes, you are right, i will write you regardless of whether you read my letters, as i enjoy the time that i am writing you, though often i imagine that you do read them. i am not thinking anymore about fingerprints, though the article i read to you has provoked much discussion in the “world” i refer to sometimes as “english.” for the curiosity though, can you tell me when (what year?) russian govt. removed the 5th question, the Jewish identification, from the passport?

i miss you

06.02.04

thit-that here-there

dear zhen,

i thought i had woke up too late for breakfast as i looked at my watch which i have not set to poland time yet and now with the computer on i see that it is 9:30 so you see i am still on the palangas time-rhythm and without breakfast and my coffee is my coffee only. yesterday i went to yet another supermarket complex and found a portable cd player made in warsaw for half the price of all the sony, jvc, panasonic etc products. also i found a recording of arvo part (much of my writing has been written while listening to this composer from estonia, and seeing vilnius reminded me very much of the music landscapes. there are also sounds in the hall of the painting kind, so today i think is a day for the earphones, if not more walks around lodz. it is so warm here that i may need to buy an iron to press my shirts which for the past three months have been worn beneath worn-out sweaters, and the heavy sweater i bought in palangas may not even be needed now.

now. tepyer (forgive phonetic spelling) (that is how i would pronounce it). the piece of writing i sent you (one writes beginnings and ends of beginnings, more than anything as trying to sound my way into sustained writing, and the kind of writing i can return to around the demand of teaching tasks) what was important to me yesterday was that the page had ended on the word, now, (teraz, which i was looking at one a page of polish writing, and i actually did look up in your dictionary the russian equivalent (that is the reason for all the equal signs, this illusion that there are equal signs, and yet there are sometimes) and i found of course sei chas (in polish it is czas) (more or less “hour” but of course something much more) and also i found “tepyer” and paging through Kharms i found “netepyer” and this is the poem that is attached to this letter and which i would like to ask for your help with. as an example of how impossible translation is, here is a version of first 7-8 lines:

This is not this.
That is that.
This is not that.
That is not that is not.
All that’s left is either that or not that.
It’s all either that or not that.
What’s not that and not this, that’s not this and not that.
What’s this and that, that in itself is ITSELF.
What self itself, that might be that, yes, nor this, or this yes not that.

i wouldn’t recommend reading the english against the russian, it will make you feel cross-eyed (an expression when both eyes meet towards the middle of the nose). so how can i interest you in this poem (the russian language one). it appears to me to be a very serious and playful philosophical poem, not about ideas, but about all the thought that language does in its simplest forms, and the russian etot, to, tyt and tam are not equivalent to the english this, that, here and there are they? by the way, why does Kharms use only the neutral form of etot (eto) throughout the poem. i also very much like this poem for the linguistic reality, you may even remember me asking you about etot since i used it all the time, in fact i think i know this word (which in my mind is always said, eta) as well as any in english. this one and that one. it can mean both, yes? as tyt can mean both here and there? in english, this is never that, and here is never there. the boundaries around these words are severe (as so much else in word-meaning in english). and do you know, even though i called you a “broken record” i very much appreciate your daily satires on the english language, its poverty so to speak, though to call english “poor” is to give it more dignity than it deserves. but i won’t draw any larger conclusions, only i wanted you to know that working, in writing, i share your suspicion of english, what might be called the domination of semantic limits. this is what i understand you are poking fun at, the absence of words in english to express what you are thinking. it is not a question of whether or not you know the words, or are the words simply not there? and if the words are not there, how can the thought be there?

what is thought anyway, that is what Kharms is writing about in Not Now. (Only, Netepyer would never be said in Russian as in English it could be said Now? No, not now. For this, in Russian, “sei chas” would be used, yes? Once in a library in Chita i was asking for help and the librarian said “sei chas” which i understood to mean, Yes, I will help you now (though of course not absolutely immediately). In the essay about Moscow in one of the two volumes by Walter Benjamin in your flat he writes about “sei chas.” Kharms is not writing about “sei chas.” He is writing about “tepyer.” Is “netepyer” ever said in conversation or writing for that matter, or is it an act on Kharms part of negativity (the negative, in writing, is not merely to say no, but to cancel the meaning of a word).

in english, tsvyo can mean all or everything and there’s a great difference between the weight of the two words. the idea that you can say tsvyo in russian and mean, grammatically, “is that all?” or “there is nothing more” reminds me also of the excess of grammatical particles which english uses and which makes it a very fast-sounding language, but one that also requires a lot of words which by themselves do not convey hardly any semantic content at all. as weights, eto and to, tyt and tam feel heavier to me than their english counterparts (not equivalents).

the help i am asking you for is not to translate! only for now, could you help me with the verbs in this poem? i only understand two or three. (i have marked in red the verbs i do not understand in the second copy of this poem in the attachment). most important, any thoughts that occur to you about expressions that are used with these simple words would be very helpful. for example, in english, “that’s that” means tsvyo, and i think somewhere there’s a line of my poetry, “and that that’s that” where the “that” is being used in three different grammatical functions. once i found a funny discussion of “that” in 18th century discussion of who, which and that (and do you remember you’re going to the dictionary when i explained that who and that are equal, equivalent?) kto could never be used for etot, yes? in one sense, such words are called demonstratives, and they remind us of the pointing nature of language (like trying to talk to someone in a kiosk in another language) and as we are told as children, it is impolite to point. Designation, in poetry, is a difficult problem. Something more, the ‘thing-in-itself’ (this comes from Kant, so Kharms is very self-consciously working with a philosophy theme, though the poem sounds more to me like Wittgenstein, and i say this not to sound “learned” but to emphasize how the poem is a very serious poem about the operations of meaning in language and that it does this by being playful.

i would recommend simply reading the russian and not thinking about it and asking yourself whether you enjoy the sound and the word play and does the poem heighten your awareness about simple words that are used every day and just how complex they are?

obviously, i will not be able to write such requests for your help every day once classes get started for both of us, but i am more certain now after listening to your paraphrase of some of the Zabolotsky that Z. is far too romantic for the needs of my own work, and i like the pull (magnetic attraction) that Kharms’ poetry has, as though it is pulling me into Russian.

So, eto-to, tyt-tam!

Once more (and i repeat myself because i am uncertain) the help i am asking you for is not for a single answer but more of the kind of beginning of a continuing “push” and “pull” between Russian and English, reading Daniel Kharms. This is what i would like to write to you about in the next five months (yes, it is too long of a time). Not every day, we will both be too busy, but if i can write to you questions and thoughts about a very clever Russian poet who was killed in 1942 (his wife, Esther, in 1943–and they were both in their early 30s!) over the next five months, we will be doing something together very much like walking for miles and miles in the snow (did you know, Jenya, that poetry is my “snow”?) Besides, how could we have known that we would find two volumes of writing by him in Palangas? A fortuitous accident, if I may sound like a professor for a moment, which i do not care to sound like.

(p.s. in polish to go shopping is zakupy i.e., za kupit – for buying – though “y” is always pronounced like Russian “i”.)

bye

07.02.04

generosity

dear zhen

once again i am awake at 9:30 and wishing you were here to have coffee with me. to feel this physically connected to the time-rhythm of palangas, and for once a time-rhythm not only my own, but ours, makes me feel something worse than before, and maybe that is the difficulty you alluded to yesterday. now every morning i wake up into the absence of the two weeks, and how am i made to feel this absence, by the persistence of the time-rhythm. also, there is no snow here, and this morning especially, strong wind and rain.

the toleration deadline is not until march, yes? there was another deadline, for a conference publication in the spring, did i miss that? in my mind (not a very clear one) both deadlines (dates) exist somewhere in the spring, so i still have february to think about them, except that now it is februrary, and hardly even early february! the first or second week of february, now i know where i am, in the first or second week of february, when is the deadline for larissa’s conference? after two months, i should even be able to speak a little russian at the conference, which, though you yourself would never say so, is very much appreciated.

do you know what i like to imagine? that my teaching in tomsk was successful, especially among the tomsk faculty (not only the classes you arranged but also the series of classes in glavne corpus) that i am even missed sometimes (please don’t laugh) and it would be very much appreciated if i could return to teach there. my classes were very good with the faculty, as i was able to encourage them to speak a lot and with confidence, though still using the needed materials, like fce. there is at least something very direct and objective and concrete about such teaching, and i am strangely dissatisfied with the prospect of teaching more culture and literature. yes, you see, i am never satisfied. never content about anything. there is a strange english word. with the accent on the first syllable, we are talking about what is in a book or a glass or any container (the table of contents makes the book sound like a box) and with the accent on the second syllable, we are talking about an emotional state, something like happiness. So, contentment can refer to how one feels, especially after a good meal, but you could never use contentment or contented when referring to the contents of a book. That content is always only content. Either singular or plural, content and contents, that is the only change the noun allows. Is the other content, the second-syllable-stress content, a noun or a verb. Sometimes i am very interested in the area between the noun and the verb in english. Are you content there, in your job? Is this question is asked, then content is being used as a verb, but if we read a title like the translated one by Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, then we are reading a noun. There are Discontents and Malcontents in english, but no Contents (at least as long as we are placing the stress on the second syllable).

for my toleration paper, i think i will write about Jenya’s toleration of my letters to her. We will make an experiment. How many do you print out to read later, how many do you immediately delete, and what is the motor-neural-threshold of intolerance when you read these sentences by this foreigner? about Kharms, if we could work with this poem or that once in a while, very slowly (it is so important to read slowly and think slowly when working with poetry, the effect is almost never total, never about the whole) it would help a great deal with my work in general with russian. even if we did not refer to Netepyer for a while, and you were to write me a little about etot and to, tyt and tam, that would be a beginning. for the russian verbs, even if you could give me their infinitive forms, makes it easier to refer to in the dictionary. the tenses all seem to me to be past tense, yes? and bog is god, of course. here of course the equal sign fails. there must be entire clusters of words and word-sounds around this word in russian, the only one i have is the folktale, tri bogatria. now there is sunlight in my window, so this afternoon maybe i will go to the food store, as i have only beets and carrots and three eggs left from shopping earlier in the week. i also need a haircut. the painters are gone. yesterday evening the doorbell rang and i did not answer it. in the afternoon to escape the sound of the painters i went walking and zakupy and found a large used polish dictionary for 18 zl. (about 5 dollars). most of the dictionaries were new and expensive, about 100 zl. and logically, english to polish rather than polish to english. i was content (stress on second syllable) to visit so many bookstores. i forgot to mention that the polish cd player i found was only 149 zl. (about 40 dollars) and the only other ones were all 299 zl. and higher. i mention this because though i do not pay much attention upon it, despite the visible high availability of consumer products, all the sony, jvc and panasonic (japanese and american products) the prices are quite high compared to at least the u.s., and especially in relation to average income. so the effect is that stores are built, filled with products, and no one can buy them. the system operates only on the logic that stores must be built and filled with products, but it cannot tolerate lack of sales or low sales. the large shopping center i went to was at the end of a busline only 15 mins. from here, in old industrial district, and almost empty, like what is called a ghost town in english. as if someone from the u.s. looked at a map of the city and designed a shopping center based on the u.s. culture of the suburb, when here everyone goes as if drawn by a magnet to the main street, or high street in british english, and those shops, though more expensive, are always crowded.

enough though about city spaces this morning. i hope you do not have to work very hard or very late today, i remember at least that it is a saturday, and it does not make me very content to think that you must work on saturdays.

bye

07.02.04

Tzvetayeva note

dear zhen

i know it is 19:32 in your city and you have left or should have left by 19:19 and no later! but in the middle of reading this afternoon i found a reference to a quotation by Tsvetayeva where she write, “all the poets are Jews” and why i mention this is that the quotation is from the book by Jacques Derrida that i found for you in russian at the bookstore in tomsk, in english, Writing and Difference. the page of the english citation is p. 132, though the essay that the quotation appears in is not given. maybe Tsvetayeva is in the index. i just thought you would be interested, and thinking, also, how strange Kharms must appear to you in relation to Tsvetayeva. it is a quiet day here, alternating rain and sun, suddenly shifting skies

i miss you

bye

08.02.04

Ostranenye

there is
there must there has to be
there has been there was
there shall be there is going to be
there will be there has been
there was there is there was and there
will be what there was
when what there is and has
that been what there was and what is it
that it is when there was what it is not

what there
there is
that there
was and there
was that what
that is the that was

there is that there is
there was that that was
there is that and this
is that what there was
what was that and what
is this that will be
what that was when it
was what is that was

__________

dear zhen

i found this piece of writing i must have written a month or so ago
and it might suggest my interest in Netepyer’ though it is typical of
things that i write when just trying to get my fingers moving on the
keyboard and resort to the “rivets” (grammatical particles) and their
repetition just to try to hear the language, which is always a great
difficulty. i can’t make the kind of claim for such a piece of writing
as this as the quotation from the Kharms introduction does for
Netepyer’ and the danger of all commentary is that ideas are
substituted for the physicality of the poetry itself, and it is always
verbally physical and material or it is nothing at all. Kharms is
simply more readable for me at this my present elementary stage of
Russian. Please, I’m not asking you to like his poetry. Though I guess
I am asking you to write about the Russian language, even if only a
few verbs at a time, and really, I would be very happy to write only
about eto and to, tyt and tam. At least to and tam are the same in
Polish. But are they really, in conversation, the opposites claimed by
the introduction that you quoted? Or do they form opposites in the way
that they’re used in Netepyer’? In the book the reference to
Tsvetayeva that I sent to you earlier today: “-that _complementarity_
which comes out of the opposition, which _is_ opposition”. So this and
that, here and there are dependent on one another for their meaning
and their function in the language. I won’t go on for now any more
about this.

In the attached page is a translation i did tonight from a small book
in polish i found a few days ago, Spirala. it’s a translation by Ewa
Fiszer of a novel in French of about 100 pages by Anne Philipe. The
French novel was published in 1971, and the translation, 1973. This
indicates to me the closeness of Polish and French literary culture
before the current period of Americanization, and I am attracted to
the double location of the writing/translation by two women, as well
as to the form of the writing (the number 27 is the page number from
the book and this is what some of the pages look like, i.e., not a
traditional narrative kind of writing). I know you do not like
descriptions of nature, but as I was translating it and the September
reference began to emerge, I thought you might enjoy the thought of
September, so, well …

You wrote that you do not feel especially comfortable with the kind of
writing that apparently my letters are asking of you, so I would ask
that nothing that I write to you and especially about poetry appear as
a demand, either immediate or eventual. I never, never, never view
poetry as work, like a task or something I must do, as it is simply
something that I do to stay alive (your “I’m still alive”). If
anything that I write to you about in the form of a request makes you
feel uncomfortable, I would hope that you would simply not respond.
It’s very simple to refuse. To say no I don’t feel like doing this. If
you think that I would mind, then I worry that I haven’t communicated
with you very well about my attitude towards writing and language and
trying to be alive in it. My mind it is just something to do instead
of doing nothing. At least for me, I refuse for it to be work. You
know, don’t you, that I hate work? Always have, always will. As they
say.

But Esther is a Jewish name, yes? That was the name of Daniel Kharms’
wife (1909-1943). Unfortunately, “pervaya zhena Xapmca” means first
wife Kharms, doesn’t it? I wonder what she would have written, if the
thought of the possibility of writing ever occurred to her. Would she
have written like Ewa Fiszer translating Anne Philipe?

bye

08.02.04

buterfly wings

dear zhen

“one of the many foci imaginarii that like butterflies, do not survive the moment when a pin is pushed through their body to fix them in place”

one line from the book i have been reading, and does it remind you of anything? i think i am a clock, as i am once again awake (out of bed, as you know, it’s not the same thing, one wakes up and falls back to sleep, rolls over, lies awake, sentient, but not active, not thinking, then falls back to sleep, wakes up, etc) though i am not dreaming as intensely as in palangas, in your absence. it is likely that we were both sleeping more lightly there, aware of the presence of one another, aware, almost, of the difficulty of the vanishing presence (the element of the time-bound, the unit of time).

in the book i have been reading i have found some passages on toleration which i will not quote now (too long) but which indicate to me that the inspiration for the title of the Tomsk conference (in Western discourse anyway) has its origin in what is called “liberalism” (always said to be between extremes, though as you have said, it’s likely that extremes mean different things in West and in Russia). in a way, this guides me a little, as in the book i was reading yesterday, well, it says, “the mask of toleration (which often means: you are abominable, but I, being generous, shall let you live).”

so the concept of toleration should come under critique, at least according to this book. if i write about something literary, then i will be able to avoid the problem. the essence of course is to appear to say something when you are saying nothing, and not to give offense to anyone. that is how the butterfly survives. do you think they would have found a place in z’ “suffering of the animals”?

there is no rain today and no food in my flat except for one bowl of kasha so i must go out into the wide world and obtain something for my refrigerator. i will delay a haircut for one more week as i do not have to publicly appear anywhere, though i will begin going to the university tomorrow to order books from the library, and find out about my schedule, etc. perhaps then i will begin to feel a little as you do now, which i sense (in the sense of having an intuition) is difficult for you. is it possible to speak of estrangement from one’s surroundings?

Ostrananenie i know as the phonetic form a concept that comes to literature from Russian formalists who wrote about ‘making strange’ or ‘de-familiarization’ of the artwork. What interests me is that strana’ means country or nation or homeland in Russian, yes? and then foreigner means Иностранец and stranger means Чужеземец, yes? both words appear to be rooted in country/land where stranger and foreigner, even immigrant and migrant have no such traces in english. such meaning-traces always mean something and nothing, and i have never really done enough writing in this direction, which tends to be circular, one goes around and around among “definitions” which lead to other “definitions” and eventually the words dissolve as well as the desire to use them.

i am sending this letter a little after 10:00 my time in the hope that if you have already gone home (which i hope you have) these words may greet you at the beginning of your monday. did i tell you that every word you write to me is very dear, and i can read Russian if you wish, but only one or two words at a time, please.

i miss you. bye.

08.02.04

we were sung

Мы говорим бог дунул. ?
We say that god breathed ?

Мы смотрели но не видели. ?
We saw what could not be seen ?

dear zhen, maybe this is the last note from me today. that you are reading a book of the letters and diaries is strangely moving to me. why. why not. one word at a time. one line a day. the other which is always only the other language requires that we read very slowly, and sometimes simply stare. do you know this word “stare” is vexing to me now. the hooligans scrawls on the walls read: HOOLIGANS STARE LODZ. but i cannot find the word in the dictionary. there is hardly a building in the city without hooligan scrawls. yes, tv was interesting in palangas. especially the russian tv news coverage of the young russian fascist (you said he was saying anti-jewish slogans). when on the german tv channel i heard the english translation of the auschwitz film, the language about the “selections” was very important to me. you know this is a feature now of international travel, at least in u.s. you are randomly selected for baggage check. it is the experience of the ‘random selection’ which is terrifying, but only a little. very nice people in uniforms assure you that your name came up at random in the computer. now, you will laugh at me. i know you are laughing. what does an American know about Random Selection? do you know that i wound up obliquely defending the philosopher whose fingerprint article i read to you and which you found so amusing? yes, Westerners are spoiled. how can my ‘random selection’ (after all, it was only my baggage they checked) compare to your experience of the strip search by russian women border guards? we see words and we see world differently. my mind, this is very lovely. what is worse, extreme cruelty (neludy) or smothering affection. rather, smothering affliction, yes? affliction? what do i know of affliction? (suffering). today a line leaped out at me in french from the novel we found in vilnius bookshop:

Tuez-nous, tuez-nous donc! Nous voulons nos droits.

Kill us, kill us then! We demand our rights.

You see, the philosophy book i am reading (not the French novel) is writing about the emptying out of the Enlightenment (in french, the Light) as part of the postmodern axiom that the Enlightenment dream of the perfectability of society (the idea that it is possible to make anything in the world better than it is now, and i’m thinking about “eto ne to” here! – potato pancakes or Collectivized Agriculture, the kholkhoz, yes?) and all the words in this sentence are not as powerful as the french ones, the emptying out of the French Revolution which somewhere in my writings remembering a passage from a German philosopher translated into English, that it was like the Ninth Symphony, its Light fell everywhere – one wonders what sharpness of affliction (glint) of the sun on the guillotine – here, though, in the French, Kill us, kill us then! We demand our rights (the scene is the arrival of gendarmes and military to suppress a miner’s strike) and the verbal blow thrown by two old women, crones, babushkas, witches – if you will, i know you are fond of this word – but the French quotation sounds so Russian, don’t you think? Kill us! We demand to treated like human beings! Every hour i think now of your pausing on the suffering of the animals in z. and my watching footage of the destruction of chickens in Thailand and Vietnam. What is terrible, really terrible, is that i experience extreme pain when watching bags of chickens being thrown in a ditch. really i do, it hurts me a lot. it’s very hard to say why. your story about Sasha’s dog (you see i do not forget the name of the boy who looks at Jenya with such adoring eyes) reminds of the Bulgakov – yes, a good film, not the same kind of film as the German one, but the scene of the peasant folk song (the Russian chanson – it won’t go away) is one of those rare moments of looking and thinking and being glad to be alive with you.

bye

p.s. I will be very happy to help you with translating your father’s textbook this summer, if you need my help.

09.02.04

snowfall

dear zhen

hardly surprising that there is still more snow that began last night and has left this morning trees coated, dusted, painted, almost, with snow, though this snow, like “eto ne to” is not the snow of Litva nor the quiet and calm of walking with you beside the sea.

today is my first day of work, so called, so i am awake earlier than usual, and there is a destination other than this exercise or that, whatever it is that the work of teaching is. there is still with me the impression of your voice when i heard you teaching once from the hallway of building 1.

at the moment, there doesn’t seem to me to be a sound equivalent for eto ne to, maybe that’s not it? or, what you are saying, that in the expression there is a content (a meaning) unequal to its parts. though it is very slow work, looking up each word in the dictionary, especially of such particles, always results in an attention to bits and pieces and not the expression that a group of words forms, and most of our use of language depends on just such groups of word forms.

my belief is that there is more attention to and feeling for poetry in writing about eto ne to than all the prefaces and introductions and academic articles in the world. their language always sends us to the abstraction, the idea, and the aspect of the poem, or any imaginative writing for that matter, which speaks to the senses, disappears.

how can i describe the snow this morning other than to write to you that there is snow, the first snow since my returning here, and i cannot see “this” snow for the memory and wishing for “that” snow which we experienced together? if i were writing this sentence in russian, would i use “etot” and “to” in the same way? how would i indicate the difference between the two snows?

if you read the thick book by Kharms then you are more applied than i am, since i do not (cannot) read in such a way. my notebook is always open and always i get lost in it. sometimes it seems i can never finish a book, or at least experience a book completely. the reading always goes somewhere else.

how can i write to you about how important the smallest passage from your reading is, and that one’s reading does not have to have anything to do with ideas? the sensuous impression, or the insight (which is so often the result of the glance) and the comment. now, reading, whatever the reading, there is no classroom, no authority, no question of correctness.

is it possible to be entirely free in reading? how i am curious how you experience the letters and diaries of Kharms, as it is an experience i am outside of. for that matter, i am even outside your experience of eto ne to. though i think that i understand it now, after our writing about it. see how slow and cautious and patient the work of writing is? there is no end to it (more infinite than the sky over the winter baltic sea) and nothing i can write to you about the expression, that is that, can unite our experiences of our two languages, their indivisibility? meaning, i think, that no language can be divided? that doesn’t sound right.

i am trying to write to you this morning that it is not the translation that i am looking for. rather the dialogue between us about the two languages. with the help of one poet or another. as i said, Kharms is more accessible to me now than the lyricism of z. or tsvetayeva or mandelstam, for that matter. as for life details, poets are no different than any other human being, and often even worse. though Esther is a beautiful name, don’t you think?

still, i doubt whether Kharms’ letters and diaries are the same experience of reading as Kafka’s. the philosophy book i have been quoting from (the butterflies passage) writes at length about Kafka, and i’ll try to summarize these pages sometime this week. can i remember a line from your writing? the many human beings that are like butterflies dried and collected and waiting to be blown away by the changing world, wind, in polish wind is wiatr, and i am – cannot help but see the word for wind as water – and this seeing double is also some of the work that poetry does with language.

i don’t believe i’ve answered your question yet about czy, since i can’t answer it, i don’t know. it is used to form a question. i should like to write a book of such simple questions. have you any questions to ask me today, zhen? Ne’tepyer? at least there is no effort to describe there, in the language of that poem. it does not pretend that language is natural, or is even capable of writing the word “snow” and saying what that is. though nouns are different sometimes. snow and shnyeg are among the oldest words, from sanskrit, so if we only used these two nouns, there is a closeness (not equal sign) that can never exist between eto ne to and that is that.

this letter is a bit longer than i wish to allow myself to write to you, and please let me know when my letters become to long or confusing to read. they may very well be confusing because my thoughts about language are not clear (if there is any truth, you write), so, how can one’s thoughts ever be clear if the truth is never existing? when i write to you i do not think that i am trying to be clear so much as to express – not always the same as communicate – to you how i feel about poetry.

bye

10.02.04

more and more snow

dear zhen

if look and see are not synonyms, what about watch and view? i learned смотреть from tv, and the sense seemed to be “watch on this channel for this program” etc. and can видеть be used for view? (polish widok for view). what is the difference for you between rude and crude? rude mostly refers to manners (social behavior) as in a shop or on the bus, etc. i can’t think of an example where it has been used for literature. crudeness, though, can come in many forms: lack of grammaticality or refusal of it, vocabulary (words that are used in the street rather than literary words), and forms of address (the more someone’s writing directly addresses the reader, the more likely an hostile relation is imagined). or, i wonder, for you is there a kind of meanness in kharms’ personal writings? asking these questions, it’s just out of curiosity, and i’m not asking you to like kharms for my sake, but any descriptive gestures are very helpful to me. could you give me an example of a “rude” passage (without translating it). the attention to the particles, very small units of language, suggests to me that one might expect an element of crudeness, or primitiveness, or brutality in his poetry. i am extremely interested in this.

the philosophical book that i’ve been quoting from recently is by Zygmunt Bauman, a polish philosopher who teaches in England. he is the epitome of civility and something of a conservative, but a better writer than many so-called radical theorists. here is one such quote:

“the spectacle of brutality that is the mark of the brutalized”

following this, understanding this, reading poets, i never ask of a poet that they be any less brutal in their language than the shape of the world they lived in. i rather detest politeness in poetry, and one attraction to me of mandelstam is that he is never polite. paradoxically, he is rarely ever brutal in his critical writings, and i feel that i can refer to them in a way that i can’t refer to the poetry, since the critical writings have been so well translated. i wonder if you share my intuition about his poetry. the intensely high lyrical level of the language there, of course, would remove the poetry from too close descriptive contact with people and the words they use in conversation and the daily brutality that is visited there.

my first day back at work went very well, i found a lot of books, spoke a little with a polish colleague (in english, of course), saw a student from one of my most difficult courses who smiled very warmly at me, and i worked for about 4-5 hours returning home around 17:00 in snowstorm so severe i didn’t think the bus would make it. strong blowing winds and snow, a lot of snow. tomorrow, perhaps, in the evening, i will work a little more with Ne’tepyer. you see how very slow i am. you are reading an entire book and i will read a single poem for a week. even if it is in english.

have you heard of a 19th century Russian philosopher, Lev Shestov? According to Bauman, he was a great inspiration to Sartre and Camus. lived in paris, wrote in russian. i haven’t had time to search yet on internet for information about Kharms in english, but my guess is that few readers on poetry in english know much about his work. so i am asking you in a way to share an interest with me, if and when you have the time. another quote from Bauman:

“to understand, as Wittgenstein suggested, is to know how to go on”

eto ne to

i now know exactly one expression in Russian. it’s quite fascinating to me that look and see in english are practically interchangeable. they just collocate with different groups of words, but as you say, to look is to see. they are one and the same action.

are there any similar expressions to eto ne to in Ne’tepyer using tyt or tam?

bye


10.02.04

lev shestov

“Hardly ever was a programme of such a retreat so blatantly spelled out as in the work of Russian-Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov, in his later life a professor at the Sorbonne and one of the pillars of religious existentialism. Branded with the stigma of a despised and resented minority, yet excelling in the very activity which the despising and resenting majority brandished as the sign of its superiority and excellence, having passed with flying colours all the entrance examinations and yet been refused entry to the academic world that defined itself as the guardian of the absolute, universal values and hence alien to all parochial difference, Shestov [Apofeosis bespochvennosti: Opyt adogmatischeskogo myshleniya (Apotheosis of Rootlessness: An Essay in non-Dogmatic Thought) (Paris, YMCA Press, 1971)] responded with a frontal assault against what was (as he set about to prove) an incurable parochiality of the very search for the absolute in general, and for the absolutely superior values in particular. The philosopher’s seach for the ultimate system, for complete order, for the extirpation of everything unknown and unruly – he declared – stems from the worship of firm soil and a secure home, and results in trimming down the infinite human potential. Such a search for the universal cannot but degenerate into a ruthless clamp-down on human possibilities. ‘The solid ground sooner or later escapes beneath man’s feet, yet man continues to live without ground or with but a shaky ground under his feet, and then he stops counting the axioms as truths and instead calls them lies.’ The bitter experience of a stranger chased away from the door at which he knocked comes out but thinly veiled from Shestov’s own philosophical programme:

“The settled man says: ‘How can one live without certainty about the day to come, how can one sleep without a roof over his head!’ But an accident threw him out of his home forever, and he spends his nights in the woods. He cannot sleep: he is afraid of wild animals, of his own brother the vagabond. In the end, however, he entrusts his life to contingency, starts living the vagabond’s life and even, perhaps, sleeps quietly at night.”

The task of philosophy, in sharp contrast to the entire philosophical tradition, is ‘to teach men to live in uncertainty’; ‘not to calm down, but to disturb’. ‘Everywhere and with every step, on each or without any occasion, with or without reason, it is necessary to ridicule the most firmly accepted judgements and to state paradoxes. And then – one will see what happens.’

[Doesn’t this sound like what Kharms is doing in his poems?]

Elsewhere in this book, a lengthy footnote:

“Born Lev Isaakovich Schwartzmann in 1866 in Kiev; died in 1938 in Paris. A brilliant student of law and mathematics in the universities of Kiev and Moscow, author of several widely read, discussed and acclaimed books in literary criticism and philosophy, he nevertheless, as a Jew, was barred access to Russian academic life and failed to secure a proper academic post. He left Russia in 1922 for France. There he acquired fame as one of the most original philosophers writing and publishing in the country and was offered a Sorbonne chair. Admired by many (notably Camus, D.H. Lawrence and W. Gombrowicz), highly esteemed even by those who found his acid, corrosive philosophy unpalatable (notably Edmund Husserl), he remained a solitary thinker, fitting none of the established philosophical schools (though sometimes, erroneously, identified with the existentialist movement, and claimed by the existentialists themselves, on the strength of his lifelong preoccupation with Kierkegaard). Nicolai Berdyavev noted the ‘astounding independence’ of Shestov’s thought ‘from surrounding currents of the time’ (Tipy religioznoj mysli v Rosii (The types of religious though in Russia) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1989). He had only one true friend and acknowledged follower – a Frenchman of Rumanian-Jewish extraction, Benjamin Fondane, who was murdered in a German concentration camp in 1944.

The settled, the secure, the sheltered, the native – Shestov insisted – can keep their brittle order only when power-assisted. Their order is a fortress, heavily armed: with the principle of contradiction, with laws of logic proclaimed universally binding, with inquisitors, gaolers and executioners (Shestov did not live long enough to add: with Auschwitzes, with Gulags). Truths which need such a protection cannot be worthy of protection (conversely, real truths may to without consent of men); like Nietzsche’s Apollonian harmony, they cannot be effectively protected either. The powers they must to protect themselves testify to both the illegitimacy and the futility of their pretentions. It is, on the contrary, the feeble, the weak, the devoid of protection who are bearers of the saving truth.

What the truths of the settled try in vain to hide is not, however, the pre-human perpetuity of the pagan forest, but the humanity of Jerusalem. Humanity means limitlessness of possibilities. It is the creative openness of human existence, its irrevocable non-finality, its capacity to break through any walls, however tough and heavily armed, with the coercive forces enlisted by Athens – the principle of contradiction in union with absolutist states and religions – aim to contain in practice and pre-empt in theory. When Spinoza seeks knowledge sub specie aeternitatis vel necessitatis, when his successors declare such knowledge the only one worth pursuing and possessing, when Leibniz declares that eternal truths entered the mind of God without asking His permission – the divine potency of man in mutilated and incarcerated. The forces of Athens are about harmony and clarity, but also about constraint and brutal force. They are set to extirpate everything they cannot absorb and hold in their power: the search for absolute knowledge means pursuit of absolute power.

*

The footnote actually continues for another two paragraphs. What attracts me is the writing from within the condition of powerlessness.

p.s. I hope this doesn’t bore you.

p.s. Thank you for the Kharms urls. I will look them up later tonight. And I will try to write you again before going to sleep.

bye

11.02.04

Verbs

dear zhen

have you thought yet that i write you in the morning because i wake up and miss you. that is what has happened since palangas. more snow last night. the painters are back sanding in the hallway outside my door and the sound is such that they might be sanding my forehead. and it is only 7:30 in the morning. my good luck is that today (this morning) i must go to the passport office to obtain my last item of legitimation here, a temporary residence card good until the end of September (a very legitimate looking plastic card with photograph and my address issued by Warsaw) so at least i have somewhere to go to escape the painters.

last night i downloaded several of the selections of translations and i haven’t had time to look at them yet though i could not help having this thought glancing at the poems in passing: that translation always reproduces how the translator knows poetry, and the general tendency is to make as simple an object as possible. the tendency is always to make as simple an object as possible. we don’t what poetry to disturb us too much (disturb is about the only word that had any life for me in the quotation i sent you about Lev Shestov, though i forget the sentence in which it occurred – only single words remain in my mind as residues of what i read – single words or groups of words – why i don’t what to forget “eto ne to” yet) and poetry, like homelessness, is disturbing.

i wanted to write (thought about writing) in response to your first note yesterday (in british call this a “quip”) that water is often said to be dirty, but no word in writing ever is. if the word is able to exist at all, and most words do not. most of what we mistake for literature is simply the substitution of words for what cannot be named – whatever it is that keeps us alive – sustains us – and i can read 90 pages of poems and find only 9 words that breathe with any kind of life. this sounds very severe and i think you will make fun of it.

i only know that i have never written poetry to make it do any work than be the words that i needed (or, without me, words which simply needed) to exist. once in my life i make a mistake about poetry, since i thought that the writing of poetry (poetry itself) (what Ne’tepyer means by CAMO?) had a belonging somewhere, that writing poetry was an activity that one did as part of the activity of belonging anywhere. i no longer believe this. what is disturbing about even remembering a religious philosopher like Shestov is that we do live our lives according to beliefs. often we would have a problem if we tried to say what those beliefs are. the action of “being alive” is not a meaningless action if we try to think as much as possible about those who were not given this choice.

dirty? once can use the word obscenity, or profanity, or more objectively, viscosity. the texture of oil is said to be “viscous” (always visually close to “viscious” in my mind, or eye, my mind’s eye), the profane almost but cannot help but to suggest its opposite, the sacred or holy, and obscene? does it have an opposite? it is a word that is often used in censorship. no one knows what it means. very often, though, it appears that the very clean and clear language is truly obscene for all that it refuses to allow into the language field – this is the disturbance of all public broadcasting language and the political language which exists only within this media sphere.

so, i am guess i am for messiness, disorder, everything and anything that doesn’t belong – one of the most harmful ideas about poetry is that every word had to belong to its proper place in the poem. who can read with such severity. poetry is against all such discipline. poetry is about trying to find just the right group of words which satisfy an impulse to use words at all. that might require ten words or one million or more words. the number of words depends on the impulse. this is where we are most human, in our need to use language – and to search (look for – add the preposition and something new happens to the verb) for … for … life? who would want to stop looking for their life? (looking for and looking at at completely two different verbs) so when i read other poets, i know i am not reading the life they passed across very briefly and with great difficulty when i read for the impression of the whole to answer the category: what is it? or, is it important, or good?

maybe i am a very poor reader. i only read for what remains with me as a residue in the day or cycle of days when i am alive enough to read poetry at all.

sending this letter after your call – again, i miss you

bye

12.02.04

sweet nothings

dear zhen

yesterday i saw something that might make you smile: two people were pulling a space heater on a sled on a sidewalk without any snow on it. there was snow all around, a lot of snow, only some of the sidewalks are without snow from the sand and salt, and the sight and the sound of the sled being pulled with the space heater roped to it on its way to the repair shop (how else do you take a space heater to the repair shop – are you supposed to carry it? take it on the bus with you? now that there are no horse-pulled carts) amused me (not amazed me) though you are perhaps amazed that i have been amused. it is not amusing that the painters are again at work so early though the philosophy of affliction should help me to welcome them, the noise (din, really, that is the better word) and the idea that perhaps they are not sanding to prepare the walls for painting but sanding so to get rid of the walls altogether. maybe they are not sanding the walls at all. maybe they are erasing the walls!

my first cup of coffee is finished and that is a great disappointment. yesterday i drank a cup of coffee (two, actually) at a cafe that reminded me of the coffee at the hotel in palangas, my mind that was very good coffee, not to mention the coffee at our cafe. my own coffee is adequate, and after two years of bitter instant coffee in chita and tomsk, i should not complain, but the coffee in palangas was really quite good. do you drink such coffee every morning? i think you must. you have settled one of the greatest problems in life. a good cup of coffee in the morning. are there any other problems? i am glad that you have your schedule now. i decided that i do not need to know my schedule until friday. yesterday they were not very nice to me at the passport office, though the officer who was rude to me is famous for her rudeness. it is the same rudeness (this word again) that you mentioned from the ones who work in the shops whose lives are so overwhelmingly impossible in russia that it is amazing (not amusing) that they respond at all to such a simple request as a loaf of bread or, even worse, the catastrophe of not giving someone exact change.

here, for any piece of paper money over 10 zl. the custom is to hold the piece of paper money up to the light for some time. it is a common custom, in all the shops. mass social superstition that a 50 zl or 100 zl (the cash machines all dispense 100 zl notes) simply cannot be real money. there is a thought here about the symbolic and the note of the currency, but i have forgotten what it is. the custom of “inspection” is curious to me, one, for the inefficiency (there are always long lines at the check out at every store) and two, such eyesight inspection could not detect counterfeit money anyway. so it is pure custom, superstition. it reminds me how traumatized the society has been in the past, though, as usual, i am probably overimagining. once again, from the book i’ve been reading (soon i will run out of quotations):

“‘Everyone knows that a native requires no special effort to conform to his country’s customs and habits of thought, whereas a foreigner gives himself away by his need to explain and understand not only complicated matters, but the simplest trifles, the thousand nothings that are said and done in every moment of daily life.’”

doesn’t this quotation give wonderful dignity to “eto ne to”? to read the poetry of another language for the simplest trifles, the thousand nothings in daily speech, which for the non-native, are as dense and mysterious as the greatest philosophical abstractions as life and death, and even, to make a writing from such trifles and such nothings, even, then, to make something out of all the nothings, that might be really something (as we say in english). really something means something extraordinary.

is the offer of larissa’s flat extraordinary? is the offer for the conference only? or for the summer? i remember that her flat was one of the options in september. would the rent be about 100 dollars a month? would you insist on leaving every evening at 9:00 or would the closeness to your flat mean that you could stay a little later. why do i ask these questions? because in september was the perfect place and time for writing, our visits and walks in the afternoon, dinner in the evening, and in the mornings, i would write, and the thought of two and half months makes me very hopeful. visits to your dacha on the weekend. walks and walks among gardens and flowers and forests, perhaps a visit to altai, though my mind you do not care to travel much.

and why “sir” so much or at all? you have found something new to irritate me with? it is one of the trifles in english which must sound hilarious to you, but to me it was a word force upon when i was very young, and i never said “sir” or “ma’am” to anyone without a world of hatred inside me (and you have to say “sir” and “ma’am” to everyone that your job forces you to wait on, like the people in the shops) so everytime you write “sir” i am reminded of the shops i escaped by reading and writing poetry. though one does not every escape the shops. now i am sorry that i am sounding like i am scolding you. for my mind you are having a lot of fun with this word, and i think you are also laughing at my letters, at the same time as you write that you enjoy them. if i am able to bring some enjoyment into your life by writing you this way, then it makes me feel quite good. and you?

bye

13.02.04

Crocodile

dear zhen,

from the ancient Popol Vuh no less:

…So these then are the deeds of Alligator in turn,
The first son of Parrot
“I am the maker of mountains,”
Said Alligator.
And so Alligator
Was bathing at the edge of the water
When there passed by
Four hundred sons,
Hauling a tree,
A post for their house.
Four hundred of them were walking along,
And they had cut
A great tree
For the cross-beam of their house.
And there came Alligator
And arrived where there were four hundred sons.
“What are you doing,
You boys?”
“It’s just a tree–
We can’t lift it.”
“Shoulder it.
I’ll carry it.
Where does it go?
What sort of use do you want from it?”
“It’s just the cross-beam
Of our house.”
“All right,”
He said then, etc.

so you see “croc-o-deal” has a long and respected history. nothing i do is ever not serious, i assure you. yesterday i re-read some of my letters to you after palangas and i think the fun you are having with “sir” has reason to it. but i don’t know how to write just a few words lightly, and so i try to write too much, and the writing begins to talk to itself, and i think this is what you are making fun of: the writing that is writing to itself.

Camo? yes?

yesterday was an eventful day. haircut and buying of a frying pan. now my hair is short enough that i will not need to have it cut for another two months and the irritation of dried-out hair and dried skin from the heat in the flat, winter heat, i’m sure you know the effect of this, one almost forgets what it’s like to have water in the air, humidity, the thickness of the air in summer which is so good for the human being, and as for frying pan, they are almost all like the one in your dacha that you would not let me cook with because of the scratch at the bottom, the problem of the thin teflon coating and how easy it is to scratch. i did find one that was not too expensive though i haven’t cooked with it yet. lately it has been too cold to cook in the kitchen (-12 c yesterday, so my sweater is getting good use) but when the weather nears zero i will treat myself to perogi po-russki, maybe even i will try potato pancakes. that is my great humorous memory of palangas, the night when we went to the pub and ate the large helpings of potato pancakes. i cannot remember but it does not seem that we spoke to one another while heating the large portions. i did notice that your wild mushroom sauce looked very “kuszna” but you did not offer me any. do you remember that evening as being especially funny? i mean our attention to our dishes, and the fact that they were so large we could not finish them.

i have two of my three syllabii written for my courses which begin next week. i’m putting my two seminars on a web space and put them there last night, then realized that i had designed the pages for my laptop screen and not for 800×600 resolution, so it will be another day or two until i can send you the web address. if you looked at them now they would be too large. also they are somewhat primitive. but i rather like the crude effect. i’m not sure that my students will. there has been such a pressure to make the web a seamless surface for advertising that the very simplicity of publishing word and image and the do-it-yourself aspect has been taken away. i have quite a good html editor which i found for free and it makes html code for both windows and unix-linux computers. i rather enjoy working with it, though i am very limited in what i can do.

so much for the latest news. i enjoy being away from the cnn variety, if you can believe it, even crocodile movies. today i go to the university for my schedule and to check out more books from the library with alligator poems in them.

bye

14.02.04

Re: sweet nothings

dear zhen

On Friday, February 13, 2004 9:06 AM you wrote:


> hi, how are you? i am sleepy, hungry and angry.

i am sleepy, half-hungry, and not angry.

the website for my two seminars is at:

http://www.geocities.com/lodzm6

what do you think?

tomorrow morning i am going to cracow to go to a bookstore. three hours by train there, 5-6 hours there, three hours return.

my classes are on tuesdays, thursdays and fridays.

work begins for me on tuesday, though monday i shall probably go to the university in case stray students from last semester for whom i still have not given them their signature are trying to find me.

it is after midnight, and really i am tired. can you tell?

will you be in the office Sunday. if yes, i will write you tomorrow evening when i return.

bye

16.02.04

surviving sites

dear zhen

after 11:00 now and i’ve finished reading for the day and re-working the first page of my website

https://hypobololemaioi.com

what do you think? it takes too much time to design these pages, and yet i’m never happy with the design of the page.

in the bookstore in cracow i found a book on hungarian, czech and polish modernist architecture which i bought for the photographs with the thought that i may begin to understand the buildings i see, not the recognizably antique ones, as in cracow (yes, it is beautiful – poland’s prague, which it is near) but the buildings that were built in the 20s and 30s and survived the war

another book i found was on the lodz ghetto, a chronicle from surviving journals, with many street names that still survive in lodz, so i can visit these streets in spring to see if any of the old buildings are still standing. lodz was apparently a warehouse for jews (german administrative zone) before sending them to the camps

one cannot help but wonder what the extent of the collaboration was among poles and germans, as in france

also, a recent and very competent looking colloquial polish grammar book with cassette

also, a book of correspondence between a poet and a typesetter

also, a theoretical book on architecture and a book of poems

when i look at pictures of buildings in architecture photos i think about web pages. there’s the possibility for an analogy here, or one that i’m just beginning to become conscious of.

i still don’t have one syllabus written, though i have a few more days to write it. tomorrow work begins (psychologically) as i will go to the university, though i have no classes until tuesday.

i did not write you today in the hope that you would stay home and you should on sundays. even if (especially if!) it is to lie in bed and read. such lack of activity is healthy.

thank you for not being upset at the absence of any letters on your sunday. as you may guess, i am sinking a bit into my reading-teaching frame of mind, which is not a cheerful one.

though i have almost one full shelf of books now, and that is a cheerful sight.

how are your friends with whom we dined once?

how is irina n.?

bye

16.02.04

tolerating monday

dear zhen

the morning coffee always makes feel very positive about the future of the world

so i am writing you a few words that will arrive in the middle of your day if only to invite or provoke a smile that i was thoughtful enough for a moment to send to you such words as these

and what sort of words are these? well, they are words very happy that their author is having his morning coffee and happier still that there is someone to read them. someone? now i am someone? only someone? the reader of these words may ask, this “someone” being one of those public discursive devices which makes reading all public discourse, cultural critique and philosophy, somewhat despairing – despairful would be the better word – though it’s not only not proper, it sounds awful, and you can add “-ing” to just about anything

so, the personal you, dear zh., who write to me twice on a day when i did not write at all – should i assume that you are in your office every – every? – Sunday?

today as tomorrow – for the entire week – i shall be more purposeful than i have had to be for the past two weeks and not having anything else to worry about, i am now worried about the effect on me of so much purposefulness – purposity? – not much fun to be had with suffixes this morning –

every time i think about toleration i become very intolerant. now it occurs to me that it is impossible for the philosophy of affliction to think about tolerance, as it is the position of such philosophy to always be grateful that one is still alive

in the practical world of objects and events, however, yesterday i understood that my new cd player uses too much battery power, so i shall have to look for a dc adapter. there is this very strong need lately for listening to music, and every time i try to listen to the radio i find about 10 minutes of music (yesterday some very old recordings of piano music – and i found myself listening to the scratches as though they were evidence of the record playing – the scratches on the record representing for a moment at least another historical period

it is a somewhat baleful project, don’t you think? walking around the streets of lodz trying to figure out whether this street or that street was a street down which masses of people were prodded on their way to the train or confined – partitioned – identified and defined and marked

administrative instruments and the object of that – administered populations – where is subjectivity in such a place, or situation? the spectacle of an administered population – so to write about being able to tolerate one’s being alive as an administered contingency – accident – anything can happen – your life can be subtracted at any moment – would be to investigate passivity?

this toleration theme is troubling me, as you can see

bye

17.02.04

22:12

dear zhen

thank you for your letters. i had a very amusing day. i woke up early
and after writing you as i wrote you i got ready to leave for the
university and when i got to the door downstairs to go outside it was
snowing and i turned around and went back to my flat and spent the day
reading, washing clothes, vacuuming and mopping the floor, and i even
cooked rice in my frying pan (the teflon makes the rice not stick, an
important problem with thin metal pots). such was the day, quiet and
domestic, and cheerful. strange to pass across so many moods. as a
result though i feel much more rested and ready to teach my one class
in the morning. my nerves are such lately that more than two or three
days of responsibility of making sense would be more than i would be
capable of doing. definitely i am in a better mood in the morning over
coffee and that is the better time to write you, though i am writing
you now shortly before 22:00 while drinking herbal tea which does not
make me happy. your letters do though, especially the one about the
roofs. i would like to work more and more with web design, doing the
most simple designs possible, as i mention, with some connection to
architecture. i only know that visually i am very moved by buildings.
much more so than by people, with one important exception. i think
that you are very moved by dogs and by long walks. with, i hope, one
important exception. the news, your news, about the dress-maker,
doesn’t it seem like not enough information? why would the visa be
more difficult? it doesn’t make sense. it is important to learn of
more people’s experiences. besides, if it is true, doesn’t it seem
intolerant? the more i think about this word, the less i am sure what
it means.

tomorrow morning i will have to pretend that i know what many words
mean, and this is difficult without becoming (or at least appearing)
pretentious. but i am glad to have a roof over my head. what is nice
about your attention to the photograph of the roof is that, maybe you
don’t know this, but it is my photograph. i wish i had the technical
means to make more visual images.

i am growing tired and so i will end here before writing words
mechanically,

missing you,

bye

18.02.04

СЛОВНО СНОВА

dear zhen

classes have begun and i have taught one class. today i stay home. i have made a promise to myself only to go to the university on the days when i teach, tues-thurs-fri, and to do everything that i need to do for the classes, copying, looking up books, etc, on those days. for some time, a small time, one of those moments in a day, yesterday, i walked from room to room in my flat, simply appreciating it, the flat, and to myself thought i have not thought good enough about it, but it is a very good space to read and so i read a lot yesterday, as i must promise to myself to read for myself also and not only to read for my classes, though the temptation is always to read for one’s classes. did i tell you that i have found a book in russian, a geological book? there was a piece of amber on the cover. there are some color photographs inside, a book published in the early 80s in moscow. i like the photographs of the insides of rocks. as you know, there is great variety on the inside. i am wondering if it is your study of geology which leads you to this argument about the toleration of subjectivity, the inside-outside matter. it is a great problem for philosophers. the current doctrine is that there is no outside anywhere. so you are from your geology in agreement. it is popular to say that ‘history has no outside’ or ‘there is no outside’. as subjects, we are or we think we are (another problem) – we are only what we believe ourselves to be – or what systems construct us – constituted – or we are composed (i’d better change the subject or this letter will become intolerable) – and i was only thinking of the pictures of the insides of rocks. what is important is to take away all semblance of volition – the will to freedom – away from human beings. why am i thinking about human beings and rocks at the same time? rock is really not the right word in english. stone and rock mean the same and they have entirely different tonal values. both words must be very old in english. what else is under the earth? metals. minerals. sediment (layers of clay in the process of becomng rock – does rock form from clay?) water. petroleum from fossil deposits. this is about the extent of my knowledge of the substances beneath the surface of the earth. you will say that sometimes i appear to write about just anything, and it is true. i was thinking about that book. the one in russian i found. i will bring it with me to tomsk. you know that whether or not the conference in sept happens i am coming to tomsk, yes? and that i think your idea about staying with irina n. a very good one, as she is the one person i have met in two years in russia with whom i felt completely comfortable forming simple russian sentences. you, my dear, are too amused at my illiteracy. if there is ever any reminder that the human being, the mind, the subjectivity, is machine-like, it is the language-learning process. words must be repeated and repeated. motor skills. this idea of the mind as motor. as of course the body and the mind are one. so the person as motor then. learning a language reminds of this. your parents were very wise to make you bilingual. that wasn’t all, of course. they had to provide you with a teacher. those are very nice memories sometimes, aren’t they? one’s childhood reading (i am remembering your saying that your teacher would simply ask you to read this or that novel and then you would talk about it with her). this confirms one of my suspicions about language teaching. that it hardly happens in the classroom, that there is no alternative to the private lesson, and that one must attain first the reading level, and then words are learned by reading and talking about one’s reading. in this year and this summer if i can complete my now two very good beginning books in russian and polish i will be able to begin reading books in this language, and so a new phase of my reading life will have begun. it is not so much a question of being able to use the languages functionally – travel, restaurants, shopping, etc. – as to explore the literatures, and build a library. i realized going to the bookstore that i need a library. there is just something irreducibly meaningful about books. their being in the world, they have this meaning, this being, they exist. i think that i avoid publishing out of awareness of this being as a form of threat, that it is somewhat threatening – what is called closure – to the writing, and for as long as i do not publish, the writing (my writing) remains writing in the active sense. so i can read a manuscript i wrote ten years ago and it is still alive to me in a way that it would not be if the writing became a book. this is what i learned when i experimented with the event of publishing a book, and i didn’t like how it made me feel about the writing. i didn’t like the closure. so, rocks and stones, machines, foreign languages, and writing. this is something of a mix this morning. i can no longer remember how to mix cement. this material is made to appear like stone. the passage from wood to stone to cement, steel and cement, in the modern period of building. this lovely anomaly in russia. the 19th century wooden houses everywhere, at least in siberia. maybe they are more attractive to look at than to live in, though it is an architectural reminder of what is called the “vernacular” (buildings made from tradition and not from design) and a sign of the strength of duration of a folk culture. all the new buildings going up in tomsk – who designs them? where do they come from? i remember talking about this with you. it was a great concern of some of the faculty members i taught. they said they felt like they had no voice, no influence, in the use of the city space, and city space is a space which affects everyone. well, i am beginning to think about friday’s seminar. so i should stop writing here. do you know that i enjoy your translations about rocks and minerals, and that if you wish when you are working on one, send me a copy for reading. that is what writing does. writing reads everything, and makes use of everything.

thank you for writing that you like me.
this is not a demand that i would wish to make.
nor a question that i would care to ask.
do you know that it feels very good
when you write to me this?

so, i miss you, this, you know, yes?

bye

18.02.04

rocks and stones

[Aleksey Tolstoy]

Ol’ga Forsh went up to Aleksey Tolstoy and did something. Aleksey Tolstoy also did something.
At this point Konstantin Fedin and Valentin Stenich leapt outside and got down to looking for a suitable stone. They didn’t find a stone but they found a spade. Konstantin Fedin cracked Ol’ga Forsh one across the chops with this spade.
Then Aleksey Tolstoy stripped naked and, going out on to the Fontanka, began to neigh like a horse. Everyone said: — There goes a major contemporary writer, neighing. — And nobody touched Aleksey Tolstoy.

1934

The story was written on the occasion of the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers and perhaps symbolically depicts the events. The mentioned persons are all known Soviet literary figures of the 1930x.

*

p.s. i just now found this among some txts i downloaded from one of the urls you sent me re kharms and rather like it not only for the reference to my earlier divigation on rocks and stones (i think somewhere there’s a line in poetry that includes this pair and someone else commenting, what’s the difference? is it redundant? bad writing? also i’m remembering n. mandelstam’s story in hope against hope that osip slapped aleksey and this was one of the incidents that led to o.m.’s increasing isolation and eventual victimization. do you know this story? i was also interested to learn that a novel of aleksey’s had been made into a film-serial like fassbinder’s Berliner Alexanderplatz. i watched part of it in tomsk. do you know this movie? what is it’s name? does it have a story?

thinking of you in the middle of the day
and wondering if you’re still at the office …

b y e

19.02.04

Process

dear zhen

yesterday one of the directors of the students scheduling called me and asked me if i could teach a composition course instead of the conversation course i was scheduled to teach (and which is the class that i like least, because of its lack of structure) so since this is a last minute arrangement (there are eight teachers from the faculty on leave this semester) it turns out that i do not have class this morning, except for one class at 10:00. So i will leave for the university at 8:45 – 9:00 depending on my mood (it takes 35 mins. by bus to go to university, then 10 minute walk, and today i have the syllabus to copy, so an extra 15 mins. which means one hour before 10:00 i should leave – you see how disorganized my life is since palangas and since have to be without you, who are – you are – an excellent organizer). End of parentheses.

My life was so organized in September that i could write every morning. Organization: wake up, drink coffee, write. Go to bus stop. Get on bus. Give English lesson. After English lesson, visit Jenya. Jenya leaves work. Walk with Jenya. Walk and walk and walk with Jenya. Cook dinner with Jenya. Say goodbye to Jenya at bus stop. Read. Go to sleep. Wake up, drink coffee, write.

So, you see, i already dream about july and august. it is very difficult to write when one is alone and unhappy as here, despite the four rooms in the flat, though the kitchen is hardly a room, as it is still cold, very cold, in there. i don’t know where you get your weather news. yesterday it was -6 c here. the painters are finishing painting in the hallway outside my flat. the color? mustard yellow! the color is so sickening it is almost comic. this is the way with institutions, i think. at least it is not green.

yesterday i read 300 pages from a novel more than twice that long until i realized the novel was terrible but clever copying of various earlier novels from a decade before. that is the way with most literature. i am only surprised at my patience, that i read for 300 instead of 30 pages. reading stories, the promise of a story, at least, one wants to give in to the narrative, and to do this, character must be accepted, scenes applied – supplied – maybe it is like watching a movie, though it is much more difficult to read when one is bored. the aleksei tolstoy movie was not important. it was only interesting to me that such an establishment writer of the early soviet period had been given even longer life by the movie adaptation of the novel.

now it is difficult for me to find something to read. the search is for patterns, configurations, motifs. there will be a certain amount of reading that i will have to do with my classes, reading that i dislike particularly because i am reading to teach, which means looking for ideas and how to talk about these ideas. when one reads for one’s own writing the ideas have no place, the process is more plastic. not written in stone at all. i found in my computer photographs from a book on stone-writing in Greece, the concept of the tablet. should i send you a picture? for a geologist, though, doesn’t the rock become interesting only when it is opened? do you read rocks like trees? both of these words sound ridiculous in english because they are both so old and implicated in hundreds of sayings and phrases and figures of speech. they are reminders of how lifeless language usually is, and this lifeless language is the language of the novelists.

Spilled milk. Water under the bridge. Lie low, kill time. Talk is cheap. These are some examples. The sensation is like reading tablets on which there is only the most boring story projected, like a bad movie that one watches anyway. There is a polish adaptation of Kafka’s trial on stage here, and guess what it is called? Proces. The Process. As you said about the Russian translation. Between “trial” and “process” there is a world of difference, how can one ever account for this immense space of difference between languages?

Tomorrow morning i will not be able to write you as i have three classes, the first one beginning at 8:30. I will try to write you tonight, but my mood is different in the evenings. Maybe i am a morning person. At least i think i write better letters in the morning than in the evening. The evening is for reading. If only there were something i could read longer than a few minutes without feeling time slipping, evaporating, disappearing. So i am in a dark mood in the evenings. If i keep writing this letter this morning i will write myself into a dark mood, and i must be cheerful for class!

b y e

19.02.04

so much for thursday

dear zhen

my mind it is not yet quitting time in tomsk so i am writing you a short note after returning from my class at almost 13:25 here so though you may not read this until tomorrow you will know that i was thinking of you the day before

what did you think today
what did you eat today
how long did you sleep today
who did you talk to today

yesterday i bought two pair of new socks. that is about all that is new here. my 1st year students are very clever. my syllabus may be too easy for them. everyone must work! everyone must be busy! everyone must obey!

tonight i am going to read about Culture and Society. or maybe i will fall asleep reading. monday or tuesday, i already forget which, i fell asleep in the afternoon for several hours and when i woke up, i ate four tangerines.

tangerines have never tasted better. i think it was the afternoon nap.

the other item of earth-shaking news in addition to my new socks is that my filling in one of my teeth fell out and now there is a great crater in my tooth. this was the crown i asked you about (600 dollars in U.S. when i was there last summer). i was hoping the tooth would last until this summer in russia. i do not think crowns cost so much there. here, though, they probably will. it is not a good idea to go around with a big hole in one’s tooth, unless i want to lose it altogether. and it is one of the teeth near the front, which i should not lose yet, for appearances sake.

does my appearance concern you? i should hope it does …

bye

p.s. please don’t comment on the question about my appearance. i can already see the expression on your face preparing to have fun with that one. and at my expense (so we say). (why we say it is another question altogether).

20.02.04

Society&Culture

dear zhen

a cup of coffee, the morning, the light from the ceiling, bird cawing outside the window, in the snow, if there’s snow (there is snow) the busses are running, even the trains, if there was one to take, this morning, my classes (despite my classes) why shouldn’t one be happy to start the day? you are there for me to write to, and in your writing, you spare me a little (“at my expense”) and yes, i will look after my tooth. did you not have a crown done last summer? i seem to remember this conversation. last night i read about society and culture, and conclude: society means group of persons, culture means way of life. i think i will take this deep knowledge to university this morning. do not ask me what literature is. or, you may ask, though you may be surprised at my answer.

did you know that it is always the same lake, the one where the monster movies are made? even if it is not the same lake, it is photographed to appear to be the same lake. more terrifying than monster to monster movie goers is the idea that there is more than one lake in the world. that is a poor attempt at humor, please excuse. it is 6:30 in the morning.

i will write you saturday and sunday, unless you do not work this sunday, but if monday is a holiday, i am sure you will work on sunday. the idea of “men’s day” is too funny to comment on. special days, even holidays, are important, but it is too cruel to celebrate such a day. if i remember, isn’t it a disguised military day? if so, on “all men’s day” all men should be made to march until they drop. that will cure them of their military sentimentality.

which is worse, in your mind, military or sentiment? it is difficult for me not to think what is not, by now, sentiment. do you think me sentimental? sometimes i think i am becoming increasingly vain, or, at least, self-conscious. oh, well, off to teach (first i will have second cup of coffee).

i miss very much the snow in the pines in palangas.

bye

20.02.04

Friday’s done

dear zhen

done with or done for – it turns out i’ve been scheduled to teach 7
classes! am very tired but thought to write you a note before yout
19:19 steam whistle blows at your factory.

i miss you

bye

21.02.04

All fool’s day

dear zhen

men can be fools more than sometimes, don’t you agree? i will give you an example. yesterday late in the afternoon i was in the katedra at the university downloading texts and books from several sites i had found and the head of the culture section of our faculty, whose house i visited at christmas, stopped by to write some emails. the night before he and two british colleagues and myself had several beers at a pub near the university, leaving around 2:00 a.m. driving home (he lives in a nearby town, or really, in the country – you may remember that i had to take a train there) and there was a police stop to check for drivers who had been drinking, so he spent the night in jail and only in the morning was he able to reach one of our polish colleagues who helped him with translation (he doesn’t speak polish, even after living here for five years). the result of drinking three pints of beer that evening will be about 2000 zl. fine (about 600 dollars, or a month’s salary) and loss of his driving license for one year. after speaking with him yesterday, i felt very glad for my life of simplicity which always requires that i walk everywhere and within distance of where i live, and the loss of only 100 zl. for walking across the street against the light. everyday i see at least one person do the same, and it still troubles me – that in a strange country one watches how other people behave and does the same, and it is only the coincidence that i was the only person crossing the street that resulted in my small fine. so, i thought, yesterday, in comparison, i really have very few troubles, and much to be thankful for. one should always remember this also: that when we tell someone else about our bad fortune, that no matter the sympathy expressed, the other person must always be grateful for the good fortune they enjoy for not being the one in the predicament.

maybe this has to do with toleration, or your joke about alcohol – in english, the word moderation would be used, though, strangely, toleration and moderation are rather close in my mind – even, perhaps, to the point where one might say that toleration is the practice of moderation, or vice versa. everything in moderation is a phrase i remember reading from an old introduction to the ancient philosophers, though i don’t know if this can be extended to everyone in toleration. many of the texts that i have been downloading are philosophically oriented, so i am looking for different points of view on this theme. the problem is that toleration as a word in and of itself is rather empty and meaningless, and it is difficult to construct a context for it. toleration is one of those words that leave one uninterested in any meaning it might have. now, on the other hand, trespass or excess (the opposites of toleration and moderation) these are very interesting words. but one could hardly write a paper for a conference in tomsk on the virtue of breaking laws and the celebration of all social forms of disobedience. yet this is where so much philosophy written since the 60s in the west leads us. the worst tendency, and one which i have been affected by, when i wrote my two conference addresses (have you read them before? i reread them again and was somewhat bothered by the generality of address [ https://hypobololemaioi.com/bio3.html ] and i am a little concerned about writing in such a mode. the effect is like appearing to be writing about something when you are really writing about nothing at all, a severe defect of bureaucratic discourse. instititutions cripple language, and the language of these essays, mine, is so public as to appear paralyzed. writing is much more urgent and concrete when it interprets and interpreting, writes to itself and to the process of interpretation (process means something different in english, a sort of vague equivalent to “ongoingness” or more simply, continuousness). so, when i write for the sake of the writing itself, there is this character or quality of the writing always investigating – exploring – the way in which it is struggling to signify, and when i write for a public event, like a conference, this writing becomes so public that it loses all frames of reference to just about anything that interests me as writing.

you see that i can write a lot about the problem of writing. this is where all writing properly begins. i am rather disturbed by any text which forgets the difficulty of its existence, and which pretends that the procedures by which the text is constituted as writing (the literary) are invisible, unacknowledged, even, unthought. maybe i should write today, since i have apparently begun the day by writing, though it is more pleasant to read, and reading and writing are always a poor substitute for the enjoyment of watching Crocodile!

bye

p.s. i will write you tomorrow morning as i am afraid that sunday is not a day of rest for you.

21.02.04

Shiftings. siftings

dear zhen

and now the ritual pleasure, the morning’s coffee. my alarm clock is set for 6:00 so turning it off and going back to sleep even if only for an hour or an hour and a half as this morning gives me the sensation of sleeping late, though it is early, i must start waking up early.

there is no question in my mind about the conference in september, though you words are rather remindful of the sensitivity of such participation, my participation, that, first, there is difficulty in getting foreigners to come to tomsk, the severity (for them) of traveling in russia, and second, the translation problem, and i mean more than linguistic. did you know that i participated, last spring, in several seminars given by a philologist who teaches at both TPU and TSPU, and we gave one seminar to an essay i had written in chita, translated into russian, and this essay was rather philosophical (i would call it discursive – or discourse, cultural-historical discourse, which i write from time to time, from the perspective of a poet – and as i’ve mentioned, mandelstam’s essays are very instructive in this regard) so, though i am not a trained philosopher, neither am i simply a sensationalist, which many poets are. so i think that i can actually contribute something to the conference. last spring at one of the two conferences in tomsk where i spoke a philosophy professor from novosibirsk (maybe, at least she was not from tomsk) adapted my remarks about grammar, i.e. What once were windows had been painted out, or What had once been windows were painted out?

“There is a linguistic question here about states and actions expressed by verbs in English, not to mention the shifting functions between verb and noun, which often leave the form of the word unchanged, so I posed the problem to myself this way: How can the windows be said to be anything except windows, since the action of painting them has not made them anything except windows which have been painted out? The action of painting them, in other words, has not changed the state of the windows. They are still windows, painted or unpainted.”

What I’m remembering is that one of the professors listening took note of this moment in my talk (there was nothing in writing to refer to, as i was reading from the text i had written) and spoke in russian in the language of epistemology (her talk was translated to me as she was talking) and to my mind, in an extremely sophisticated way she expanded on the element of the philosophy in my very practical (very english) paragraph, and i was reminded at that time of russian as a language for ideas, you’ve spoken about this before yourself, even in the context of the tendency of bureaucratic language to achieve a complete state of meaning indirection so that the reader has no idea what they are reading except for the fact that they are being directed.

english is far too personal-practical sometimes, though i think sometimes more than you say you enjoy the difference. i wonder also if there is a difference for you from the two weeks in palangas where you needed, for my sake, to use english every day, and now in tomsk, the contrast, if it is even a contrast, of having to deal with english only or almost only in my letters? what is the difference for you, if there is one, between speaking-listening and reading-writing? if i am sentimental, i worry that i am more sentimental in person, the personal presence, speaking and listening, and that in writing i have almost, sometimes, it seems, another person that i am or project. writing is always about projection of a state or mood, and the mood aspect of sentiment is one that i often forget. how much i depend on meaning in english as the accumulation of associated reference without focus of attention to a single word. there is no environment like the language one has been raised in and which surrounds.

once i wrote, and i forget where, maybe in a letter, that the greatest sentimentalists were nazis. now, the noun the ends the sentence troubles for its imprecision, since the phenomenon referred to by the designation, the term, is a collective identity. how could such a power manifest itself in mass form and produce so many (almost infinite) instances of cruelty human to human? this question is not abstract for me as only the day before i found what to my mind is a very interesting book unfortunately in french, so i have to translate it as i read, written about three lives – one youth who commits suicide in 1910, and two women both of whom are killed in auschwitz (where, by the way, is Gorizia? that is the place name that is given, where they are from) and the writing is very inspiring, as the author reconstructs by imagining a fiction for these lives buried in an archive. an idea i was working with last night was that it is the administrative sentence which, in language, creates the conditions, sanctifies, the elimination or liquidation of populations. part of such thinking for me is finding my way to a conception of poetry as meaning-work, that the meanings are not there, before the poem is written, but that the writer of the poem by writing the poem is writing about the problem of any and every word’s meaning.

this, to my mind, is not a sentimental art. though i have worked with the representation of emotions before, what the author i am reading, Patricia Farazzi, calls “generic emotions” (the ones that we are surrounded by and which we inherit, unconsciously, and which are readily available, without much thought, and the problem is that these “generic emotions” are what the greater part of humanity depends on, especially if they are more worried about what to eat and how much money it will cost, so that one is left with the problem that the experience of emotions which are not generic depends on the development of one’s culture. in a sense, that is what Farazzi is writing about, the fragility of molecular cultures (jewish microcosms) such as Carlo Michelstaedter, Emma Luzzatto-Michelstaedter and Argia Cassini belonged to.

Farazzi quotes Kafka: Faire le negatif puisque le positif est la tout fait. (Make the negative since the positive is there already made). If i were to translate that into how it might sound in the environment of english, it would sound something like: Apply the negative as the positive is always aready there. even in such an apparently simple sentence, nothing is simple, unlike zola’s kill us, kill us then, we demand our rights! to make or to do the negative? what is it? a loaf of bread? one makes bread. you cannot make an idea in english. so, something like apply needs to be used, or construct, or assert. something more abstract. there is such great difference in english between concrete and abstract. the positive is there, and remembering kharms, we know that here and there is a big problem in all languages and their grammars, la and ici, there and here, tyt and tam. there, where existence is, what exists, and everytime we answer the question, where? by saying, there, it is there, we are speaking as philosophy (ideas are molecular, particles, magnetized towards the abstract) and the positive? the cup of coffee is a cup of coffee, or that bowl of kasha is a bowl of kasha.

poetry (and kafka is a writer of the poetic) is not satisfied with these certainties. why, if the cup of coffee is only a cup of coffee and the bowl of kasha only a bowl of kasha, and you may notice that the distinction in english from the concrete and particular to the abstract depends on the shifting article, which russian does not have, so does that mean that everything in russian reverberates simultaneously in the thingness and the idea? but we have to be demonstrative. we have to distinguish. we have to point things out (remembering Ne’tepyer again). or, when we make the negative, this cup of coffee this morning includes within it the accumulation of actions called coffee, and there is nothing simple about it, nothing obvious, and at this point you are saying no, reality is basic when it is reduced, diminished, when one has coffee and their coffee includes the awareness that has not in the past nor may in future exist.

there is this threshold of instability of perception in kafka. everything may just as soon disappear as they are experienced as existing. this is the fragility of the microcosm. and suddenly i am remembering a sentence about butterflies.

you can see that i am working towards writing about something, whatever that something may be. now i must make a second cup of coffee. will i sound sentimental if i continue to write this morning? is it sentimental to write you every morning?

rather, rhythms of structured activity, focus, direct address, tangibility of the other, you, who are there, at least sometimes, i hope, amused. tomorrow you will not have to work on All Fools Day, yes?

bye

24.02.04

your corrections

dear zhen

this is written early monday evening and i am in different mode and mood.

though i wanted to send you this paragraph from a novel i was reading sundays as i was reminded of you:

“A lonely daughter of culture, with a strong mind and a dense will, she had browsed all her life on the hard stones and remains, and at the same time she had retained a strong sense of humanity, and a slightly fantastic humorous vision of her fellow men. She was an odd number; and all alone, she could give the even numbers a bad time.”

You may not think that it sounds “near” you, but i thought of you while reading it. The even numbers had their day off today, yes? And you, were you able to rest? Read?

If you visit my website for my classes you will see some small changes, but that’s what i have been working on today in addition to reading:

http://www.geocities.com/lodzm6

I am interested whether the pages appear in your browser as readable.

As far as getting home after 2:00 a.m., I never go anywhere in lodz farther than walking distance. You needn’t worry, if that’s why you asked.

I have eaten well the past several days, cooking cabbage, carrots and potatoes first with chicken and then with ox-tail. The latter you would probably not care for. Strange, but I haven’t cooked with potatoes hardly at all, so now even boiled potatoes are a real treat.

The temperature is hovering around 0 and the sky doesn’t know whether or not it wishes to snow or to allow the snow to melt. Saturday we had one full day of brilliant sunlight. That morning I wrote you such a long letter. The weather really does affect my moods.

The conference paper corrections should be in red ink. You know that I am always more than happy to help you in any way that I can.

If you can call this week, Wednesday morning would be a good time.
bye

24.02.04

dark blue and black

dear zhen

first few minutes at school this morning. yes, the colors of the city
imaginary are dark, somber perhaps, not gloomy?

this evening i am going to visit a private language school near where i
live where i may teach for two or three evenings during the week until
the end of june.

i will write you more when i find out more.

hope your day is bearable, today.

bye

25.02.04

new news

dear zhen

life is becoming more complicated or as tends to be said, interesting. at least i am writing you in the morning with my first cup of coffee, which always makes me happy, and tomorrow and friday i won’t be able to do this, so already i am unhappy about the thought of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps at its petty pace etc. today i have four hour training session at the language school after observing classes for three hours last night – my evening was consumed by this new distraction. instruction. 40 zl. an hour, about 10-12 hours per week, about 100 extra dollars per week, according to my calculations. this would not be a bad idea for the next four months in addition to the necessity of recognizing and admitting that, after palangas, i am somewhat depressed, and time weighs heavily. more work, less time, no thoughts. this is a useful formula. also, the problem of the tooth reminds me that it is not a good idea to have no resources, and needing resources, yes, i will say yes, to private language teaching job. the great advantage is that the school is only 15 minutes away walk, so no extra time is spent going to a new place. the method is entirely pavlov, productive, everyone repeats, small groups, everyone must speak, simply pointing at them will do, all the questions and their answers are in the book. this is the idea i fell asleep with last night: 99% of all we say both to ourselves and others exists as a script that can be written down and drilled into others learning the language. this means, none of our thoughts, not even our most intimate thoughts, are original. everything has already been thought and felt and said, and most of it is boring! we are not left with very much choice. that is the genius of the language method. originality? maybe it exists in humor, turns of speech and figure in a language, but the thought that everything we say is what is called a “stock response” is quite a disturbing thought, don’t you think? the method i observed is the method of the stock response. all of this time i have wasted waiting for original, thoughtful, sensitive responses from my students when i should just tell them what to think and not think about it!

the illusion is that there are ever original, thoughtful, sensitive responses anywhere. how much simpler life is and how much more basic reality is when we defer to the stock response. do you have this expression in russian? it is very useful. now, for more exciting news. yesterday one of the americans who live in the building called me to tell me that her flat had been broken into and money and laptop stolen. typical (middle class) american, her laptop was insured, so i was glad that she was only calling me to warn me and to seek sympathy. my first thought of course was about my own laptop, which is not insured. the good news is that my door has two locks, one that can be stripped by a crowbar (which is how her flat was broken into) and second is a deadbolt, much more difficult to break into. but the burglary happened in the daytime, and that is always a disturbing thought. as burglary itself is a disturbing crime. when someone robs you on the street, there is a reality dimension to it, but when someone has been in your flat, your living space, and taken what is yours, without your being able to see the theft happening, suddenly the living space is changed. my neighbor spoke about how much she hates lodz now, and can’t wait to leave after living here for two years. so, the private language school has another dimension: should i become disillusioned with teaching here, which is likely, not only will i have the experience of the university, but also private language school. more references, more letters of recommendation. it seems i will never be able to ask you for a letter of recommendation! ma’am.

after my training session today, i must write a syllabus for my composition class, read and prepare two short texts, and read a longer text for another class. i will work from 4:00 p.m. to midnight. what happens when one has too much time is that one begins to float in time, and i very much like to float and read and wander carelessly and write vagrant words into my notebook and pay attention upon my moods, and basically be bored and not-bored, aware of time passing, sounds developing, writing happening, and sometimes it is even poetry. do you know something jenya, the world despises this method. it is not productive. so, in the interest of being productive, and above all in the interest of additional income, i shall refuse to float until the summer. the summer, for the summer to be for me a threshold of time and a destination, evn the thought of the train and the fields rolling by (someone has a theory that the views from the train in the 19th century inspired the invention of cinema – and the early panoramas) and walks with you among flowers and meadows, may i float in and out of words there and then?

b y e

26.02.04

Coloquial interlude

hey girl it’s me here,

do you really want me to sound this way? why then, why then, yes, yes, very good very good.

tis the end of a long night, and i am as prepared for tomorrow as it is possible to be. the private language school promises to be a source of a lot of humor, so watch out.

by the way (by way of freud) take a look at the chekov quote you sent me. don’t you, um, think, maybe, it’s a little too suggestive? or perhaps “redolent” is a better word.

my first thought was that you were throwing back at me the “lonely daughter of culture” quote i sent you. you probably were, even if you weren’t intending to. after all, with due apology, i am one of the even numbers.

nighttime is not my time for writing very good letters. so you will not have one until saturday morning. my last (sigh) saturday morning before teaching at the repetition tank.

really, i have a lot of humor about this, perhaps too much. my zaplata will be “under the table” and i am sure you know what that means.

oh, my lonely daughter of culture, what rock will you throw through my screen tomorrow?

bye!?

p.s. thanks for calling. your voice sounds very “hale” and full of humor. the note of gloomy in your email i did not quite understand, unless you were unhappy with the end of the conversation. i think the last word was “idea.” yours or mine, i forget which, but March 2 it appears is a tuesday, so i should be able to call you in the afternoon, about 5:00 p.m. my time, 10:00 p.m. yours, okay?

you amuse me
you amaze me
but you dont faze me …

p.s.s. and i have a deadbolt on my door, so they will have to drive a truck through here to get my laptop. i don’t keep any cash here, except my last two 50 dollar bills. they’re souvenirs, anyway (most importantly, my russian visa money – it is getting to be about that time for the invitation process, yes?)

the language school method should be introduced in russia (apparently it’s very popular here in poland), everyone sounds like parrots, which is what english sounds like most of the time anyway, don’t you agree? i rather like this idea of teaching parrot-english. (the horror of the thought is that we are all fundamentally parrots)

26.02.04

whilst&whereabouts

dear zhen

as soon as i learn how to say whilst instead of while and whereabouts instead of where, i will you show you how and when to use these very useful expressions.

i have been very efficient this morning and have a few minutes before leaving for the university. in six hours i will have the rest of the day to myself (reading for tomorrow – i must present text about woman captured by indians in 1675) and, in general, performing and entertaining.

when did teaching become a method of trying to make learning attractive? always i am returned to the problem, why is this or that text important. what can i say about it that will make it sound important. and i often lose faith at this moment, since it is difficult to say why this or that text is important.

so, i must instead sound like a parrot.

about march, i know you do not like to visit the bureaucracies, i know you do not like to visit the bureaucracies.

i know
you do
not like
to visit
the bu-
reau-cra-
cies.

bye

(bureaucracy has never before appeared to me as such a phonetic mishmash, how could anyone figure out how to say it from the way that it’s spelled?)

“bu” rhymes with “dew”
“reau” rhymes with “row”
one hard c and one soft c
with no indication of the difference
etc. one knows, always, that english is a very strange language,
though it helps to be reminded once in a whilst.

26.02.04

13:29

dear zhen

according to my calculations you are still unless today is your lucky day at work at the office at your classes in the pursuit of your profession and the instruction of bright and eager minds and i am home, home, home at 13:30 in the afternoon, the temperature hovering above freezing, the snow and ice softening, a few smiles on the faces of passersby, painters still here and noisy and paint smell everywhere (it would give you a headache).

this afternoon if there is not too much noise i will read for a while and wait for that most welcome luxury in the day: a nap. have you had a nap lately? i highly recommend it. in fact, this seems to be a practice of yours that has influenced me. are you able at all to go home in the middle of the day to sleep for an hour or two? i always feel much more rested from two hours sleep in the afternoon than a nighttime of forced sleep when i would rather read but have to go to sleep because of morning classes.

there’s nothing much to report here on teaching, except that i like one of my first-year groups quite a lot, and can see the advantage of teaching for a number of years at the same place, working with the same students across the duration of their studies. doesn’t this happen in your case? do you still work with students from first to fifth year? do you think that it makes a difference, for you?

i can’t think of a single thing to say about english apart from the obvious observation that this is the language i am writing you in. when it starts to sound not-english, you will of course let me know. i am going to have lunch now: pierogi russki.

bye

27.02.04

TGIF

dear zhen

so great is my pleasure to write you in the morning over coffee (pause) drink of coffee, thought, what thought did i have, oh, yes, please send me anything you wish for help with anytime. the text that you mentioned, if you send it today, i can finish it tonight and send it to you tomorrow. my new teaching does not start for a week. because it is a method, they give several training sessions. one must learn to make others repeat (not to mention repeating oneself) and one must learn to prompt and correct (which i have never cared for while language teaching). at university, i have one class of students in the last semester of the fifth year, over 25 students, and this class was given to me at the last moment, and it is irritating, aggravating, to say the least. what is the motivation. it is simply a conversation skills class. but it is a good reminder of the old system, which includes very many superfluous features, and needs badly to be redesigned. even in the fourth and fifth years students do not choose their own classes. i wonder if at all they are encouraged to choose their own books to read. we spoke about this before, i believe, how under the “old” system there was a kind of infantilism built in to the system, treating students as children until they begin to act like children. this is what can happen when there is no possiblity of making choices.

enough lecturing for this morning. this tendency of mine must aggravate you sometimes. otherwise, i am reading for my classes, eating the food in my kitchen, tomorrow i will do some laundry and vacuum. just in case you imagine sometimes that my life here is eventful. your walks to and from TPU are more eventful than my busrides to the university. is it an event when one reads? there is an old translation into english of a book by chekhov to a prison colony in eastern siberia. i started to read it once, but the translation was not very good. one of those books published in 50s-60s when all of russia was (presented to be) a prison. there was probably also always a prejudice from the ‘westerners’ in moscow and st. petersburg towards siberian towns. recently i saw an online article about media art in novosibirsk. (i am remembering your assertion that tomsk-novosibirsk had an urban culture comparable to the western cities). maybe this summer we may try to visit a media lab or some events there? even to go to novosibirsk once in which to “sight-see” – would you care to?

now, please excuse me for ending this letter. i am thinking about second cup of coffee.

bye

28.02.04

evangelist

dear zhen

i thought that i had allowed myself the luxury of sleeping late on the last saturday morning before parroting and it’s something of a disappointment to discover that it is only a quarter past eight in the morning and not noon (i wanted it to be noon). even coffee does not taste very good this morning. i haven’t yet had time to discover what my mood is. i was very happy last night to receive your emails and glad to hear that you were able to leave early and that at least one directive dissolved by attrition. my reading this weekend will be, once again, for my classes, and a pattern has already emerged: as i mentioned, i like very much my four classes with first, second, and third-year students, and dislike extremely my three classes with fourth and fifth-year students. something here happens to students after the third year exam. they are the first to admit that they are very lazy, and tend not to do the reading. without even this minimal interest, it is difficult for me to do more than talk, which is what they prefer. i don’t know whether this passivity is due to the cross-cultural factor, since my polish colleagues talk about the same problem. there is a larger disaffection with the entire university process which one usually encounters at the first and second year level in universities at the u.s., but by the last year students should have identified their interest and so at least be interested in what they are studying. instead, lack of interest and engagement and activity, and dullness all around, and the appearance at least that i am speaking to dolts. in my one fifth year seminar no one was familiar with the concepts of modernism and postmodernism. everyone seems to have a basic introductory-level acquaintance with the materials at about the level of a high-school senior in the u.s. so, you see, i am somewhat unhappy with teaching here, though several classes as i mentioned are extremely good. the fault is mine, perhaps. i cannot just go through the motions. i need to be stimulated by my environment. and that’s not happening here.

so, this morning, i sound like an evangelist. what will i sound like tomorrow morning after a day of reading? will you be in the office tomorrow? remember that tuesday i am going to call. there’s a faculty meeting at 2:00 p.m. so i should get home between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m.

it is snowing today, the sky is white and the roads are quiet, the sounds of the passing cars muted by the snowfall. according to another resident of the building with whom i spoke yesterday, four apts in this building have been broken into recently. it is strange to feel that i might be perceived as someone who might have something somebody else might want. did i use enough modals in that sentence?

if you could read for a day for your own pleasure and distraction, what would you read? not a book by chekhov, i imagine. probably you do not care for dosteovsky. who are the interesting modernists besides bulgakov? would you read bulgakov if you had a day free for your own wanderings. there are books by him in russian in the bookshops here.

i hope this letter does not sound entirely like chattering of a parrot. i am preparing myself for my new job in thinking of myself as a parrot. the parrot-evangelist. i must change the world into parrots. another parrot-like bird is a macaw, though i’m not sure whether they repeat words or not.

tuesday is too far away.

bye

29.02.04

Yesterday’s reading

dear zhen

i thought that i had allowed myself the luxury of sleeping late on the last saturday morning before parroting and it’s something of a disappointment to discover that it is only a quarter past eight in the morning and not noon (i wanted it to be noon). even coffee does not taste very good this morning. i haven’t yet had time to discover what my mood is. i was very happy last night to receive your emails and glad to hear that you were able to leave early and that at least one directive dissolved by attrition. my reading this weekend will be, once again, for my classes, and a pattern has already emerged: as i mentioned, i like very much my four classes with first, second, and third-year students, and dislike extremely my three classes with fourth and fifth-year students. something here happens to students after the third year exam. they are the first to admit that they are very lazy, and tend not to do the reading. without even this minimal interest, it is difficult for me to do more than talk, which is what they prefer. i don’t know whether this passivity is due to the cross-cultural factor, since my polish colleagues talk about the same problem. there is a larger disaffection with the entire university process which one usually encounters at the first and second year level in universities at the u.s., but by the last year students should have identified their interest and so at least be interested in what they are studying. instead, lack of interest and engagement and activity, and dullness all around, and the appearance at least that i am speaking to dolts. in my one fifth year seminar no one was familiar with the concepts of modernism and postmodernism. everyone seems to have a basic introductory-level acquaintance with the materials at about the level of a high-school senior in the u.s. so, you see, i am somewhat unhappy with teaching here, though several classes as i mentioned are extremely good. the fault is mine, perhaps. i cannot just go through the motions. i need to be stimulated by my environment. and that’s not happening here.

so, this morning, i sound like an evangelist. what will i sound like tomorrow morning after a day of reading? will you be in the office tomorrow? remember that tuesday i am going to call. there’s a faculty meeting at 2:00 p.m. so i should get home between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m.

it is snowing today, the sky is white and the roads are quiet, the sounds of the passing cars muted by the snowfall. according to another resident of the building with whom i spoke yesterday, four apts in this building have been broken into recently. it is strange to feel that i might be perceived as someone who might have something somebody else might want. did i use enough modals in that sentence?

if you could read for a day for your own pleasure and distraction, what would you read? not a book by chekhov, i imagine. probably you do not care for dosteovsky. who are the interesting modernists besides bulgakov? would you read bulgakov if you had a day free for your own wanderings. there are books by him in russian in the bookshops here.

i hope this letter does not sound entirely like chattering of a parrot. i am preparing myself for my new job in thinking of myself as a parrot. the parrot-evangelist. i must change the world into parrots. another parrot-like bird is a macaw, though i’m not sure whether they repeat words or not.

tuesday is too far away.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: odds & ends

Дата: 1 марта 2004 г. 4:30

dear zhen

i thought i would write you a few lines as it is getting late, almost midnight, and i need to go to the university early in the morning and then later to the parrot school and i don’t expect to return until past 14:00 or later, past your bedtime. I didn’t quite understand your sentence about empire. to lose one’s face and to lose one’s head have slightly different meanings in english. i’m at this scattered moment when, even though i don’t have any classes tomorrow, i’m constantly feeling that i’m forgetting something or that i will forget something. the result of being responsible for too many details. for one class i need to give something of a summary of 20s-30s modernism in new york, the 1912 or 1913 armory show (i can’t even remember what date), strangely enough, in the text i’m teaching, visits to New York in 1906 by gorky, 1922 by esenin in the company of isadora duncan, and 1925, mayakovsky. what else happened. i forget. i wasn’t born yet. that’s the problem with having to teach cultural periods. there’s such a thing called the crisis of representation, and it’s quite funny actually, in the text i’m teaching this crisis of representation is associated with postwar postmodernism the floating signifier, etc., and yet all or so many of the early modern works are not exactly neoclassical monuments. whatever the referent is, it was already being shattered before world war 1. so i will have to sound contradictory. even a few searches and one quickly realizes that there’s a great deal of digitalized reproductions of art on the internet. it’s very interesting. i found the reproduction of a painting of a dog by a pretty good modernist painter, joseph stella. it’s the best picture of a dog i’ve seen since this detail from a painting by goya. would you like for me to send you it? the size of the file is fairly large, and i don’t know whether you are very fond of digital non-objects. but the painting is actually quite good. obviously this animal did not represent a crisis to represent. one can make too much of representation. but then what would there be to talk about? i find visual images to be a great help in trying to address subjects for which there is little reference here. not the modernism of the arts, especially the visual arts, but the strange place that NYC represented at the turn of the last century. in 50 years from 1 million to 7.5 million. i shouldn’t bore you with details from information that i have to talk about, but it is interesting (at least for me) to approach any kind of sense of history through artworks. i don’t really think it’s there. on the other side, narrative histories leave one with even less to talk about. so, nothing else happened today, a day that pass very quietly and evidently quite cold though i didn’t venture outside. i can tell by how cold my kitchen is. last week you had a holiday on monday, i hope that does not mean that you must work twice as long tomorrow. remember that i will call you tuesday afternoon. by quiet i mean that i didn’t talk to anyone at all, nor did i even listen to music. i had one phone call, from the parrot school. i did not vacuum, i only swept. and that not very much. i don’t remember that you yourself pay very much attention upon such activities. as they are not worth paying attention to. i hope i am asleep within the hour. and you, lucky you, have been asleep for five or six hours now as i send this.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: ends over ends

Дата: 1 марта 2004 г. 12:20

dear zhen

it is interesting that i cannot think right away of many expressions in english about avoiding work. the first ones that come to mind are proverbs from the bible about one must work. work is life. even reviewing some materials for thursdays classes there were comments about so-called puritan influence on the society and the language into the present, especially in contemporary political rhetoric which conceives of the “empire” as a chosen people which the rest of the world must imitate. none of this feels quite accurate to me, and does not take into account that most people are simply mute so we don’t know what they they think, though we may assume that they would rather do something than work. myself for example, this morning i woke up and my first thought was that i would probably have time for a nap this afternoon to compensate for lost of hours of sleep this morning because i have decided (puritanically) that it is a more efficient use of time to run my errand to the university before going to the parrot school than afterwards. i do not want to come home very late in the afternoon today because today is not a work day. so you see work is a very appropriate theme to write to you about. also as even among a language for which there are so many clever expressions about work, you, dear, are always working! have you noticed, by the way, that i, in comparison, am almost never working? what conclusions can we draw from this contrast? my experience is this: the more i work, the less able i am to perceive time. if i want to feel time passing, then i must not work. then, there is the possibility that this word, work, is empty anyway. what does it mean? very basically, work means going somewhere and doing something that you would rather not do, if you had a choice. since we live in a world without choices, does this mean that we have no choice except to work? in russian i know you have “trud” and “rabotat” – what is the difference. is it like labor and work in english?

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Telerabat

Дата: 1 марта 2004 г. 15:03

dear zhen

on my way back from the univ. i bought a phone card at the poczta and they didn’t have the one i’ve been using and this one says the best rates are after 18:00 though i can’t even tell whether it will work for russia or not (not included on the list which i couldn’t see without opening the card package. shall i try to call you tonight after 18:00 and if the card doesn’t work, i’ll use it for calling my folks in the u.s.? and tomorrow try to find the card i’ve been using at another poczta.

the sun is shining and the snow is melting and i must go to the parrot school.

if you can, let me know if i should try calling you this evening (rather late for you).

i miss your voice.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: exigencies

Дата: 2 марта 2004 г. 12:20

dear zhen

i wrote you this three letters ago:

there’s such a thing called the crisis of representation, and it’s quite funny actually, in the text i’m teaching this crisis of representation is associated with postwar postmodernism the floating signifier, etc., and yet all or so many of the early modern works are not exactly neoclassical monuments. whatever the referent is, it was already being shattered before world war 1

and yesterday i found this:

“Various commentators have pointed out that descriptions of postmodernism almost invariably thrive on a kind of blindness to the presence within modernism of the very features that are supposed to make postmodernism what it is.”

the first quote is from my private letter to you, the second from a prestigious journal published in london though the text is from a conference paper given at univ. of california at los angeles.

so, just in case you wondering about the quality of my letters to you. often, and it is part of the writing process, i have severe doubts about any writing that i make. it helps to be reminded once in a while that whatever the difficulty, i have not entirely stopped thinking and perceiving while reading.

it was something of a torment to hear your voice for very briefly and yet the circumstance reminds me of how practical you are and how helpful you are. at the poczta i went to you yesterday they had one remaining card for half the time from the card i have used to call you before, so even if they do not have any more of these cards at the poczta at the university, i will be able to call you for at least 30-40 minutes, though late i am afraid.

the parrot school has added another time-complexity to my daily life, so now there is a place i must go to some evenings, and it will take me a while to adjust. as to your questions about going to the dentist, i will be quite honest with you: i am simply waiting to have a little more money in case the repair costs two-three hundred dollars, i do not want to have all my money gone at once. that is why i am going to the parrot school.

you are very practical about these matters too, though i am always somewhat anxious to mention such details. i rely not only on your great practical sense, but also your knowledge of the lives of the russian poets. “exigencies” is a very good word in english to apply to decisions that are determined not by one’s own choice in the matter, but by other factors that are best left unsaid.

as far as i mention them to you, it is from some sense of trust, as you have told me before about the days of the rationings, not to mention the sudden emptying (disappearance) of people’s savings. this is a very postmodern experience! russia is in advance of the west! the floating signifier! now you have it, now you don’t. yesterday you had enough money to eat, today you have nothing!

do i remember your story correctly? that during the worst crisis people actually stopped going to work for a week? surely it was not an entire week? hard to believe. russian people stopping from going to work. what does it mean to work since that is what one does with others and what one has been doing and what is there to be done if people stopped going to work?

guess what. i have to go to work. tonight i will speak with you, though i am afraid my phone call will wake you up.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: More snow

Дата: 3 марта 2004 г. 12:01

dear zhen

coffee now after pulling myself up from the depths of sleep on a dark grey day of blowing snow

in two hours i must walk through the snow to the parrot school, though last night observing there was an elderly man and i thought this was a good method for older learners of english

repetition, prompt, repetition, prompt – how to place the sounds that are made in the brain

how often i have relied on subjective questions whch require the student to form a thought

no one forms thoughts, mind-body is motor, and all speech is a form of repeated drill, like military drill, our conversations with others, the material-mechanical-human

still, this dire view aside, this view from the parrot school, my first thought upon waking (if you will allow me to say that i have thoughts) was that you are tired

it is an important thing to say. sometimes i think i am more tired that i can permit myself to say now.

you will say that i sound like a foreigner, but one becomes tired in this way from the repetition, the same work day after day, the same responses, the same demands – it is the tiredness of absence of newness, surprises, even the ability to sense the simple enjoyments

since i forgot to make copies of some texts i am teaching on thurs morning yesterday when i was at the university, last night i tried to find them on the internet. only two or three poems, and not the poems i needed, were available on line, and this poet died 300 years ago!

since in the u.s. a university owns his papers, his estate, no free poems! they must be copyrighted for sake of the profit of the press that puts the poems in anthologies students buy

meanwhile, you can find pushkin everywhere in every way shape of form – what of the point of this comparison?

i went to sleep more angry than i expected at that property system – that other world. more and more that world is becoming only a language to me

yes, you are right, i rather like this sensation, though the separate and distinct days are sometimes difficult. today, for example, may be one such difficult day

so, on this difficult day, i wish you a pleasant one. and i hope that my call is not responsible for depriving you of sleep and rest

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Fatefulness

Дата: 4 марта 2004 г. 11:38

dear zhen

thank you for very lovely words yesterday. it is snowing again early this morning and i am awake and up and around (awake and writing) a little earlier than usual, three classes facing me this morning and my first class at the parrot school this evening. it is the nature of things that this new job has assumed such importance in our letters, thankfully replacing dentist concerns. the prices, by the way, in russia sound quite reasonable. because of the language problem, what i am afraid of happening here is being talked into more expensive choices given the pressure of communication, so that is why if i can wait until russia it really seems a better choice. i went to a dentist once in chita and he was very good and the visit only cost 200 rubles. here, according to my students, medical care in general is very confusing. by tradition, it is available to everyone, and there is some form of general healthcare, but for attention, you must pay a bribe (i remember you said it is the same in russia). as you know, i do not know how to pay extra, how much or how little, so there is a greater possibility of being taken advantage of since i am in a strange place. in the u.s., the private insurance system inflates the cost of all dental and medical care far beyond the actual cost, so you are actually punished if you try to pay from your own money. there is also discrimination. on the form you must fill out in the office when you first go, if you write: no insurance, they look at you as someone who will not pay them, and the dentists can actually be insulting. when i was a student, one year at a university, by accident (because it was a private university) i found myself among medical students. i don’t remember then anyone expressing an interest in people generally. it was just a profession, and a very high paying profession. in the past, this was a little different in russia. i visited one clinic in chita, and i was amazed (not amused) by the atmosphere (the chief of the clinic visited with me to answer some questions) and through the translation she was extremely critical of western surgical procedures and the treatment of the body like a dead object (matter) from which invading organisms can be extracted (like mining). she kept talking about medicine in china, and in ways that sound a little mystical. what does this have to do with teaching at the parrot school. second-language learning is traumatic, so the best method for mass-teaching of a language is to actively traumatize the learner. there is nothing more error-prone than someone who is learning a language who pauses to try to think of an answer. there is also the performative role of the instructor. if the student cannot learn by repetition, the functioning example of the parrot-instructor inculcates imitation. the lesson is that we do not live in a free world. all our actions and behaviors, even our most intimate thoughts, have been put there by forces beyond our control. how to cope with this condition? well, for right now, extra “zaplata” will be enough.

don’t be surprised if in the coming weeks i write rather darkly. i do not think that i am as cynical as you, but something happens to me inside when i observe the internalization of strict discipline authority from the fear of survival. it reminds me of an earlier time in my life, though only about several years ago. the threat of real and authentic helplessness and poverty. it feels good to have overcome that, not to let that happen to oneself (it is a fate as you know that has happened to many poets), and i imagine at least sometimes that i am facing the possibility of an opposite future, where at least life will not be so extreme and threatening. that is how i interpret my own action, taking this second job. you also work more than one job so i hope you do not criticize me (having fun at my expense is something else).

you say you are simple, but it is not in my mind simple to appear as you do as someone who is remote and ironic, and you are not this way at all in private. if you asked me about any image i have of palangas, it would not be snow, but the clinging together of two wet autumn leaves. you are actually a very affectionate person, and i don’t think you care for me to know about this too much. yes?

it’s strange but lately i haven’t watched any of the images from then, there. what i meant to say that the worst month was over (you said it was the shortest month) is that i felt the first month would be perceived as the longest, that is why i did not let myself call for one month. the 18th is a thursday, so i should be able to call you late in your evening then. my saturday afternoons are probably the best time for you to call me. i’m not quite sure what my new schedule will be like, but apparently i made a very good impression at my training sessions, so i am going to be given a lot of classes. please don’t worry.

every job-performance demand (and what is teaching if not performing for others) is external and an imposition and a helpful reminder that we live in a world without choices. everywhere we are surrounded by blank and faceless powers beyond our control. sometimes i feel that i am only beginning to really understand this. how to respond? not to be in a position where one’s life can be taken away. i don’t mean the actual physical life (though i remember very well the death of your friend last year) but in my case, as in yours, the means of life.

i am sorry that i sound so serious this morning. do you know, the evening of your friend’s death, when you told me of your friend’s death, you were not ironic at all? in such moments we expose ourselves to another, and through grief create the condition where another may victimize us (every expression of emotion creates the possibility of persecution by those who are more powerful) and i can only hope that in the course of the passing of time, whether we call it last year or not, you have not by me been made to feel weaker from the momentary expressions of such feeling. these sentences make it difficult for me not to remember last march, and wishing that i were walking in the snow in the early evening towards building 1.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: quite=very or very much

Дата: 5 марта 2004 г. 11:46

dear zhen

my trial class for one hour last night was successful. the students liked me, and even though their level of language was much more basic than at the university, i was able to communicate and even make them laugh. people enter the school with little or even no english, and the two-year program is designed for them to take the english compentency test, whether FCE or an European Union equivalent that is beginning to be used. So there is some relation to the problem at TPU: how to bring faculty members to the test standard in a short time. Maybe i am learning a method that will be valuable at TPU, though i do not think you wish to involve yourself or myself to be involved in the englishification program beyond the need of responding to directives. i doubt whether people are able to pass the FCE after this two-year program anyway. your filter analogy was (and is) quite apt. a british moment: really rather quite, wouldn’t you say? hip hip hurray! whilst i shall return in a tryst, do take a peek at your lesson books my jolly good fellows.

at least i have learned that high street means main street. one of the british teachers i have met here is a fan of 50 and 60 U.S. black soul music and all he want to do is visit the U.S. to go through old record shops and basement sales looking for “vinyl” (apparently it is now a collectors item). contradictions, we live in a world of contradictions. as i’ve mentioned, the big news, the really big news, is that in a month or two after EU status, any English-speaking person here can work in England without any special documentation like my temporary residence card. This is an huge historical change. (I actually had to teach that vocabulary word last night: huge). big, large, huge. why cannot we say bigger and larger, but not huger? huge has something of the superlative about it. and let’s not forget about vast and enormous and incomprehensible! cheer up mates! right, yes, are there any more questions, what?

I came to Poland to turn into British. Actually, seriously, and are you not glad that i am not so serious as yesterday, it is cause for a pause in thought to consider that here i can earn 10 dollars an hour without taxes whilst in the U.S. last summer i earned 8 dollars an hour with taxes. And there is no comparison in the cost of living, as, at least for me, i pay the same rent as in Tomsk. At the very least if the parrot school goes well I will, at the end of June, if the visa invitation goes well, be able to simply take a bus to Warsaw airport, and fly to Moscow and from Moscow, to Tomsk. The convenience is worth the extra cost, to my mind, more than anything as a reward for these hours at the parrot school. Just as important for my peace of mind are the “savings for a rainy day” which I had for both my two years in russia and the lack of which here causes me a great deal of anxiety sometimes. So, despite all my complaints to the contrary, the parrot school is a happy accident, or coincidence. Saturday, for example, I will earn back the 100 zl. fine I rec’d for crossing the road on a red light. Monday I will earn back the 55 dollars I spent on a money order to Belarussian visa which I couldn’t redeem when anywhere except in the grocery store where I bought it (U.S. is full of such paper money scams). I do not even want to think about the money I spend here in order to be able to teach anything at all: computer printer, paper, ink (each cartridge costs 25 dollars and I have already used two). Sometimes, as in Russia, one wonders whether they should not pay for the privilege of being allowed to teach here. But that is on days when I am critical. Most of the time, I accept the inconvenience as part of the reality, the strange reality, that for very complex historical reasons, some countries have more resources than other countries. Last year, in Tomsk, I had to pay 1 rouble for every xerox copy. And you know that I only charged 1 rouble a minute for private lessons. I like this idea of the One Rouble. Last night, there was a program on TV: Putinomania. In the land of the One Rouble, the Man of Many More Roubles.

Contradictions abound.

At the very least, I hope that it is always good news to you that whatever I do that things go well and that my contribution is valued. I think this is one of the meanings of successful, and I would like to have this confidence about myself. You are, however, dear, quite correct about my terror of everything out there in the world which disturbs my day-dreaming. Unfortunately, no one has ever been successful by being alone with their thoughts. So, I must adjust.

Cheers!

(this can mean bye in British)

b y e

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: This afternoon?

Дата: 6 марта 2004 г. 12:17

dear zhen

my nerves are a bit bothered by the new stimulus of the parrot school and i did not sleep very much or very well last night. my first lesson is in an hour. i should be home by noon today if you wish and if you try to call. the internet question: a good theme for toleration? it is difficult to imagine how you must feel about the loss or disappearance or the going away of your friend, Tanya. chances are, though, that she will return eventually, probably sooner than later. assimilation there is extremely difficult without command of english (does she speak english very much?) although, if i remember, she has career in law enforcement, and that is one of the most popular jobs in the U.S. today, so with or without english she can probably find a job in any city.

i am hoping that i may speak with you this afternoon.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Trout

Дата: 7 марта 2004 г. 15:15

dear zhen

i have slept two hours later than is my custom and i hope you have not yet finished your day.

my trout was quite successful, and i will try to duplicate this success for you the next time we dine together and there is a whole trout in the neighborhood. i fried it in my new fry pan with shallow olive oil, nothing else, after cleaning though without filet into two pieces as is the custom in restaurants, so the fish when it was cooked lifted out of the skin in which it had been fried quite nicely. i never thought frying a fish could sound so violent as it does right now. anyway, if you were here, there would probably have been enough, though it would not be a bad idea to get a bigger fish. i remember that you are fond of salmon, and to my mind the fish at “our cafe” in palangas was among the best dinners there. it was important to me yesterday, as the only other time i have tried to fry fish here (actually broil it in the oven) i had bought salmon and the fish had been frozen before and as a result there was a terrible smell in my flat for several days. and this of course depressed me, as it is rather nice to have variety in one’s diet.

yesterday i started reading also from a book that i bought in Cracow, what is called The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto. in English, it is one volume of about 900 pages, but there are actually several volumes in the complete German edition. The Chronicle is written in German and Polish by Jewish administrative department created at the time of the German occupation of this city and the partitioning of part of the city into a ghetto. My flat is in the middle of where this ghetto was, and the street, Marysinska, is the same. In fact, the train station for the departures first to the ovens in Chelmno and later to Auschwitz-Birkeneau left from a station in Lodz called Marysin. This station no longer exists, and as far as i can determine, neither does the rail line. But the thought that the name of the street that i live on and many of the surrounding streets have the same names as those spoken by the ghetto residents is somewhat disturbing, to say the least. The Lodz ghetto was a departure point for many Western European Jews (especially from Germany): they were shipped here, lived here for a time, and then were sent to the camps. So one cannot think about the labor-death camps without thinking about the organization of the ghetto. What is most surprising is that the Jewish administration with the help of religious leaders organized themselves the work in the ghetto (uniforms for the german army, i.e. wartime production) and organized their own police force, and there are (positive!) references in the chronicle to open collaboration between the local German law enforcement officials and the Jewish Officers of Order. They meet together, they agree on how to keep order in the ghetto, and they are even photographed together. The rationale the book gives is that, as elsewhere, in other such ghettos in Poland, the German social police exploited divisions within the Jewish community itself, and some of the worst actions, like choosing people for deportation, was actually done by the Jewish ghetto administration. It was a world in which potato skins were the greatest luxury. The Lodz ghetto existed from 1940 to 1944, and was liquidated when the Russian army was only 120 km from the city. Out of an original 250,000 Jewish citizens of Lodz (about 25-35 percent of the population before the war) only about 700 survived by hiding at the end of the war. The lesson: a large and highly skilled minority population in a major industrial city was able to be organized and eventually liquidated by their own city leaders in collaboration with (as well as in fear of the terror of) an overwhelmingly powerful military force occupying their city. The introduction to the book does not draw these conclusions, and makes an effort to be kind to the Jewish civic leadership (they were trying to save as many lives as possible). But one sees at a glance the rottenness of the patriarchal (hierarchical) religious leadership, and their acceptance of the concept of “expendables.”

Somehow, this material relates to work that I’m beginning to do with the concept of the experience of city space, and one wants to be able to include the event of military occupation and the concept of a target population that must be organized for cheap labor. It is the nightmare rationality of the problem of labor organization and production quotas when there is war.

You see, working with such thoughts, even as they are in a very much beginning stage, it is not always possible to view life and society and history in a very positive light, so you may believe that on a day when you call me and i hear in your voice that you are feeling very good and have as always your strong sense of humor and infinite practical good sense (it is good sense, that is a better word than the hyperbolic wisdom) then my day is very much improved.

Tomorrow presents the problem of a day marked as a holiday which should have some meaning, and probably doesn’t, for you. But i hope that you enjoy the day away from the office, and one more thing: I wanted to add two words of advice for your childhood friend, Tanya. First, and I’ve noticed this difference in both Russia and Poland, the public buses and subways in the U.S. are very loud (I mean the people on them are very loud) and it can be very frightening at first. Second, especially in the city areas, there is a great increase in what is called telemarketing mail, and i noticed this in Florida as well as the summer in New York: it is impossible to live without an answering machine. Sometimes the telephone will ring 15-20 times a day with pre-recorded advertisements. This is organized by computer, and it is rather expensive to have an unlisted number, so the possibility of answering the phone all the time for a commercial (advertisement) is very great. These are two problems in living in a city area in the U.S. that a foreigner might not think of beforehand, and i only think of it now, since i noticed the contrast the last two times i visited the U.S. There are other contrasts, but they are more subjective. In Florida, for example, where I was living, as in many wealthy regions, or neighborhoods, there are very large and beautiful parks with landscaping and ponds and flowers and palm trees, but people only drive by them. Never do you see lovers in the parks, and the police would probably arrest them if they began kissing in a “horizontal” position since “horizontal” looks like making love, and it is absolutely illegal for couple to make love in public in the daytime or in the nighttime anywhere in the U.S. Can you imagine trying to clean up the parks of lovers in any city in Russia? There would have to be a major “sweep” (this word is actually used for crowd control in police language in English) of all the city squares as well as all the parks besides the rivers. This was one of my first impressions of arriving in Russia, in late summer in Irkutsk: everywhere there were lovers, the sun was setting on the river, and earlier in the afternoon someone had a small radio and 30-40 people were dancing in the rain in a small park, including very elderly women. This is a kind of spirit the police cannot touch, even if they speak English.

From the parrot conductor, (me?)

b y e      

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Back to work

Дата: 9 марта 2004 г. 11:51

dear zhen

how was your holiday, dear? did you rest? were you able to rest? did you notice how much more quickly time passes when one is trying to rest? most recently, the longest periods of time are the two-three hours before lessons at the parrot school, only because i do not yet know what to expect, except terrible boredom. the boredom is relieved only by the time passing, and the hour of freedom before needing to go to bed, and the tyranny of having to wake up to an alarm clock. all of this i’ve mentioned before, so i apologize for sending you old news.

the good news is that one of my friday classes is going to move to tuesday morning, so my friday afternoons will be a little longer (and i don’t have to teach on friday night). maybe i shall be able to write you interesting “non-obligatory” letters for your saturdays. my letters to you, to my mind, are never obligatory, though i am sure that their writing sometimes suffers from the mechanical motions i seem to be going through increasingly now.

thank you for your words of caution about visa process. here, the unknown is having to go to russian embassy in warsaw, though i know the general area where it is located, and it should not be difficult to find. even if the worst happens, a 30-day visa in late august will still be possible, though i shudder to think of this possibility. do i need to mention that i am quite lonely here? it is easier to sound positive to you when speaking, but in writing it is more difficult. the weather does not help. warm “melting” days combined with more snowfalls produces greyness everywhere and slush and mud. march is one of the ugliest months, almost as depressing as november. i am tired generally, and especially tired of winter.

please excuse my writing this way, it actually helps to write this way though (a little).

i miss you

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Vitamins

Дата: 10 марта 2004 г. 10:21

dear zhen

i think i am going to need some vitamins soon. yesterday between classes at the university someone came to my office and asked me to teach three conversation classes at another college within walking distance of the university, so now mondays and thursday afternoons i will teach there, for an additional 50 dollars a week. it appears that until the end of june i will be earning about 1200 dollars a month.

at the moment, i don’t know whether this is good news or bad news. after my parrot class last night, i came home and watched a soccer game, then fell asleep with my clothes on. now i am awake without alarm at 5:00 in the morning. i have three classes to prepare for tomorrow at the university, and two classes today at the parrot school: one at 10:00 a.m. and one at 19:00 p.m. have you ever noticed that when you are agreeable to people, they take advantage of you?

about aggressiveness, or confidence, perhaps it is a national trait, though these generalizations are troubling (hardly scientific). i have noticed, though, while travelling, that if you hear someone with a loud voice, that person will have an ‘american’ english accent. we have a saying: they act like they own the place. when i was first in russia i noticed a tendency of people to seem to withdraw from you when you speak to them, and perhaps i have learned to imitate this. i also like very much formal politeness, and i was even told that i have a soft voice by the teacher who showed me the parrot method (it was topic for concern as parrot method prefers demonstrative enununciation).

today, this morning, i have aches and pains in my arms and neck. march, april, may and june will go by in a blur. they say that it is good to be busy, occupied. if this is not true, then i am in trouble. you know that i always exaggerate. do you know also that i am not a creationist? you remember, don’t you? nothing must come of nothing. language teaching is entirely substanceless, and yet something happens during the lesson, i am not sure what. the character and nature of the language at the basic level is amusing to me. how do you find yourself explaining concepts like too much? more than enough? i try to put tolka and menoga together, but it doesn’t work. did you know that also always goes between the subject and the verb, the too and as well go at the end of the sentence? english will probably survive whether or not you know this, though my own survival is in doubt, at least without vitamins.

i miss you

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: sleep

Дата: 11 марта 2004 г. 11:21

dear zhenya

do i understand from your letter yesterday, the last of four which i was very happy to read, that you wish to study english with me? the path is long and hard, with many sharp turns, as did you know that there are not really corners of the earth, even though in english, there is the expression, i would go to the corners of the earth for you? oy oy oy

she says

did you know that often people refer to siberia as one of the corners of the earth? perhaps it is because there are such clever and young inhabitants residing, or should i say presiding? there?

this is about as much humor as i can muster this morning, though i did enjoy your last letter.

i have no lesson plan for my new class at the teacher’s college, this afternoon, perhaps some speaking activities will fall out of the sky on my way there, walking there. the colleague who asked me to teach there drew a map for me, and that is all the directions that i have to go on, in addition to the information that i must find my way to a room 300.

i like your image of my wandering here and there around lodz, teaching english at every school. this is unlikely, as there are too many schools here. the reason is very simple: in may poland joins the european union, and everyone who can speak english plans on moving to britain to work in the restaurants. pound sterling, pound sterling.

my hours at the parrot school are not too bad next week, and i even have monday evening off, which is helpful, as i have two classes at the teacher’s college on monday. by then perhaps i shall have a lesson plan. i have done this so often by now, walking into a strange room and creating conversation, that perhaps i am a “creationist” if that means creating something out of nothing.

ex nihilo

i should like to become a nihilist. there were many of these in russia in the last century, yes? the book about the lodz ghetto is heavy reading, in all sense of the word, and i think i should begin to read from it like an almanac. what happened here on this day on this date in that year. chances are, somebody jumped out of a window, somebody else was shot, there was a riot for firewood, the Chairman (the eldest of the jews) released a new bulletin co-signed by the police that the new food ration will be reduced to half a potato skin per resident (with the exception of course of the ghetto administrators).

yes, it is heavy reading. one learns contempt for human nature, even when one thought that their contempt was enough. whatever it is that is good in a human being, it has to be the result of an accident of circumstances.

i am in a good mood to go teach this morning, don’t you think? yesterday evening i spilled coffee on the chair and rug. that was the big event. i woke up this morning again before the alarm. this disturbs me slightly. sunday i think i am going to sleep until noon. when you wrote me that you slept monday until 13:00 and then went back to sleep until 16:00 i could almost feel myself becoming drowsy, the sensation was very thick, like a cloud. as for tiredness of life, yes, i understand what it means to be tired of life, though by all accounts the alternative is even worse. this thought should be cheerful: you have no choice, especially when you are most tired. as always, the best alternative in such situations is sleep, sleep, sleep.

bye

p.s. thank you for telling me from time to time that you like me. this word as you use it has a certain solid meaning, which is not shared by very many words, for me, in my language.

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: A not so very small request

Дата: 12 марта 2004 г. 4:42

dear zhen

this letter is written about 5:00 a.m. your time and it will sound like all business as it is late and i am tired and i need to ask you for a small but very important favor.

can you look among my papers/books for a copy of my Masters Diploma from the University of Iowa? I’m certain (almost) that a copy of this document was sent when we sent the fax from your office to Lodz early last summer. it may be among my papers or it may be in your computer. almost certainly there is a digital image in my laptop, but it would be very difficult for you to find without connecting the monitor to it.

the reason i ask is that i need a copy of my diploma for my new job, which is actually not a teachers college but a small philological faculty where several other colleagues from my department at the university teach. my first class was very nice, and reminded me almost entirely of the students i taught at the pedagogical institute in tomsk.

if this request for your help causes you any inconvenience, i regret this, especially since you do not seem to approve of my teaching in every college in the town.

i’ll try to write a more lighthearted note in the morning when you will have already been at work for too long. i’m also almost certain that the original document is at my parents in florida, and it will be very hard for them if not impossible to email to me a copy of the document.

we’ll save contacting the intl. dept. as a last resort (i know they have a copy there).

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Early morning aesthetics

Дата: 12 марта 2004 г. 12:04

dear zhen

my first thought this morning was the unbearable amount of time it takes to get from the first moment of waking (the alarm) and the shower. after the shower, normal perception of reality returns. between the moment of waking and the shower however, panic (alarm!) despair and exhaustion, which means general and thorough tiredness, with which you are rather well acquainted. if i continue this thought, i will fail to keep my promise to write you a cheerful letter this morning.

one of my senior polish colleagues here asked me to read a short paper he is giving in slovakia next week: traditional reading of traditional novel in realist tradition, but from anti-militarism point of view, drawing a connection between the novel about war in u.s. literature and increasing criticism, by writers and intellectuals, of the militarization of the u.s. society. the paper reviews the history of the war against spain for cuba and phillipines, and ends with reference to war in iraq. my students yesterday also at the little school asked me about my feelings about the war. it is a popular topic here, since there are polish troops in iraq, and the polish government does not appear to be popular (students and colleagues alike are always making fun of it, even at the parrot school).

i work now at the university, the little school and the parrot school. today i have two classes 8:30-11:30 then one half-hour meeting with a student, another half-hour for copying and collating materials for next week’s classes, and then my afternoon and evening are free. i think i shall rest, reading and sleeping, until 9:00 am tomorrow.

if this doesn’t sound cheerful, then i should add that on my way home i am going to stop by the british council to return some books and look for conversation-class materials.

recently (last week) to amuse myself, i read a novel which everyone on my faculty refers to and to which there is a reference in one of the cultural essays i’m teaching for my city spaces seminar: the novel was written in 1989 or 1990 or thereabouts, called “American Psycho.” It is an early example of what has come to be known as avant-pop novel: the novel as throw-away, consumer (cheap consumer) item. (turgenev would roll over in his proverbial grave). A&P is about serial killer who mutilates the bodies of his victims, though i prefer the interpretation that all the gore is imagined and in fact the narrator is a harmless fool who writes about expensive restaurants, and expensive clothes, and the emptiness of the 20-30 year-old generation in New York. Scenes of graphic pornography and murder appear side by side paragraphs that might be found in a restaurant and nightclub review.

my favorite detail: conversation at dinner about whether to use bottled water for ice cubes.

so, no matter how bad the novel, there is always at least one funny thing there. i am rather interested in the sensation of consuming as reading, the need for a transparent surface (legibility, so that we always know what it is) and this recognition of the consumption, the seized object, engenders a type of representational violence.

literature (at least literature in english) is at an impasse where there is nothing that cannot be represented, and this is a result not of creative freedom but of exhaustion with the representation. this is what happens when all words are empty, emptied. they can be made to represent any brutality, any form of violence, any atrocity, and it is all just good fun in the avant-pop. (why do i keep hearing avant-prop? as in agit-prop?). do you know the trick of blowing air into a plastic bag and then exploding it? it makes a sharp noise, like “pop” (gunfire in the distance is actually said to make a popping sound).

you may conclude that i am expanding on your memory of reading turgenev by thinking about recent examples in english of nihilism (still very much alive as an aesthetic force). to conceive as representational writing as a rush of air which explodes in a sound that everyone knows is fake, that is what is avant-pop agit-prop.

the chronicle of the lodz ghetto is more complex narratively, since the writers (the scribes) half-believe and half-disbelieve what they are writing, more than forced positiveness under the awareness of surveillance and censorship, the character of the recording of facts overtakes the determination to put a good face on an overwhelming collective experience.

finally, i think there is a lot for you to feel warmly and strongly about in russian history, and this history is in the mouths of the people of russia, in the language, and not in any single interpretation of the last 100 years, nor perhaps even in the literature. it has been my belief for many years that russian literature is a very young (though appears to be very old) literature, where american literature, though it appears to be a very young literature, is actually at death’s door, as the expression goes.

pop!

b

y

e

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Before Saturday classes

Дата: 13 марта 2004 г. 12:30

dear zhen

i’ve a few minutes before going to teach a three-hour class, and the contrast between the waking state now (ive been up for an hour preparing, which i shouldnt have to do for too many more classes) and how i know i’ll feel when it’s over, at noon, tired, needing an hour or two to change mood, etc., well, the contrast is sharp.

for two years i kept that diploma with me in russia, and when i returned to the u.s. last summer i left it with my few books, trying to travel light. did you know the 20 kilogram luggage limit for travel in russia is the same as for the jews on trains being deported out of lodz? that is at least the figure that was recorded in statistics (and the military occupation kept minute statistics).

anyway, if there’s a copy of it among my papers, it will be easier for you to send, (?) though if looking for whether i left a copy takes up too much time, please accept my apologies. i was surprised to find that i didn’t have a copy here, either. the trouble is, when one is tired, such small details appear almost too much, and are given too much significance. right now, i’m willing to accept the interpretation that i really am getting tired of teaching, and just when the teaching itself (at least my classes at the university) are becoming very successful. so, i don’t quite know what to do.

not knowing what to do, i write you and ask you for your help, sometimes. i think what is the matter is the tiredness of living in different places all the time, and this is just about all the time for most of my adult life. many years. sometimes, perhaps, i am sure you appreciate the solidity and continuity of your life. there is something indelible and fundamentally substantial about living (being) in one place.

i hope you do not have to work too hard today.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: My address

Дата: 14 марта 2004 г. 15:58

dear zhen

half an hour after hearing your voice. here is my address,

Kevin Magee

ul. Marysińska 70/74 m. 6

90-850 Łódź  Poland

or Polska, if the Polish name of Poland is required. i can imagine the following exchange:

Officer of the Office of Immigration Control: “This is the address, yes?”

Zhenya: “Yes.”

Officer of the Bureau of Foreigner Management: “Is English the Official Language of Poland?”

Zhenya:  “No.”

Officer of the Bureau of Management of the Office of Immigration Control: “Then you must write the name of the country in the language of the country.”

Likewise, the accents are important: in case my email does not transmit the accents accurately, i am including msword doc with same address. there should be an accent such as in french language over the e as in the french word for summer which sounds very close to russian eta only it is ete with accent marks over both e’s, the accent grave i think it is called, though the a in grave should have an accent mark going in the other direction, what is called the aigu, i think, though that may only be for e’s (accent marks go in two directions over french vowels). there is likewise an accent grave over the o in lodz and over the z in lodz. the first letter, the letter L, is called a barred L, with a mark drawn through it or across it, and this represents the sound “w” (not “v” which the letter “w” itself represents. all of or most of the sh and sshh and ssshhh sounds in russian are in polish, and the accent marks help to distinguish the difference. for example, a single dot over the z means the sound similar to the sound of your name, the first letter, much softer zsh sound than is in english. as you know, it is really impossible to represent this sound in english, we have only sh, which is only for the slavic sound system, the beginning of what can be done with zh and sh and ts and shsh and zhzh, etc. as we have also no accent marks at all in english. even the word resume no longer appears with the french accent mark over the e, the same one as in ete (with accent marks). without accent marks, as i have written it, there is only the latin echo, et tu? you could probably still say this today in french or italian, and be understood, and you?

you, dear zhenya, allude to worsening situation in r. and i hear about worsening situation in p. and read about worsening situation in u.s.a. by (we admit) very spoiled writers, but what plans does one make? how does one imagine the future? you will remind me that the future is not something that can be planned for (no bargains or contracts to be made, no deals, no assurances – what in legal language of contracts is call “warranty”) but one can be smart or one can be stupid. it is very smart to refuse to budge (to refuse to move, to wait until the very worst happens so we can be fully satisfied in the confirmation of impending social chaos, or, one can try to exert an influence over the course of events of one’s life. where do you stand on this issue, zhenya? what are your thoughts? you are far from helpless. you are (and i am lecturing and you are right to laugh at me) very talented, and you have a deep knowledge of your native russian. i believe sometimes, when you do not have to work every day, that you even love the russian language. (you can say this in english, that one “loves” a language, though how to do this, since the love is never returned, i don’t know. it is an expression in english.

why am i writing like this. i have a very good ear for silences, perhaps because of many hours given to the labor of writing poetry. i am not writing poetry now, or very little, maybe i have written three or four poems since october, less than even in two weeks in september. so i am writing you after speaking with you and writing towards (in the direction of and not about) (not directly addressing) one very significant silence, yours, and to me you are very sensitive and thoughtful, though you would disagree if we were speaking. when i am writing you, as now, how convenient that you cannot disagree, until the writing in return, complicated by the distance between the two languages, and i only wonder what you hear in my voice sometimes, across the distance between these two languages.

last night, there was a notice for a translation conference/workshop in u.s. the deadlines for which have already passed (there were other creative writing programs with current deadlines). here is the text of the part of the notice:

Banff International Literary Translation Centre

Linda Gaboriau, director

2004 Residency Program

June 14 to July 3, 2004

Application deadline: Completed

2005 Residency Program

June 13 to July 2, 2005

Application deadline: December 15, 2004

The Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) is the only one

of its kind in North America. It offers literary translators an opportunity

for a three-week residency where they can focus on their manuscript, spend

time with the writer whose work they are translating, or consult with their

colleagues and two experienced translators-in-residence. It is open to

literary translators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States translating

from any language, and to international translators working on literature

from the Americas.

For more information:

Visit   www.banffcentre.ca

i send this as an example (not limited to canada) of opportunites for literary translators, and to suggest to you that this is one way to imagine the future. charles reznikoff needs to be translated into russian. his novel, about 200 pages, By the Waters of Manhattan, would be very important to Russian-Jewish culture. you will say that you are not a specialist (everyone in russian is a specialist, even the specialists in public toilets who collect one ruble for right to “use the facilities”) and you know how much i disagree with the notion of specialist and literature. all good and important and necessary literature remains free only to the extent that it is free of specialists. that is actually the joke about my diploma. the way that i grew up and in the economics and the psychology, one had a great faith in specialists and in the university. then i went to one of the very best-known places for writing poetry (even here, in lodz, when i mentioned to a colleague from the u.s. that my diploma was from this place, he was very impressed) and when i was there, the disappointment was so great, this is still part of the joke of the diploma. we experience multiple disillusions in the short time of anyone’s life, but this was certainly one of the most severe. i was not rejected there. my student poetry was well respected there. but the perception (mine) of how empty and shallow the system was (there is a wish at a certain time in someone’s life, maybe it is called “youth”) when you wish for the structure, and belonging, and to give something to the structure (whether or not it is called culture, i do not know, as you may say, there is no Jewish-Russian culture in Russia, no readers for Reznikoff in Russian). insitutions do not change themselves. they must be changed by events in history. i am reading from time to time the chronicle of the ghetto of lodz and seeing on the news the spain bombings and one is as if filled with foreboding (a slight sensation of disbelief in the possiblity of culture at all, literature, and i have lived my life more or less for literature, though to my own mind i am never quite living enough for it, at least not as much as is possible.

but whether canada or u.s. we should try to accomplish this summer some sense of what and where it is possible to seek that mysterious event, “entry” into another country, even as visitor. perhaps it is part of the changing (harsher) climate in russia you mentioned, but it is safe to assume that legal documents in russian only have any value in russia. this is probably a trend everywhere. which legal system is best to try to live in? it is an increasingly similar (totalitarian) legal system with national accents everywhere. i have mentioned before, in poland at least for the time being (meaning this year and next year, as in russia, the rules change every year) anything written in english is very popular. if you have a document in english with the most minimal notarized stamp, it is legal tender (as they say, a currency). i told you about the joke of the documents from the american embassy, the famous five-minute affadavit. but i rather like this about poland, No Fingerprints. there is, in fact, quite a lot that i like about poland. i have not even begun to write to you about all that i like about poland. my students most of all, at least when i am not exhausted, and as you can tell from this letter, it is sunday morning and i am writing such a long letter that it will probably arrive to you after you have left.

am i suggesting to you a plan? or am i quite (oppressively) suggesting to you to think about how you might live your life differently? no one can suggest such a thing. that is why i say over and over that i am succeeding here, even when i am tired here, that i am creating respect and trust among the polish colleagues i work with (this is why the diploma was so important, the new college asked for these documents on monday, because of an audit, and as well i learned that the chair of my faculty teaches there, another senior colleague on my faculty who just this week asked me to read an essay of his that i mentioned, and another senior colleague from the practical english faculty. the fact is, as i was told, that i was recommended for this new job, and i am replacing a teacher from Scotland very well liked by faculty and students (he had to leave suddenly from emergency). these are very positive signs, as are the students who stay after class, even first year students with almost perfect english. do i dream sometimes of working here for a while, even having an influence on some of those among whom i work? every writer wishes for this, perhaps. i dont wish to sound like idle dreaming (as i know you hate this). but the sense of possibility in a worsening world, that is important to me.

so, no conclusions, except that you may expect my call this thursday, about 22:00.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Mon morn rush

Дата: 15 марта 2004 г. 12:54

dear zhen

i have only time for a short letter this morning as i must go to the university for a few moments before going to the new school for conversation classes. still, as you might imagine, i am drinking coffee (my second cup). last night i went to sleep very early, before 8:00 p.m., then kept waking up and going back to sleep through the early morning. when i got up at 6:00 a.m. it felt late (already daylight) and i felt rested. maybe this will become new habit: going to bed very early on sunday evenings. as you recall, i was just waking up when you called, about 9:00 a.m., so i was not awake and conscious for more than 12 hours on sunday. sometimes it is very good to sleep. today i feel very rested and energetic and happy, all my many bananas and oranges and tangerines are gone, and yesterday afternoon for supper i made for the first time in a very long time (i think since tomsk in sept) simple cucumber and tomato salad with olive oil and wine vinegar to go with roasted chicken and potatoes. over the chicken i emptied the contents of one lemon, and the effect was excellent. i cannot cook every night like this, but the warmer weather, and the increase in light is improving my habits. the doors to the three rooms with doors are open now, which lets in more light. for warmth, i kept my flat rather dark in the winter, and i am thinking now that this influenced my moods. it also feels very good to have vacuumed thoroughly (behind sofas and tables and on windowsills) eliminating cobwebs and the layers of sand from the renovations in the hall. maybe i eliminated some cobwebs from my own head as well. still, i have not waxed the floors. i will probably do that the first truly warm day of spring. by the way, when does the time change?

your childhood friend Tanya is soon to be in boston and your warm and friendly colleague Olga is soon to be in Toronto or Montreal. thinking about this, though i did not mention it, is one of the influences for my writing at such length yesterday about the uncertain future. there is always the risk of crossing boundaries, and if and when i insult you, please remind me. believe me that i do not ever intend to insult you or even make you feel self-conscious, about anything. but, i repeat, the one thing i know anything about, literature, does not require specialists. all that is needed in a curious way, is “disinterest.” what do i mean? it is the disinterested writer who often makes the greatest contribution. the writer who is disinterested in using the literature he or she makes, whether their own or in translation, for any purpose other than the life of the literature itself. i sent the notice since there are contexts, in institutions, which halfway support such extended disinterest. maybe it is a paradox: i wish to say to you that everything is not as difficult as it appears, and yet i learn from you when listening to you about the absolute thresholds of difficulty, which listening, i tend also to believe in. that is why i am trying to be so cautious here, by building something of my very own, an accomplishment. enough thoughts about this, or i will write you a novel. i hope you have time to write me even a hibye today.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: More info

Дата: 16 марта 2004 г. 11:44

dear zhen

the address of the university which employs me is

Universytet Łódźki

ul. Narutowicza 65

90-131 Łódź  Polska

My officical job title is

Senior Lecturer, English

Department of American Literature and Culture

or

Zakładzie Literatury i Kultury Amerykańskiej

na Wydziale Filolgicznym

Just yesterday I obtained from the Rektorat my current contract which shows the date of my employment with the university until September 30, 2004. If the specialist recommends, I can fax you a copy of this transcript, though as you know, any documents used in Russia will need to be translated into Russian, and my contract is in Polish. The contract shows my salary, which may be helpful. But most likely it is best not to volunteer more information than is asked for. Another way of looking at this problem, a more positive way, is to believe that any difficulty you experience will mean less difficulty here for me, and I am less skilled to deal with difficulties with the Russian consulate. Probably what is most important is proof of employment and the length of the contract, to show that I have a job and a residence to which I am returning after the end of the visa.

Two new classes yesterday, both rather disappointing. As always, the presonalities of groups of students differ, and one group in the afternoon was even rather rude, which tends not to happen here. I wanted to laugh at them and say that I have taught in the ghetto of Cleveland, so their attempts at rudeness were ineffectual, and trite. But it is also helpful reminder that not everyone views foreigners positively. The university is a rather elite place, very difficult entrance exams, even though the tuition is free. The students are at least somewhat motivated, and even if they are not, they politely pretend interest. When this pretending is taken away, one is more realistically in colonial type situation, as in fact one is in a colonist type situation in the u.s. ghetto. but i cannot write about serious themes this morning, very tired.

for three hours this morning i will talk about big ideas. sometimes the big ideas seem rather dull to me. the weather here is changing dramatically, i don’t even think i shall wear a sweater today. tonight, one two-hour class at the parrot school, and then tomorrow off except for one more two-hour lesson at same parrot place. so life is not wretched, just dull. i need more oranges and bananas (potassium, don’t bananas have potassium?)

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Re: Dates

Дата: 16 марта 2004 г. 11:56

dear zhen, forgive the short reply

dates:

I would recommend for the 90-day period

June 23 to September 20

You may want to count these days yourself to make sure.

I need to return to Poland before my contract expires, so I would probably fly back on that Sunday, Sept. 19, directly after Larissa’s conference. I won’t be able to be with you on your birthday, though. In a perfect world, you would be returning with me. What do you think the chances are for this? Would you want to if you could, legally? Also, you may also need copy of my temporary residence card, Rzeczpospolita Polska?

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Times

Дата: 17 марта 2004 г. 12:00

dear zhen

when you write

“among the varieties of values in my particular present existence one of

the most important is not the place of living or surrounding, the most

important are our relations and ability to co-exist”

i am reminded about conversation with you, and the musical quality of your speech.

That, and my continual embarassing practical questions, such as the time: my computer this morning says 7:44 and my watch and alarm clock say 6:44. Did the time change? When does the time change? Doesn’t it usually change on a Sunday? Every year this is a great concern for me. I don’t even know in which direction the time changes in spring.

I am without ink for my printer, and tomorrow I need to distribute some hand-out assignments for my classes, so yesterday I went to the store where I bought my printer, where they still have many many boxes of the same model, though in the replacement ink section they had just as many replacement cartridges for both the model immediately before and after mine (combinations of numbers and letters). The outcome of the story is that I inspected the size and the shape of the cartridge with precious ink in it, concluded that it was the same shape and size, and purchased it for 85 pln (about 25 dollars) and of course when I arrived home the printer refused to assimilate the model number. There was a flash of anger from me, such as I rarely have, about the infinite stupidities of fabricating equally infinite numbers of models for so simple a task as printing (not to mention the fact that anything for teaching I must produce myself, everything operates accidentally and inefficiently here) and then after search for correct model number last night after parrot classes I learned that they sell here kits for refilling the ink before the cartridge is empty. This must sound strange, but there is a logic to it. The technology companies build into their products needless variations (models) and then to cope with the high cost other companies build tools (what are called “work-arounds”) to make the products less expensive. It is a reminder of the commodity system, a minute (with accent on the first syllable) reminder.

Last night at the parrot school I found myself teaching the difference between “quite” and “quite” as unbeknownst (remember this verb?) to me, there are two meanings: completely and nearly completely, depending on the accent, the stress. I must confess I did not know this. Neither did I know that it was an important feature of the English language. I imagined people running around High Street saying to each other, Lovely weather today, what? Quite! (This is what the book that I teach instructs the parrot-learners to sound like). It is rather comic.

As comic as the fact that this morning I must make separate trip to another store to try to find an ink cartridge which the machine called my printer will accept, and today is a day such as yours without an hour to spare: four classes to prepare for tomorrow. Composition (I have to read and comment on several student writings), Gang culture in L.A. for American Culture, the Semiotics of Advertising for 5th Year class, then Conversation at the New School. At least Thursday’s group is polite.

Today is grey and rainy, and I do not know what time it is.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Caliente

Дата: 18 марта 2004 г. 11:28

dear zhen

i hope you did not forget to mention to Natasha that there is someone (myself) who enjoys her CD a great deal (as i remember, you said you did not care for your friend’s voice?) though lately i am listening to piano music more and more. still, hardly a week goes by that i do not listen to her CD. What did you listen to at the cafe kukushka? the last performance we attended with Sveta from Novosibirsk was hilarious, didn’t you think? You were both very kind that night, or perhaps typically Russian, refusing to criticize too harshly poor musicians. There is a difference between poor and bad, in English, though they are closely associated.

My adventure with the ink cartridge ended positively. Here is my logic: had I not made a mistake and bought the wrong cartridge (the wall was full of the wrong cartridges, and the shelf was full of my model printer) I would have continued to buy this brand of cartridge for 25 dollars. Obliged to wander to other stores in search of the correct cartridge, I discovered an entire economy of clone cartridges for less than half the price. In Poland they make “caliente” (Spanish for warm) cartridges for all the major printers, and they cost about 8 dollars. Also, they make refill kits with small vials to extract and inject ink from cartridges, so with this kit I shall be able to transfer the ink from the wrong cartridge to the right cartridge. As I write this, I am thinking cartridge? Or partridge in a pear tree? The moral of the story? What originally began as fear of wasted money (one of my great anxieties, as you know, and one which is only suspended in the paradise of the restaurant, any restaurant) ended in a discovery of the resourcefulness of economies dependent on advanced countries’ technology, but unable to afford their products. Or, more simply, I found a cheaper cartridge, as well as a way to make use of the wrong one that I am unable to return, as, unlike you, I am not in my native country, and reluctant to make too many demands.

For some reason or another, I am very well prepared for all four classes today, and even rested (I went to sleep at 22:00 last night, waking at 6:00). Perhaps it is the influence of the change of season. It is warm here, spring here, birds singing, etc. Most of all, it is the increase of light that makes me feel good.

I shall call you this evening, about 22:00 your time. Bye.

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: laptops

Дата: 19 марта 2004 г. 11:56

dear zhen

about laptops i have not special technical advice to give, except, as you’ve mentioned before, you need a russian-language keyboard. microsoft software makes it fairly easy to move between keyboards, though the placement of the russian characters on an english keyboard is almost crazy, so your sense of needing the russian keyboard then to switch to english through software is very sound. there is the problem for the english keyboard of the 7 more letters of the russian alphabet, and also capitalization functions differently, i believe? on the keyboard, the keyboard.

other than that, what a laptop allows you is a less strict relationship to the screen and to online connectivity, if that is important to you (i don’t know if you would be able, for example, to connect to the internet through the same phone number as you do at TPU, although it’s likely, since your flat is so close to the university–if the TPU line is a private line, which i seem to remember your mentioning, then you should be able to dial in the same number, and the connection speed is not bad, about 38,000 bps, more than i have here.

probably most laptops today come with 10-20 gigabyte storage space, and it it is a question of cost, it really isn’t worth several hundred extra dollars for 10 extra gigabytes. even 6 gigabytes, such as i have on my 1999 ibm, the one i obtained last summer in florida, has more than enough storage space, unless i was going to store audio and video files.

finally, you simply find yourself reading from the computer more, since, the lighter the laptop, the easier it is to operate as an electronic notebook. given your fondness for your cellphone, you might ask about palmpilots. i don’t know anything about them, though in western europe and u.s. they are apparently quite popular among the professional classes. email and internet connectivity, in an apparatus the same size as a cellphone, though i think these are often used as accessories to more powerful communications tools, like a laptop or home pc.

interestingly, the motors are different on laptops, just as in a car, and it is important to listen to the machine and how it sounds when you are typing on it and reading from it. the motor in my macintosh runs much more quietly than the ibm, and even when i change the settings for the hard drive to spin down after 10 minutes or so, when the machine comes back on, it sounds like it is using a lot of energy and that it is hard on the machine, so i don’t expect the motor on the laptop to last longer than several years, though i’m not using my laptop as much as i might if i had regular internet access (i haven’t subscribed to an internet service provider in view of my probable trip to russia this summer).

ideally, you will find (and with the help of your friends) a model that may last you 5-7 years, and more than the pc at the office, the laptop will interest you in its technology, and you will find yourself learning about various software applications, such as powerpoint.

as a writer, i deeply believe that cultural production is migrating to the electronic sphere, and that one risks a certain degree of illiteracy and even, dysfunction, without command of the basic technology. in poland, internet access and basic knowledge of the communication tools is divided along economic lines. my students at the university are rather sophisticated in its use, and my students at the “college for people who did not do well on their exams and have to pay for their education” almost no one has internet access.

the current commercialization, like the earlier period of what is sometimes called the ‘dark net’ (early 1990s) is a sign of the hyperventilating times, and will in its own time give way to increasingly sophisticated cross-language and cross-cultural platforms for communication, extremely urgent communication, among artists and intellectuals. i also believe that we will see a form of nationalization of the internet, where servers in other countries become more difficult to access.

why do i believe this? now around lodz one sees posters with fat ugly men at the screen in a chat room trying to seduce little girls and boys, with warning words in polish which i have not translated, but which one can assume reads something like, Don’t message with anyone you don’t know. The real fear is the obliteration of borders between countries and cultures, what has been happening here for the last ten years in the commodity distribution, but which is intolerable in the sphere of communication among peoples of different countries (such as, for example, our correspondence). if they are not doing business, and if they are not romancing each other, then they must be doing something else, like communicating.

so, i think your thoughts about, as you might say, investigating the properties of the laptop apparatus in view of your eventual manipulation of one, are – are – why should or how could i say what they are? i can only write to you about what i know and think, and how important a tool my laptop is for me in my daily intellectual life. that’s all.

i miss you.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Art in Novosibirsk

Дата: 20 марта 2004 г. 11:02

dear zhen

Does this article interest you? (I have to prepare new material for my parrot lesson at 9:00, so i will write you a longer letter tomorrow … bye

Attention! Siberia! Dispatch from Novosibirsk

Ludmila Ivashina (Novosibirsk)

Artists in Novosibirsk, as those throughout the world, are separated into various groups and factions. Even during the period of Soviet totalitarianism, when the ideals of equality were strictly enforced, artists were separated into two groups: members of the Union of Artists of the USSR (now the Russian Federation) and non-members, more commonly referred to as “amateur artists.”

In today’s society, artists of Novosibirsk are more frequently separated into groups through individual characteristics such as talent, productive nature, style, and business principles.

Most artists of Novosibirsk work within traditional fields of art that are relevant to Russian culture, such as painting, sculpture, graphic arts, cartoon, architecture, and the applied arts. Within the last few decades there has been an influx of artists specializing in advertising, television, photography, filmmaking, and design.

However, these artists were rarely allowed membership into the Union of Artists and, therefore, founded their own union, the Union of Designers. Artists specializing in design resemble the faction of contemporary artists in that they are not united by any specific organizational structure or institution.

Within the city of Novosibirsk, which has a population of approximately two million, there are few individuals who would claim to have been influenced by the ideals and expressions of contemporary art.

Artists of design occasionally participate in contemporary, international art exhibitions that take place in Moscow or St. Petersburg. But, more frequently these artists take part in various festivals and events sponsored by foreign charitable organizations such as the Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation, British Council, Goethe Institute, etc.

Contemporary artists do not consider the members of the Union of Artists to be of equal artistic status, but rather dull craftsmen conforming to the rigid, traditional views of Russian art. Conversely, members of the Union regard contemporary artists as reckless, unstructured individuals who disgrace the “high-status” and “cultural mission” of Russian art.

During the Soviet period in Russia the ruling communist party carried out an “ideological struggle” against the westernization of art. Because of the Soviet administration, some artists took a conformist approach to communist ideology through the expression of their work, creating a sense of aggression towards those artists with Western, experimentalist views.

This situation did create some conflict but none that was taken seriously or proved to be extremely detrimental to the art community. In spite of the repressive acts of society, young artists still became stimulated and inspired by Western artistic views.

In the period of perestroika the conflict between official and informal, traditional and innovative views of art were spontaneously neutralized by the introduction of a diverse, comprehensive art market.

This ideology, which has continued through to the present, substituted the old “ideological struggle” of Russian art culture and has since conformed to its new political structure of a multi-party system.

Westernization is a common influence in much of art culture, but due to the fact that Russia is a non-western culture, there is a sense of controversy in how much Westernized styles should influence Russian art. There is particular criticism placed on contemporary Russian-especially regional-artists due to the Western association of their artistic style.

The material livelihood of artists is usually dependent on commercial success or failure. Some aspects that contribute to financial well being within the artistic market are productivity and the ability to work within market trends.

It is now possible to sell any form of art anywhere and within any price range. Generally speaking, prices are seldom high and most often accommodate middle to low figures.

Overall, the art market in Novosibirsk is rather consistent. The demand for art usually focuses on a traditional style including the fine and decorative arts.

In general, the most popular forms of painting are stylistically representative of the Western European masters of the 17th-19th centuries, or modern art. The strongest individual stylistic influences include Bosch, Canaletto, Klimt, Dahli and Brunovski.

Within in the past few years there has been an emphasis on abstract painting by the group the “New Russians.” There are approximately five internationally renowned abstract painters in Novosibirsk.

Contemporary artists on the other hand do not find much of an open market for their technologically based work. Photo, video, Internet projects, objects, “ready-mades,” performances, and installations do not sell very well, and even then they are sold primarily to foreign consumers.

Due to the increase in private contracts within the artistic market, active architects, designers, and artists have opportunities to design interiors for cafes, offices, and private apartments. The Novosibirsk State Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, which opened in the 1930’s offers a background in architectural education, mostly concerning interior design. In fact, most contemporary artists in Novosibirsk have studied at the institution’s department of architecture.

The prices of artistic pieces vary according to one’s artistic status within the artistic community. Street craftsmen sell their paintings in parks and metro stations for $10 to $100.

Union of Artists members sell at $100 to $800, rarely reaching $1000. There is one known case of a painting being sold for $2000, but this is regarded more as rumor due to the lack of documentation as to the identity of the piece or painter.

Some artists are involved in architectural planning, designing their own projects, and collaborating with others. Other artists teach at art schools such as the Academy of Arts and Architecture, Department of Fine Arts and Graphics of Pedagogical University, and School of Arts, earning a monthly income of approximately $50 to $200.

Few artists manage to sustain a stable income strictly from selling their work. Nonetheless, the talent of these artists is emphasized by the constant market demand for their work.

These artists are concerned with developing their own personal sense of style, recognizing the importance of expressing an individual, unique vision. Their work concentrates primarily on the role of form and color, less often on that of narrative. In general, not many artists discuss the social and political responsibilities of artists or contemporary art.

There are those artists who produce contemporary, socially reflective works of art. In Novosibirsk there are approximately 20-25 artists who are distinguished through small, often disintegrating groups that discuss such issues.

Among such groups are the “Blue Noses,” which includes artists such as Dmitry Bulnygin, Viacheslav Mizin, Konstatnin Skotnikov, and Maxim Zonov, who recently died in a car accident. The group’s philosophy revolves around social and personal critique, expressed through black humor, “artistic idiocy,” silly heroics, irony and self-mockery, parody, and the grotesque.

This is an art that expresses a sense of context: addressing the “here and now” in relation to westernized, skeptical, contemporary audiences. The Blue Noses present photography, video, and performance for both their domestic and international art scenes.

Their social attitude is reminiscent of medieval Russian yurodivys (God’s fools): traveling buffoon artists or European court jesters. The artistic style of the Blue Noses appeals to more Westernized sentiments and is often more appreciated in larger, more culturally diverse cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg.

Despite this fact, the Blue Noses do find a local following within Novosibirsk. The artists act as their own curators and art managers, consciously developing their own sense of appeal and audiences. To quote Baudrillard, the Blue Noses “manufacture demand” for their work and do it quite effectively.

The 1990s saw the development of clubs and galleries in the promotion of art culture. Such established art clubs and galleries include “888,” presently closed for repairs, and the gallery club “Black Widow.”

Functioning among these clubs and galleries are the so-called alternative cultural venues such as the Kondratiuk Foundation at Municipal Museum of Space Exploration, and Open Bunker, a former bomb shelter.

These are the venues used by contemporary artists for exhibitions, video screenings, and related parties. Such exhibitions rarely occur within the other few galleries and never take place within the venues controlled by the Union of Artists.

The history of contemporary art in Novosibirsk is briefly outlined in a catalog “Kunst aus Nowosibirsk,” published by ifa-Berlin (1998.)

The contemporary art scene in Novosibirsk is covered by the following web sites:

http://www.inart.nsk.ru/ – Novosibirsk group Blue Noses

http://www.esf.nsk.ru/- Novosibirsk Extra Short Film Festival

http://www.guelman.ru/nsk – Novosibirsk artists on the website of the Moscow “Guelman Gallery”

http://www.blackwidow.nsk.ru/ – Club gallery Black Widow (Novosibirsk)

http://www.dvp.ru/b-lab/888/photo/archive.html – Club “888” (Novosibirsk)

http://www.gallery.nsc.ru/ – Novosibirsk galleries and artists

http://www.nsc.ru/ru/ris/gallery – Novosibirsk galleries and artists

http://www.novosibirsk.ru/ – General information about Novosibirsk

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: First cup of coffee

Дата: 21 марта 2004 г. 13:32

dear zhen

on a day such as this i lie in bed for an hour trying to listen to my life, or even signs of life, and all i am able to think about are tasks that i must do, what to prepare for class tomorrow, which will be a hectic day, two classes at the college for those who must pay for their education, and one evening class at the parrot school. fortunately, i have no classes on wednesday, so i will actually have one free day during the middle of the week. something is not entirely as it should be, though, as one should wake up on a sunday morning free of thoughts of what needs to be done, free of thoughts generally. it has been quite stormy throughout the night and early hours of the morning, and now the wind has calmed down somewhat. the word in polish for quiet or calm is spokojny.

for the first time this morning i succeeded in opening my freeze-dried sealed coffee package without tearing the foil, so it is easier to fill the coffee pot, though my apparatus is malfunctioning just a little, and a final jet of hot water sprays coffee grounds around the interior of the cannister. more than likely it needs to be cleaned. do you use vinegar to cleanse your coffee maker? if so, how much vinegar do you use?

the article about art in novosibirsk is of interest to me as i can imagine the possibility of visiting artists there with you, and interviewing them about their work, and eventually writing an article. but the project would have to interest you as well, as a translator-collaborator, and i am afraid, genuinely afraid, that you will reply that you are not a specialist. there is actually some distinction made in the art world between institutionally trained curators and historians, largely because the financial rewards are so considerable for artists whose work is recognized and defined as important, as there are collectors, and even many western galleries and university-related museums have significant resources at their disposal for exhibitions, conferences, etc. literauture in the u.s. is a bit like this, as there is very real contention for publication, high-profile jobs which are almost like political appointments, and the visibility and name recognition that derives from public appearances such as readings and conferences. still, there is less the sense of the dreaded concept, specialist.

what rarely happens in art or literature, is simply conversation about making art, the social conditions and challenges, interests and information, etc. this is what i would be interested in writing about. for you to be convinced that you do not need to be a specialist in order to activate an interest, perhaps i will need to write to you more about what i understand to be art. a theme for another letter. but it begins by listening to someone talk about what they are doing, or what they were thinking when they made something.

i need also to ask you for a favor: once again i must ask for the submission deadlines for the spring conference publication for which i have a paper to submit (i remember the deadline as either march or april) as well as the deadline for the abstract for larissa’s conference in september. the latter conference is somewhat troubling, since i realize that i wrote an essay on this topic of tolerance as part of the background for my notes to a lecture about walter benjamin, though it is about mandelstam as well, and reading it, i realize that i cannot submit this essay to the conference, as the makes statements that would not be tolerated (specifically about Trotsky). this reminds me of the game played by academics, and it is troubling to participate in this game. how to write about something entirely innocuous that will trouble no one, and fulfill the symbolic function of a foreigner’s participation. for a writer, when they begin to participate in such games, and write words in which they have no belief, an incurable rot starts to take over, and one’s writing is threatened. i am more than a little worried about this, as certain events that occurred the year before i left the u.s. made me very intimidated by the same online publishing that i wrote about as so important in my previous letter.

certainly i am more cautious now, because i work on a year-to-year basis, contract, and have no protection. being able to support myself is my first concern, and my greatest concern. i wrote, before leaving the u.s. the first year, very strongly and powerfully in a public forum, and even contributed to an online discussion list that year and through the next summer when i was in new york. my last public statement in an online forum other than the discussion list for poetics at a u.s. university was last year in tomsk, at the end of march, about a year ago, and even then i suffered from significant anxiety afterwards. one might say that more and more i am silencing myself. no one is silencing me. i am silencing myself. disturbing to admit this. perhaps this is why one thinks about classroom tasks on a morning when one should be writing, reading, active, exploring thought and language. that is what is writing. above all, this development towards silence is based on insecurity, and fears based on past events. you may recognize some of this from problems of russian writers in the earlier period, 60s and 70s. without a secure university position, or independent means of support, one cannot really write what they like in the public online space. i am even suspicious enough to believe that on the one online discussion list that i participate in, mostly poems and fragments of writing, some statements, but critically directed when they are not aesthetic, that there are attempts to provoke me to make more extreme political statements, such as are supported in the imaginary sphere of my poetry. if i let this happen, to be provoked, and on one level it is simply a writer’s wish to participate in public discussion of the events of the day, what is sometimes called a climate, the cultural climate, to be involved in debates, and contribute to a discursive space sharpened by critique, but i stand to lose everything, and in the cultural sphere of the u.s. literary culture there are very powerful people capable of destroying my means of support, even as i live abroad. the extreme position is suspicion of one’s enemies, and writers do become enemies based on their suspicion and antipathy towards one anothers’ work (you may associate this with the conflict between officially recognized writers and samizdat in 60s and 70s) and there is always open argument about the place of their work in the future. the future my poetry has been written towards is not an apocolyptic future, but certainly one where all the foundations of the society are shaken if not destroyed. if, instead, there is developed a more totalitarian future, then there will be even less and less space in that culture for my writing. these are some of my reasons and motivations about being what might be called circumspect about publishing in book form, yet. and this is why i express an interest in working with you this summer by trying to establish some contacts with artists in novosibirsk, visiting them and interviewing them.

i understand that you are always cautious, and i can promise you that the field of my interest is only aesthetic, though there is an implicit politics about someone from western europe or u.s. visiting and writing about artists who survive on 50 to 200 dollars a month. how to artists organize themselves in such conditions, how do they share resources? these are important questions, not in the journalistic sense of exposure of harsh living conditions, but as a reflective-like lesson for artists in western europe and u.s. who contend for resources and rewards.

so, that is why i wrote to you yesterday about your interest in the article that i found in a rather informative publication, http://www.artmargins.com

there is other information there about art and architecture in russia, and some of it is very good reading. not everything is written by specialists.

and about the question of specialism in language and literature, it is my opinion if that someone reads caringly the literature of their language, then an interior voice and ear develop. sometimes this sensitivity to sound is activated in writing, and sometimes it is made present in speech, in conversation. i hear this sensitivity, this sensibility, in your conversation, and i have heard it since our first meetings. you are free to not believe me, of course. but if i write to you as someone who cares about their language, about reading, about the life of the imagination, this is in response to your voice, and your person, your presence. i do not wish for you to think that i write to you in the form of a demand. we are both of us surrounded by more than enough demands.

bye for now. i hope that you have time to write to me today. but i hope even more that you have some time for yourself. and that it is not too cold. there is a terrible echo in the hibye, called drivebys in english, someone in a car shoots someone on the street, sometimes they know them, and sometimes it is random murder. even in cleveland there were such incidents. i am sorry to end on such a sombre note. something is rotten in the state, etc.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: A few small edits

Дата: 22 марта 2004 г. 0:48

dear zhen

nothing stands out as incomprehensible except “discrepant” and perhaps, “vacancies.” I’m not sure what is meant by vacancies, an erasure or absence? some kind of negative reaction? of course, the language (the science) is way beyond me, but the basic core of the translation is quite readable. You are rather talented, but I suppose you know this.

Which conference is the March 15 deadline? I can’t possibly write anything for Larissa’s conference until Easter break. After I wrote my sorrowful letter this morning, I was going through some articles for a class this week and found the roundtable discussion of The Russian Ark (Sokurov). I will simply summarize the discussion, by both Russian and West European film critics, including one Central European writer from Univ. of California Irvine. The reactions are quite distinct and contrastive, both for and against. How to work this into tolerance, I don’t know, but part of the controversy of the film is 1) the way that history is inflected (Russia’s classicism circa 1913) and 2) the technique of a single-shot film (no montage, fades, splices, etc). I’ve done some writing recently about cinema, so I have a basic working vocabulary. I should be able to write 10 pages over the Easter weekend, about two weeks away. Will that be time enough?

The other essay is already written, and yes, if you would care to format it, that would perhaps take less time than trying to explain the formatting conventions. Can I send it to you Wednesday?

Today was a quiet day, reading the autobiography of a Sioux holy man, or shaman. The language (translated) is very beautiful sometimes, and the setting (near Pine Ridge reservation in western South Dakota, I have actually visited, so I know the landscape. It actually makes me a little homesick, at least for the landscape). Vast skies, as in Siberia.

bye

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Lithuanian Light

Дата: 23 марта 2004 г. 11:22

59th Light Poem: for La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela – 6 November 1982

Late light allows us to begin,

Altair’s light on an altar guides us onward.

Many lights are seen where mountains cluster.

Orange lights are spangled over hillsides.

Neutral light glows above their ridges.

Tiny lights of many kinds begin to be discernible.

Evanescent lights arise and die.

Yellow light momently overspreads.

Ochre light succeeds it.

Umber light in a while is all that is left.

Nearly nonexistent light increases rapidly.

Green light envelops everything.

Magenta light glows over the farther peaks.

Alabaster lights suddenly shoot upward.

Red lights cross the sky diagonally.

Incandescent-lamp light glows in the foreground.

Acetylene-lamp light splits the ambience.

No light at all supervenes.

Zodiacal light replaces light’s absence.

Algae-green light maculates the glow.

Zinc light flares amid the highest oaks.

Escaping light illumes Lithuanian paths.

Earthlight grows near the Baltic.

Lithuanian light lessens environing earthlight.

All the light there can be won’t be enough.

Jackson MacLow

p.s. Do you like this? zhen?

Thank you for your efforts on my behalf with the Offices of Border Crossing. Yesterday was a hard day teaching, and I am tired, though fortunately I have only to show two videos to classes this morning, meet with another student about Ruskin’s King of the Golden River (Pushkin-like fairy tale written in 1851), then no parrot classes, no classes at all tomorrow, and in-class writing and video for my two culture classes, so the only class I must prepare for is Amer. Lit (Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow, texts I would never teach in U.S. but here by tradition they are quite popular, as in Russia, as I am sure that you have heard of these two stories before. So I think I shall make it to the end of the week in not quite complete state of fatigue.

I am missing the light in Lithuania, and remembering you. Do you mind?

b y e

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Camus’ notes

Дата: 24 марта 2004 г. 2:47

dear zhen

After having read for several unanxious hours this afternoon, I should

write towards Larissa’s conference, that essay, which, as I mentioned,

I will try to write no more than a summary of Sokurov’s Russian Ark as

it appeared, by way of critique, in a roundtable of reviews in the

publication the url for which I sent you in a previous email. But

tonight as I was reading I found myself thinking more and more about

the idea of the Ark itself, and thought that I might try your patience

by writing tonight to you about it, not seeking a response from you

so much as merely asking you to be there and listen to me or, as the

case may be, read me. If and as you wish.

Camus? I wonder what and who Camus is in Russian. One would

have to take into account factors I cannot even begin to take into

account, and that is part of my thoughts about writing about the

Russian Ark, and from my writing position, writing as a poet towards

“the narration of historical structures” which is culture, according

to Mandelstam.

Ark would suggest there is a flood coming, apocalyptic? That is, if in

responding only to the title, one were to go no farther than a

positive reading of the title, and how could it not be ironized? I am

glad that I do not have any Walter Benjamin with me. The books would

intimidate me and keep me from writing. Because I would go to his

books if they were here and look for support for the idea of the

spectrality of history, and the Hermitage/Winter Palace/St. Petersburg

nexus of the Russian Ark would perhaps open to a Benjaminian reading.

I don’t know if that’s what I have to give.

One deep emotional concern for me (and I am really only capable of

becoming emotional over my own writing) is the ending of the essay I

wrote last year in Tomsk (my last essay on poetics). “Her

revolutionary classicism” the essay ends on this phrase, on an

inflection of whatever it is that Russia is, and how it is being

imagined and has been imagined in my writing. What troubled me is that

the phrase, here, to me, sounded absurd, and it is disturbing when

something I’ve written returns to me and I can’t feel any belief in

it. What has changed from when I ended that essay is where I am, which

I think is haunted by a lot of Jewish ghetto ghosts, though the

language is unfortunate (there is a presence here of that past, but

it’s buried in the architecture).

“Many of the names in that period were buried” is the very beautiful

line you spoke one morning over breakfast and which I found this

afternoon in my notebook, though the writing does not record

three-syllable rhyme of buried with period. Would you mind if this

became the title of the essay I am writing? The essay that I am

beginning to wish to write?

Because the Russian Ark manifests the Names, the rollcall of bones,

the museum of ghosts, and how one reads this museum of ghosts–how

does one read this museum of ghosts?

History, especially cultural history, only knows itself by the names,

the signatures, that survive, and few people write or make art without

some degree of acute awareness of their posthumous existence, the

dream of the life of their work beyond the painful existence of the

life that gives birth to the work.

To try to show the other history–that of the nameless suffering

multitude, that way leads into expropriation of the anonymity of their

suffering, and even to commit the (aesthetic) crime of socialist

realism, that uncritical acceptance of the feasibility of the

representation, that’s not an option for Sokurov.

The film camera is turning its eye to the active dreaming of the past

in the present, the very figure of Russia’s classical culture and the

concept of the museum. But why? And why, Ark? Zabolotsky’s “Suffering

of the Animals.” That is the great news that the peasantry had to

bring to poetry and through poetry, to culture and history. You

remember the child’s bible story, two by two, into the boat, forty

days and forty nights. This element of fable inflected in the title.

And what is it possible to imagine as the experience of the viewer,

shown this parade, like rows of pictures on a wall, of the memory of a

great culture? The date, 1913, situates this Proustian world on the

threshold of its disappearance, and presents us with the temptation of

nostalgia? If only history had not happened! If only Kerensky’s

provisional government could have survived!

The flood that is coming in The Russian Ark is 1917, to try to keep

that in mind and not succumb to the temptation to posit the coming

catastrophe, which exists in my own writings as the Mass Grave.

Did I tell you without some return in some form of 1917, that my

writings are worthless, meaningless, and my life (my writing life) has

been lived for nothing, and I have made such a mess of that other life

which I have never for once believed as anything but a motion towards

the writing. Writing?

There are moments of perception my two years in Russia that I cannot

even begin to approach in language, this dogs’ language I speak and

write in.

So, yes, the very title resonates for me, the Russian Ark. Recognizing

fully well the dream and the nostalgia in the invitation even to

imagine the viewing and participation in the cinematic thought of the

Ark.

Or, the film does surrender to the blindest nostalgia, and refuses

scientific history, and even the recognition of the advance–for the

world’s multitude–that 1917 represented, however briefly.

Nostalgia would be to imagine the 19th century, to imagine it at all.

Isn’t that what the 19th century did so well? Imagination as the

Representation. The literature, at least, in every language, gave us

whole worlds.

Isn’t it interesting that art became painfully self-conscious of

itself at about the same time as 1917?

I am glad that I write poetry sometimes, as for whatever other faults

I commit, the opiate of the narrative is not one of them. You cannot

help but be aware that you are reading poetry when you read poetry.

But the `narration of historical structures’–that was the great dream

of the museum and the university alike, and the concept of culture in

general, and I am not trying to assert some postmodernity in

opposition to this, but to accept the infinite molecularity of

existence and of social life in particular, and its unavailability for

the representation, and to supplant narrativity with multiple

approaches towards auto-cognition of the artwork, how to be always

aware of one’s procedures, so that you do not fall into the abyss of

the illusion–that is what artists in Europe and America were learning

in the 20th century, and it is not self-referentiality.

So, now, though it will appear as a contradiction, I’m going to end

this letter by quoting one of the most beautiful poems I know of,

called “A poem for the storyteller”:

July 23

There are many here where I am

                                   right now, the ranks of

                                            fabled dead shadows

fall across this paper. Names. Cleopatra

                    lists her beloveds gone underground:

                                                          Anthony, who is to me

                                                               or I to him

                    that I should name him courtier to that heavenly

                                                                  crown.

                                                                            Oh lush

                              life

coming out of your graves,

       it is the day

     the dead shall rise and populate

                                                     the skies.

                                                              They are tears

                                                                 in my eyes,

Mists that lie along the land

                      to the west, gray blue spectres

                         that have no names,

                            but play

an enchanted game with our minds. Childhood stories,

                         we never heard

                              till now.

John Wieners (1958-9)

p.s. In a sense, you could say that for Larissa’s conference I am

going to translate John Wieners’ poem using Sokurov’s The Russian Ark.

What do you think? You who say to me at breakfast, “many of the names

in that period were bur-y-ed.”

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: First paragraph for Toleration conf and Essay for philology conf

Дата: 25 марта 2004 г. 4:33

dear zhen

I shall try your patience. Here is the first paragraph, written or in the process of being written when you called. No response is request, though your reaction, as a Russian reader, to any “hot” spots would be greatly appreciated. Basically, I’m trying to elaborate a Mandelstam-type insistence on what is not there, in the Sokurov film or in the discussion about it. But it’s too early to tell, though I was sensing O.M.s presence this afternoon, and the sensation was quite nice. As for the attached essay, all it needs is formatting, maybe by this Saturday or Sunday?

I miss you. Bye. Oh, and as regards the “feather” of a poem I sent you yesterday, here are a few more words for it, by another poet:

“from where I carry you a feather

as though, sharp, I picked up,

in the afternoon delivered you

a jewel,

            it flashing more than a wing,

than any old romantic thing,

than memory, than place,

than anything other than that which you carry

that that which is,

call it a nest, around the head of, call it

the next second”

*

My subject for this paper raises several problems probably none of

which can be resolved here: the relationship of poetry to the cinema

across which exists the problem of the relationship between word and

image; the problem of the definition of culture in the actual space of

translation across languages and cultures; the problem in the history

of cinema of the major production as opposed to what is sometimes

called experimental film; and the problem of the interpretation of

history by the work of art, and whether that work of art is visual,

audio-visual, or lingual is a question which directly influences the

ability of critical discourse to account for the impact of a work of

art such as Sokurov’s _The Russian Ark_, and the debate about this

film in the pages of the online journal, Art Margins. Just as this

paper begins with a quotation from a poem by John Wieners, as a

further comment on the difficulty of the subject proposed here is Osip

Mandelstam’s remark that poetry exists outside the narration of

historical structures commonly known as culture. Such an extreme

proposition asks that one accept the poetic word as the supreme

antagonist of critical discourse and its objects, just as one might be

expected to believe that history only exists, or survives, in language

and at the level of the poetic word. In the poem I began by quoting

there is a dialogue between the date of composition, 1958-59, and for

lack of a specific marker, 1616, the date of the printing of

Shakespeare’s folio of plays. The shadow of the Elizabethans falls

across this page written almost 50 years ago, and a liminal acoustic

space is created in the equivalent duration of a sonnet which may

cathect in the reader the uncanny recognition of the coincidence of

historical times in the sensitive phrasal timing reproducing the sound

of the past in the present. The visual experience the poem offers is

the departure of the lines from the stanza into the floating space of

arrangement by ear, or improvisation, further and further removed from

stanzaic patterning and repetition. But there is no image as such, no

visualization, and it is the domination of the audio-visual image and

the appropriation of narrativity by the cinema so that a cultural

object may be produced which functions as the address for critical

discourse, and whether that discourse identifies itself as art history

or the philosophy of history is less important to me than asserting

the opposition to such discursive practices by the poetics in which

every poem participates. Why not look to the margins of a culture and

its language for evidence of the thresholds of tolerance and

intolerance as to the question of representation and what can and

cannot be signed? The pressure on the cultural sign called _The

Russian Ark_ and the debate about it in Art Margins that can be

exerted by the poetics, and tactics, of permanent exile from all

conceptions of national, cultural or ethnic identity, the foundations

for which are established in the nineteenth century’s narrations of

historical structures, might proceed to its own breaking point, the

threshold of intolerance for an unacceptable statement. To state, for

example, that the space of paradox represented by the absent referent

in Sokurov’s film and the Art Margins debate, the terrible knowledge

brought to the world by the Russian peasantry in the twentieth century

and epitomized by Nikolai Zabolotsky’s “Suffering of the Animals,” is

the actual locus for the concept of classicism in _The Russian Ark_.

The illegibility resulting from this space of paradox and its

disavowal is manifested in the tension between what can and cannot be

visualized: the procession displaces the demonstration; the staircase

displaces the ladder; baroque displaces vernacular architecture; the

museum itself displaces the untilled field. The displaced referent,

what might be called _The Triumph of Agriculture_, one sign for the

historical reality the film cannot allow to exist without calling into

question the grounds for its own existence, cannot be expected to

appear in the form the image and its narration. History can neither be

seen nor told, though whether or not vast layers of time can be heard

moving through language at the level of the poetic word depends on the

space occupied by poetics in the collective and intellectual life of a

society.

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>

Кому: Lukyanova <lev@tpu.ru>

Тема: Cold again

Дата: 26 марта 2004 г. 11:55

dear zhen

the cold rain tried to snow last night, and there are patches of ice and snow on cars, though the ground is too warm to allow one of these last reminders of winter. there is a mist in the air that might be rain. very cold rain, as yesterday. last night, it was cold enough in my bedroom to force me to sleep in the beige room, where my computer is. often i sleep in here anyway, falling to sleep while reading, i especially like to fall asleep while reading with the light on and fully clothed, waking up in the middle of the night, not knowing for a moment where or who i am (if the book was really good).

only 3 of 12 students came to my conversation class at the college where students must pay, and when i asked them if my lessons were too difficult, they politely responded that the change in weather had made everyone depressed, so they stayed home. doesn’t that sound like russia? you don’t stay away from school on a sunny day, but you stay home on a cold and dark day, too sad to leave home. whether or not it was true, i enjoyed the explanation. one of the students had an “advanced gold” FCE book, and when i asked her about it, she said that this was the book they were using for her “listening” class.

the condition of organized disorder created by lack of educational materials is almost comic sometimes, though it represents sometimes almost half the time required for teaching. your preparation efforts for english-language lessons are heroic, at least it seems to me. you should make them give you a book first. even on syllabi of universities in western europe i see posted on the website the books students are expected to buy, though the textbook market may not be as highly developed in the u.s. how can university education proceed without books? this is a problem which intrigues me, as the university education does proceed, though to be honest i am probably teaching in English at about an eleventh or twelth-grade high school level. with few exceptions, this was generally true of students in the u.s. also. even in my most ignorant moments, my first two years of college (at a very cheap and non-academic community college) I wrote ten-page term papers with research for literature, political science, philosophy, etc. maybe it was all empty forms, and i am the first to admit that my education is not very good, but there seems to be a kind of institutional blindness here (or, bureaucratic opacity). one of my colleague was making a test for his students, and asked me the following question: what was the name of the woman Daisy kills in the car accident in the Great Gatsby? If I asked such questions of my students, I would feel like I was torturing them, and yet that seems to be how the system is structured here: benign torture as a form of internalizing the very real economic torture.

I try to ask of my students at the university only those questions that are discursive, open to interpretation, and which may admit into the answering in writing whatever it is that they know. The writing will be good or not-so-good depending on the degree of their interest. I elaborate on this since I gave a very successful mid-term exam yesterday for my first-year group. Full attendance, and the students wrote until the end of the period. No one wanted to stop writing. This made me feel good, simply as a writer who teaches literature and culture, as I feel that I am making some progress with communicating basic ideas in a second-language without being authoritarian about it (and so many seem to suffer from this authoritarianism which is like the air, the climate, the cultural memory). Does learning have to be about rules and obedience and humiliation? Can’t there be an element of permisiveness which communicates generosity, that kind of generosity of sensibility we always find in the very greatest writers?

From your email yesterday I sense that you approve of my working, and this would be a very good influence on me, as you know I tend towards long periods of idleness. The two states aren’t necessarily opposed to one another, all intensity of activity needs its abeyance, but I know equally well that I suffer from a sort of long-term melancholia, sense of loss in the past impossible to recognize and name and overcome, a loss that is always around me, and which keeps me still, strangely still, quiet, passive, unmoving and unmoved. Most of my creative energy is dissipated in conversations in the classroom, and I often feel completely exhausted after teaching. About a week ago a spoke for more than an hour on cubism and the perspectival analysis of the referent, the assertion of multiple planes, geometrical perception, literally physically pasting the world on to the canvas, and the discovery of the canvas as the space of vision, and not the illusion of the depth perspective, and I eventually realized that no one had ever heard of this before (the heritage of social realism) though Polish art is quite advanced, all that art and thinking about art takes place outside the academy. I was remined of just how intellectually conservative an environment I was in, such as I felt in Tomsk (not the sciences, but the exposure, the degree of exposure, to modernism in the West). I’m not complaining, it’s helpful and insightful to be reminded of this.

This morning I have time for a second cup of coffee, so, if you don’t mind …

And do you know that I miss you ? …

b

y

 e

От: Kevin Magee <km@hypobololemaioi.com>