Plot Kills Brain Sells

Lit mags and Adam Bellow

2012-01-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours today going through my pile of literary magazines today, taking stock, purging and reorganizing. I've been collecting the magazines for a few years, since I started submitting my own stories and especially since I got the gig reading submissions for All-Story Zoetrope. I subscribe to about 4-5 magazines a year, playing the field and rotating my subscriptions each year. I also buy individual issues once in a while, like the pretty Noon Annual or the charismatic The Fabulist. I try not to get more than I can read, and end up reading about a quarter of the magazines that I get.

The task of looking at old magazines turned into a fun social activity when my friends Genine and Amber came over and sat with me on the floor and flipped through the pages. We ordered Chinese and had dinner together, after which everyone turned drowsy. When my friends left, I thought of cleaning up, but actually ended up reading some stuff. A few stories, and an essay that had only tangential relationship to literature: Adam Bellow's "On Conservative Intellectuals," published in World Affairs in the Summer of 2008. I think I'd picked up this magazine at a Slavic conference I went to a few years ago. What grabbed my attention about this essay is that it started like a story, with a funeral (William F. Buckley's); that the writer is an editor; and that the writer is Saul Bellow's son. I'm not sure I understood the point he was making in the article: he seems to be uncomfortable with the direction of the contemporary conservative movement (which he distinguishes from the Republican party here), but is unapologetic about his place in it. Anyway, I'm coming to this debate in the middle and have only a vague idea what he is to apologize for, and what I liked most about this essay was a metaphor he used about the media stream of the 90s: "Metaphorically speaking, the Berlin Wall had been replaced by the Jersey Turnpike--and eight lane superhighway filled with trucks zooming past in both directions, variously labeled "Gulf War," "Bosnia," "O.J. Simpson," "Princess Di," "Titanic," with no particular distinction made between them. For in the postmodern world, all media events are created equal." This is not a particularly fresh metaphor--the information superhighway--but he delivers it with a lot of punch and conviction.

No overarching conclusion from this flurry of activity today, but a sense of nagging sadness. I ended up mixing the stacks of magazines I've read with the ones I haven't read and packed them away again in such a way that I won't be able to remember which is which.

New Years in Sydney

2012-01-02T11:56:00.001-08:00

As the afternoon settles in, the level of excitement rises. Couples with picnic baskets and tents are heading for the ferry. An organized market at the back of the church yard closes first. There are still plenty of customers, but the girl who sells laser-etched greeting cards needs to get across the bridge to the apartment party her friends are hosting. It makes sense to close out the year on the positive note. She sold more cards today than in any week of October. One more card with the outline of the Harbour bridge, and she's done. Jewelry and designer clothing boutiques make their best sales of the year and close swiftly, encouraging the dawdling window-shoppers to move downstream to bottle-shops and convenience stores. A flower shop has a line around the corner. A boutique shop selling outrageously priced novelty jewelry--necklaces of orange and green ostrich feathers moulded from Tupperware-quality plastic--is one of the last ones to close, and what a mob scene inside. Nobody can quite afford it and everybody is on the verge of buying. Everybody is drunk with anticipation of getting drunk later.

The bottle shops are the last to close. Wine, champagne, miniature bottles of whiskey and bourbon, everything goes on New Years night. Even if we're planning to spend the night at a pub, it doesn't hurt to plan ahead and bring extra champagne. At 5 pm, all museums, stores, and cafes are finally closed for the night. Things are getting really serious now. We were walking at a fairly leisurly pace before, but now we're suddenly aware of the clock ticking. We look for the right bus, which never comes, then we look for any bus, then we look for a taxi going the right direction, then we look for any taxi going in any direction. Everyone else is going the same way we are. We panic and feel silly for panicking. The expectations are high--we want to have a good time!--but why should our good time depend on making it to a restaurant? Yes, we've made a reservation, but surely we are not letting down the restaurant much by not showing up. It's New Years, and hoards of hungry customers are roaming the city. No, no, if we are set on making this dinner, it's because we've made these plans, and somehow our ability to have a good time for the night has gotten hinged on going through with our plans. But how sour and unhappy with ourselves must we be to not have fun in Sydney on New Years, surrounded by all of these happy people having a good time? Everywhere we look is a party already. It's a tense moment, but of course we get a cab. From here on the evening is smooth sailing, our panic itself and the relief adding to the good time. It's clear now that the stakes were higher than we consciously knew them to be; and this was hardly even about the dinner and the restaurant. Something about our ability to make and execute decisions jointly and with respect to each other's wants and expectations. But of course, it was always going to work out. Events in the future having a rippling effect on the past. And we were always already going to have a good time on New Years. We are both devoted to the idea.

We eat fish for dinner and then settle in at the pub, Lord Nelson, on Kent street, and so British in style, it'd be easy to forget we're in Australia if not for the weather. The warm breeze comes in from the open doors and windows. Bats are waking up and shrieking in the setting sun. When the 9 pm fireworks hit, the bar empties, and people start climbing up the hill for better viewing spots. Elsewhere around the harbour, groups have been picnicking since noon waiting for the fireworks. Everyone has a decision to make, old friends or new friends, private or public, on the land or on the sea, north or south, sitting or standing. No, the apocalypse isn't coming, or at least not so fast, but if we want a moment to mark the passage of time, why not choose this night? Our new friend Adam is celebrating his 30th birthday at the Lord Nelson. He ditched all of his firework-loving old friends, and he and a woman he's just starting to date, Rachel, are camped out at the pub for the night, getting trashed and making brand new friends. Our diving buddy Danny shows up to celebrate with us. Quickly this New Years becomes about building a transitory community with strangers. What attracts us to meeting other people? What brings us out into the world? Is it too little of something (dissatisfaction, loneliness) or too much of something else (curiosity, love)? Why do we write, blog? Everything is happening all at once, and the more whiskey we drink, the faster the time moves. The fireworks fire like clockwork, one round each on the hour, then half hour. Finally, we get out of the bar and start climbing the hill. It's happening.

Our champagne bottles (which we bought just in case, an attempt to over-determine our good time) get confiscated--of course. The observatory hill, our chosen viewing location, is an alcohol-free zone. "You can pick it up later," a guard tells Dave with a wink. But of course we can't. We go back to Lord Nelson. Rachel, Adam, Danny, a couple from Sweden, a couple from Germany, Lev from LA, and rounds of shots, beers, whiskey. At 2 am we close down the bar and walk back to the train. Everything in the city is super orderly. There is evidence that some streets and alleys in The Rocks, the historical downtown, had been completely packed, people standing neck to neck. The streets are still busy, but there's very little trash on the ground, and cleanup is starting already.

My friend John who drives a cab in Sydney and was working on New Years night reports picking up a Japanese couple in the center of the city three minutes before New Years. They wanted to be driven to the airport. Why? Had they seen the 9 pm fireworks and had enough? Had they become completely overwhelmed by the crowds? Hanging out downtown, they must've wanted to see the fireworks, but what made them abandon the idea at the last possible minute? Did they suddenly decide that they've had enough fun for one night, that actually seeing the fireworks wasn't that exciting? Was the experience for them all about the people, watching the crowd, being with the crowd, knowing that they're in the middle of the crowd? Perhaps they knew themselves so well that they could admit to themselves and to each other that watching the fireworks was just another excuse, another silly reason people make up as an excuse to come out and gather together and be with other people. So they got what they wanted and then they didn't actually need to see the fireworks. They made another good choice by getting into John's cab: he knew them even better than they knew themselves, and made sure to drive them past the harbour so they could get a glimpse of the fireworks anyway. It's a spectacular show, and everyone should see it especially if they're in Sydney on New Year's night, having a good time. They must've enjoyed the show immensely, and all the more for knowing they've made all the right decisions that night.

Dave blogs about our New Years here: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/12/dec-31-2011-new-year-is-happier-in.html

Cairns

2011-12-29T04:57:00.001-08:00

Did you know that coral is an animal, not a plant? It's odd to think of corals as having any life at all. Personally, I'm used to thinking of animals as sentient beings. (The ocean is really watching us.) Male and female corals release sperm and eggs into the water simultaneously, 4-6 days after full moon in November and December. The sperm and eggs float near the surface in threads of pink goo. I might have seen some of the remains of this goo as I was snorkling in the Coral Sea the other day. The threads float around for a while, looking for a place to implant themselves, and when they do, they immediately start building their calcium shells.

Probably the main danger that divers face is nitrogen poisoning (not sharks)--the longer the divers spend underwater and the deeper they go, the more nitrogen accumulates in their bodies. Nitrogen poisoning has effects so freaky (divers going crazy in the water, or developing nitrogen bubbles under their skin) that apparently there was a Dr. House episode dedicated to it. Divers have to come to the surface very slowly, resting at shallower depths to help release some nitrogen from their bodies. Each diver these days is equipped with a computer that monitors their exposure to nitrogen. Taking rests between dives and spending only a few hours under water each day are all ways to avoid overexposure. The threat of nitrogen poisoning is also why divers are strongly discouraged from flying at high altitudes for 24 hours after their last dive.

The tourist industry in the town of Cairns seems to be prospering from this nitrogen business. People come from all over the world to dive at the Barrier Reef, and are forced to stay in town for at least one other day. That's when they discover that Cairns is surrounded by picturesque tropical rainforest, has zoos and botanic gardens, crocodile sanctuaries, and of course lots of shopping with local souvenirs, etc. And since many tourists are wary of driving on the opposite side of the road, they are shuttled and taxied around between the various attractions. We've met only one couple from the Netherlands, Jorrit and Audrey, who after the boat, are not flying out of Cairns, but renting a camper van and planning to take a week or two to drive to New South Wales. Even in the Cairns area alone, there are lots of fascinating things to see and do off the beaten tourist track. From working dairy, sugar cane, coffee and fruit farms to old gold prospecting towns and communities. I've seen the map, and it looks very exciting. Lots more to do during our next trip to Australia. This time, Dave and I shuttled around Cairns for three days (every time being the first ones to be picked up and the last to be dropped off), and so learning the geography of all the hotels and backpacker hostels in town quite well. There's Rydges, there's Coral Tree, there's contemporary-looking Trilogy, etc. etc.

Trapped in town (and tired after several action-packed days), Dave and I camped out at a cafe in town for the afternoon. It was starting to rain, but a warm, tropical rain. We sat outside, under the awning, Dave blogging and I writing postcards. Very quickly Dave made friends with the guy working the cash register, originally from Hamburg, he likes to spend as much time as he can in India playing around with obscure computer technology and building computer games. He was only in Austrlia for a few months, working for a friend who owned this cafe. According to him, the tourist business in Cairns was down, suffering in the last 2 years from the comparatively strong Australian economy that made the country particularly expensive for tourists from other parts of the world, more affected by the economic crisis. We couldn't quite tell: it was hard to know which shops were closed for the Christmas holiday and which for good.

As we were just about ready to leave and look for dinner, Dave spotted Erika--one of the divers from OceanQuest. She and her friend Alexandra (who is not a diver and didn't go on the ship at all) were meeting up later with more people who'd spent 2 nights on the boat and disembarked only an hour or two ago. We joined in, of course. We'd met everyone the day before, and shared a few meals on the boat together. There were 8 people at dinner, including us. Erika and Alex from Gothenburg, Sweden. Amanda from Washington, DC but lives in LA, Robin from Calgary, and Jorrit and Audrey from the Netherlands, near Amsterdam. We all ate at a central "Night Markets" area -- a food court with mostly Asian shops selling some local fish and various combinations of rice and noodles. After a day of diving (and snorkling) together, we really didn't know about each other except that we were all interested in travel and colorful fish and we all liked the desserts on OceanQuest--chocolate pudding and vanilla ice cream the day we were there, and pineapple cake with whipped cream the day we left. But meeting again after a day apart felt very much like we were reuniting with family members. We had dinner together, and then most of us also had gelato. Cairns is packed with ice cream and gelato shops -- there were about ten of them in the one block radius from the Night Market.

The next morning, Dave and I ran into Eugene and Katya, a Russian couple whom we also met on the boat and who were staying in the same hotel as us. Katya is originally from Kiev, grew up near Tel Aviv, and now the two of them live in Washington, DC, working as programmers. Together, we went to explore the local Botanic gardens and the rainforest, and then they had to get back to the hotel to get a taxi ride back to the airport. Dave and I went back to town for more gelato, and then we followed them to the airport.

As we were leaving Cairns, it started to rain with some force. Cairns is in the tropics, and that's what summer is supposed to be like there: days and days of monsoon, tropical rain. We got lucky with good, fairly dry weather. A few hours earlier, when we walked in the local Botanic Gardens, it was barely drizzling, rain coming down a few drops at a time. We saw lots of different kinds of palm trees and tropical plants, birds that looked like turkeys and chickens, a lake that is known to harbor crocodiles. The morning local paper reported that a python attacked a 2-year old boy. The day before, at a little zoo in a mountain village near Cairns, Dave got to huddle a koala bear, and we took a brisk walk through another part of a rainforest. Lots more to explore in the area, and hopefully we'll come back one day, with a camper van and more diving (and snorkling) buddies.

Dave has blogged about our day in Cairns here: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/12/dec-28-2011-cairns-australia-so-many.html

Lone Snorkler at the Barrier Reef

2011-12-27T14:11:00.001-08:00

So, you decided to snorkle at the Barrier Reef? It's odd why you, a young, able-bodied woman are abstaining from diving. But don't try to explain your reasons: they aren't good enough. There really can be no reasons (except for your own strong-headedness) why, given that you're already spending a night on a live-aboard diving vessel, you're not working on your diving certification. No, no, don't try to explain. You know that you're wrong to miss a diving opportunity this good. You'll get certified on the next trip. But for now, you're insisting on snorkeling, so here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Most likely, you're the only snorkler on the live-aboard diving boat. No problem. You can swim wherever you like, completely alone. Hovering on top of the reef, you will see many of the same things the divers see, but likely, since you're without a guide or a buddy, you won't be able to identify what you're seeing.

2. Even if you're only snorkling, you still get a to don a wetsuit, so that you won't feel like you're standing out too much in your swim suit. You will also get a warning not to touch coral. Yes, in some parts of the reef, the water will be shallow enough so that you could dive down just holding your breath and touch fish or coral, but don't do it. Leave diving to the divers. The coral and the fish can be poisonous, and you're the only snorkler out at sea.

3. The shark that you see will be less of a shark because nobody has seen it with you (and can back up your story). Also less of a shark because you don't have an expensive underwater camera to document the encounter. Also less of a shark because you didn't find it in its den among the corals, but you let the divers find it, and then the shark found you. Even if in your own imagination the shark is more of a shark because you're the lone snorkler outside the boat, and the shark is going right for you, good luck explaining the experience to the divers, who have donned oxygen tanks and took several hours of training courses so that they can go to the bottom of the ocean and swim with the sharks. Your shark is definitely less of a shark.

4. You will make eye contact with giant, colorful fish, but you will be the one to get scared and run away. Proper divers, on the other hand, are not afraid of anything but their own equipment.

5. Snorkeling right on top of the reef plateau, you might find yourself uncomfortably close to giant purple lips of a clam that look ready to eat you. Everything within your arm's reach will look severely poisonous and/or sharp, but that's because you're a silly snorkler and don't know any better.

6. You might have a harder time seeing stingrays that stick to the sandy bottom of the ocean. If you do see one, it will be more or less by accident because you're not at the bottom of the ocean.

7. You won't see tiny, beautiful worms living in the sand or in the coral at the bottom of the ocean.

8. You might see a giant sea turtle, but it might be less of a turtle because of #3 amplified by the fact that nobody, even a snorkler, could be afraid of turtles. They are TURTLES! Haven't you seen enough movies, snorkler? Turtles are cute, cuddly animals. Turtles are your friend, snorkler! You might as well be afraid of your own shadow, snorkler, or of Nemo the fish.

9. It's entirely possible that snorklers like yourself give diving a bad name. Admit it, snorkler, you're just scared of everything. You're a) chicken and b) a stubborn chicken. Why don't you stop being so stubborn, and simply take a diving class with one of the certified instructors on board? Then you'd be safe in the company of other divers and won't be afraid of anything (except running out of air, getting disoriented at the bottom of the sea, losing your buddy, getting a nitrogen poisoning because of surfacing too quickly, and a couple of other technical details -- which are really nothing to be afraid of since you'll get your training). Stop being so silly, snorkler!

10. Good luck having your picture taken in the water by the ship's photographer. If he does happen to take it, you'll find it in the deleted items folder. Really, snorkler, you'd pay $18 for just one picture of yourself? How odd.

11. Everything about you is odd, snorkler.

12. Snorklers might not get a second helping of chocolate pudding at dinner. Just kidding. Chocolate pudding is for everyone.

Snorkling or diving, the Barrier Reef is a pretty spectacular sight. For a more in-depth view of it, read Dave's blog: dave-grenetz.blogspot.com.

Talking to strangers

2011-12-25T00:08:00.000-08:00

On Friday night, the evening of our first day in Sydney, Dave and I settled in for dinner at The Australian Hotel, a pub that attracted our attention by their large selection of pizza. The crowd spilled out on the sidewalk, some sitting at the communal benches all around the perimeter of the building and others standing around in groups and drinking beers and smoking cigarettes. One party left half a pitcher of beer on the table next to ours, and two young women who sat down to wait for their pizza gladly poored the remains into their own cups. Dave and I split a pie loaded with smoked salmon and shrimp, further afield from pizza as in cheese-and-tomato-sauce than we get even in California.

"California, that's where they have that pizza place... what's it called?" asked one of the guys at our table, having inquired where we were from.

"California Pizza Kitchen?"
"Yeah, that's right!"

Conversation temporarily halted. Dave and I share curiousity about people, especially when we travel--meeting people on the road is more or less the whole point of travel for us--and yet neither of us has a particularly easy time striking up conversation with random strangers. I get intensely shy and at the exact time when I get an opening to say "Hi" and "How do you do," I freeze up and run away. Dave is doing a little better than me. A few years ago, when I was doing a lot of travel to Russia, and Dave started making friends on his own and figured out mental tricks to overcome his shyness and chat up strangers at bars and parties. Still, we don't work very well together as a couple meeting new people. One particularly difficult moment was this summer, in Oslo, when Dave smooth-talked an old sailor into inviting us to a private party at a Literature Cafe, but I was too intimidated by the awkward social situation, and at the end we ran away.

At The Australian, we sipped our drinks and looked at the crowd around us. This is the thing to do in Australia around Christmas time--go out to a pub with some old friends.

"I want to have as much fun as they're having," Dave said.

I got up and went to the bathroom.

When I came back, he was chatting to Bill, Fred, Stu, and Patrick, our mates at the communal table. They were all in there 50s or so, locals, or from near Sydney, anyway. They were sort of curious about California, but even more curious about Russia. Bill's dad came from somewhere in Poland, and Bill had a long story about how he found somebody on Facebook with the same last name, but that person lived in Minsk, Belarus. So we talked geneology, and then we talked weather (which has been surprisingly cool in Sydney this summer--perfect for us), and then we talked things to do in Sydney for New Years (the most important question on our agenda for this trip, as far as I'm concerned), and also other hang outs and restaurants we should check out. Bill recommended No Names, one of the oldest Italian joints in the city, where they make their own pasta. (We tried to find it the next day, but it was closed for the holidays already).

And so, we were having fun, and then we had almost too much fun, when Dave and Bill and Fred somehow managed to turn our communal table over onto me and the other two guys. Glasses hit the pavement, two men completely drenched in beer, I escaped with only one wet toe, and what do you know, the guys wiped themselves off with napkins a bit, and then sat down and ordered another round.

Dave's blogging about our adventures here: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/12/12242011-sydney-throw-roo-on-barbie.html

Synthesizing Knowledge

2011-12-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

Ten or so years ago, my friend Johnnie and I got mired in an argument about the nature of time. It was Johnnie's opinion that time moved forward in a circular fashion, always repeating itself. Russian history certainly gives frequent causes to believe that, and yet, I protested, there's no reason to think that it can't also leap forward and develop in some entirely unexpected dimensions. Moreover, personal time doesn't need to adhere to the pattern of historical, or national time (national time, so arbitrary--who or what defines a nation, anyway?). I'd been living away from Russia for a long enough time already that I couldn't imagine myself being bound to its rhythms just because I had happened to be born there. I don't remember what geometrical model of time I proposed to Johnnie; anyway, this was not that kind of argument. Johnnie advanced his cause in rhymes, and I tried to respond in kind, by writing poetry.

In a way, what I argued against was a deterministic model of the future, a model that I felt would limit my ability to change simply by proclaiming that change was impossible or pointless. It's likely that this wasn't the point of view that Johnnie was advancing, but something I inferred and thought unacceptable. Time, the way I perceive it today, works more like sign in the de Saussure's model of language: it's arbitrary and the way it functions is determined more by social conventions than by its own inherent properties. Storytelling and literature are an important part of this mechanism, they are both formed by and form the social conventions that in turn determine our individual perceptions of time. The novels of high realism observe and structure the ways we see cause and effect and perceive our own lives in terms of plots and arcs. The post-modern novels that try to destroy the conventional notions of arc have to struggle with more than our ideas of what literature is, but also with our ideas of what time is. They are stuck in avant-garde; while time-travel and science fiction novels are too fully mired in literary conventions and offer intellectual food for thought without affecting our more deeply ingrained notions of time.

Somehow these thoughts might (but don't need to) relate to the fact that Dave and I are in Australia now. We landed in Sydney yesterday morning after a 14 hour flight that took us across the International Date Line and catapulted 24 hours into the future. It was the shortest 14 hours flight in the history of 14 hour flights -- we slept for ten of them, and then barely got a chance to do some reading. I read a few Julio Cortázar stories and was terribly disappointed by them (I'd never really read Cortázar before, but he'd been for years at the top of my lists). Maybe it's because I read him in Russian -- and lately I've started to notice that everything I read in Russian strikes me as slightly sentimental.

InsideStoryTime Gods and Dogs

2011-12-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

I'm reading at one of my favorite reading series in town, InsideStoryTime, with a bunch of great people: my Alia Volz, Peter Orner, Gary Turchin, and Sarah Ladipo Manyika (whom I don't know personally yet, but look forward to meeting). The show will take place on December 15, starting at 6:30 pm, at Cafe Royale. Here's the link to InsideStoryTime: http://www.insidestorytime.com/.

The theme is Gods and Dogs, and I'm thinking of reading from A Dark and Empty Corner, my story that recently appeared on Narrative Magazine, that features God as one of the characters. Or maybe I'll write something new by then about dogs.

It's Litquake week!

2011-10-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

Check out my review of James Warner's novel All Her Father's Guns up on HTMLGiant. This is the third piece I've done for them, probably the most difficult and rewarding one to write.

Litquake is rocking the town this week. A couple of friends have been asking me for event recommendations, so I thought I'd post a few cool upcoming events below. Barely Published event on Saturday night was a blast; two fellow SFWW regulars Salvatore Zoida and Ken Yee made 200-something people laugh, yay!

October 10, 2011 - 7:00 PM
San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers and Quiet Lightning Present: The Greenhouse Effect Summer Reading Series, V.3
San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers

October 11, 2011—12:00 PM
Lit & Lunch
111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna St.

October 11, 2011—6:00 PM
10 Years Later: A Granta Conversation
The Book Club of California, 312 Sutter St., Suite 500

October 12, 2011—7:30 PM
The Fighter and The Writer: Litquake presents The Barbary Coast Award to Ishmael Reed
Z Space, 450 Florida St.

October 13, 2011—7:00 PM
Flight of Poets
Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter St.

October 14, 2011—7:00 PM
Jeffrey Eugenides at Books Inc. Opera Plaza
Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave.

October 14, 2011—8:00 PM
Nordic Noir: A Dark and Stormy Night of Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market Street

October 15, 2011—2:00 PM
Invisible City Audio Tours: Everywhere Man
Cable Car Turnaround, Market St. at Powell St.

And, of course, LitCrawl. Everyone must experience this, it's epic! Narrative Magazine will have an event in Phase 1, at 6 pm, at The Lab ( 2948 16th St). I'm definitely there :)

03 and "you are here"

2011-09-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

After a long string of event-packed weekends, this Saturday morning I got a few uninterrupted hours of reading. I picked up two short things, two little books I could quickly finish. Feels good to start off the weekend finishing things :)

The first book was a novella by a French writer, Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03, translated by Mitzi Angel. It's 84 pages long, composed in the form of a single, uninterrupted paragraph -- really meant to be read in one sitting, I think. I was reading it for over a month, a few sentences or pages at the time. Sometimes this was because the sentences were interesting and demanded a lot of attention; at other times, I picked the little book up between the multitude of other tasks, and flipped through the pages instead of really reading.

It's a thought-provoking novella -- a portrait of a young adolescent boy, attracted to a mentally disabled girl living in the same neighborhood. The tale is narrated by himself as an adult, from the remove of many years, maybe decades. Power and powerlessness of attraction are a major theme, as well as the binaries of uniqueness vs difference, beauty vs ugliness, suburbia vs city. Because of the way I read it, my impression of the novella falls apart into certain ideas about the quality of its translated sentences. This, for example: "Oddly, though, this made her face more lively -- she seemed really to face the world, and her gaze came at me as if by catapult." Whatever the phrase might read like in French, this noun/verb paring of face and to face works surprisingly well in English.

I related to many observations about adolescence on a very personal level. This, for example, starts with a cliche, and then dives into the depths of it: "The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality?" I love that this long sentence is a question.

The other book I read was a literary journal in which one of my own stories has been published. The magazine is called "you are here: the journal of creative geography," and it's published by University of Arizona's School of Geography and Development. (It's a print publication, and I'm waiting for them to update the announcement on their online page, but this hasn't happened yet). Their XIVth issue published over the summer was dedicated to the theme "Dislocation" that happens to define a few of my stories. What I really love about the smaller university magazines is their willingness to experiment with the genre. The editors of this magazine, for example, asked the writers for their permission to excerpt and edit the stories at will, and also to publish them without acknowledgments in the text, so the magazine reads as a work of a collective (if somewhat disturbed) mind. (Actually, it's not as radical as I thought it could've been: there's a table of contents at the back, and all the writers get their proper credits.)

My favorite part of this magazine, I think, is a poem the editors -- Majed Akhter and Tom Nurmi -- published together with a letter from an associate editor that recommended it for publication. "I want to advocate for consideration of this; given that it appears to be written by a non-native English speaker in a forced rhyme scheme. The formal layers sort of peel off from the content, as one is forced to do mundane interpretive work. ... To me, dislocation here would be linguistic, libidinal and unconscious..." I love the framework of this magazine that allows its readers to find meaning in something that's written in substandard language. I wondered if my own story in this magazine could've been interpreted in a similar way -- it's an older story, and rereading it now, I'm very aware of the extra layer of formality in every sentence that came from my lack of linguistic fluency. The story still sort of works because this peculiarity became a character flaw of my first-person narrator. First-person narrators are good souls :)

Portuguese Artists Colony: Toothless

2011-08-20T10:12:00.001-07:00

Next weekend, on Sunday, August 28th, starting at 5 pm, I will be a featured reader at a local reading series -- Portuguese Artists Colony -- who always do a wonderful show with music and live writing at a local art gallery, Fivepoints Arthouse. The address of the gallery is 72 Tehama Street, near Montgomery MUNI/BART station. Come to see the show if you're around!

The theme of this month's reading is "Toothless" -- my first association had to do with aging, but I am trying to interpret the word more broadly. I am planning to read two very short recent stories. One of these stories, "The Weather in Dublin," was published by elimae, one of the oldest online literary magazines.

Priorities

2011-06-16T06:25:00.000-07:00

Priorities of two counter-hip yuppies spending three & 1/2 days in Denmark:

*) Roger Waters' "The Wall" tour in Herning, Jutland (a small town in the mainland part of Denmark, unremarkable save for the Messe Center -- the largest concert venue in Jutland. Next act: George Michael).

*) No fighting! You can have ice cream AND pastry.

*) Carnival in Copenhagen, a Brazilian festival ten years (and three months) past its prime. Copy dance moves from the Danish Brazilians.

*) Bicycle tour through the city. Avoid all castles and churches like the plague that had ravaged their walls, but do bow to the gravestones of Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen and then hop across the city straight to Christiania, the 40-year old hippie enclave.

*) You won't be admitted to Noma, the World's finest restaurant according to some (two Michelin stars and counting), but you can have the breadcrumbs at the bakeries and cafes that Claus Meyer, one of the co-founders of Noma, has sprinkled all around Copenhagen. A breadcrumb literally at the Meyers bakery in the Norrebro neighborhood, and then a couple of macaroons (French-style) and a chocolate-covered nougat at Meyer-owned Sweet Treats cafe in Christianshavn.

*) No fighting! Frozen yoghurt CAN be considered a meal.

*) Cheap out on bus tickets and walk everywhere.

*) Spend 1/2 hour each in three to four well-chosen museums. Avoid all mentions of the word "Viking" or "Royal Castle." What, you haven't seen large knifes and upholstery before?

*) Buy postcards and mail to all friends and family, preferably from the Post & Telegraph museum, but if it surprises you by closing in front of your nose at 4 pm, from the adjacent post office.

*) Amusement park Tivoli! Rides! H.C. Andersen fairy tales! A pantomime show! Waffle cones! Bathroom with jungle sound effects! Go there twice.

*) Eat bread.

*) Talk to locals. They know where the best beer is.

*) Cheap out and don't reserve seats on the train to Herning and back. Then, sit on the floor between two cars for three hours and try to sleep because you cheaped out on buses the night before and got back to the hotel when the sun was already rising.

*) Pack for day trips without any regard for possible weather. T-shirts all the way, even when the locals are piling on jackets.

*) Give due to the local traditional midnight snack: hot dogs and chocolate milk.

*) Find out where the local yuppies hang out. If you don't see them at the pub, maybe they are at a French-Canadian traveling circus show/live electronic music performance (w/ spoken word in English). Go see "Fibonacci," where you will be in the audience with 211 people, 51% male, 48% female, 41 years old, predominantly Danish, but also people from Sweden, Norway, England, Italy, South Africa, Malaysia, etc. The statistics will be a part of the show. You will feel right at home in this nomadic crowd, unattached at the moment to any homeland, doing cartwheels around heavy pieces of luggage.

*) Average lifespan in Sweden is somewhere around 82 years old. Consider moving there?

*) No fighting! There will be more ice cream in the next country.

Dave blogs about all of this in greater detail here: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/06/so-called-danish-situation-june-15-2011.html

The National Bestseller

2011-06-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Dave and I left St. Petersburg yesterday and flew to Copenhagen via Stockholm. Right now we're traveling across Denmark, from Copenhagen to a small town in the middle of Jutland, Herning. Tonight, Roger Waters is playing in the large music arena there, and we not only get a chance to see The Wall show in its European version, but also to step off the tourist path for a little while.

The last week of my stay in St. Petersburg was particularly hectic. Dave arrived on Sunday, and the days flew by in a whirl of visits with family and friends--and some sightseeing. Looking back, I think the most interesting event I attended that I didn't get a chance to write about was a literary award ceremony last Sunday. I got a pass to attend this ceremony because the people who run the event, Viktor Toporov and Vadim Levental, are also the chief editor and the associate editor of Limbus press, the press that published my second Russian-language collection in the fall of last year. The event was scheduled last Sunday afternoon, exactly when Dave was due to arrive from the US via Stockholm. My parents picked Dave up from the airport, while I sat among the "press" (according to the pass I'd been given) and observed the local writers and critics.

The award is called "National Bestseller," and when Viktor Toporov invented it 11 years ago, he gave it a slogan: "Wake up famous." The American term "bestseller" here doesn't signify that the book has been a popular choice of the reading crowd, vice versa -- the award is given by a jury of annually selected critics (literary, film, cultural) and fellow creative types. The idea is, I suppose, that (to use a Russian term) an "elite" book would receive a press moment and would then climb higher in the bestseller charts. The prize amounts to $10,000. However, a week prior to this ceremony, there was another ceremony called "Super Bestseller" -- staged in Moscow, the competition was among the ten previous winners of the "National Bestseller" who were competing for the title of the decade and the monetary reward of $100,000. (The award has very wealthy sponsors).

This was the second literary award ceremony that I've had the privilege to attend in my life. A little over a year ago, I was in the audience when the Northern California Book Award in the general non-fiction category was given to Tamim Ansary, the beloved leader of San Francisco Writers Workshop. That ceremony was held in the main lecture hall, the Koret Auditorium, of San Francisco's Public Library. The event was freely open to the public and the people who received the awards got a chance to read a few pages from their books. I remember finding the event very interesting, in large part because I was exposed to the work of the writers I hadn't heard of before.

The award ceremony of "National Bestseller" took place in the Winter Hall of a luxury downtown hotel in St. Petersburg, "Astoria." (During the Soviet Era, this hotel housed exclusively foreign visitors to the country). In the foyer the guests were served drinks (wine, champagne). Many photographers with large cameras were taking pictures of the illustrious crowd, creating the atmosphere of a "high class" event. I mingled with a few people I knew socially until the doors to the hall were opened, then found a seat in the back of the room. The two MCs, Artemij Troitskii and Julia Aug, introduced first the organizers of the prize, Viktor Toporov and Vadim Levental, then the books and the members of the jury. Troitskii (who is a well-known media personality) was playing the "comic" to Aug's "straight man," except Aug seemed very nervous and sometimes got confused about the order of things. Victor Toporov didn't help much by yelling out corrections from his seat to the side of the stage.

Toporov made an introductory speech, in which he characterized the authors of all six books up for the prize as "romantic characters." This is actually something that I've been thinking a lot about lately--contemporary Russian fiction largely seems to answer Northrop Frye's definition of romance. As Toporov pointed out, five of the six novels have fantastical elements to them -- realism as a genre is not particularly popular with the contemporary Russian authors. Part of this is probably a reaction to the official Soviet genre of "socialist realism," part of it is escapism, and part something else that I can't quite define at the moment. In a very romantic pose, two of the writers didn't show up for the event, the third excused himself claiming a broken leg, and the fourth was present in the audience but didn't want to reveal her real name.

As an aside, of six novels up for the prize, five were penned by men and sixth came under a gender-neutral pseudonym, Figl-Migl (the English-language equivalent would be roughly "Hurdy-Gurdy"). In the course of the evening, it was revealed that the person hiding behind this pseudonym is a woman who wished to leave her true identity private. She, they said, was present at the ceremony, but incognito. The ratio of men and women was matched in the jury: one woman among six jurors. The jury had one extra member, the seventh -- the "honored juror," called to resolve ties. She, in this case, was also a woman, a notorious personality: Ksenia Sobchak. Ksenia Sobchak is the daughter of St. Petersburg's first mayor, Anatoliy Sobchak. The man was considered a hero during the Perestroika era, but then his reputation became muddied in the later Yeltsin years. He died young--too young--and whether he died on his own or if he had some assistance remains unknown. His daughter Ksenia, a public personality from a very young age, went through a very rough Lindsey Lohan-type period that included starring in some horrible Moscow-based reality shows. Now and then she appears on talk shows or in the press, and everything she says is immediately noticed and carries a tinge of scandal. In any case, her speech at the National Bestseller ceremony was very tasteful -- in general, she spoke as a professional, delivering her points in a calm and self-assured way, very aware of the impact her words might carry. She expressed some surprise at being invited to judge a literary contest, and then plainly stated her opinion about the two top books. The one thing I found odd about her speech was that she kept referring to herself in the third person: "Ksenia Sobchak thinks..." This created an impression that she treated herself as a brand, as a project, rather than as a human being, as an individual with an opinion.

I'd read or started reading four of the six books up for the award, but not enough to really form an opinion. The book that won the prize, Dmitriy Bykov's "Ostromov, or a magician's assistant," was one of the two that I didn't get a chance to read. Dmitriy Bykov is one of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers. (In fact, I heard that he was invited to lecture at UC Berkeley this coming fall). He's already won National Bestseller award once, and it's somewhat unlikely that winning this award the second time will bring him any more fame. Ksenia Sobchak giving her deciding vote for his novel, talked about it as a "good novel," the kind that has a well-developed plot. Nobody said very much more to recommend the novel. None of the writers (the two of them in attendance) had a chance to read from their books, and so indeed my general impression was that the competition wasn't so much about the books but about the writers themselves and their different poses and gestures, the romance of it all.

Meantime, Dave is blogging about our adventures in Denmark: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/06/copenhagen-and-herning-june-13-2011.html

A Fitness Club "Young Leninets"

2011-06-07T00:44:00.000-07:00

In one word, I found Sochi charming. I spent three days there, and though the weather was unusually rainy and overcast, and though right now the city is one giant construction site, and even though I was trying to combine sightseeing by day with work in the mornings and in the evenings, the trip ended up being very relaxed and relaxing. To me, it had a sense of a place that is so far removed from the centers of my world (San Francisco, St. Petersburg) that if my everyday concerns didn't entirely cease to matter there, they at least lost much of their urgency. The funny thing about Sochi is that because of the Olympics it's very much in the center of public attention, and because of its status of the prime Russian resort area it has always been a destination. Sochi is also very important as a city that borders Abkhazia, one of the territories that have become centers of recent conflict between Russia and Georgia. Sochi is one of the Russian strongholds in the Caucasus mountain region--a city locked between the foothills of the Caucasus mountains and the Black Sea, once a very important military conquest for Russia and a center of a lot of social and military unrest. And yet despite its historical and current significance, despite all the trouble that's brewing in and around it, to the tourist, Sochi feels like a small city, a quiet Southern resort town. The tourist notices spas and potholes, tries to work around traffic jams and looks for a free bench to sit down and finish her ice cream or a cup of kvas. Sochi has lovely benches -- with unusually tall legs, so that when you sit down you can dangle your feet in the air and remember your childhood while doing so.

I visited four museums in Sochi, the Art Museum, the History Museum, the Dendrarium (an extensive Arboretum and Botanical Garden with trees and plants from all around the world), the museum of the writer Nikolai Ostrovsky. The Art Museum had a heart-wrenching photo exhibit, portraits of the children from the local orphanage. The curator of the exhibit told me that there are 64 pre-school children in the orphanage in Sochi, from the smallest infants to clever little kindergartners. The curator had gone to the orphanage with the photographer and her crew when they were taking the pictures, and she couldn't hold back the tears when guiding me to a picture of a little boy captured at the moment when tears burst from his eyes or to a picture of three little girls doing their best to sit still and to listen attentively to their lesson. "The children," the curator said, "were so touching, so sweet." The rest of the museum houses a collection of Soviet art by Moscow and St. Petersburg artists who over the years came to paint at the Sochi resorts; it also has more contemporary art by local artists who have grown up here and in a larger city, Krasnodar, the administrative center of this region.

Perhaps due to the time of day (I visited the museums either early in the morning or late in the afternoons) or to the fact that it's still very early in the tourist season in Sochi, I was the only visitor in all three museums, the Art Museum, the History Museum, and the writer's home. Each time, my appearance caused a flurry of activity: the ladies who guard the exhibit rooms (one lady per room, to make sure that the visitors don't touch or break anything) broke off their conversations and ran off to their rooms, turning on the lights everywhere, opening the protective covers on the showcases. In the Dendrarium I was not entirely alone but for large stretches of the walk it felt like I was -- they told me that they did have a crowd earlier in the day, but by now (I came two hours before closing time) everyone had dispersed. All of these museums in Sochi (like all the theaters in St. Petersburg and many art organizations throughout Russia) are fully dependent on government funding, they could not survive without this support -- they wouldn't know how to even try.

Another word I am finding useful in trying to describe Sochi is the word "province" in the Russian sense. Technically, in the old Russia this word described any township that was not a seat of administrative government of a region. For example, Sochi is a part of the administrative region with the seat in Krasnodar, a city on the other side of the Caucasus mountains, closer to river Don. I overheard conversation of a couple who were discussing the purchase of a flat in a new apartment building that's being built in Sochi. "The management company received all the permissions [necessary to build the apartment building] from Moscow, from Krasnodar, but in Sochi they got turned away. So now I don't know what they're going to do. Probably give somebody more pocket money." Since administratively Sochi is a part of Krasnodar region, and Krasnodar region is a part of Russian Federation, and all the administrative decisions are made in Moscow it's not surprising that the development of Sochi has been so tardy. If everything that has to do with local infrastructure, from road construction to telephony, postal services and all other government services has to be governed from Moscow via Krasnodar -- I can imagine that any new undertaking is not impossible but requires an astounding amount of paperwork and money to sweeten the officials' moods. This is probably one of the reasons why there are so few Moscow and St. Petersburg chains in Sochi -- the coffee shop and fast food and grocery store chains probably cannot or don't want to expand to this area. There are local cafes and fast food shops and grocery stores, but most of the reasonably priced ones are hold-overs from the Soviet era in appearance and menus (which is not necessarily a bad thing, personally I enjoyed eating there very much), and the modern, Western style cafes and restaurants charge prices ten times higher. One day, I could eat a full dinner for under 150 rubles in an old Soviet-style dining room (no bathrooms!), and the next day I'd go to a more modern restaurant and pay 500 rubles for just one dish. In St. Petersburg, the prices of both types of establishments have more or less evened out (not entirely, but as a matter of degree), and there are a lot more medium-range options.

Actually, the best place to shop for groceries in Sochi is the local open-air market. We bought strawberries and cherries, and souvenirs to take home: local spices, local tea (Sochi and Krasnodar Region is the only part of Russia suitable for growing tea and wine), churchkhella (a Georgian treat, nuts soaked in fruit juice). Prices are negotiable and people are friendly, talkative.

Two more notes on the curious condition of Sochi as simultaneously a province of an empire and a showpiece of the same empire. Since Sochi is also the location of many trade shows and conferences, the local hotels and clubs are used to catering to businessmen -- who, in their overwhelming majority, are business men, not women. Thus, for example, on every flat surface in the rooms and in the lobby of the hotel where I stayed (a nice business-class hotel, 4 stars), there was advertisement for the hotel's "Erotic Club 'Twilight'." To translate (as literally as possible), "'Twilight' -- a club of erotic fantasies and sensual temptation for those who truly appreciate the beauties of female bodies. Here you will find exquisite entertainment in the society of sexually appealing dancers. We offer striptease-show that lasts until the morning, a sea of alcohol, intriguing 'crazy'-menu and rather democratic prices."

Restaurant menus do exist in English -- the kind of English very similar to what Dave is finding in post-World Fair Shanghai and post-Olympic Beijing. "Cold fish for fish gourments." "Pizza: a pepperoni, a salami, the bulgarin pepper." "Milky cocktail: milk, ice-cream, syrup with your choice." "Coffee on the sand like turkish."

Leaving downtown on our way to the airport, we noticed an advertisement for a "Fitness Club 'Young Leninets'," a Western style fitness club for young people who believe in the work of Lenin -- the ultimate sign of the rapidly colliding worlds.

Meanwhile, Dave has joined me here in St. Petersburg and is blogging about it: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/06/white-knights-june-6-2011.html

How the Steel was Tempered

2011-06-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

One of the main museums in Sochi is the house of Nikolai Ostrovsky, a Soviet author who in 1930s wrote an immensely popular novel, "How the Steel was Tempered." These days, the novel is ill favored by the literary community. Sometimes, it's studied as a prime example of the "Socialist Realist" genre. Largely though people avoid talking about it because it's so charged with the communist doctrine. There's an ideological passion to this novel that makes it disturbing to people these days. I read it as a child--I remember enjoying it a lot, rereading it several times--but I haven't returned to it since. Ostrovsky's house is located on the street named "Pavel Korchagin," and I failed to recognize the name of the novel's hero in the street sign.

The visit was interesting on many levels, but one thing in particular stood out. (I think I knew some of this information as a child, but I have forgotten it since.) Ostrovsky started writing only when he became completely blind and paralyzed. He had arthritis--his Russian Wikipedia page says specifically that his symptoms would be diagnosed today as Ankylosing Spondylitis. At the time, the medicine could do nothing to relieve his symptoms, not even the pain. And he must've been in a tremendous amount of pain all the time. His spinal cord was probably entirely fused--he was bedridden for about the last ten years of his life. What might be worse, his eyes were inflamed, which means every tiny bit of light hurt him immensely. His rooms in the house (built only after the novel became a huge success with the people and the party leaders) were made of dark wood, the windows shaded with heavy curtains to ensure large periods of complete darkness.

The fact that he managed to write two lengthy novels while sick with this disease I find astounding, and in a way also exciting, encouraging. I must've known this story as a child, this is also why the idea of "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield" was always so attractive to me. "To find" in this context is to find pain. The museum guide who told me the story had tears in her eyes as she recounted the later parts of Ostrovsky's biography--even though she must've given the same speech hundreds if not thousands of times.

Sochi, "City-Resort"

2011-06-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

I've got an opportunity to spend three days in Sochi this week, and so here I am reporting from the Caucasus mountains region, from the shore of the Black Sea. If you haven't heard of Sochi yet, you will in 2014, when it will host the Winter Olympics. The running joke in Russia is that Sochi, the Southernmost region of Russia, has been picked to host winter sports. Is the rest of the country much too cold? Of course, all the Olympic stadiums are being built from scratch, and it hardly seems to matter what the weather conditions are like. The Caucausus mountains are topped with ice (lately, receding) and already house first-class skiing resorts. Another curious factoid -- Sochi is located at the same latitude as Nice and Toronto.

The climate in Sochi is actually characterized as subtropical--it's moderately hot in the summer (in the 80s) and humid. The city is laden with palm trees, boasts its own unique varieties of yew and boxwood trees. Administratively, Sochi is labeled as a city-resort -- it's hardly a city at all, but rather an agglomeration of Soviet-style health resorts stretching along a thin strip of land between the Black Sea and the mountains. The city, at closer approximation, breaks down into several small coastal villages (and one inland village, in the mountainous valley, where the Olympics will actually take place), united together in one administrative body. The downtown area is quite small, although it too is undergoing major construction before the Olympics. Construction of everything is booming in the area -- from new hotels and stadiums to new roads and bridges through the mountains to new apartment buildings and beaches. At the moment, it can take up to an hour to drive the distance that normally takes 15 minutes.

What immediately struck me upon arrival is how young a city Sochi is. The territory was acquired by the Russian Empire in 1838 as a result of a war with Turkey. The local peoples--Shapsugs, Circassians (?), other "Caucasians"--were pushed out or left on their own for Turkey and Iran, and later in the 19th Century settlers moved in from all parts of the Russian Empire, from Estonia and Germany to Ukraine and Russia proper. Later, closer to the turn of the 20th Century the area became developed for dachas -- country houses for the aristocracy and for the growing middle class. They formed the first spas and parks in the area. The administrative city buildings and most of the largest health resorts were built after the Revolution, starting from the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Soviet construction was only one of the historical layers imposed upon pre-existing cities, here the Soviet city plan and aesthetic is the basis upon which the contemporary construction is developing.

Talking about the Soviet aesthetic, there weren't brand names in the Soviet Union. A grocery store was simply called "Produktovij Magazin" -- "Grocery Store." A restaurant was "Restoran" or a "Stolovaya" -- "Cafeteria." A bath house was called simply "Banya" -- "Baths." If there was more than one restaurant in a city, they would be numbered: "Restoran N1," "Restoran N2," etc. In Sochi this is still very much so. The first thing I noticed across the street from my hotel (a contemporary construction by a Western chain) was a "Stolovaya" and a "Konditerskaya" (Pastries) across the street. A downtown bookstore is simply labeled "Knigi" -- "Books." The attractions that do have names, are named (by pre- or post- Soviet settlers) after other places: Park "Riviera," Cafe "White Nights." There's a general sense that changes of the new, post-Soviet era, came to Sochi much later than they did to Moscow and St. Petersburg (contemporary Russia, after all, takes after the Soviet Union in that all decisions and changes are usually transmitted from Moscow out to the peripheries), and that they are coming now, with the Olympic Games, in the proportion never seen before.

Upon closer examination, the "Konditerskaya" across the street from the hotel sells goods produced by a local pastry factory that does have a name, "Kaskad" -- "Cascade." (This is another peculiarity of the Soviet labels -- when things do have them, they are very arbitrary). I've tried to Google this factory, but came up with nothing. I'm quite sure though they have been in business since the 1960s or 1970s, because the pastries I tasted are very much like the delicacies from my childhood. Long waffle rolls stuffed with baked sweet condensed milk. Choux pastry with scalded creme. Eclairs. Quality eclairs are very hard to find in this world.

Borges the bookstore

2011-05-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

At the end of last week, I attended two literary events at a brand new bookstore on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg--a bookstore with a telling name, "Borges." Unlike San Francisco and most other cities in the United States, St. Petersburg is experiencing something of a bookstore boom: in the fall, I presented my collection of stories at a brand new location of a local chain, Bookvoed. Now, Borges opened a block away from Bookvoed. A few more blocks away, there's a bookstore called "Poryadok Slov" -- "Word Order," selling "intellectual literature." This bookstore opened in January 2010, and I haven't had a chance to check it out. Perhaps this is because they (and the events they book) focus on non-fiction and film.

Browsing bookshelves on my first visit to Borges, I overheard a conversation between another customer and the administrator. The customer wondered why the store's inventory has changed so dramatically, and the administrator was confused because the store had only been open for two weeks. Eventually, she realized the source of confusion: Borges opened in the space previously occupied by an LGBT store "Indigo" (the term I overheard was: "the bookstore for sexual minorities"). Indigo is still in business, although they moved to a different location--the other part of Nevsky, closer to Vosstaniya. As far as I know, Indigo is the only store in the city targeted directly toward the LGBT community. When I started asking people about it, it turned out that some of my friends had heard of it--Indigo advertised on Nevsky as an Internet hot spot. They also sold (and probably continue to sell) a good amount of English-language books (hard to find in St. Petersburg), Russian-language books from smaller publishers, and stocked cute t-shirts and underwear.

Unlike Indigo, Borges does not (yet?) advertise on Nevsky (the store, although it has a Nevsky address, is located deep inside a courtyard, and is not visible from the street). Perhaps they advertise in other ways; as far as I know, they only advertise to the literary community. Does this mean that the literary community in this city is vibrant and wealthy enough to carry one more bookstore? I wonder. The two events I went to were attended both nights by many of the same people and certainly not all of them were buying books. I am really hoping this bookstore has a long-term business strategy that will enable them to prosper for years to come--it's a cute little space, selling excellent books, and friendly to the local authors. Yay!!

The first event I attended was dedicated to Phillip Roth. Two of his translators to Russian led the debate about the significance of the International Booker Prize he recently won. Also, one of his translators, Vera Kobets, has just released a book of short stories, and so the event was also meant to mark the publication of her book. The second event was dedicated to the publication of a new anthology that contains the work of Andrei Bely Prize laureates. The prize committee and a few of the current and past laureates were in attendance and talked about the future of the prize, the future of literature, and the future of the book. The consensus here is divided, some people think that most interesting stuff these days happens on the Internet, while others think that Internet is inundated by trash and that the only books worth reading are published in paper form. Interestingly enough, nobody mentioned ebook readers -- for one reason or another, they are not making as huge of an impact on book publishing here (yet?). One philosopher (with a large local following) argued that copyright in the contemporary world is becoming meaningless, that works are created by consortium of people and no longer by an individual, and that we're witnessing the complete breakdown and end of an era of individual authorship.

One thing I found interesting during both events is that both the authors and the audience were reluctant when it came to reading from the books. During the second event (the anthology release party), nobody read from the book at all and one of the authors even said "I don't want to bore everyone." During the first event, Vera Kobets did read a short-short (a tiny two page story), but also apologized in advance about reading in general and about the quality of this particular story (she said that its inadequacies are quite blatant but hoped that the audience might find this interesting). I bought both books, and have started reading Kobets's work over the weekend -- I'm enjoying it a great deal. The quality of the prose is impressive, there is a lot of character depth, a large range of subject matter. It's as good of a book as any I've been reading lately in Russian, and yet I wouldn't have ever thought so from the way it was presented. She (and everyone else who spoke about the book, including the man who wrote the intro) spoke about it as a slight but worthy effort of an insignificant woman-writer with a lyrical, poetic style (as opposed to Rothian, detail-oriented and dry). It seemed to me as though the author and her editors were too shy, too reticent, too concerned about the opinion of their peers to speak well of the book (to praise? never!). I registered this as a major cultural difference from the San Francisco lit scene.

Another cultural difference--attitude to cell phones. Cell phones rang throughout both literary evenings; some people even picked up the phone and held brief telephone conversations during the talks. In a room the size of an urban living room, this affected everyone's ability to concentrate on the authors--and yet nobody (except me) seemed to be disturbed or bothered by it. At one point, even one of the speakers got a phone call. Instead of muting his phone and apologizing (what I with my American attitude toward cell phones would've expected), he picked up the call and yelled into the receiver: "Call me back, I'm at a bookstore, in the middle of a speech!" Then, I started to wonder whether this kind of attitude was possible because everyone in the room knew each other quite well and were like family to one another. Considering the fact that I, too, were slightly acquainted with a few of the audience members, I think this is not a bad theory. A book event at a store is not necessarily all that different from a family gathering in a large communal kitchen or a living room. But can one family really sustain even a living-room sized bookstore? Luckily, I've brought my aunt to the first event, and they've now got her to advertise on their behalf.

Autobiographic Geography

2011-05-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

St. Petersburg is a fairly large city with a sizable historical downtown, and yet the routes that I traverse on my visits here include only few places of historical or cultural interest; I spend most of my time in the nondescript residential neighborhoods where my friends and family live. And even when I do get to go downtown, I tend to visit the same places over and over again, and never set foot in other fascinating parts of the city. I've spent three afternoons on Nevsky Prospekt--at or around Dom Knigi--the "House of Books"--a centrally located bookstore. Three times I've been to Vasilyevsky Ostrov, the island on the Neva where St. Petersburg University is located. I've gone to the same theatre complex twice, to see shows by two different companies. The Hermitage? The Peter and Paul fortress? The Russian Museum? The Neva embankment? On this trip, I haven't had time to walk around the city at all. I am proud though of making it to the new art museum, the museum that's opened just this fall, Erarta--the museum of contemporary St. Petersburg art. How cool am I to go to a museum!

My parents flat (where I lived from age 8 until 17) is located near "Kirovsky zavod," a famous old factory that stands just outside the historical downtown area. In 1905, the workers of this factory (it was then named after its owner, Putilov) started a strike that became Russia's first revolution (the strike was brutally suppressed by the tsar). My father's father was an engineer at this factory, made a long career from the 1930s until 1970s. When the workers of this factory started a strike and walked from here to the Winter Palace (where the Hermitage is now located), this walk must've taken them at least two hours. Nevsky Prospect is ways away--I've walked the distance only once or twice in my life; measured in subway stops, it's at least five stops away.

It's possible to live in a residential neighborhood and never make it to the historical downtown. In fact, many people who have kids make the trek downtown only a few times a year, to take the kids to a museum or to a show. In my childhood, I remember that every trip downtown was an event, a treat. When, as a 15-year-old, I went to math school that was located in the downtown itself, I loved the experience of traveling to school every day. At least once or twice or three times every week, I would make a detour on my way home from school. I'd walk down Liteyniy Prospect to Nevsky, and head for Dom Knigi--the House of Books, where I'd stand in front of the counter and stare at the books displayed behind the glass and on the opposite wall. I had other routes. I'd go to the Summer Garden. I'd walk across the river to the Finland Train Station. I'd stop by my parents office near Vosstaniya. Many times, one or two of my classmates would come along--we'd buy ice cream on the way and try to get into strange and silly adventures. Talk to foreigners on the street. Walk into a residential building to see if we could find access to the roof. For many years, during my visits back to St. Petersburg, I liked to check up on my favorite side streets and buildings. Now I can hardly make time even for this simple exercise.

Dandelions

2011-05-22T02:22:00.000-07:00

This week, parts of St. Petersburg--not the historical downtown where
there are few trees and little greenery of any kind--are covered with bright yellow flowers. Dandelions in Russia are considered a weed: if you are trying to grow a field of potatoes, dandelions are a nuisance. And yet in the city, even today when mowing lawns has become fashionable, nobody has the heart to mow the blooming dandelions. The Russian word for the flower, oduvanchik, originates from the verb "to blow," it means something that's being blown at or away--something very transitory--referring to the phase that comes after the blooming, when every gust of wind sends little white dandelion paratroopers afloat to establish new dandelion colonies out in the world. Dandelions are ubiquitous.

Yesterday, my friend Lyona, his wife Yulya, and I went to "TsPKO"-- "Central Park of Culture and Recreation" -- a largish park in the Northwest part of the city. Built in the 18th Century in the English style, the park is a system of canals and islands, with a very popular boating house where people can rent traditional wooden boats and row around. Booths selling ice cream abound; also games like darts--the goal is to hit several balloons; if you hit at least three balloons, you get a prize. Yulya did really well at this game, she was able to hit 4 or 5 balloons with 5 darts. I didn't hit any (despite considerable practice several years ago at a bar in the town of Sonoma). On a neighboring island, there are larger attractions--"American slides" -- roller coasters and other rides. My friends and I had ice cream and walked around. Somewhere in the park, there is an old palace that now houses some kind of a museum, but we didn't walk far enough. It was a beautiful warm day. Cheryomukha, "bird cherry," is also blooming. Cheryomukha is a medium sized tree that blooms with small, incredibly fragrant white flowers. I've been a little sick all week--my nose is stuffed--so I'm missing a large part of the spring experience. The dandelions, though, the dandelions--I feasted on the very sight of them.

Dandelions, I know, are a very useful plant. Wikipedia tells me that in China (where Dave is currently partying), it's considered a vegetable. Roasted dandelion roots can be used as coffee substitute. Young dandelion greens are very good in a salad. The yellow flowers themselves can be made into jam or wine (I'm remembering Ray Bradbury's story, "Dandelion Wine"). Honey made from dandelion flowers has a very potent taste and fragrance. In Russia, though, as I mentioned earlier, we mostly treated dandelions as a weed. At the beginning of every summer my grandmothers would concern themselves with making dandelion juice--for vitamins. We, the kids, collected the flowers and helped our grandmothers clean them and stuff them into the large glass jars with a bunch of sugar. In a day or two we were supposed to drink the sweet and slightly bitter mixture. I remember being thoroughly grossed out by it, but it wasn't the worst thing we were supposed to consume for our health as children. Something about the experience was oddly pleasant. It was like drinking the concentrated taste of summer itself.

The main reason my brother and I loved dandelions was because we could make striking gold crowns out of them. My grandmother taught me to weave dandelions into garlands--the stems of freshly picked dandelions are perfect for weaving: they are supple yet bendable. The stems are also full of sap, white when it first leaks out and gray-green when it dries on your hands, on your dress, on your face. It's almost impossible to make a garland or a crown without getting your clothes, your arms and legs and face completely smeared in dandelion sap. To make a thick wreath, we used two or three flowers at once; and the trick was to work fast and to try not to damage the flower. The yellow flowers are very fragile, they remain full and fluffy for only a few hours after picking, and if you're rough in handling them, they wilt immediately.

This is what the summer is like at its best: barefoot in a dandelion patch with a dandelion crown on my head, a dandelion garland around my neck, another dandelion crown I'm making for my brother.

Theatre

2011-05-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

A few days before I was due to arrive in St. Petersburg, my mother was introduced to an administrator of one of the small local theatre companies. This woman turned out to be a huge theatre popularizer and a ticket resale agent. Clearly good at her job, she talked my mother into buying tickets to at least four shows in the upcoming weeks, and maybe more that I don't yet know about. As a result, I've been splitting my time in St. Petersburg between working (among other things, I'm preparing to give a talk at a major city library about my recent book, Keys From the Lost House), visiting friends--and going to the theatre.

On Friday, we went to see "Скамейка [The Bench]," a Soviet play from approximately 1960s. A man and a woman meet at a bench in the park, and it turns out that they'd met there before and had gone home together. The man is a habitual liar and a womanizer, and the woman is a naive and yet relentless detective, determined to help him and help herself. The production was stylized to the 1960s aesthetic (this didn't please my brother and his partner who came with us), the two actors of "Our Theatre" did a very good job, he, playing a man with many different faces, and she, a woman who constantly wavers between her desire to believe him and her lack of trust in his words. This play would be a great subject of analysis from the feminist point of view: I found it interesting that she initiated all the action in this play, and he was the one constantly on the defensive. They played traditional gender roles in that she was looking for a man to marry, while he was looking for a one night stand, but then it was also quite clear that this particular man would be a huge nuisance to her as a husband, and he thinks of one night stands as a kind of a chore.

On Monday, my parents, my aunt Maya and I went to the opera at the Mariinsky theatre, to see "Boris Godunov." Blame a young conductor or the ancient staging (the theatre restored Tarkovsky's production from 1960s or 1970s), this particular opera was a slow, depressing bore. This, despite the fact that all the singers were in excellent form, and our family friend, Akimov, sang the major tenor part, Grishka Otrepiev. His sweet, colorful voice woke us up once in a while, but by the end of the performance most of us were overcome with deep, albeit fitful, sleep.

Tonight's theatrical engagement was with a company named "Not Very Big Dramatic Theatre" (as opposed to the local "Bolshoi Theatre" and "Malyi Theatre" -- the Big and the Small theatres). The play was called "The Orchestra," written by a French playwright Jean Anouilh in 1962. After WWII, a man obsessed with an orchestra imagines the difficult private lives of the musicians. The acting was excellent, once again this week, especially parts of the play that were mimed or done in incoherent speech. I was not a huge fan of the dialogue--some of it felt much too melodramatic. The staging was very imaginative and inventive--characters used very simple and clear signs to indicate change from realist mode into a more introspective scene. Great use of simple props--like buckets of water to wash the floor of the theatre at several key moments during the play. What was particularly unexpected about this play: I think, this is the first time, when on the stage of a St. Petersburg theatre, I get to see a love scene between two men. It was the best scene of the play, too. The actors had great chemistry with one another, and although they stopped shy of a kiss, they seemed completely in love. There was also a hint at a sexual relationship between two women, little more than a hint, really; worse, intimations of an abusive relationship. I wonder what this relationship looks like in the text of the play. Would love to see other productions!

Both of the plays we saw ("The Bench" and "The Orchestra") were produced by small theatre troupes. Each of these companies employs about 10-12 actors. Both of these small troupes are sponsored by the government. The Russian government pays actors salary, also pays rent. This enables them to stage rather ambitious plays (like "The Orchestra" that seemed to require the participation of the entire company) in small spaces. The auditoriums at these theatres are limited to about 200 people, and despite their excellent qualities, neither of the plays sold out. I kept expecting the actors to ask for money at the end of the performance, but they never did. Such a thing is unheard of here; instead, at the end of the performance, dedicated theatre patrons give their favorite actors flowers--and applaud until their hands develop callouses.

By the way. One of the pieces "The Orchestra" played (in addition to a bunch of French chanson) was a Squirrel Nut Zippers song, straight from the 50s, right! Go Zippers! Except, I bet the theatre never paid the band any kind of usage fee.

Dave is in China, and blogging from China again: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-road-again-in-shanghai-5182011.html

Eating fish in St. Petersburg

2011-05-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

I am in St. Petersburg again. It's warm here, in the 60s, but there's still a sense of everything waking up after a long winter. The trees are still budding, the fragile green leaves are slowly unraveling, turning towards the sun. The grass is coming up from under the ground in uneven patches. Lots of sand dust in the air. Pale yellow and beige buildings look like they need a new coat of paint. The good weather feels tentative.

In St. Petersburg, it's koriushka season. Koriushka, "European smelt," is a small white fish, traditionally fried with some breading. They say, fresh koriushka smells strongly like cucumbers -- not sure if that's the most accurate analogy, but it certainly has a peculiar smell. They also say that in the old days, in the spring, the whole city of Leningrad would smell of koriushka. The fish is found in all the northern seas, including the Baltic. It also lives in the lakes and rivers, including the Ladoga lake near st. Petersburg. It spawns in the spring, when ice melts and water warms up to +4C. This is also the fishing season. The traditional recipe is as simple as can be: clean off the scales, take out the guts (leaving the roe and the head), coat with flour and salt, and fry in butter or oil. Some people add eggs and breadcrumbs to the flour before frying.

Last night, my parents treated me to some koriushka that they bought already cooked. To warm it up, my mom fried it again. "You can never fry koriushka too much, that's the best part."

Here's a picture of koriushka from a blog that also has step-by-step cooking instructions:

FL-AL-MS-LA-TX

2011-04-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

I didn't have time for the daily blog on this trip, so here is a single gigantic post about the week's events.

Day 1: Woke up at Disney World, drove about 2 hrs to St. Petersburg, to the Dali museum. Listened to the Junior Docent tour -- 5th graders each chose a painting, wrote an essay about it, then lectured the visitors to the museum on their painting. My dad asked one girl, "What do you mean, 'hallucinogenic'?" She thought about it for a moment, then said: "You know, honestly, I don't know."

The museum has a very good collection of early Dali works, before he went to the Madrid Art school. They clearly show the genealogy of his work from post-impressionism and his affinity to figurative painting versus abstract, something that defined the rest of his career. When he outgrew surrealism, he turned to classicism and Christianity for inspiration and themes for his new figurative works.

Next, I took my parents to the St. Petersburg's Fine Arts museum, where they were introduced for the first time to the work of Georgia O'Keefe. Her paintings are virtually unknown in Europe, and they made a big impression. I think I had given them postcards and albums before, but it's not at all the same thing. At the museum, we met a very friendly security guard, Rosie. She heard us talking Russian, and volunteered to help. She herself was from Bulgaria, and could speak several Slavic languages equally well. She told us where to go for a Russian store in St. Petersburg, also pointed out a few interesting destinations in the area (like the Greek beach and neighborhood to the North of the city) that unfortunately we didn't have time to see.

We walked to the St. Petersburg pier and the upside down pyramid. On the way, stopped to take pictures in front of the history museum that had good signs of "St. Petersburg" -- the two St. Petersburgs are as different as two cities can be, and a picture like this tells a good story. Saw pelicans. Watched them for a while. Took pictures of them. My aunt particularly is very attentive to all life forms, she likes to pet dogs and cats, to feed birds, to look at alligators.

Next, we drove to the beach on the other side of St. Petersburg and took a swim. Luckily, we got there when the sun was about to set -- otherwise, the heat would've been completely intolerable for my parents. We went into the water altogether, meantime plucky seagulls almost stole a plastic bag we left behind. My dad saw the thieves and ran out of the water to fight the birds for our belongings. We hung around the beach waiting for the sun to set, and saw another magnificent bird: an egret or a heron who like a little puppy begged every passerby for food.

We had dinner in the old Latin quarter of Tampa, Ybor, then checked into our hotel, then walked around Ybor some more. I think my parents were slightly intimidated by the quantity of tattoo parlors we passed (they were closed for the night, but still impressive), loud clubs with long lines in front of them, dark alleys of small office buildings, and the heat that persisted into the night. The hotel where we spent that night, right in Ybor, turned out to be a major honeymoon destination -- we ran into at least two wedding parties that night.

Day 2: Woke up in Tampa, drove all the way across Florida to the Kennedy Space Center. My dad's engineering firm does some business with aerospace construction bureaus in Russia, and so we enjoyed the opportunity to hit at least two major NASA sites on this trip. While at Disney World, he and my mom took a ride that recreated the experience of take off and heightened gravity. They almost lost their breakfast, but enjoyed the thrill.

In the aftermath of the latest nuclear disaster, my aunt had brought a Geiger counter with her from St. Petersburg. She measured radioactivity in all the suspicious points on her route. It turned out that on board the plane we're exposed to radioactivity 10 times higher than normal. My aunt showed her findings to a flight attendant and the flight attendant took the counter to the pilot to confirm that these findings were within expected parameters. They were. In Dave's and mine apartment the radioactive elements were at about the same level as at my aunt's own flat in St. Petersburg. When she pulled out the counter in the parking lot of the Kennedy Space Center, the results were slightly lower than at her flat.

At KCS, my mom and my aunt went to the 3D movie that told the history of the Space exploration -- they were very impressed with the quality of the movie and with the number of Russian cosmonauts featured in the story. Having grown up with the cult of cosmonauts and space exploration, we know surprisingly little about the history and mechanics of space flight. My aunt loved the experience of catching with her mouth little drops of juice spilled in weightless 3D world.

My dad and I went to the briefing on the upcoming Shuttle mission, saw pictures of the crew scheduled to go up April 19th. Later in the week, we found out that the flight was moved to 29th because of "a scheduling conflict" with a Russian flight. The last flight of the last shuttle is planned for June, but its status remains unclear. They have the Congress's authorization for it, but due to the current budget crisis, they don't have the money and might not have the money by June.

We took the bus tour through the Center, making two stops: one at the observation deck from where we could see the booster already on the pad. The orbiter, they said, was still inside its hangar, going through the final checks. I never quite understood when and where they hook up the orbiter to the booster -- inside the hangar or on the pad? The second stop of the tour was at the museum dedicated to the Saturn rocket -- the rocket that delivered men to the moon.

My aunt was most excited by the alligator sightings in the ditches by the side of the road inside the KCS. The bus driver joked that alligators were their additional level of security, and after I translated the joke to my aunt, she believed it literally for the rest of the week.

After leaving the Space Center, we drove two hours north to the town of St. Augustine, "the oldest continually settled European settlement in North America." On approach to the historic downtown, we drove by the ruins of a fortress, very much like something you'd see in Spain or France. The small old town is very lively with tourists by day, and closes down quite early in the night. My mom couldn't resist buying an alligator head for souvenir in one of the first shops we saw. Then we walked to the Atlantic coast and tried some crab cakes and flounder at a local restaurant. There was a lovely band playing on the terrace, but outside was still much too hot for my parents, and we hid in the air conditioned inside.

The evening was long and exhausting. My dad's back was hurting. We were exhausted after spending a lot of time out in the heat at the Kennedy Space Center. Wine at dinner improved everyone's mood a bit, but then we had another 3 hr drive ahead -- we were scheduled to spend that night in Tallahassee. We got to our hotel at 1:30 am and were asleep by 2.

Day 3: Drove around downtown Tallahassee with its one tall building. Then headed out en route to New Orleans. The drive was about 6,5 hours long, and we hit four states in one day: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. We made two stops, one in Pensacola, one in Mobile. Pensacola was hot, hot, hot! I started to become concerned about my trip plan: my family was getting cranky with the lack of sleep, with various aches, with unusual food, the heat was getting to them. We had no patience to look for quality lunch, and so stopped at a bar in the middle of the historic town (Spanish town?). The best thing we found on the menu were tomatoes stuffed with tuna salad. My mom made a meal of chips and salsa. We packed half of all of this to go: we were too exhausted even to eat.

Mobile surprised us all with a humongous cruise ship we found docked there, and with the lovely colonial houses on the Government Street. I'm not sure what I expected of Mobile -- I know of Alabama primarily from the Civil Rights era history, which means a few very random tidbits. Every town we passed had some kind of cultural center with museums and theatres and stadiums. We kept talking about what we'd find in small cities in the middle of Russia. Somehow the idea of a trip like this through Russia seems prohibitive. Lately, we've been hearing of a few brave souls who've attempted this, but these adventures require weeks of careful and clever planning (such as renting a Russian-made car that could be easily repaired outside of the major cities). And what one finds on the road except shabbiness and desolation is not exactly clear.

This drive took us through some amazing landscapes. The seemingly endless Appalachian National Forest in Florida. The giant bridges over bays and rivers. Later, the many mile long bridges through the swamps and the bayous. My one major regret is that I didn't schedule enough time to visit one of the parks or springs we passed.

Finally, at 8 pm, we arrived to New Orleans. This was Saturday night on the weekend of the French Quarter Festival, and so we drove straight into town, parked on the perimeter of the Vieux Carre. Dave and I had been to New Orleans once, nine years ago, for New Years, and so I had a rough idea of the geography of the town, but really didn't have too much to go on. I asked the parking lot attendant for a map. He didn't have one, but he gave advice. Straight ahead was Bourbon street and the river embankment, to the right was Canal street, and to the left--Esplanade. "But don't go there," he said. "There are a lot of bad people out that way." He looked us over and then added, "Carry all money and valuables in your pockets, leave your purses in the car. There are a lot of bad people in town for the festival." He was clearly unhappy with the influx of people into town.

Luckily, I was the only one in our group who understood him--my dad speaks English quite well, but in the South the accents were unusual for him, and he only got the gist of what was said. New Orleans was partying. People of all ages were out in the streets, drinking rum cocktails from funky tall glasses, smoking cigars, dancing. The French Quarter Festival was a lot like New Years but with less topless girls and with lots of great music. It seemed like there was a band playing on every block -- and that's not counting the five or six big stages constructed in different squares and on the riverfront. No matter how tired and achy we all were after the long drive, it was impossible to remain cranky in New Orleans. We walked out to the embankment of Mississippi in the last moments of sunlight and photographed the barges on the river and people sitting on the grass listening to the music. We got dinner at a nearby bar, then continued to walk the streets and people-watch. My aunt bloomed. "I had this feeling in San Francisco, but then I wasn't sure yet," she said. "Now I know: I love people." She walked up to somebody on the street and asked her: "You're beautiful. Can I take a picture?" My dad was into rock, my mom was into jazz, my aunt was into dancing, and we got to do a little bit of it all.

Day 4: Two weeks before the trip, when I had started looking into hotels in New Orleans, it turned out that all hotels in or near the French Quarter were already sold out (because of the festival). I got two rooms at a hotel across the river, in Gretna, which, in retrospect, may have been a good thing, because we were able to get a few hours of sleep uninterrupted by drunk loud people. With our intense sightseeing schedule, were getting about 6-7 hours of sleep a night, and every moment counted. When we woke up on Day 4, a Sunday, we drove back to the city, and I took my family to the restaurant called The Court of the Two Sisters, where Dave and I had eaten years ago, on our first trip to New Orleans. Back in 2002, Dave and I were only a couple of years out of college, and this was one of our first joint trips together. We were enchanted by the buffet brunch at this restaurant, by the feel of the New Orleans courtyard, by the jazz band that accompanied the dining experience. Now, nine years later, it all seemed a little cheesy, overpriced, overcrowded with tourists. The food was good but not great, the band was mediocre. Perhaps my tastes have grown more sophisticated with age, or perhaps the restaurant has really changed in the intervening years -- the experience was not the same. Nevertheless, my parents and especially my aunt seemed to enjoy the place as much as Dave and I had done once; for my aunt, I think, this courtyard brunch has become one of the quintessential New Orleans moments.

New Orleans was hot, and we didn't have a precise sightseeing plan. We meandered the shops--my mom was impressed by the quality of art and souvenirs available in almost every window--then hid from the weather in the museum of Voodoo. Almost all other museums were closed for Sunday. Even the famous cemeteries were closed, or closed at noon, which I should've expected but didn't. My parents had been to Argentina and France, so they think they saw similar cemetery structures, but still it would've been interesting. I sent them to take the boat tour on the Natchez -- something Dave and I also did in 2002. They saw a lot of industrial activity on the river, and probably heard some historical information about New Orleans, but missed most of it due to language barrier. My aunt, looking for something in her purse, dropped her Swiss Army knife into the Mississippi. But none of this mattered, because party on the streets was still continuing. The city was the spectacle, and we roamed the streets as much as we could in the heat, and listened to the different bands. I met the owner of one of the souvenir shops, and she told me she divided her time between New Orleans and San Francisco. In New Orleans, she missed the BART system and also good restaurants -- I didn't catch whether she meant all restaurants (that seemed a little drastic) or all certain kind of restaurants, like Mexican or sushi. She too seemed jaded from the influx of people that weekend, not particularly interested in talking about the good parts of New Orleans.

That night we drove to the Oak Valley plantation, about an hour northwest of New Orleans, up the Mississippi River. We spent the night in one of the two-bedroom cottages on the property. This was our one experience with something like the local nature--we got bit by the local mosquitoes and got to walk on the lawn around the property. They still grow lots of sugar cane in that area, and we saw some of it in the form of unimpressive little sprouts. Apparently, sugar cane is a late summer crop.

Day 5: In the morning, we toured the Oak Valley plantation, learned some of the history of its owners and a little bit of the history of the people who worked on the fields. Then, we drove a few miles to tour another plantation, by name of Laura--both stops recommended by my friend Suzanne. Their tour is based on the memoirs of a woman who remembered four generation of her family living on this plantation. The tour focused on the creole lifestyle and management practices. They also had an interesting tour of the property, including one slave cottage that would've housed two families. On this tour, we learned a little bit more about the slave system on these plantations. Apparently, this plantation is associated with the history of the Brer Rabbit tales. A folklorist Alcee Fortier, who lived nearby, collected stories told by the plantation slaves and eventually translated them and published in English. Wikipedia is a lot more tentative about this origins story: "Fortier did publish such a book and may have collected the tales at Laura and his own family's plantation."

Later that day, we drove another 6 hrs west to Houston, making two stops on the way, one in Baton Rouge and one in Lake Charles, LA. The downtown Baton Rouge seemed boarded up -- we were looking for lunch, but saw only sketchy pizza places. Eventually, I found a very lively university area, where we got fantastic sandwiches. In Lake Charles, we stretched our legs and walked around the very pretty lake in the middle of downtown. We didn't dawdle very much -- we had a friend to see in Houston that night, and so we were focused on getting there. Also, my mom had started reading us a book from my aunt's ebook reader collection -- a post-Soviet science fiction novel (Boris Akunin's Фантастика) -- and, even though the book was very intellectually problematic, we were all hooked.

That night in Houston we met Grisha, a son of my parents' friends, architects from Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria (Bashkortostan), a region in Russian Federation. Grisha's grandparents and cousins live in the States and he too is a resident here, trying to make a living as a geologist, working on the Gulf and looking for more oil digs. He was telling us about all the people who were put out of work when after the BP explosion and fire all the drilling in the Gulf stopped. Grisha drove us to the Kemah Boardwalk--sort of like Pier 39 here in San Francisco, but with bigger restaurants--but since it was after 10 pm, all the restaurants and oyster joints were closed. We went back to our hotel, and had a party in my parents' room with leftover sandwiches and sweets.

I spent the week rooming with my aunt. As far as roommates go, she was an extremely easy-going one. Most of the time, she didn't mind that I was on the computer while she was trying to fall asleep. A couple of nights, she had trouble falling asleep and so I took my work to the bathroom. Every morning, she woke up with or even before the alarm clock, set up an ironing board and proceeded to iron the clothes for the day. Along with the Geiger counter and a hair drier, she had brought an iron from Russia (even though, as it turned out, most hotels had one in the room). She was also going to bring an electric tea kettle, but at the last minute decided against it. We ended up drinking a lot of the hotel coffee.

One thing that she noticed at every hotel and at every restaurant bathroom was the uniformity of most plumbing equipment in the US. In all the States she has visited on this trips, in all of the hotels and private residences, in all the airports, and in all of the restaurants, there was very little variety in the models of toilets (and all have water in it--unlike the European toilets, where water is only at the very bottom of the bowl) and faucets. In contemporary Russia it has become a point of pride with the different restaurants to install inventive faucets. And in every European country, one spends quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to operate the bathroom machinery. In the US, the standardization was disconcerting.

Day 6: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 was a day of triple significance. On this day 50 years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to be rocketed into space. Then, twenty years later, this was the day that the US flew the first space shuttle--a ship that could return back to Earth and land like an airplane. Thirty years later this day signaled the end of the shuttle program. We were in Houston, and so we went to the Houston's Johnson Space Center to take another tour. Unlike KCS in Florida, the Houston facility does not have an airfield, there are no pads and landing strips. But this is where all the administration and research facilities are housed. Here, we got to see the giant building, where astronauts train for upcoming flights. They have an exact model of the International Space Station, a shuttle, Soyuz capsules, etc. We also saw the Mission Control room from where the Apollo missions to the moon were managed. When the Apollo program ended, this room lost its practical purpose and became a museum.

When we got to the Mission Control room, our tour guide turned on live TV, and we saw the current Director of NASA, Charles Bolden, give a speech in which he marked the ending of the shuttle program and listed the museums around the country that would receive the remaining shuttles when the program would be finally shut down. Atlantis would go to Florida, Discovery to the Smithsonian, Endeavor to Los Angeles, Enterprise to New York. Houston was not on the list--they didn't even get to keep the training shuttle they already had, that was scheduled to go to a museum in Seattle. Disappointed, our tour guide turned off the TV and cut short his presentation. It was an emotional day for a lot of people involved with NASA. Even Charles Bolden, making his speech on TV, broke down to and almost cried when remembering his dead comrades and when trying to envision the future of the space exploration. Now that the shuttle program is ending, the American astronauts are scheduled to use Russian Soyuz capsules to go up to the International Space Station for at least three years, while NASA and Boeing design and test their new generation rocket. The future of American space exploration will depend, in a large way, on private enterprise, so for NASA this definitely means an end of an era.

We continued this conversation later that day when we met up and had dinner with a man my dad had known from college back in the 60s and 70s. Peter works for NASA as a translator from Russian, he and his team translate technical documents to English, interpret live conversations, and also train astronauts in the basics of the Russian language. Peter lives a couple of miles away from the Space Center, and pays to access a NASA satellite channel and also Russian TV channels. He made us a traditional and delicious Russian soup, a rassolnik (a soup with pickles) with chicken kidneys. Also Russian traditional blini with homemade (Peter had made it himself) cottage cheese. Peter and my dad were doing vodka and cognac shots, and reminiscing about their youth, telling stories, and talking about space exploration. Back in the 60s, Peter had been a member of a very popular Leningrad rock band. He was a couple of years ahead of my dad and his classmates, and so when my dad and his friends started their rock band in college, Peter's band were their heroes. I haven't seen my dad drunk on more than a couple of occasions before, so this was fun on all kinds of levels.

Meanwhile, no alligators on the property of the Johnson Space Center, but we did see a herd of generously horned cows. The tour guides were joking that these are "Moooon Cows," genetically modified cows for tests in space; but really this is an award-winning herd being raised by the local high school students and exhibited at state fairs, etc.

Day 7: We had breakfast at the hotel, toured the excellent Menil Collection, and drove to the airport. The Menil Collection is a great museum, not very large, but organized as if around a single strand of thought, on the intersection of the tribal art and the high modernist-surrealist art. The highlight to me were the Rene Magritte paintings -- I have seen so many reproductions of them before, but I don't think I've seen any of them live. A wine bottle painted over with a clouded sky entitled "The Curvature of the Universe"--I love that. But all of his work is equally playful and thought-provoking.

Messy travel

2011-04-06T20:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not, not ready to step away from my writing desk, where piles of books and magazines ground me in the sense of things moving, work being done. And yet here I am at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, Florida, where hotel building are named "Cabanas," "Ranchos," and "Casitas"; terra-cotta and cement galore; a small cup of watery coffee costs $2,25, Internet access is $10 a day; and drinks at the decorative pond in the middle of the resort are being charged to my dad's credit card. Who cares about the seedy showiness of it all when I'm here with my family--my parents and my aunt--whom I haven't seen since September, so many new stories, work dramas, snow plowing accidents, rainfall, thought-provoking literary gatherings ago that it feels like forever.

My parents and my aunt are visiting from St. Petersburg. My aunt--my mother's sister--spent five days with Dave and me in San Francisco while my parents stayed in Chicago and visited cousins in Milwaukee. Today, my aunt and I flew to Orlando, where my dad was just finishing up a three-day conference. This conference was what had set in motion the planning for this crazy adventure we're in the middle of right now. We're going to explore Central and Northern Florida, then drive to New Orleans--we will be there during the weekend of French Quarter Festival--and then continue on to Houston, Texas.

Life is good, and yet I'm here at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort, spending much of the day in my room in one of the "Cabanas." It's not like I've been dying to see Disney World, but yes, it does feel silly to not see it now that I'm here. My priorities lie elsewhere: I have a cousin in town. She came to meet us here at the hotel. My cousin's name is Muffet, and her mother Fanya was a younger sister of my grandmother's father, Grisha. Fanya had left Russia before 1917, and so we've only reconnected with this branch of the family a few years ago. I've never met Muffet before, and neither did my dad. Muffet's mother, Fanya, had read and kindly commented on a few of my stories several years ago, when I was first starting out as a writer. She and I communicated over the phone, and I never got a chance to meet her before she passed away. Muffet brought picture albums to show -- of her mother, and also other family pictures. Several prints were copies of the ones my parents have at home: my grandmother's grandparents, Mordecai and his wife, whose name none of the cousins can remember.

My mom and my aunt did go to the Animal Kingdom today, and spent most of the time in lines. They saw some monkeys and parrots. The highlight of their day was petting some adorable lamb. They petted the lamb, and then were able to wash their hands immediately afterwards in the washbasin providently provided by the park administration. I love traveling with my aunt who's in the US for the first time. Onion rings are a wonder, airports are a challenging puzzle, giant glasses of water half-filled with ice are a health hazard, public libraries are a pinnacle of convenience, mangoes are to be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, while cognac is a rare drink only poorly substituted with whiskey. Why do ATMs speak Spanish and Chinese (in addition to English), but not Russian? Why do you (I) make such a big deal of composting at home, if you leave unfinished salad at a restaurant? Are oysters dead or alive when served fresh in the shell? Aren't they supposed to be breathing and squeaking when you eat them? Do all rental cars have this smell or does it go away eventually? Good questions, all, and the answers I can give are hardly satisfactory.

My aunt doesn't speak a lot of English, but she claims to be able to understand locals wordlessly, by intuition. She finds very clever solutions to the language barrier. For example, she and Dave found a highly technological and yet brilliantly simple way of communicating with one another: two computers and Google Translate tool that now translates as you type, and not only displays the translated word but also voices it aloud. They managed a surprisingly profound conversation this way.

FOGcon and The Fabulist

2011-03-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

A little over a week ago, my friend Amber and I went to Friends of Genre Conference (FOGcon) here in San Francisco. I only had enough time to attend a couple of panels, and had to skip even the live action role-playing game based on Hamlet (still waiting to catch up with Amber to see how it went). What I really liked about the panels I did hear ("Race, Class, and Urban Planning," for example) was that they approached writing almost entirely from the thematic point of view vs. issues of "craft." The conversation focused on the problems of contemporary society (for example, gentrification of cities and urban planning projects that cause more harm than good) and how to address these problems in writing (if you're creating an imaginary city, do you think about where the poor people live, or those who have service jobs?). So often in workshops we focus on "how to say something" problems that we forget to address the "what" of what we're saying. I loved the opportunity of reassessing yet again my own approach to writing.

Among other fabulous people at the conference, I talked to the man who edited? published? promoted? The Fabulist magazine. As a fellow editor, I should've known to ask for the man's name, but I got excited about his magazine and forgot to introduce myself or to ask for his name. The magazine has been around for a couple of years (I think), producing in this time two issues. I have seen their calls for submissions, but shied off submitting before reading an issue. Who knows what kind of approach to the fabulous they took? The weird stories that I write are inspired largely by contemporary Russian politics and might not make much sense outside of that context. What The Fabulist proposes to do is to bring together the world of fables, magic realism, and science fiction. Exciting!

I bought the second issue. It intersperses stories with art by the house artist Adam Myers -- a story of his is also featured in the issue. The whimsical art is clearly inspired by the content of the stories. I love the drawing (collage?) called "Knitted, Knotted" that goes with a weird tale by Bosley Gravel. The freaky little devil who emerges from within the body of a wise old woman is a great metaphor and really appeals to my understanding of wise old women. Most stories in the book had a fantastical element to them, but not all. Tram Nguyen's story "Khoa in Chiapas" could easily have appeared in any realist lit mag. Other stories explore fictional possibility of alternative energy, video gaming, plastic surgery; and others, like Gravel's tale, take roots deep in folklore and mythology. The reading experience was very diverse and thought provoking;.

Notable from narrative theory point of view was the way many of these narratives were segmented. Several of the longer stories, including Nyall Boyce's "Gleam" (which I liked a great deal) and Nguyen's story, alternate between different time periods in the life of the same character. Jeremy Adam Smith's story "Centaur in Brass, 2041" unfolds within a single timeline, but alternates the narrative modes in which the main character's story is told. In some segments we have access to the main character's physical reality, in others, we get glimpses of his avatar in the game world, and in third, we get only bits of dialogue as he and his teammates discuss their play by play progress in the game. We very clearly move between the different levels of this character's psyche. And the stories that alternate between the different timelines in the lives of their characters allows one timeline to be a commentary on the action that unfolds in another. This technique is not too far off from a more conventional flashback technique, but by breaking up the narrative into separate segments it forces greater distance between the character's past and future, allowing the two exist in parallel to one another, as if in two separate story worlds. One does not necessarily follow from one another. The causal relationship between the two is the most obvious, but there are other possible ways to interpret the ways the pieces connect.

Links

2011-03-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

Two of my stories have been recently published in an online magazine Mad Hatters' Review, in their special section "Back From the USSR." My stories are two humor pieces "How to Tell if a Student in Your Beginning Poetry Class is a Russian Spy" and "Sweet Dreams." I am very excited that in this publication my name is featured next to others whom I respect and admire, in particular a poet Vladimir Gandelsman and a quirky prose writer Linor Goralik.

Another publication I'm very proud of is my essay about Clark Coolidge's book of poetry, "This Time We Are Both," written in 1991 and published last year by Ugly Duckling Presse. This review appears on HTMLGiant, a great blog about all things lit (esp. avant-garde lit).

My friend Genine Lentine has published an essay on her project "Listening Booth" -- I have participated in this project about a year and a half ago, and Genine interviewed me about it. Part of this interview accompanies the essay. The other part Genine has graciously emailed me so that I can remember how cool this project was and continue to wonder why it has resonated so much with me and how I can use the ideas I had generated thinking about it in my work. Genine's own thoughts about the projects are expressed with power and clarity in her essay. Genine also blogs here.

Character in Grace Paley's "Goodbye and Good Luck"

2011-01-28T22:40:00.000-08:00

One area where the creative writing community is frequently at odds with literature and narrative theory students is the attitude toward characters. That characters aren't people is one of the tenets of contemporary literary criticism. Suzanne Keen writes: "your work will at some point or other be read by a critic who adheres to the principle that fictional characters should not be referred to as if they were human." (69). And she quotes at length from Richard Posner:

a critical difference between fictional characters and real people is that the evaluation of a fictional character is made within a framework created by the work of literature, and the framework is an artificial world rather than our real social world. ... We cannot say, without seeming ridiculous, that Pip is a better man than Achilles, or Leopold Bloom than Odysseus, because to make such comparisons requires ripping the characters out of their context and so destroying the aesthetic structure of which they are components.

This last quote made me laugh as it brought back a memory from my childhood. When I was in my early teens, I kept a running list of my favorite characters. These were mostly male but some female characters, and while I didn't specifically articulate their qualities I admired, I freely included anyone who I had a crush on, whom I wished I could meet in real life, whom I wanted to be or to be with. Every time I found a new character to love in a book or in a movie (I admitted exceptional movie characters to my list, even though I had a separate running list for my favorite movies.. also a separate list for my favorite ice skaters -- they, too, create very strong characters), I would consider where they fit on my list and reorder the ranks. The character who was never dislodged from the top was Sanya Grigoriev from "Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin (I blogged about this book recently). His compatriots on the list included the boy and girl heroes of Soviet literature, Timur and Zhenya from Alexander Gaidar's pioneer novels, Vasyek and Dinka from Oseeva's fiction; characters from foreign fiction -- Pip, ripped out from his "aesthetic structure" might have made the list at one point -- and D'Artagnan and Aramis were always there; characters from Russian classics, like Pechorin, Shtolz (a secondary character from "Oblomov"), Shubin (a minor character from Turgenev's "On the Eve.") As I grew older, I moved on from admiring the heroes and looked for characters who, I thought, weren't given justice by the author. Shubin, in my opinion, was a very charming and interestingly troubled young man -- Turgenev had undeservedly given him short shrift. I came very close to writing what I now know is called "fan fiction."

I'm not alone in this impulse -- to take characters outside of their textual constraints and force them to interact with other characters. I'm thinking of a Hollywood blockbuster, for example, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that pitted Sherlock Holmes against Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, and Tom Sawyer. (Mostly men; original genres all quite different.) The impulse behind my childhood fantasies and this and similar movies might be "ridiculous" from the literary analysis point of view, but it's clearly a powerful one.

Ultimately though I do believe that characters belong to the text, are functions of the text, they manifest reality only insofar as reality is defined by the text -- while readers read both fictional characters and "real" people by the same (or closely related) process, comparing a number of verbal and non-verbal clues to create their own ideas (fictions) about them in their minds. Characters are different from people -- they are defined by fewer variables -- but the reading process is not altogether different from making a new friend. (I wonder if there are neuroscience studies out there testing this hypothesis. Do we use same or different parts of the brain, meeting somebody for the first time vs. reading a novel?)

One of the most revealing parts of Jim Shepard's workshop, was when he suddenly turned to one of the participants and asked her: "Imagine somebody said to you that your eyes shone like those of a wolfhound. How would that make you feel?" He stared at the woman intently, like he really meant it. We laughed, and then realized that the idea of testing lines of dialogue and flashy narrative phrases on a real situation is not a bad one. Words -- characters -- have power. To compare somebody's eyes to a wolfhound is a violent act. A narrator, using a phrase "her eyes shone like those of a wolfhound," expresses an attitude towards a character -- anger, perhaps, or revenge. The relationship between the narrator and the character is immediately circumscribed by this characterization.

On my friend Genine's recommendation, I've started reading Grace Paley's Collected Stories. The first in the book is "Goodbye and Good Luck." In it, Aunt Rosie is telling a story of her life to Lillie, her niece. The niece doesn't materialize as a character in the course of the story -- there's no description of her and she doesn't have any lines of dialogue -- she mostly functions as a listener, as somebody to whom Aunt Rosie is telling the story. And yet the few phrases Aunt Rosie addresses to her every so often do create a viable character. Let me illustrate by copying out a few of the phrases where Lillie is addressed directly:

Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years. Who's listening? Papa's in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. ...

Don't laugh, you ignorant girl. ...

In those days -- it looks to me like yesterday -- the youngest girls wore undergarments like Battle Creek, Michigan. To him it was a matter of seconds. Where did he practice, a Jewish boy? Nowadays I suppose it is easier, Lillie? My goodness, I ain't asking you nothing -- touchy, touchy ...

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream. ...

So now, darling Lillie, tell this story to your mama from your young mouth. She don't listen to a word from me. ... Give me a kiss. After all, I watched you grow from a plain seed. So give me a couple wishes on my wedding day. A long and happy life. Many years of love. Hug Mama, tell her from Aunt Rosie, goodbye and good luck.

One reason these bits of dialogue function so effectively as characterization of Lillie is that aunt Rosie uses her as a mirror; in Rosie's eyes, Lillie is clearly a younger version of herself. If we don't know what Lillie looks like (and it's easy to picture her as a slimmer and even more pink-cheeked Rosie), we know what she must think of Aunt Rosie: she's eagerly listening to a rather long and elaborate story, and so she must by fascinated by Rosie, perhaps, admire her; but she's also capable of laughing at aunt Rosie, so she must also find her somewhat ridiculous. The little we know about Lillie turns out to be enough to create a complex, multifaceted character.

Time Capsule

2011-01-14T22:18:00.000-08:00

In November, Dave and I received an email from forbes.net with the following message: "Greetings from your past. In the fall of 2005, you agreed to receive this message, which has been preserved in the Forbes.com E-Mail Time Capsule." A message from ourselves was posted below, opening with this: "Don't forget - it's time to move out of London, people!!!!"

Neither Dave nor I remember the specific circumstances of us writing this message to ourselves, but the general context came very much alive when we opened the email. Forbes was running an interesting experiment, asking people to send messages to themselves into the future via the Internet, not knowing whether they will have the technology to deliver the messages after the time lapse. Would yahoo mail still be around? Would google? There were no obvious answers to these questions -- as there aren't now. The experiment is ongoing: people had an option of sending themselves messages 5, 10, or 20 years into the future. Dave and I can't remember, but it's very likely that we signed up for at least two out of three.

Here's a recent blog post on forbes.com that provides background of their fascinating experiment. "We’re excited to see this strange thing is still working, because while it’s pretty simple to preserve a physical time capsule (dig hole, insert non-biodegradable container), the realities of digital preservation are surprisingly complicated."

As someone who conceives of herself almost exclusively in the present, I set great value in leaving messages for my future self. I've been a regular diarist since the age of 9; I store as many college notebooks, old manuscripts, and random scraps of paper as I possibly can without getting buried under the data; I have not only kept copies of every letter and greeting card I've ever received from friends and family members, but at one point even experimented with making carbon and photo copies of the letters I sent myself; same goes for digital communication -- I save everything I can. I'm the first to admit: most of this information is useless, a waste of storage space. When was the last time I have looked at the notes I kept from the Macroeconomics class I took as a sophomore at RIT? Probably three years ago, when we moved to our current apartment and I decided to "clean up," to throw away duplicates and drafts of papers I wrote at RIT, leaving only graded copies in storage. All of my folders from my SFSU days are still intact. Once, I spent an afternoon searching old email, trying to remember the exact year my grandmother died (how come I don't have this written down somewhere accessible?).

When forced to justify this behavior, I claim endless story potential contained in these folders. So far, I haven't written anything inspired by a single one of those scraps. (I have a separate filing system for old story ideas). But, save extraordinary circumstances, I can't imagine myself getting rid of this stuff. How else can I have know who I was before, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? By keeping these papers, I allow myself the privilege of purging the memories to the very back of my mind. I want to remember -- I need to remember -- but I don't have to remember anything about it now, as long as I am secure in my external storage system.

Five years ago, Dave and I lived in a tiny apartment on Waller Street. I was in my first year of grad school, still contemplating a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Dave kept crazy hours working his consulting job. Here's how we described our situation in the time capsule: "Dave: works 12 hour days + 2 hours travel, loves Netflix. We are cooking non-stop thanks to our organic produce delivery service (Planet Organics). Obsessed with Palm Pilot (can't wait to get a Treo!!) Sick and tired of driving my car. Just discoved tea with milk." And Olga? "Olga: procrastinates on writing papers, dreams of ending school and working on more stories. Wendy, Paula, and I started a writing group. Hope to keep in touch with SFSU friends."

Together, we contemplated moving to London after I was done with grad school, dreamed about taking cheap weekend trips everywhere in Europe, easier travel to St. Petersburg and annual trips to Pennsylvania and New York. In our email to ourselves, we looked even further ahead. Dave expressed a desire to end our sojourn in London at the end of these five years: "Prepare to move back to The States and start a biz-natch," he wrote. My immediate plans included "Gotta get over my email hangup where it's difficult to force myself to answer emails," and more long-term: "Plan for 2005-2010: Find a way to earn a living by writing." This last one appears very naive at the moment, but it's great to know I was thinking about creative writing even in the middle of the whole Comp. Lit. adventure, when I wrote at best two stories in two years.

We never ended up going to London. Dave started searching for jobs there, but no immediate opportunities turned up, and then we figured out we liked San Francisco too much to move. I never applied for Ph.D. programs, soon deciding that if I were apply to school again, I would want to do an MFA in writing. I'm still debating this decision once in a while. We signed the time capsule very warmly: "Love you guys! Olgie and Davey." Isn't that sweet? This alone is worth the effort of writing such a message: we gotta keep reminding ourselves of our old, dopey selves.

The Art of Reading Poetry

2010-11-14T16:35:00.000-08:00

On impulse, I bought Harold Bloom's "The Art of Reading Poetry" this week -- part of its appeal was surely the brochure size of the book. I could -- and did -- read it in a matter of two or three hours. If I understand him correctly, Bloom claims that the art of reading poetry is the art of comprehending the meaning of poetry, learning the ways the meaning is constructed in poetry, and then learning to interpret the meaning. No argument from me there, except maybe Bloom's "cognitive" quality is not sufficient to characterize the ways poetry affects us on the level of sound.

I'm struggling to find English-language poetry that I could connect with on an emotional rather than intellectual level. The best way I've figured out to approach this project is to read a lot quickly, until something catches my eye, and then read that something more attentively. The line that stopped me in Bloom's book was from Tennyson's poem "Ulysses": "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Something about this line struck me as deeply familiar, and after a moment's pause -- I suppose I translated the line automatically in my head -- I realized that this line was a motto of a character from my favorite novel growing up. "The Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin was favorite to several generations of Soviet children the way children of different generations grew up with Jules Verne or Mark Twain.

The connection between Tennyson and Kaverin immediately made sense when google helped me remember that this line was used on the gravestone of the British explorer of the Antarctica, Robert Scott. Kaverin's main character, Sanya, made it his life quest to find out what happened to an explorer of the North, a fictional figure modeled largely on the British explorer of Antarctica. Scott had reached the South Pole only to discover that he had been preceded there by a Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Dispirited, Scott and his team died on the journey back to their ship. The words on his grave come from the concluding stanza to the Tennyson poem:
"One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

This phrase, "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," -- or its Russian translation, "Бороться и искать, найти и не сдаваться" -- has accompanied me through life in a very literal sense. At the age of nine, I, copying my hero, Sanya, took it up as my motto and wrote it on the first page of my diary -- and have been ritualistically rewriting it on the first page of every new book I've since designated as my diary. (I am very loyal to my rituals).

I've now gone back to Tennyson and reread "Ulysses" several times -- slowly, it's starting to develop some meaning for me on the emotional level. The sentiment -- Ulysses's striving for something to do after the Trojan war and his return to Ithaca -- is colored by what I perceive as the meaning of the sentiment on Robert Scott's memorial and is colored by Sanya's quest -- it signifies to me on all of these levels, and cannot be separated from the later interpretations. Perhaps, to truly commit to this poem, I should memorize it.

Post-trip randomness

2010-11-08T19:41:00.000-08:00

Dave and I returned to San Francisco on Saturday, so technically, the trip is over. But endings are never that simple. For example, I still have about two dozen browser tabs open: research on the places we visited. Some of them I can close with no regrets: I have five tabs dedicated to microbreweries in Beijing we wanted to visit our last full day there. It turned out, most of the pubs listed online have gone out of business, and the only one we found still in business, is a Japanese company that makes beer with a Russian name, Okhotsk. Actually, Okhotsk is a town and also a sea, the sea that separates Japan from the continent, and where the group of the disputed Kuril islands is located. Just the other day, these islands were in the news again, when President Medvedev went there for a visit, and Japan temporarily called their ambassador back from Russia. Never mind, I'm supposed to be closing tabs, not opening new ones.

Two more sites we visited our last day in town: Silk Street and Pearl Market, one of the places to go in Beijing for knock off purses. I wonder what the career paths of the girls who work there will be: the place is an amazing training ground for an army of aggressive sales reps. In the evening of our last day, we ended up at Sanlitun, a neighborhood of all-American bars, restaurants, shopping. There's a mall there that reminded us very much of the refurbished downtown LA (Nokia Center). The place was mildly creepy in its blandness, so we got out as quickly as possible. A couple of days prior, we'd walked by another touristy restaurant area mentioned in many tour guides, Nan Xin Cang, built in a restored old granary. It's another Disneyfied recreation targeted at tourists, and so stripped of any real personality.

Here's a cool discovery: http://www.dianping.com/, a Chinese equivalent of Yelp. The website is entirely in Simplified Chinese, but thanks to Google translation tools that wasn't a problem. We searched it for some fun restaurants and also it led us to a very decent and well priced foot massage place. Meanwhile, according to Dianping.com, the best restaurant in Beijing is a place called ebeecake. Cake sounded good, and we decided to seek this place out -- especially since the address showed it to be located at the 798 Art Space the day we were going there. Big mistake. Turns out, the right way to read the name of the place is e-Bee-Cake, that is "electronic" cake. When we finally found the right building in the middle of the 798 Art Zone, it turned out to be a wholesale bakery, and they asked us where we wanted our cake delivered. They gave us a pretty catalog with over a dozen titles, and told us that there was a cafe next door that served ebeecake. We found the cafe, but out of all the dozen pretty cakes on the brochure, the cafe was serving cheesecake and tiramisu. We turned up our noses at that, and opted for pizza and ice cream at a cafe down the street.

My other open tabs take me all the way back to Shanghai. Here's a blog by an American guy, Jonathan, that's been really helpful to me in finding the foreign-language bookstores in Shanghai. Jonathan is studying at a university in Nanjing, and his blog is a good source for information about the expat life in China. I've added his RSS to my Google Reader.

Dave's coworker, Laura -- she's an interpreter freelancing for Dave's company -- told me the story about the Soong sisters, three very influential women of the 20th C Chinese politics. The eldest of the three, Soong Ai Ling was married to the richest man and a finance minister of China. The middle, Soong Ching Ling was married to the founder of modern China, Dr. Sun Yat Set. And the youngest, Soong May Ling married Chiang Kai Shek. I immediately wanted to know more about them. Apparently, there was a 1997 Hong Kong film made about the three, but what I'm really looking for is a good novel :) While in Shanghai, I went to Soong Ching Ling's residence and memorial, memorial being a museum dedicated to the life of Soong Ching Ling from the point of view of the Communist party. The residence itself was like a small English country house, albeit with a few oddly angled walls. One very neat thing I noticed: she had her typewriter set up in the bathroom, right next to the tub. I wonder what her writing routine was.

Also, while in Shanghai, I walked down Duolun Road, a street famous for many turn of the 20th C writers who lived there. The street is enjoying something of a renaissance these days, and features some new cafes and bookstores and even one Museum of Modern Art. I walked into this museum to discover an exhibit of сontemporary Saudi Arabian art, a part of the World Expo.

Finally (for this mishmash post), David and Cici, our gracious guides through Hangzhou, left me with a list of (popular 20th C) Chinese writers I should check out. I have no idea when I will get to this, but here at least are the names they put down in my notebook: Jin Yong, Wei Si Li, Lin Yu Tang, Zhang Ai Ling, Xiong Yao, Lao She (the only name familiar to me on this list), Ding Ling, Han Han, Bing Xin, Lei Yu, Ba Jing, Guo No Ruo.

Ring 4

2010-11-04T18:12:00.001-07:00

My nose seems capable of producing infinite amounts of goo. Both Dave and I have been sniffling all week; it's no big deal -- no other symptoms, except red noses -- but it is making it difficult for me to sleep or lie down in general, my nose gets immediately stuffed up. Yesterday, we decided to get foot massages, and I was breathing so loudly in my reclined chair, that a woman working on Dave's feet brought me some pretty gel-capsuled pills to take, presumably to clear my nose. I took some NyQuil instead, and more or less slept through the night.

On the other hand, stuffed nose is a fine symptom to have when walking through a neighborhood fire. As we were walking back to our hotel last night, having gotten our foot massages, our path took us down a street that was blocked off to automobile traffic. My first thought was that they were clearing an accident: we've already seen one accident the day before, where a motor-powered rickshaw collided with a motorcycle. With the aggressive local driving style, accidents must be frequent. As we kept walking, we started seeing fire engines on both sides of the street, and then finally passed a small crowd gathered at an entrance to a side alley: one of the buildings some ways down the alley had caught on fire.

Beijing's city plan divides the city with wide automobile streets into neighborhoods, rectangular blocks of houses separated from each other by narrow and sometimes very ancient alleys (hutongs). Many of these alleys are inaccessible to cars, and only pedestrians, bikes or motorbikes can get through. So when trying to put out a fire, the firemen had to extend great lengths of hose all the way down the alley, by which time the fire probably spread from the first building to the next and maybe to the next. The buildings are made of brick, but they are located so close to each other, that the fire, once started, is difficult to put out. As we passed that alley, we entered a cloud of smoke so thick Dave thought the cause was a smoke bomb; it was hard to imagine this kind of smoke being caused by a single house burning five hundred feet away.

Beijing is a grid city, but like Moscow, is circumscribed with several concentric ring roads. I am not sure what in Beijing is considered the first ring -- perhaps, the walls of the Forbidden City -- but most tourist sites and activities seem to be contained within the Second ring (except Summer Palace, where we haven't been yet). The residential city is much wider, extending out in all directions to 4th, 5th and 6th rings. This is where most of the millions of people inhabiting Beijing actually live: not in the historical and atmospheric hutongs of the city center, but in the Soviet-style (or post-Soviet, more contemporary) apartment blocks. I feel very much at home in these neighborhoods. Here are the shops for the middle classes: grocery and clothing mega-markets, stores selling washing machines, offices of the telecom companies, bakeries, a random pipe and tobacco shop.

We ended up in this part of town following a lead recommended by my friend Yvette (her recommendations have led us to some very unique and fascinating places this week): to find 798 Art Zone. It's an old auto factory that fell in disuse and was taken over by artist-types that converted it to their own needs. The project achieved legitimacy on the governmental level as Beijing was gearing up for the Olympic games. The old factory neighborhood was re-zoned from industrial to "artistic," and large-scale tourist-friendly construction began. Today, the area features many cafes and restaurants (most of them with some international flare, even if that simply means pizza and tiramisu), bookstores and stores with artistic souvenirs (lots of souvenirs that feature art from 798 galleries), and most importantly, a countless number of galleries, workshops, ceramic studios, etc.

And all of this is located in the middle of the otherwise nondescript middle class neighborhood, past rows and rows of apartment blocks. Tourists who know what they are looking for, find it, but otherwise -- forget it. You're never going to stumble upon it by chance.

Read Dave's blog for more details about the art we've found at 798.

Sightseeing in Beijing

2010-11-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

We've been walking around Beijing the last few days, took a bus ride to the Great Wall, but then came back to the city and continued viewing the sites. There are many major attractions here that are on every tourist's must-see list, and we've barely covered those yet. The Wall, for one, also the Temple of Heaven. Planning to spend half a day at the Forbidden City today, and maybe will make it to the Summer Palace on Friday. Distances are huge, and once you get to a site, it absorbs you in a multitude of pavilions, corridors, landmarks -- and soon enough it's 5 pm, when everything closes down. Sure, we're not very dedicated sightseers, we get out of the hotel very late, by noon at best, and prefer to stay out as long as we can in the evenings -- exploring the neighborhoods, getting lost in the alleys, finally finding our way to the night markets, settling down for dinner, going to shows.

I feel very ambivalent about visiting the must-see sites. I am not huge on taking pictures, and the massive hoards of tourists are frightening. The Great Wall, at least the most popular stretches of it, is a huge tourist trap; the loveliest thing about it is the ability to hike from one mountain crest to the next, and to enjoy the autumn. We don't see much of this kind of fall in San Francisco -- the Wall was covered in soft yellow glow from all the trees around it, dry weightless leaves gathering at the bottoms of each staircase and by the parapets. It really seems that the "Wall" is a misnomer -- it's not much different from the Roman road, a way to connect distant provinces to the empire center. Any army that scaled those mountains can easily take the wall, not that much higher than any wall aristocrats built around their palaces and gardens in Beijing or Shanghai.

Yesterday, Dave and I visited the Palace and the Garden of Prince Gong, similar in its vision to Yu Garden in Shanghai, but also featuring a separate mansion with nine inner courtyards. The Garden of Prince Gong is rumored to have inspired Cao Xuequin's "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (or "The Story of the Stone"), the one classic Chinese novel that I've (partially) read. The garden with its multiple pavilions and several man-made lakes was completely overrun by tour groups, so Dave's and mine vague notion of having a tea and resting a while in one of the pavilions seemed absurd. But we did meander around, climbing the rocky paths on the second and the third level above ground, and this way managed to sneak by a few particularly ugly bottlenecks. This, to me, was the most surprising discovery about these traditional gardens: their three-dimensional architecture. Somehow, from the books, this part never became apparent to me, that the traditional garden is not conceived on a plane, but also in the vertical space. This is also one aspect the smaller-scale gardens like the ones in Portland or Vancouver cannot replicate.

Beijing clearly presents itself as a much older city than Shanghai. Walking down a seemingly random alley, we've come across a sign that marked the existence of this same alley from the 13th century. Also, we've walked into a store with wooden triangle roofs and a series of courtyards, labeled with a plaque: this store was a pharmacy built in 1606 and served the emperor and the court. There were several different shops located on the premises now, but the only one still open (it was after 5 pm) was a state-run shop with traditional souvenirs, tea and candy.

My friend Yvette has been telling me of the ever-present danger in Beijing that the new bout of construction will destroy yet another historical neighborhood; that the traditional compounds will be replaced with ultra-modern office buildings and hotels. She herself has been writing fiction, short stories and novellas, that explore the changing cityscapes and social structures of contemporary Beijing. I am thinking about her stories as I walk around and look at the tremendous construction sites that border every neighborhood, that meet you every time you turn a corner from a well-trodden tourist path. Yvette's project, to reflect and remember, resonates with me: I also keep thinking about the one skyscraper, the infamous Okhta Center or Gasprom tower, that may or may not be built in the next few years downtown St. Petersburg.

Read Dave's blog for a more detailed account of what we've been up to.

Episodic imagination

2010-10-31T08:13:00.000-07:00

I've read an essay recently by a philosopher Galen Strawson, in which he argues that people differ in ways they experience self in time. The two polarities are Diachronic and Episodic self-experiences, where a Diachronic person imagines self "as something that was there in the past and will be there in the future," while an Episodic person "has little or no sense that the self was there in the past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being." I strongly identify with this second type of experience, the Episodic.

An example: I can never pack right for the weather. I look at the weather forecast, I estimate how much hotter or colder it is than San Francisco, I advise Dave (or whomever I'm traveling with) what would be, theoretically, the right clothes to bring, and then I go on to pack my own suitcase with completely random stuff that has no relationship to what I'm going to need on the ground. I don't do this intentionally. At the outset, I firmly decide to break the pattern, to plan the trip right, to pack for all eventualities. And I always end up with the wrong clothes, trip after trip after trip. I seem to be simply unable to project myself into the future, cannot imagine ever needing or wanting to wear anything other than what I'm comfortable with at the moment.

Here, in China, I ended up with a bathing suit and sandals I haven't used once, and without a proper jacket for the low 40F temperatures in the evenings. My suitcase is filled with tank tops and summer skirts, and only three long-sleeved shirts. I did pack an umbrella and several scarves, but I didn't bring a single sweater. I'd worn my favorite sleeveless vest on the plane -- and this was the warmest piece of clothing I had with me. So one of the things we had to do in Hangzhou -- before we got to the supposedly cold Beijing -- was to buy me a jacket.

This is pretty much how I get most of my shopping done. I end up in various parts of the world without necessary articles of clothing and have to improvise. My previous jacket, I got two years ago when I ended up in Ireland over New Years without warm clothes (what kind of a person would show up in Ireland in January without a good jacket? An Episodic, unable to imagine self in the future). And last year, in Israel, I bought two skirts and a dress, because Israel in January was quite summery. In the past, I'd had to buy boots in Spain and T-shirts in Germany. The only reason I rarely buy new clothes in Russia is because I can always wear my mom's stuff there. And also, she has a tendency to plan for me and buy me clothes whether I need anything or not.

My wardrobe is a hodgepodge of uniquely patterned, brightly colored articles from all over the world (but actually probably all made here in China), most of it bought at the time of need and in a rush. A lot of it has been acquired even without my presence. Few articles fit me well, and the notion of matching is unthinkable. Even if I can wear my Israeli skirt with a plain black shirt, it's never going to look right with my purse made of complex geometrically patterned material in moss green, brick red, pale yellow and other colors, a purse I cannot give up because my mom brought for me from Armenia (even if it had been made in China or India, so what).

Here's what happened in Hangzhou. Our friend David had brought the report that Beijing was having a cold spell, that the temperatures in Beijing approximated 0 degrees Celsius (32 F). I was already feeling uncomfortable in my vest (a birthday gift from my mom several years ago, she'd mailed it to me from Israel) worn over a pair of long-sleeved shirts -- and we were still in Hangzhou, where the temperature climbed to 15 degrees Celcius in the daytime. The prudent thing to do was to buy the jacket before we left Hangzhou, especially since we had time to shop after dinner.

David and Cici took us to a few clothing stores -- luckily, they were all on the same street (did I mention I hate shopping? I blame my Episodic imagination for my inability to select what I would actually ever want to wear). Nothing fit right. Everyone was advising me to try larger sizes -- in China, the sizes are marked based on height; I am 164 cm tall, and the sizes range 160 - 165 - 170 -- and I did try 170, but it was no use. I must've tried on ten different models of sweaters and jackets, and it all just felt wrong. This is part of the problem with buying clothes in foreign countries: I never know what the right models for my body type are. The clothes were too tight and too baggy at the same time; one jacket seemed to fit fine but then it had a hood lined with bright orange fur, and even I could tell that I would never wear something like this in San Francisco.

Finally, at what I was determined to make our last stop for the night -- the exercise was getting ridiculously stupid -- Dave pointed to a nice looking men's pea-coat, just for the hell of it. "Try this." The first one I tried on was it. The shoulders were the right breadth, the sleeves the right length, I had enough room in the chest to button all the buttons and still be able to move my arms up and down. The material was thick enough for cold weather and the plain gray color classy enough to look good even when I picked up my crazy purse. The only thing about it, being a man's coat, it buttoned on the right side. I figured, I'd get used to it.

We bought the coat without further ado, and I walked out of the store wearing it instead of my old vest. Will I be able to wear it in San Francisco? I don't see why not -- but of course, I've said so about many things that are currently gathering dust in my closet. Being gray, this coat seems pretty easy to match with a lot of things -- if I were suddenly to take up matching as a hobby. The coolest part about it is the story that goes with it: Hangzhou, hanging out with David and Cici who seemed to get a kick out of the fact that the only thing that fit me right was a men's jacket. Also, the company I bought the jacket from -- Meters/Bonwe, a local chain -- is one of David's clients, and this added to the fun of the experience.

These kinds of stories are the best part of my wardrobe, the reason why I have such a hard time emptying my closets, donating anything to Goodwill. Being an Episodic, I don't have ready access to my memories as a Diachronic person, perhaps, might: to imagine (Diachronics would say "remember") myself in the past, I need the physical objects to prompt the memories. So I insist on wearing my random clothes, even if they make the task of getting dressed in the mornings extremely challenging.

Happy Halloween, everybody :)

Tourist will eat

2010-10-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

A tourist moves through a foreign city driven by desire. She is looking for an undefined, unknown experience that will somehow effect change upon her. The more unfamiliar the culture, the more opportunities it seems to offer for radical transformation of her consciousness. She yearns to study, to learn, to grow, to understand. At the very least, she's looking for some kind of human interaction that will allow her to feel less foreign in this formidable city, less alone. She finds souvenir shops and street food. Buns of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. Hot dogs on sticks. Spinach dumplings. Corn on the cob. Chestnuts. Pearl milk tea. Black sesame cookies and cream-filled pastries. Hard-boiled eggs. Bowls of noodles and cabbage. Pancakes with scallions and unspecified meat. Melon on sticks. Barbecued chicken on sticks. Baked potato. Stinky tofu. She samples these by pointing and counting out coins; at the end of the day she still hasn't talked to a single human being, and if she's been in any way transformed by what she has seen, the transformation has been so minor as to go entirely unnoticed. But the desire--an undefined yearning for something extraordinary--has been successfully channeled into hunger, and the hunger satisfied. Stomach full, she keeps walking, stuffing her purse with baggies of dried fruit and nuts, hard candy, sesame balls, lychees and apples, bars of chocolate, boxes of miniature mints, gum. The desire has been transformed and satisfied, and yet it's still there, burning in the back of her mind, driving her down miles upon miles of narrowly paved roads, through crowds of goal-oriented locals, by ways of hundreds of vendors that offer more opportunities to put off the inevitable realization that what pushes her along has nothing to do with her surroundings. The desire is born of something deep within her self, and must be answered by looking inwards, not outwards. She sits down at a cafe, at a bookstore, at a curbside, leans against a lamppost or a granite facade, and starts writing. This, isn't this what she was looking for in the foreign city: the way to stop looking. This, she thinks, is freedom. This is happiness. Her thoughts are fueled by the full stomach, and the supplies in her purse will ensure that her stomach will remain pleasantly full at least until the next day.

Meantime, Dave's conference ended somewhere between 3 and 11:30 am this morning, and the touristy part of the trip has officially started. Our new friends David and Cici drove us to the nearby city Hangzhou. On the way, we stopped by what looked like a truck stop in a town called Jiaxin to try a local specialty dish, zongzi -- a bun of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and filled with deliciously soft pork. David and Cici were telling us the tidbits from the history of this dish in Jiaxin, and while they were talking they started remembering all the wonderful Hangzhou specialty dishes: shrimp cooked in tea soup, Beggar's Chicken cooked in lotus leaves and ashes, fried tofu skins dipped in tomato sauce, fried ice cream, Dongpo pork, named after a poet and a governor of Hangzhou from the 11th century, Su Dongpo (also known as Su Shi). After finishing our snack, we rushed to Hangzhou, quickly toured the famous West Lake, had tea with lotus root starch soup in one of the tea houses on the island in the middle of the lake, then took the boat back to shore, and rushed to the restaurant where we could sample all these other famed dishes. Today offered a kind of culinary experience that puts the idea of a "Chinese restaurant" to shame.

Tourist, know thyself

2010-10-27T16:51:00.001-07:00

I am not entirely unfamiliar with Chinese culture. True, I don't understand even the basics of the language and know only tidbits of history, but I've read a classic Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), for my Master's exam -- at least three of the five volumes. And in high school, we'd studied the history of the Chinese revolution. At that time in the evolution of USSR-PRC relations, my teachers were a lot more sympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek's cause then they were to Mao. Oh, of course, I've seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- who hasn't?

This doesn't add up to much, but it turns out to be a decent jumping-off platform. For example, The Dream of the Red Chamber, written in 1759, gives a very detailed account of the philosophy and aesthetics behind the construction of the traditional Chinese garden. So when yesterday I found myself getting lost in the vistas and nooks of Yu Garden in the Old Shanghai, I felt like I was revisiting something very familiar. In the last few years, I've visited Chinese gardens in Portland and Vancouver, but the scale here is completely different. And size matters: Yu Garden is much more than a garden, it features, for example, a classic theatre ("Ancient Opera Stage") with a live music show of traditional china instruments ("china music is a great invention of China"). And that was just one of the two dozen pavilions and attractions.

I got a very good tour of the Yu Garden by inadvertently eavesdropping on guides speaking to German, Russian, and British and American tourist groups. Of the languages I didn't understand, I heard Chinese, French, Spanish, and Italian. It was very amusing to compare the different spins each guide put on the stories they told. For example, one American English-speaking guide pointed to a two-storied building and said: "This is called the Heavenly tower. In China, young women of noble families were not allowed to step out of the garden until they were married. And when they were married, they left the garden and went out into the world. So to prepare themselves for it, they climbed to the second floor of this tower to look over the wall into the world outside: and so this is called 'Heavenly Tower.'" The German speaking guide pointed to the same building and said (I'm paraphrasing): "Metaphorically, the second floor is 'above the clouds,' thus, the name of the tower, Heavenly." (I am unable to confirm either story on Google -- I'm finding only very bare-bones descriptions of the garden. And very basic, inaccurate maps.)

All the pavilions were very well marked in English with a few words describing their history and purpose. Since the pavilions frequently served purely contemplative, aesthetic purposes (to enjoy this view or that), the descriptions require a poetic interpretation: "Viewing the scenery of the big rockery by the wooden rails one feels carefree and joyous." Indeed, one does.

I've stuck to my decision to focus my explorations of Shanghai around literature and literary figures. One of the streets near my hotel, Fuzhou Lu, is apparently known as the Book Street. My friend Yvette has told me that most bookstores in China are owned by the publishers, and so I'm guessing that all the different bookstores on Fuzhou Lu are owned by competing publishers. One of Dave's coworkers said that the bookstores in Shanghai are having a hard time staying in business these days because most people buy books online. In any case, I've walked by several multi-storied bookstores on Fuzhou Lu, and spent time in one called "Foreign Language Bookstore" that had plenty of books in English, from popular paperbacks to textbooks for people studying Chinese to novels and nonfiction books about China in general and Shanghai in particular. I picked up and started reading Chuang Hua's "Crossings" -- it was very hard to put down, but I decided to check it out of the library back in San Francisco. English books are ridiculously expensive here, probably because they have to be imported. This little paperback cost more than $20.

And the day before yesterday, I visited a museum dedicated to Lu Xun, one of the founders of the modern Chinese literature at the beginning of the 20th Century. He is one of the rare writers who is well known (and well loved) in both US and China. I've read several of his stories before (although I'm yet to read his most famous one in English, A Madman's Diary). Lu Xun never joined the Communist party himself, but he was very much a Socialist and was friendly with many of the Communist leaders. He died in 1936, before Mao came to power, and so in a way this helped to preserve his legacy in both worlds. This museum, located in the middle of the park bearing Lu Xun's name, was a big, modern building, featuring a lot of interactive exhibits and clay models depicting scenes from Lu Xun's life. The focus of many of the exhibits was on the development of Lu Xun's political education and ideas, suggesting perhaps that had he lived a little longer, he would've become a member of the party. As it was, "He became the most loyal comrade-in-arms of the communists."

Political pathos aside, it was very touching to see some of his personal items on display: a pair of black socks, a watch, a purple woolen sweater, his cup and saucer, a graph that monitored his body temperature for several days before his death, an umbrella "with which Lu Xun attended in spite of rain the memorial meeting for Xang Quan at the International Funeral Directorate." It's been a long time since I've been to a museum dedicated to a writer; last time Dave and I tried to go to Moika 12, where Pushkin died, it was closed for a holiday.

Lu Xun died in Shanghai, a few blocks away from the memorial museum. His flat -- which is also open to tourists for a nominal fee -- is located in a very typical Shanghainese building block, it's end wall facing the street and long narrow alleys in front and back separating it from the other blocks in the development. This was a great opportunity to take a closer look at the way this system works: even if Lu Xun's place is a museum, all the other apartments in his and surrounding blocks are still very much occupied. The apartment itself consisted of three floors: living and dining room on the first floor, a bath and a toilet on the half floor between first and second, master bedroom and his study (a bed and a desk next to each other) on the second floor, and his son's bedroom on the third floor. There was also a room for visitors next door to the master bedroom, and plenty of closets on the half floors. The view was not much: all the hustle and bustle of the alleys, but as one of the stands at the memorial museum implied, this kind of setting was exactly what he needed for inspiration. In any case, I had an impression, that this was a rather upscale lodging.

Oh, another cool thing about the Lu Xun museum. The alley leading up to it was decorated with stone plaques inscribed with short quotations from love poetry by poets from all around the world (and maybe also Chinese poets, although those weren't translated to English, so I'm just guessing): Plato, Goethe, Sándor Petőfi (Hungarian revolutionary poet), Rabindranath Tagore, Omar Khayyam, Alexander Pushkin (oh that Pushkin, he gets around!), Percy Bysshe Shelly, William Butler Yeats, Pablo Neruda ("I like for you to be still"). And one of the exhibits at the memorial museum highlighted this idea: "Li Xun had an extensive access to Western Literature and foreign friends in his earlier years. ... Meanwhile, the foreign works he read could not be numbered. Therefore, his ability of critical thinking had been improved."

Anyway, this post is hugely long and rambling, and I didn't even mention half of the things I've seen in the last two days. I've visited two museums of contemporary art -- one featuring contemporary art from Saudi Arabia, the other from Hong Kong; accidentally stumbled into a fashion show of Italian designers (catwalk and all!) on the third floor of MoCA--the Museum of Contemporary Art; two temples, one Taoist and another Buddhist (the Taoist temple featured Gods of Literature and Wealth sitting right across the courtyard from one another, God of Literature with a wily smile on his face, and God of Wealth with a stern scary look); tried lots of street foods and pastries (OMG, pastries -- delicious) and walked through all kinds of neighborhoods. More on all that in the days to come.

Keep up with Dave's work adventures in Shanghai here.

Shanghai: accidental Pushkin

2010-10-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I walked out of the hotel with the intention of walking over to the Shanghai Museum of Arts and Crafts, supposedly located only a block and a half from the hotel. I decided to take the long way there, and turned right where I could've turned left. I used the opportunity to explore the quieter residential areas of the French Concession. Battled some school kids in line for candy and gum (I, too, it turned out, wanted candy and gum), watched men on rickshaws transporting bags of Styrofoam in all directions (recycling?), people opening market stands for the day's business.

The French Concession boasts not only platane-lined streets, but also once in a while tiny little parks at street corners. In one of these, I spotted a familiar face. "Boy, can this statue here, in the middle of Shanghai, really be a monument to the greatest Russian poet of all times, Aleksandr Pushkin?" I asked myself and crossed the street to look. The curly hair and abundant sideburns, the flamboyant collar and tie, the eyes gazing into the distance all fit the traditional Pushkin image. The name on the monument was inscribed only in Chinese characters, but the dates of birth and death were given in Roman script: 1799-1837. Pushkin!

I guess this is not surprising: Russians have a good long history of engagement with China in general and with Shanghai specifically (and I mean besides the shared Communist history), but it was really lovely to keep encountering the physical manifestations of this relationship all throughout my day. On the Bund, for example, I saw a strangely familiar-looking building that, on approach, turned out to be a former "St. Petersburg Russo-Sino" bank building, now a foreign exchange center.

(As a subset of this history, there's also a story of the Russian Jews in China -- but I haven't come face to face with it yet).

In the afternoon, I moved with Dave and his coworkers from our hotel in the French Concession to the new hotel on the Bund -- the actual site of the conference that started yesterday. This took up a big chunk of the day, and then Dave had to get back to work again, and I set out to explore the town on foot. I walked all the way back to the French Concession and spent the evening at a foreign language bookstore/ice cream parlor, Garden Books. Pushkin is great and all, but I know virtually nothing of Chinese literature (or culture, or language -- but fiction is a good place to start from), and now that I'm in love with Shanghai, the lack of information is unacceptable. My plan now is to see as much literature-related sites in the city as I can manage, more bookstores and libraries included. Sightseeing in a completely unfamiliar land is a daunting proposition, and limiting what I should try to learn and to remember makes it seem much more doable (and fun!).

Oh, meanwhile, the Shanghai Museum of Arts and Crafts is perfectly charming. The coolest part about it is that in addition to displaying works of art (mostly 20th Century handcrafts: intricate ivory and wood carvings, silk embroidery, clay figurines, etc) they provide space for artists to work on new projects -- and to sell their work to the visitors. Almost every piece in the museum had a price tag attached to it, and some of it was very reasonable. Or, rather, the prices were conveniently arranged to match the pockets of all kinds of depth.

Dave has a contest running on his blog today. Check it out and participate!

Shanghai, Day 1

2010-10-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

Dave has been telling me all along that he finds Shanghai very charming, but the general buzz one hears about China is so filled with stories of poverty, industrialization, poor ecology, and communism, that I had trouble hearing him. Downtown Shanghai is charming. Definitely the part of town we're staying in, the French Concession (the area was maintained by the French from the mid 19th century until 1946). Dave says it's the only part of the city to feature tree-lined streets. This morning, there were also a bunch of stands selling delicious dim sum -- buns filled with spinach, purple potato, brown rice. We were on our way to a brunch place Dave's pre-approved for us, but we couldn't pass these by.

Dave took the afternoon off today, and we went to the World Expo. Dave's coworkers and my friend Yvette have been warning us that the Expo is crazy busy. The rumor had it that today was the last day the Expo is open to the general public; after today it's invitation only. Somebody said that the day before, on Saturday, there were 1,2 million people at the Expo, that it took them four hours to get into the US pavilion, that after spending a full day at the Expo, they'd only made it inside three pavilions. Yvette had advised me to go in the evening, when the crowds thin out a bit. But Dave wanted to go, and we had to fit the trip around his work schedule.

It was drizzling lightly. Exiting the subway at one of the Expo stops, we were guided through metal detectors (we'd also had to go through a metal detector to enter the subway!) -- and emerged in a sea of people. All the country stands were divided by continent affiliation. Asia and Middle East to the right, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas to the left. We made the game plan on the spot: to skip all the big, popular pavilions, and go to the ones we can get into, the ones with short or fast-moving lines. We turned to the right, and went to Sri Lanka.

Inside Sri Lanka, we found booths with blown up photographs of ancient ruins and Buddhist sites; ancient-looking vases and statuettes in glass cases; a few models of architectural structures and parks; food stand; a guy making silver anklets; lots of tea, scarves, saris, and jewelry for sale.

This proved to be the pattern of the pavilions: photographs; glass cases with artifacts; some food items; stands selling souvenirs and parts of national costuming. Usually, in every pavilion we found one creative way a country distinguished itself from all the others. In the Sri Lankan pavilion, there was that guy making silver anklets. His work was quite intricate, and he had a full set of tools in front of him, from fine saws and files to pliers to other instruments I couldn't identify. If we didn't get pushed around by all others who wanted to take a peak at his work, we could've watched him for a good long while.

In the Afghanistan pavilion (they didn't have a full pavilion, but a space within Asia Pavilion 1), a woman from Nepal painted a henna drawing on my hand. In Uzbekistan, there was a map of the world with Uzbekistan at the center of the world, and "New York" occupying a third of the United States. In Viet Nam, there was the building itself, adorned inside and outside with bamboo in gothic church-like curves. Inside, there was also an oversized statue of Buddha and a zen pond with lotus flowers that might have looked very tranquil and zen, if not for the crowd that was stepping on our heels and rushing us along. In Nepal, there was another very beautiful building with intricate wood carvings for awnings and hand rails, but after we'd waited in line to get inside the pavilion, we found another line of people waiting for their turn to climb a ladder to the top of a two-storied globe, with indefinite rewards at the top. We opted out.

The lines were intense. Dave and I stuck to our resolution to choose only the fast moving lines, but in these lines people kept moving fast right past us, as if we were completely invisible. To keep up with the crowd, we had to get aggressive, to work elbows and shoulders, to push forward or to push back, to hold our ground and inch forward. At the end of Nepal, we were completely exhausted. But we wanted to meet up with Dave's coworker Laura, and Laura's local friend. And we also wanted refreshments: we were thinking, Belgian beer, why not.

To get to Belgium, we had to walk the length of the Expo, across all the continents, to Europe. We walked by a lot of long lines. The China pavilion had a long line. The Japan pavilion (that looked like a pig about to take off into space) had what we thought was a ridiculous line. The India and South Korea had people looping around and around in wait. But then we saw the line to Saudi Arabia that seemed to dwarf all the other lines. To get into Saudi Arabia, some people waited for six hours or more. Laura's friend told us that Saudi Arabia had the best attraction: a 3D movie right at the entrance.

Belgium shared a pavilion with the European Union as a body, and there was a long line there, too. But we'd figured out how the pavilions worked by then. The food parts of the pavilion usually had back entrances, so that you could skip the pavilion and go straight for the food. We looked for that, and found an entrance to a cafe. A long staircase led us to the second floor of the pavilion, and right away we saw the blackboard with brand names of beers, the Leffes and Chimays and Duvels and Kastels and Kwaks adorned the ceiling of the long bar. We sat down -- the first time Dave and I sat down in about six hours -- and had some Belgian french fries with mayo, a second course of red snapper, and a glass of highly alcoholic sweet beer, Kastel. The ordering when like this:

Do you have this beer?
Let me check, ummm, I don't think so, no.
What about this one?
No.
And this?
No.
So what do you have?
What do you mean?

They are dismantling the restaurant in the next few days or maybe weeks, so their supplies were dwindling.

A receipt from the cafe got us inside Belgium pavilion -- and this is another good way to skip the crazy lines. Belgium boasted the Magritte museum, the solar plane that, judging by the movie, could lift itself 6 inches off the ground, the solar powered car for one skinny driver, and the chocolate samples that they'd just stopped giving out the minute we approached the stand. They also sold chocolate in another part of the booth, but that's not the same.

For more of Dave's adventures, check out his blog: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2010/10/oct-24-2010-shanghai-exposed.html

Organ-ized

2010-10-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

After I almost missed a dentist appointment on Tuesday, I've implemented a new task organization system, my third this year. I was sitting at a cafe with my friend Sarah and admiring her beautiful calendar: she keeps the handwriting tiny and neat, the tasks are color coded and prioritized in columns by days of the week, and there's also room for sketches and pretty little drawings in the margins. Sarah's calendar is an imprint of a beautiful mind, a mind that knows what her priorities are and sees a clear path to achieve them.

I wanted to have that -- I yearned for it. So I came home, and pulled out the smallest blank journal I had, and used my tiniest handwriting to enter the tasks that came to mind. Write a story. Read this, this, and that. Write a story. Edit. Revise. Do dishes. Revise, edit. Turn off the heater before I leave for China. Vote. Revise.

This is the second time I've almost missed a dentist appointment this year. In the spring, I missed one by fifteen minutes, but they called, and I said I'll be right there in five minutes, and they said okay, just be here quick, and I made it in ten minutes. This time, I was still in bed, reading a novel when they called. I couldn't have taken a shower and brushed my teeth and gotten dressed in ten minutes. The thought flashed through my head when I saw the caller ID. Luckily, this time they called ahead -- to tell me that they were running ten minutes behind. I made it with minutes to spare.

The problem with keeping task lists is that if I don't want to do something, I'm not going to do it, no matter how many times I have to carry the task over from one page of my calendar to another. I'm much more likely to abandon the journal (so new, so attractive today) because I can't face all the tasks I'm carrying over. Task lists intimidate. They scare the hell out of me. The failures embodied by a task list dwarf all possible future and past accomplishments.

Aron Zinshtein

2010-10-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I got a phone call from a legendary underground Leningrad painter, Aron Zinshtein. I'd met him in St. Petersburg this summer -- my friend and editor, Galina, introduced us, she'd brought him to my presentation in Bookvoed. In the 1960s and 70s, Aron had been a part of the world that's mostly familiar to me through stories: the world of artists who wanted to exist independently of the Communist party, and thus were unable to sell their art through the official channels, forced to earn their living by sweeping streets and operating furnaces. (I actually don't know how Aron himself had earned his living back then, I should ask him).

In any case, Aron's is having a show of his work in the Bay Area this coming weekend -- the show starts on Friday, in San Jose, and he is staying with friends about 50 miles away in Richmond (the town north of Berkeley). His friend who lives in Richmond doesn't drive on the highways, and the friends who are helping him organize the show in San Jose work during the week. So he needed my help to deliver the paintings from one place to another -- which I was happy to do, especially because I'm going to miss his show this weekend -- I'll be in China.

Theoretically, I've always known that there exists a sizable community of Russian immigrants in the Bay area, but I had no idea where they were or how to find them, especially the artists and the writers. Aron introduced me to a very friendly couple, who until a year or two ago published a Russian-language magazine Terra Nova (they even did a bilingual issue once), a magazine of interviews and essays written by the local Russian-speaking physicists, mathematicians, poets, musicians, architects and other "people of the arts and sciences." They generously gave me copies of the back issues: it felt like receiving a treasure chest. I signed up to their mailing list as well. Even though the magazine is temporarily defunct, the community is going strong with art shows and lectures and talks with all kinds of visiting Russian (and, if I'm not mistaken, particularly St. Petersburg) celebrities. The only problem: they meet in San Jose.

Home alone

2010-10-17T22:27:00.000-07:00

Dave left for Shanghai on Saturday morning. The day before, my parents, who'd been visiting with us for three weeks, went back to St. Petersburg. My brother is working in Israel this week. I need a computer just to keep track of the time zones. I've spent the weekend reading. I've read from a few books about China, some magazines, a couple of novels, I've even picked at some poetry books and started Dead Souls again -- I must've started this book a dozen times already, and I never make it past page 50. I find it painfully boring. But then, I always run into the Dead Souls enthusiasts who make me think I'm missing something. Last week, I was talking to a person who not only lavishly praised Dead Souls, but also told me Marcel Proust has changed her life. Luckily, my weekend is almost over.

In the spirit of international travel, I had lunch yesterday at a Korean BBQ at a food cart a block away from my house. Check out San Francisco Street Food Cart project. The neighboring cart sold pretty awesome cupcakes.

Last week, my Russian book Keys From the Lost House went on sale at the Russia's largest online bookstore, Ozon.com (if "ozon" sounds like "amazon," I'm sure the similarity is intended). Check it out here: http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/5515182/.

Two Sundays ago, I read my story "Sweet Dreams" at the Barely Published event, a part of Litquake. The crowd was very friendly and laughed a lot, so I count the reading as a success. Our local literary reporter Evan Karp wrote up the event and filmed all of it on video available through youtube. Here's Evan's article: http://litquake.org/blog/a-post-rest-meditation. Scroll down to Barely Published and click on my name to see and hear my bit. But all the readers were excellent, and I highly recommend listening to all of them.

And here's a link to Marie Houzelle's story "Égalité" that is now featured on Narrative Magazine as a Story of the Week. Marie is my friend from a writing conference I attended at Skidmore college over a year ago, and I'm very proud to be able to link to her story. Her writing is profound and hilarious at the same time, there's an unmistakable voice in everything she writes. This story, like much of her writing, is set in Paris in the 1970s, in the middle of all kinds of social and personal turmoil. So good!

Ключи от потерянного дома, presentation

2010-09-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

Every book related event seems to be as different from another as are the books themselves. At least the four or five events I have been involved in seem to belong to entirely different genres. They have ranged from a theatricalized production during the book release party for Kofe-Inn, my first Russian-language collection, to the game show format last week in Moscow.

This one today, in Bookvoed in St. Petersburg, most closely resembled a typical book reading that I've seen in the US. And still, I didn't simply read from my book, but first talked for about twenty minutes with one of my editors, Galina, about the evolution of the book, about my path as a writer, about my editing work, etc. Only then did I read one of my stories. And afterward took some questions and signed copies. I was on stage for about an hour altogether, talking for most of the time. This is probably the largest amount of public speaking I've done as an adult. It was stressful, but also invigorating. There were many friends and family members in the crowd -- and there was a small crowd -- and this helped to make my talk very warm and personal, despite the fact that this wasn't really a talk. Since I'm so inexperienced as a public speaker, I chose to read most of what I had to say -- I had good notes, and I had practiced reading them a number of times so I could react to Galina's questions by skipping a paragraph here and there or by changing the order of things.

As a huge bonus to this event, I've met some new exciting people. Two of them are planning to be in San Francisco in the next month or so: an artist who is going to have a gallery show, and a journalist who is going to California to write about Fort Ross, but might also be around for part of Litquake. I've even got to talk German today for about five or so minutes! My old country-house friend Masha who now lives in Germany happened to be in town today with her German friend Ron -- and we got a bit of a chance to talk after the presentation.

Now comes the sad part. I'm packing. The trip is effectively over -- I'm leaving at noon tomorrow morning. I've said good-bye to all of my friends, promising many to write letters or call on skype. I should know better by now: back to San Francisco, I don't make time to write letters or talk on the phone anymore. I can even disappear from email for months at a time. I guess, what I can do is write more stories. This is what I do these days: part of the reason I write is to keep up connections with the people I love. Writing and calling is good too.

Ключи от потерянного дома, St. Petersburg Presentation

2010-09-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

Book-related events are proceeding full speed ahead. At 7 pm on Tuesday (Sept 14), I'm going to present it in St. Petersburg at a new branch of a prominent citywide bookstore chain, Bookvoed (Буквоед) -- the name roughly translates as "Eater of books" or "Eater of letters (of alphabet)" and references a cultural image of a voracious reader as somebody who "consumes books." The new store is located in the middle of Nevsky prospekt (Невский 46), and is rumored to have three floors full of books, glass walls and elevators, a standard cafe, and a bunch of brand new managers who don't know the inventory yet. The store opened last Wednsday, and my aunt was one of their first customers. She reports that the store was empty, "but it's not surprising because they'll need at least 5,000 people to fill that place up! It's a stadium, not a bookstore! What were they thinking??" We're not going to try to fill it up for my presentation, but we're inviting all friends and family members to participate.

The presentation at the Moscow book show was very low-key on my part. I didn't really have to do anything except hang out and meet people. We had a trivia contest going at our stand: passers-by had to answer questions slightly related to my book. Who was President of the USA in 1992? How long does it take to fly from San Francisco to St. Petersburg? What ocean does the aircraft cross on the way? Winners got the book as a gift. Everyone who stopped by got postcards with the book art and info, links to my brand new Russian website (www.grenetz.ru). I smiled and chatted with a couple of friends who stopped by.

The event in St. Petersburg is going to be entirely different. I'm preparing a talk -- trying to figure out what I can tell my friends and family about myself that'll be new and interesting to them. It will probably have something to do with my life in San Francisco, with San Francisco Writers Workshop and the amazingly supportive San Francisco writing community; with the work I've done over the last few years as a reader and an editor at literary magazines in the US; the ways of dealing with rejection -- and with acceptance; with all the choices I keep making that allow me to go on writing -- and writing, somehow, in two languages. The presentation will be structured as a conversation between me and my friend and editor Galina, and hopefully she'll help me to streamline my thoughts and stop me from rambling. I'm planning to write as much of it down as I can, and, if I need to, read from my notes. I am a very nervous public speaker, and particularly so in Russian. And with a microphone! Yikes. I'll probably read the Russian version of "My Mother at the Shooting Range," too. I'm scared, but I'm also looking forward to it. I've invited a lot of friends and family members, and it'll be fun to be able to share with them some part of my world and my work. It's a rare opportunity, indeed. Do wish me luck!

Happy 5771

2010-09-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

My cousin, his girlfriend and I went to the St. Petersburg synagogue today for Rosh Hashanah services. There is only one functioning synagogue in St. Petersburg, the Grand Choral Synagogue; there's another synagogue at the Jewish cemetery, but the last time I saw it (a few years ago), it was still in ruins. Since my family is not religious, I had never been to the synagogue before, but nevertheless I knew exactly where to go. The building is located between the two stages of Mariinsky theatre -- I've seen the dome many times on my way to the theatre. The synagogue was constructed at the end of 19th Century in a bizarre mix of Moorish, Byzantine and Arabesque styles; renovated completely in the 1990s, today it struck me as one of the best maintained buildings in the city. The dome, the mosaic walls, the cast iron fence all sparkled brightly in the light of the setting sun.

My cousin had been at the synagogue once when he was ten years old, with his father. He remembers a decrepit building, completely deserted: in his memory, there were four or five people present during the service. My main memory connected with the synagogue is of our grandmother who made the trek downtown every spring -- for Passover -- and brought home matzah. This memory is very vivid because my grandmother, when she grew older, usually didn't travel very far from our neighborhood. Moreover, she always went to the synagogue alone. She brought us along when she went out grocery shopping, to visit relatives, to the doctors' offices, she took us to the swimming pools and music and painting classes, but she never took us with her when she went to the synagogue. Perhaps, she thought we wouldn't understand it. Or perhaps it was safer this way. I'm not sure I can authentically reconstruct her way of thinking about it. But she brought back matzah, and to us, the matzah itself was a big deal, very exciting -- it was so different from our regular food, and then she used to fry it and made a cake out of it.

Today, the building and the courtyard were very crowded. My cousin ran into somebody he knew from school, a sister of his classmate, and I was recognized by one of my mother's friends -- even though she didn't come up to acknowledge this on the spot, but later called my mom to tell her she saw me. I came to the service quite late, maybe halfway through, and had to climb to the second floor because this synagogue maintains the gender separation law. This, too, I had known before entering. I found my cousin's girlfriend up there, on the "Choral" level, and she pointed out a tableau next to the cantor's stand that displayed the current page of the Machzor, the Rosh Hashanah prayer book.

Russian translation of the Hebrew prayers is written in an elevated language with slightly old-fashioned diction. It was sweet but also somewhat amusing, like reading a century old newspaper article. The prayers were in Hebrew, but the sound was completely unfamiliar to me from what I've heard of various services in American synagogues (although I have never been to a Rosh Hashanah service in the US). Here, the prayers sounded a lot like "Ay-yay-yay-yay, Ay-yay-yay-yay" repeated for many minutes at a time. At the end of the service, the prayer seemed to turn suddenly into a popular song as the cantor turned to the crowd, and everyone interrupted their casual conversations for a moment (at least on the second floor people had been ceaselessly mingling with one another) and joined him in singing "Shalom Aleichem" and clapping along.

The service was followed by a reception with cakes and cookies and Coke. We partook of a few treats, and then proceeded to everyone's favorite restaurant Teplo for a lovely meal and more dessert. We played scrabble while waiting for our food, and my cousin's girlfriend won the game by composing words like "Challah" and "Tsahal" (Хала and Цахал in Russian).

Book sillyness

2010-09-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

Friday night, as I was posting the previous blog entry featuring the cover of my book, I had a scare: I discovered a spelling error right there on the back cover. It was three o'clock in the morning, and I had to get up at five to make it to the train to Moscow. The books had been printed earlier in the week, and a stack of them had already been sent to Moscow for the book show. The only thing I could do was send an email. "Wow, I can't believe we missed this!" As I lay in bed, I tried to find the ways to turn this situation into a joke. In the morning -- an hour and a half later -- it turned out that I was posting an old image: the mistake I discovered had already been corrected during one of the steps in the editing process, the step I'd apparently missed.

Today, flipping through one of the books from my own stack, I discovered that the text inside the book was printed backwards. Inside the front cover, I found the last page of the last story in the collection, upside down. I feverishly started opening all the other books in the stack: could this be a singular fluke? But no, the next one was also backwards. And the next one? The next one started properly, from the beginning. Whew. The next one after that was also okay. In total, there were two backwards books in the stack of twenty. Why only two is hard to guess, and what about all the other stacks? My mom suggested that I should turn this into a game: anyone who happens to get a backwards book wins a prize. A special signature, for example: the person who reads this book is a very special reader.. The thought needs further development, but the main idea stands: to turn a silly printing error into a happening :)

Ключи от потерянного дома

2010-09-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

My second Russian-language short story collection, The Keys to the Lost House, is getting released in Moscow on Sunday. The publisher is St. Petersburg-based Limbus Press, and the book is being presented at a Moscow book show ММКВЯ on Sunday, September 5, at noon. Here's how to find it in case you happen to be in the neighborhood: Зал B, стенд E-4; F-3 :)). The book show is taking place in Moscow's largest trade show center, VDNKh, that has several permanent museum pavilions and vast grounds with fountains and gardens. I don't know if I'll get to play tourist there over the weekend, but I'll report back on the things I do get to see. My book's presentation alone promises to be eventful; already people have reported sightings of an oversized "Olga Grenetz" balloon flying around the pavilion. (Oh yeah, my book in Russia is being published under my code name Olga Grenetz. It's confusing.)

Here's the link to the online catalog listing for the book on the Limbus Press's website: http://limbuspress.ru/page/book.php?sel_book_id=289. Check it out!

Protest and art

2010-08-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

I walked by the Dissenters' March today. Apparently, in Moscow the police beat up and arrested a bunch of people. In St. Petersburg, they arrested a bunch of people as well, but on a smaller scale. What I saw from across the wide Nevsky prospect was a group of 300 or so people (including some parents with young children) hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the shopping center Gostiny Dvor, surrounded by the busloads of policemen. I hung about for a few minutes -- there were lots of onlookers from across the street, including traffic cops and a man with government tags on the windshield of his car -- he was on the phone, perhaps giving orders. A fire engine arrived and parked right next to the protesters. The firemen in full gear unraveled the hose and stood by waiting for the word from the top to unleash the water. I'm not sure what happened next, but according to the reports online, it seems nothing much happened in St. Petersburg except some of the protesters were arrested by the special police. A breakaway protest started nearby, in the square in front of the Winter Palace (that houses the Hermitage), a few dozen of people walked around a commemorative column and chanted slogans. Many of them were arrested as well.

The organizers of the March have promised to gather protests on a 31st of every month that has 31 days. And if Putin has his way, they'll keep getting beaten each time: he said so himself. Here's a Yahoo News article on the matter that translates his quote this way: "You will be beaten upside the head with a truncheon. And that's it." Fun stuff.

I walked by the protest by accident. My friend Polina and I had gone to see the Picasso exhibit at the Hermitage, and I was on my way to meet my parents at their office. The Hermitage owns a few Picassos (I remember the early works, a mandolin and a guitar), but the exhibit was a very special opportunity to see Picasso en masse: an exposition of 280 works from all periods, including sculpture and photographs. It came from the Picasso museum in Paris that is currently being renovated, and was displayed in the main ceremonial halls of the Winter Palace, in the spacious halls around the emperor's throne. Unfortunately, the halls seem to have the same infrastructure as during the emperor's times -- there's no air conditioning or air circulation of any kind. It was hot and stuffy -- and huge crowds of tourists didn't help. I spotted one museum attendant who was fanning herself with an old-fashioned ladies' fan, and asked her what it was like when the temperature in the city climbed to record-breaking heights for three weeks in a row, over 100F.

"Awful," she said. "Just awful. Many of us were having heart problems, and stayed home. The crowds were enormous, and we barely survived the experience."

"I'm sure the heat is damaging the art as well," I said thoughtlessly.

"Art! Everyone cares about art, not about the people who work here!" She pointed out the tactlessness of my statement -- I had spoken from the point of view of a tourist, who associates museums only with the art and not with the people who work there. I rushed to correct my mistake.

"You're right, it must've been much harder on people," I said. "Did anyone get a heat stroke?"

"Mostly people stayed home, they took sick leaves. But," and she came closer to me and lowered her voice to a whisper, "one woman died. One of the cleaning staff."

"From the heat?"

"Yes, this summer."

This was grave news, and I wanted to know more details about the incident, but the attendant went on to talk about what was on her mind. "Art!" she scoffed. "This is not art," she said referring to the Picassos hanging all about the large hall, "this is a bunch of smears."

"You're not a fan?"

"We send abroad good paintings, real art, and they send us this!"

Picasso, it seems, is still challenging and very controversial with many of the locals. Later, Polina and I found a guest book and read some of the notes that previous visitors had left there. By and large, they were very positive, expressions of gratitude and excitement at the opportunity to see so much of Picasso at once. But here and there, people wrote: "This is degenerate art! Picasso should've been examined by the psychiatrists. He's mental" or "Your museum is criminal for bringing this rubbish into the country, the only country where there still remains a tradition of good, realist art." And of course a bunch of curses, variations on "Picasso sucks."

Polina and I enjoyed the exhibit immensely, even though the flow of traffic was not very well marked, and we had to walk six times through one hall and climb several sets of stairs to find all the parts of the exhibit. It was very interesting to see how wildly experimental Picasso's art was from the early 1900 until the mid 1930s, and how in the later years he moved towards minimalism and abstraction. Polina made a fascinating discovery: she pointed to a painting of a vase and a plate with two apples perched on top of the vase, and said: "Later, he would've called this 'Portrait of a woman'." Indeed, every later abstract painting of a woman featured two round balls of various colors, and usually a vase-shaped curve somewhere on the canvas. So do his sculptures. I, a Salinger fan, was on the lookout for the paintings from Picasso's Blue period, but saw only one in one of the far galleries: a painting of an old woman (Celeste?) with one blind eye. I spend a good amount of time in front of it. I wondered if the museum attendant from earlier had seen this painting -- if she thought this, too, was a bunch of smears. That conversation bothered me deeply -- the woman's fierce anger at Picasso in combination with her story about another woman dying from the heat at the museum bother me still. And somehow these experiences are connected with the Dissenters' March I saw later in the day, but I am not sure how yet. To figure this out, I must transform these experiences into fiction.

Meet the Internet

2010-08-29T23:46:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I visited with my aunt. For her birthday in May, my parents gave her her first computer, and she's learning how to use the Internet. She wants to be able to use skype, and she was also hoping to shop for books online. I want to help.

I used the Internet for the first time in 1996, at RIT. When I was leaving Russia for the first time, my dad told me that I could send letters to him at the office using fax and this new technology called "electronic mail." He tried to explain to me how it worked, but I stuck index fingers in my ears and said Stop-Stop-Stop, I can't listen to this right now, I don't want to know, too much new information, I don't get it, maybe I'll use fax, but I don't want to know anything about anything else. By this time, I had been using computers for five or six years. I'd played Formula One Grand Prix game and strip poker on our home computer, I knew how to program a growing snake game and asteroids in Basic and Pascal. I had earned a certificate at school qualifying me as a trained "computer operator." Nevertheless, computer was a black box, infinitely breakable, and thus hardly approachable. Every new thing I had to learn about it seemed like too much. Windows was a program I accessed from Norton Commander -- and I didn't really see the point of it. Did our home computer even have a mouse?

The days before my first trip to the US, I was overwhelmed by all the things I had to remember at the time: what to say to the customs officers if they had questions about my student visa, the names of the people who were going to meet me in New York and give me my tickets for the airplane to Rochester, the name and address of my host family in Rochester, the days when I had to show up at RIT for orientation, whom and in what order to contact in case of emergency, etc, etc. Everything seemed complicated and scary. But three days later, I was already emailing my dad from my host family's home computer: "Wow, this electronic mail, how amazing!" And another week later, I had an RIT vax account, and two dozen computers at the library with Netscape Navigator and webcrawler and lycos, and later yahoo, altavista, then metacrawler, google, and the entire history of the web.

Fourteen years later, the Internet seems to have gotten more complex and easier to use at the same time. For one thing, it's way faster. There are online bookstores in Russia and in Russian. But what we used to call "mystery meat" dominates the computer screen. Icons big and small come with either unfamiliar words or no words at all. Letter "S" for skype -- but what does "skype" mean? My aunt, who doesn't know English (she'd studied German), reads it as "scooreh." The only way to remember that this is the program she needs to use to call me is to write it down in a notebook. Letter "E" for Internet Explorer -- at least it says Internet, and this word is familiar enough to get by. Inside skype, it's easy to see where one types a text message (the cursor is blinking there), but how do you send a text? The blue button next to the box with the cursor has no words on it, but only a dialogue bubble with three horizontal lines. How can anyone know that this is a button, anyway?

Some things become clear almost right away: a word underlined in blue is a link, and moves you to another page. But how can you find what you're looking for on a page? There's text and pictures, some of them are flashing, and all of them seem to be located on a page randomly, in no particular order. I explain the menus, the navigation bars, the content field, what information is located where. A page entitled "Theatre Calendar" ends with "September" -- so where is the calendar for September? To get to it, you need to scroll down, I explain, but I don't remember the Russian word for "scroll," and so I say "press on this gray column over there, no not on the arrow part, on the light gray part above the arrow -- it's faster." Dragging and dropping is difficult, because it all goes by in a flash, and you have no idea where you're going to end up.

We go to Ozon.ru -- one of the biggest Russian online bookstores -- and immediately become overwhelmed by advertising that grows to take up the third of the screen. We use the left-hand column to navigate the catalog: books -> literature -> foreign literature -> English, Australian and New Zealand Literature -> Contemporary English, Australian and New Zealand Literature -> and, finally, get a listing: Marina Levitskaya "A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian," Tom Stoppard "The Coast of Utopia," Peter Ackroyd "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein," Joe Dunthorne "Submarine," etc. With the exception of A Short History of Tractors, these are all the books that my aunt has seen in the bookstores around the city. A Short History of Tractors? Really? So this is what the Internet has to offer! No wonder people have been saying all these years that there's nothing on the Internet but trash. And it's so much easier to go to the bookstore!

My aunt is almost ready to cry Stop-Stop-Stop, this is too much, I don't need to know any of this, when I get an idea to show her Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the "cleanest" sites I can remember: there are almost no icons or pictures, it's mostly all text. We choose a language, Russian, and search for Handel. My aunt has recently been to a Handel concert, and he's on her mind. There are many Handels on Wikipedia, the program reports, but we're searching for George Frideric, the composer. We press on the blue underlined text and go to the right page. "Now I see why people like the computer so much," my aunt says, "It's talking to me!" This is good: Handel's biography is there, his portrait, a list of all his works. My aunt is particularly interested in Handel's oratorio "Messiah," and we go to the right page -- and voila (if we remember how to get to the bottom of the page), there are music clips there, and we're listening to the arias! The lesson is a success.

Gulf of Finland

2010-08-27T00:05:00.000-07:00

St. Petersburg is located at the easternmost end of the long and narrow Gulf of Finland, a shallow appendage of the Baltic sea. On the north, the gulf is bordered by Finland, and on the south by Estonia; the entrance to the gulf is guarded by their capitals -- Helsinki and Tallin. Approximately 400 kilometers or 250 miles separate Helsinki and St. Petersburg, the distance of 40 minutes in flight time. Fifteen minutes to climb to altitude, fiften minutes to land, which leaves about ten minutes in the air. Just enough time for the flight attendands to serve packages of apple juice and pick up the empty cartons.

This was the last leg of my journey yesterday, and I did it twice - after we climbed to altitude and had our juice, the pilot announced that there was a glitch in the navigation computer, a problem that would not affect our flight, but without solving which the plane could not take off again, and this problem could not be fixed in St. Petersburg, but only in Helsinki, and so to Helsinki we were returning. The flight plan monitors hanging above the chairs all throughout the cabin showed our plane making a u-turn right in the middle of the blue triangle formed by Helsinki, Tallin and St. Petersburg.

Finnair planes are supermodern: they are equipped with cameras at the front and the bottom of the craft, allowing the passengers the view of the runway as the plane runs to take off, and then quickly switches to show the trees and the houses under the plane's belly. This was particularly cool a feature on the previous leg of my journey, as we were taking off from JFK airport in New York. The clear skies allowed us to see the cityskape of Queens, and then far into the fields of Connecticut -- before the displays were switched to the flight entertainment program (a wide selection of TV shows and movies, Avatar being the highlight). Watching the runway disappear under the nose of our plane during take off was exhilirating, a feeling not unlike I experience when I fly in my dreams, especially when the camera suddenly switches from the view of the sky and the clouds straight ahead to show the land receding below.

I think this is a great stress relief for those of us who might feel tense or scared during take-off -- take-off becomes a show, the experience looped through the camera eye loses a degree of immediate sensory details (we pay less attention to noises and vibration, and more to the visual experience of it), and acts upon us in much the same way as a videogame or, a better analogy, a 3D ride in an amusement park. The only problem, in Helsinki the cloud cover hangs so low that the second and third times I got to enjoy the view, it only lasted moments before being obscured by white mush.

My parents were shopping the entire time -- all while I took off in Helsinki, turned around over the Finland Gulf, landed back in Helsinki, waited for the computer to be fixed, was moved to another plane, and took off again. My parents went to Lenta, one of the giant local megasupermarkets, and shopped for everything from pears and watermelon and chocolate waffle cakes to dish soap and toilet paper and the new dish drying rack for the country house. And after they picked me up from the airport two hours after my scheduled time of arrival, we went home and had a giant feast. You can only go so far on two small cartons of apple juice for breakfast, and I was starving. We spent the afternoon chatting and reading and watching Volker Schlöndorff's 1984 rendering of Swann's Way, Un Amour de Swann, with Jeremy Irons and Alain Delon -- and not napping. Okay, maybe napping just a little bit.

Travel mode

2010-08-25T03:00:00.001-07:00

Once again, I'm staying up all night to pack. This is not just because I didn't make time to pack during the day, but also because it gives me a slight advantage on battling jet lag the first few days in St. Petersburg. I did put the most important things into my purse earlier today -- my passport and itinerary -- earlier, before the delirium set in. Just now I remembered to pull out my small cache of Russian currency (what is the exchange rate these days?). To forget it would not have been a big deal since there are ATMs at the airport and everywhere in the city, but definitely an annoyance. Do I have Euros? My second layover is in Helsinki, a few Euro coins for a cup of coffee would be nice.

I experience lack of sleep as a state of altered consciousness not unlike being drunk on a bottle or two of wine, even to the point of nausea. I don't practice staying up till dawn often anymore, but I do enjoy it whenever I can justify the loss of time the next day. I am so much more aware of my surroundings at night -- dogs barking across the street, cars speeding by on the highway a quarter mile away from the house, the noise of my computer fan. I can almost hear the cogs in my brain rotating slowly: did I pack underwear? did I pack running shoes in case I decide to exercise? did I pack an umbrella? No, I didn't pack an umbrella. Should I? The rain is inevitable (what a strange notion, I haven't seen rain since early June!), but my mom might have a spare I could use, and I can save myself half a pound of luggage.

Packing is always a feat of imagination. They've had a crazy hot summer in St. Petersburg this year, weeks worth of record breaking temperatures. But now google tells me the temperature is in the low sixties, with rain expected every day of the week ahead. Will I need sandals? Jeans jacket or a warmer (and nicer) corduroy? Sweaters? Bathing suit? I would love to get a chance to swim in a country lake this trip, but wishful packing is not likely to guarantee the best results. What about theatre clothes? Should I bring jewelry that I never wear? Oh, alright, I'll bring a dress and a baggieful of earrings. I've brought them on every other trip before, no reason to leave them behind now.

MP3 player! Check.

Can I do with only one novel on this 20-hour, 2-layover trip? I shouldn't pack more books. I have lots of things to read on my computer, and Dave says my plane from New York to Helsinki will come with a power plug.

I've been stuffing my suitcase with food all day -- I'm bringing edible souvenirs this time. Maple syrup. California wine. Fancy chocolates. On the way back, these will hopefully be replaced with books. And maybe a box or two of chocolate muesli. How come chocolate muesli remains an exclusively European know-how? Chocolate granola has become available in the States in the recent years, but chocolate muesli is still nowhere to be found.

Yay blogging -- I have to take with me the contents of my gift drawer, a few random things I've set aside for friends and family during the last few months. A kid toy. A bandanna. More chocolate. What's the point of collecting this stuff, if at the end of the day I forget it at home? Not quite, not this time. This time it's all coming with me. Anything else? Anything else? Maybe. But I'm rambling.

All this chocolate is making me hungry. I have an hour to go before my taxi arrives. Time for breakfast. I'll make it simple: chocolate granola and yogurt.

Mice Might Help

2010-08-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Once, a woman had a son sick with epilepsy. He experienced seven to eight seizures a day. She cured him by brewing several mouse pups (or two to three grown mice) in a half-liter of vodka for one week. She gave her son a tablespoon of this mixture before every meal. Now he no longer has seizures.

Baptize your daughter, and with God in your heart, begin the treatment. Cross the medicine before taking it and bless it with a prayer.

(folk medicine, a recipe from a newspaper cutout posted on a Russian blog, and forwarded to me by my brother).

2010-08-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

I am at a writers conference in Squaw Valley, near Lake Tahoe, CA. It's a Wednesday in the middle of the conference week, and we were given the afternoon off. Most people are outside, exploring the surrounding area -- the mountains and the valley. Some are resting in their rooms, some are partying with their housemates and workshop mates, others are reading. I should be doing one of those things, but instead I'm sitting in the empty conference hall, trying to work on non-conference related writing and editing projects. I'm really not doing much; I'm brain-dead. The building has been locked up from the outside, and the sun is setting. The house where I'm staying is two miles away, and I don't have a car. I should leave now before the stars and the bears come out. Why can't I leave?

There's a comfort that comes from being always in front of something -- in front of a computer screen, in front of a book, in front of a sheet of paper. The tasks are stacked up and organized (I've developed a brand new prioritization system last month, at a previous writers conference, and I'm still excited about it) -- it's easy to know what to do next. Outside are pine trees and fir trees and aspen trees -- I can see them in the window from where I'm sitting, but outside there are more of them. And outside I can smell them. Outside, the wind brings whiffs of the musty smell from the creek that runs through the valley, the dry cool air from the mountain peaks, the sweet fragrance of wildflowers. None of this has anything to do with St. Petersburg, even pine trees and daisies are all wrong. I'm tired; this week has been exhilarating, the never-ending conversation about writing and literature is not only a very emotional experience, but challenging in the way it constantly requires me to be able to articulate my emotions. I have been going on very little sleep this week, and the preceding months have been equally rough. All I can see ahead is more work; however creative it is, I experience writing is work.

There is, I suppose, an objective reason for me to be thinking about St. Petersburg -- I'm going there again in a couple of weeks. Thinking of it is partially a comfort; in my mind, I see my aunt's dining room table with stacks of books and a glass bowl full of chocolate bonbons in colorful wrapping, endless cups of tea, and I hear the warm cadences of my aunt's voice. I picture the kitchen of my parents' apartment, and the warm spot between the table and the fridge, by the window and the radiator below the windowsill. I picture myself there, with my parents and my brother all gathered together, or myself alone, reading a book, or looking out of the window at the graffiti-covered walls and the yard of the secondary school, abandoned for the summer. I wish I could stop my thoughts there, in the territory where my memories are so pleasant and comforting. But even this indulgence -- or especially this indulgence, allowing myself to write about St. Petersburg, to blog it -- feels ugly and obsessive. For a long time now, thoughts of St. Petersburg have not been a pleasure without also being a self-flagellation. And I have not done anything wrong.

Galich on Pasternak, my translation

2010-06-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

José Manuel Prieto's essay on Mandelshtam in The New York Review of Books, about which I blogged earlier, reminded my of Aleksandr Galich's famous poem dedicated to the memory of Boris Pasternak. I searched for it online and found a YouTube of Galich performing this song. I decided to translate it here. I'm not sure what English translations of Galich exist out there; he does have an English-language Wikipedia page. Galich's own biography runs the gamut from writing and performing benign love songs to openly political pieces -- and being forced into an exile in 1974, and dying in a freak accident in 1977, raising rumors of KGB or CIA assassination and suicide.

Galich's work is unique in genre. He wrote long poems and performed them to music of his 7-string guitar (a traditional instrument of the Russian stage). It's hard to say that he's singing them -- in terms of the American stage, Galich's performance style is probably the closest to Bob Dylan's. The songs were recorded on large reel-to-reel tape decks. My mother, who had discovered the protest music in the 1960s, had some copies in the house -- but when I was growing up, things were hectic, we lived in tight quarters with my grandparents, and there was never an occasion to pull the large tape player from the closet. I think the first LP appeared in the late 80s, and that's probably when I first heard these songs.

To me, Galich was particularly interesting, because he was one of the few authors I knew who spoke openly about the Jewish experience. Galich himself came from a Jewish family in what is now Dnepropetrovsk; his last name at birth was Ginzburg, and he changed it in college (he studied drama with Stanislavksi for one year before Stanislavski's death in 1938). One of his long songs is dedicated to a Polish-Jewish writer Janusz Korczak, who died in the Holocaust. The song is called "Kaddish" -- I'd never heard the word until I heard Galich's song.

But to return to his poem about Pasternak, here's a YouTube video of Galich performing this song:

This song was written after Pasternak's death in 1960. As I wrote in my earlier post, Prieto is not the first one to bring up Pasternak's death "in his own bed"as a charge against the poet, as a lesser death compared to that of his fellow poets. I wrote earlier that these words were said in very bad taste, and this is precisely what Galich lashes out against in his poem. Galich references these comparisons directly in the second stanza: Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself in Yelabuga, Mandelshtam was rumored to have died at a camp near river Suchan, in Siberia. The leitmotif of Galich's song is this line: "How proud we, the scum, are that he has died in his own bed!" This line lashes out with anger at "us" for implying the insufficiency of suffering in Pasternak's mode of death.

Pasternak died of lung cancer in his country house at Peredelkino, near Moscow (Pasternak wrote many poems of country life, the snow and fir trees, which Galich also references in his song). Many believe that the cancer was if not directly caused by then certainly indirectly influenced by the stress of the scandal following the award of Nobel Prize (for Doktor Zhivago), his forced refusal to accept it, and the subsequent exclusion from the Union of Soviet Writers that effectively robbed him of income and opportunity to see his work in print (almost any article written on Pasternak today, especially in English, mentions this story, i.e. Wikipedia, Nobel Prize section).

The central image of Galich's poem is the meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers when the writers voted unanimously to expel Pasternak from the Union. Galich claims that "We [his contemporaries] will remember by name everyone who raised a hand" to cast a "yes" vote in those proceedings. And indeed, to this day the reputation of Soviet authors includes as a byline their actions during this meeting. To vote "No" was to commit a political and personal suicide (withdrawal of income, potential incarceration or withdrawal of citizenship) -- and nobody dared. The way to abstain was to not show up, which 26 people did (some said they were sick, others didn't give a reason). Veniamin Kaverin, one of those who didn't show up, always wrote about this with regret, a lapse of judgment--he felt in retrospect that he should've been brave enough to protest publicly. But nobody was brave enough. At the very least, writers could abstain from giving an insulting speech, but 29 writers speechified ("all the yakking," says Galich). I can't easily find the info of these proceedings online in English, but here's the official Russian memo: http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/195_dok/19581028past.html. Google.translate does an adequate job to get the gist.

I'm taking the original Russian text of Galich's poem from this website: http://web.ru/bards/Galich/part28.htm

A few more contextual notes about the poem. If something remains unclear, please let me know -- this translation is a work in progress.

LitFund -- the Literary Fund -- was an insurance organization, to which Pasternak still belonged at the time of death.

The opening of the poem (the "wreaths," "the funeral banquet") refers to Pasternak's public funeral, attended by hundreds of people, despite the fact that the poet was officially non-grata.

The indented quotes are lines from Pasternak's own poems.

Aleksandr Galich
In memory of B. L. Pasternak

". . . the board of the Literary Fund [A Society for Assistance to Writers and Scholars in Need] of the USSR reports that a writer Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, a member of LitFund, died on May 30th of this year. He was 70 years old and died after a long and serious illness. The board expresses condolences to the family of the deceased."

The only notice that appeared in newspapers -- in the one newspaper, "Literaturnaya Gazeta," -- on the death of B. L. Pasternak.

We have taken the wreaths apart for brooms,
we were saddened for half an hour,
How proud we are, his contemporaries,
that he has died in his own bed!

And Chopin was tormented by wannabes,
And the farewell proceeded with ceremony . . .
His neck didn't soap the noose in Yelabuga,
He didn't lose his mind in Suchan!

Even the members of the Kiev Writers' Union
arrived in time for his funeral banquet! . .
How proud we are, his contemporaries,
that he has died in his own bed!

And it's not like he was only in his forties;
Exactly seventy -- the age for dying.
And it's not like he was some poor bastard;
A member of LitFund -- budgeted for!

Ah, the fir trees have shed their snow,
the tolling of the blizzards has ceased . . .
How proud we, the scum, are
that he has died in his own bed!

           "A snowstorm swept, it swept across the land, in all its reaches
          A candle was burning on the desk, a candle was burning . . ."

No! It was no candle,
a chandelier!
The glasses on the headsman's snout
twinkled brightly!
And the audience yawned, the audience was bored --
all the yakking!
"Why, the prison or Suchan aren't even on the agenda,
And neither is the supreme penalty."

And not with the crown of thorns
broken on the wheel,
But chucked with a brick in the face --
the hand count!

And somebody, soused, was asking his neighbor:
"What for? Who this time?"
And somebody chewed loudly, and another chuckled
over an idle joke . . .

We won't forget this laughter
and this boredom.
We will remember by name everyone,
who raised a hand.

          "The humming has ceased. I've stepped on the stage.
          Leaning against the doorway . . . "

Finally, the smear campaign and the arguments are over,
As if we've taken a leave from the eternity . . .
The raiders are standing by his tomb,
and carrying out the honor guard.
                                                                                                    Help!

Prieto on Mandelshtam (and Pasternak)

2010-06-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

José Manuel Prieto, a Cuban writer who studied in Russia and wrote at least one novel that deals with contemporary Russians (I've heard him read a few months ago at a Lit&Lunch event hosted by the Center for the Art of Translation), wrote an essay on Osip Mandelshtam's famous poem about Stalin. The essay was translated from Spanish by Esther Allen and published on June 10th in The New York Review of Books (it's available online). In his line-by-line reading of the poem, he summarizes the entire complicated history of the dictator's relationship with the Soviet-Era writers, from Mandelshtam to Akhmatova, Pasternak, Bulgakov--mentioning a few others in passing. I am not a huge fan of the idea: in the brief space of the article, he has time to recite only the most famous incidents, the best publicized already, without really going in-depth on any of it, including Mandelshtam's own fate. It's unclear, for example, from this article, that Mandelshtam was arrested not once, but twice: in 1934 and, after a brief reprieve, again, in 1938.

Altogether it's not a bad piece -- although I am convinced The New York Book Review could do a better job of reproducing original Russian without typos and transliterating it in a more coherent way (their version of "Мы живём под собою не чуя страны" goes “My zbibiom pod saboyu nie zbuya strani”, which is very close to gibberish). What's upsetting me the most about this piece is that Prieto allows himself several backhanded gestures against Boris Pasternak. Prieto writes: "Mandelshtam had recited the poem in private to Pasternak, always the more cautions and astute of the two (Pasternak would die in his bed, in the privileged writers' villa of Peredelkino)" -- essentially comparing the suffering of one man, Mandelshtam, to a good fortune of another, Pasternak. This is done in bad taste. What's worse, this is a bad habit inherited from generations of Soviet commentators on Pasternak, acknowledged in verse (and performed as a song) by a 1960s underground singer-songwriter Aleksandr Galich. "До чего ж мы гордимся, сволочи, / что он умер в своей постели," writes Galich on Pasternak's death: "How proud we, the scum, are / that he died in his own bed." Maybe I should translate this poem in its entirety, it's a good one. Nobody should ever be reproached for the luxury of dying at home, and least of all Pasternak.

Guest blog post on Well-Read Donkey

2010-05-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

I wrote a guest post of the "Well-Read Donkey" blog, a blog of Kepler's Writing Group (Kepler's is a great independent bookstore in Menlo Park, a town where Dave happens to work). Here's an excerpt from my post:

"One of the ironies of my nascent writing career has been that, while I write most of my fiction in English, my publications are primarily in Russian. In the United States, my stories have appeared in a score of online magazines with various levels of affinity toward zombies, vampires, and the preternatural—even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never intentionally written genre fiction. In Russia, my second collection of short stories is scheduled to come out in September from a well-established publisher of literary fiction..." Read more here.

The cute Ray Bradbury

2010-05-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Ray Bradbury is turning 90 is August. Related to this or not, there's an interview with him in the latest issue of the Paris Review. Obviously, I'm missing something about the Paris Review, but I find it curious that the interview is unattributed to a specific interviewer or editor. Moreover, the interview is heavily based on an unpublished interview that the magazine conducted with Bradbury in the 1970s. So, it's a compilation of two separate interviews, written by two unnamed people. The strangeness of this aside, the later of the unnamed writes: "It's unclear why the interview was abandoned, but according to an attached editorial memo, editor George Plimpton found the first draft 'a bit informal in places, maybe overly enthusiastic.'"

The interview itself is super cute. My favorite part is when Bradbury compares story ideas to hungry nestlings:

I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn't quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles. It's like a father bird coming with a worm. You look down at all these hungry little beaks -- all these stories waiting to be finished -- and you say to them, Which of you needs to be fed? Which of you needs to be finished today? And the story that yells the loudest, the idea that stands up and opens its mouth, is the one that gets fed. And I pull it out of the file and finish it within a few hours.

Although, if I think about this quote a little longer, there's something very paternalistic in the metaphor -- a story idea that is separate from the father-bird and depending entirely upon him for nurture. Also, something very survival-of-the-species -- it's not the hungriest or the smallest bird that gets the worm, but the one who yells the loudest. Still, I find the metaphor cute. A lot more cute than, say, Bradbury's rant against teaching of mathematics. The Paris Review quotes him as saying: "We should forget about teaching children mathematics. They are not going to use it ever in their lives. Give them simple arithmetic -- one plus one is two, and how to divide, an dhow to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists, and then they can simply learn it later." This reads to me more scary than cute.

Also, Neil Gaiman just published a personal essay on Bradbury in TimesOnline, where he basically gushes about the Bradbury books he read as a child. This is definitely cute.

Narrated monologue or free indirect discourse

2010-05-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

I've written about psycho-narration before, and I've come up with a couple of examples of quoted monologue here and here. In addition to these, Dorrit Cohn and Suzanne Keen after her suggest the third mode open to third-person narrators when they attempt to represent a character's inner psyche: narrator's monologue or free indirect discourse. I've left the discussion of these to the last, because I remember having a lot of fun with this idea in class -- and because I was also trying to come up with good examples of this mode in recent fiction.

First, the definition. "Narrated monologue presents the character's mental discourse in the guise of narrator's discourse," Keen reports. This is what makes it fun -- we receive two voices in a single phrase, frequently leaving us uncertain what the relationship between the narrator and the character is: what does the narrator think about the character? is the narrator treating the character's thoughts in good faith? is the narrator indirectly making fun of the character? Narrated monologue does this by retaining the tense and person (third) of the narration while at the same time allowing the feel of the character's inner speech to come through--the word choice, the sentence structure might be borrowed from the character's own diction. "Reading narrated monologue gives the impression of the words and modes of expression of the character, while retaining the tense and person of the narrator's language," summarizes Keen.

The difference between narrated monologue and free indirect discourse is largely formal: narrated monologue turns into free indirect discourse when it omits tagging, words like "he thought." On a historical aside, Keen reports that this technique is considered "one of the most significant innovations in the nineteenth-century novels, though some critics have spotted it in earlier texts."

Perhaps, this is just due to my inattentiveness (what do I pay attention to while I'm reading??), but trying to find definitive examples of this technique in the recent magazines turned out to be rather difficult. One good example I did find, comes from Sona Avakian's story "Artichoke Hearts" in Instant City's volume 5. The main character of this short story, Harry, is addicted to smoking, so much so that even when his wife and his daughter threaten to cut him out of their lives unless he quits, he's unable to comply. The narrative mode is very interesting, because while the events are told as if seen through Harry's eyes (Harry serves as the main focalizer for the heterodiegetic narrator), the narrator is not necessarily sympathetic to Harry. The narrator never breaks the fourth wall and tells us directly that Harry is a selfish old man, no, nothing like that; instead, we're able to surmise this purely through the way the story is narrated.

Free indirect discourse seems to be key here. On the one hand, the narrator puts us very close inside Harry's mind. For example, at one point Harry goes to see a performance by a traveling circus and reminisces. The narrator tells us: "And each booth filled him with a longing for the good old days. Days when cars had ashtrays in the back seat and you could smoke in the hospital when your mother was dying." The second sentence is narrated monologue without tagging: this is Harry thinking about ashtrays in the back seats of cars, Harry remembers smoking in the hospital. And this memory clearly brings Harry pleasure, because the narrator also reveals (in a bit of psycho-narration) that Harry's longing for the "good old days," key word being "good." We get another affirmation of how much Harry enjoys these memories when he becomes attached to one of the circus performers and repeatedly goes back to see her.

So on the one hand, we know that Harry's attachment to the cigarette smoking is very earnest and goes to the very depths of his psyche -- it seems to be all that Harry ever thinks about; and on the other hand, we get a chance to see that the narrator disapproves because these flashes into Harry's mind are so brief that they seem to function like quotes taken out of context. When these flashes repeatedly come at the end of a paragraph, for example, at the time when we're expecting a minor revelation, the narrator seems to set up Harry's thoughts as punchlines to the jokes about the man himself. For example, when Harry is considering the hypnosis treatment, the narrator reports: "He looked forward to being put in a trance. If nothing else, maybe he could ignore Arla and Jennifer better." You can almost hear the drum roll at the end of this paragraph. The last sentence seems to be lifted almost exactly from Harry's own thoughts. However, this is reported to us still in the narrator's discourse. And if Harry's thinking this in earnest, the narrator's stance in reporting this is very coy.

Keen explains that "most theorists consider [narrated monologue or free indirect discourse] a double-voiced kind of discourse." It allows us to glimpse deep within the character's mind and at the same time makes us aware of the subtle commentary by the narrator.

Nothing good can come to the character who's the butt of a joke for his narrator -- and certainly nothing good comes to Harry.

I'll keep looking for more examples of FID, there's got to be loads of it out there that I'm simply not seeing. It's too easy to read without paying attention to any of this.

Daniil Kharms and other coincidences

2010-04-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Three completely random links. First of all, a wonderful story by my friend James Warner on Night Train. This story manages to be cynical and heartbreaking at the same time. I googled "Ichiwa Ango" and I think James invented the label. But somebody definitely should steal the idea and design all the pieces James is describing. I'm also convinced that "Ichiwa Ango" is a secret code, and playing around with tangorin.com, it's possible that one of the meanings of it is "a bunch of coincidences." Which kind of makes sense. But then I don't know how to use Japanese dictionaries. Or whether Japanese dictionaries are of any help here.

Second, an online magazine dedicated to studying the work of Raymond Carver, appropriately entitled The Raymond Carver Review. One day I'm definitely going to read pieces published in Issue #2, on Carver and Feminism. It looks exciting.

Third, a review of the work of two Russian-Jewish-American poets in The Tablet: Ilya Kaminsky and Matvei Yankelevich. The best part of the piece are quotes from Yankelevich's translations of Daniil Kharms, who's definitely one of my literary heroes. I mean, how could he not be?? I'm reposting the quotes here, enjoy!

It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.

And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.

Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I’ll write about Pushkin after all.

Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.

And another piece:

There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing to speak of! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him any more.

Jim Shepard on video

2010-04-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

I've blogged about Jim Shepard's amazing lecture on how to read and edit fiction, and now folks from Sirenland posted his video presentation online.

I am seriously considering playing this video every morning as I am eating breakfast or something, because of how inspiring this is -- and also good advice.

Psycho-narration

2010-04-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

As writers, I feel, many of us are obsessed with finding more immediate ways to represent our characters' interiority. Not only what they are thinking, but also what they are feeling, what physical and emotional experiences they are going through at the moment of crisis. This interest in interiority of experience is certainly a matter of the style currently in vogue -- Suzanne Keen reports that "some commentators see the focus on represented consciousness in modern literature as a symptom of a crisis of privacy" (63). I will leave the underlying philosophical discussion alone for the moment being, and limit myself to practical matters. We're interested in representing consciousness -- how do we do it?

Keen uses Dorrit Cohn's book Transparent Minds for her discussion of this. I've already mentioned this before, and since this is a key point, I will inevitably come back to this in the future from another angle. For now, let me repeat again the three ways Cohn sees narrators employing (and this discussion applies to third-person narrators, both authorial or figural) to describe the interior world of their characters: 1) psycho-narration; 2) narrated monologue; 3) quoted monologue. I have already briefly discussed quoted monologue in a reference to Clarice Lispector's story "The Imitation of the Rose," so now I'll pause on psycho-narration. The thing about quoted monologue is that I don't really think it's very much in vogue at the moment -- reading stories for Narrative Magazine, I'm by far more likely to encounter a first-person story than a third-person story that uses quoted monologue.

Psycho-narration basically describes those instances when a narrator tells us what a character thinks or feels. A narrator can tell us what a character thinks of feels at any given moment or over a long period of time, in general; these thoughts and feelings can be acknowledged by the character on the conscious level or not, the narrator has access into the character's subconscious psyche. Keen also reminds us that psycho-narration is very effective at representing what a character has not thought or felt. The example she gives: "She forgot to call the allergist for the third day in a row" (60).

Psycho-narration preserves the narrator's voice, the narrator's access to the usage of metaphors and other figural language; it certainly preserves the tense of the narration and the third-person perspective.

Almost any story I read today uses some form of psycho-narration. Here's an example from the magazine I'm reading at the gym this week, "Black Clock," No.11, short story by Susan Straight called "Alfonso":

A rat ran across the phone wire above his head just when he stepped behind the dumpster at the back doorway of Los Tres Chochinitos. He ducked, but the rat leapt into the branches of the tree across the alley, and he could smell the rotting fruit on the ground. Nectarines. It was August. Damn -- the rat was leaving Los Tres for dessert.

I love this example, because it's got both, psycho-narration and quoted monologue. This phrase "he could smell the rotting fruit" is psycho-narration because it gives us access to Alfonso's sense of smell in the voice and tense of the narrator. And the last sentence of this passage, "Damn -- the rat was leaving Los Tres for dessert," is a very good example of quoted monologue -- the word "damn" indicates Alfonso's thinking in the first person, and the entire line is something that Alfonso might actually say. The part of the sentence after the dash is in the past tense -- so I think technically this is narrated monologue (I save the discussion of narrated monologue for next time), but the word "Damn" set off between a period and a dash -- this one word, I believe, qualifies as quoted monologue.

Blok's "You walk by, unsmiling"

2010-04-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

The fun part about translating Chukovskaya is that she keeps referring to different poets and sometimes quotes entire poems in her text. I suppose, as a translator, I could site one of the previous translations for these poems -- most of them have been translated to English multiple times, but since I don't have any pressing deadlines on this project, why not have the fun and try my hand at it? Here's one. In Russian, this poem written by Aleksandr Blok in 1905 is referred to by the first line, "Ты проходишь без улыбки":

You walk by, unsmiling,
with lowered eyelashes,
and in the total darkness above the cathedral,
the cupolas are golden.

How your face resembles
vespertine Virgin Marys,
lowering their eyelashes,
vanishing in the darkness…

But next to you walks a curly-haired
gentle boy in a white hat,
you lead him by the hand,
you won’t let him stumble.

I stand back in the shadow of a portal,
where the piercing wind is blowing
into my strained eyes,
misty with tears.

I wish to burst out into the open
and shout: “Oh Holy Mother of God!
Why did you bring the Babe
to my dark city?”

But my tongue is incapable of scream.
you walk by. Behind you,
above your holy footprints,
the blue darkness presides.

And I look on, remembering
the lowered eyelashes,
the way your boy in his white hat
smiled at you.

Lydia Davis

2010-04-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

In one of the blogs I read, saw a link to a 2008 interview with Lydia Davis in the Believer. The interviewer seems to be completely flabbergasted by the kinds of stories Davis writes and most of the questions seem to dance around the notions of genre and style. (The question whether Davis ever thought of her narrators as "autistic" sounds like it comes from a very frustrated reader.)

But I do love that Davis provides a reading list, among which only one or two are familiar to me: "Yes, I suppose I do find the category “story” to be more elastic. But of course part of the problem is that we have only a limited number of familiar categories and into one or another of these we try to fit the work of writers such as Edson, Kafka, Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, Jim Heynen, Henri Michaux, Léon-Paul Fargue, Peter Cherches, Francis Ponge, Geoff Bouvier, Martha Ronk, Phyllis Koestenbaum, Diane Williams."

an excerpt from “Broken Glass Park”

2010-04-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Words Without Borders posted an interesting excerpt from a novel called "Broken Glass Park" by Alina Bronsky (a pseudonym, which looks kinda like "Vronsky" if you read the first "B" as it's read in the Cyrillic alphabet, "V"). The excerpt from the novel itself doesn't strike me as yet another homage to "Anna Karenina," but then I wouldn't be surprised if the larger text of the novel took that turn.

The website claims that Alina Bronsky is a very private person and that not much is known about her, except that she was born in 1978 in Yekatirenburg (Sverdlovsk at the time). Which makes her inherently interesting as a representative of the ever-growing tribe of Perestroika-formed writers abroad..

A classic from Fyodor Tyutchev

2010-04-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

Russia cannot be known by the mind
Nor measured by the common mile:
Her status is unique, without kind –
Russia can only be believed in.

(Translation by Alex Cigale)

Robert Rozhdestvensky

2010-03-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, due to the popular demand, and because I'm fascinated by all the possible interpretations of what seems so straightforward to me, here's my translation of Robert Rozhdestvensky's poem. I'm making this as literal as I can and trying not to let my biases affect me. (I am using the text here as my source material.) I'm preserving the original line breaks and punctuation (wherever it makes sense).

Do you see how this poem reinforces patriarchal stereotypes (even though the speaker apparently asserts his weak position -- or, I should say 'performs' weakness)? Or do think it's more complicated? (Of course, it's more complicated -- the poem betrays an underlying problem of masculinity in post-WWII Soviet Union, where the model of masculinity is changing rapidly, and drinking and womanizing become the main ways for men to perform their masculinity.. I think this poem also fulfills this function, a creative way to assert masculinity..) I am also interested in thinking about the ways this poem reads today in English -- sans the complicated Soviet context. Can it be read as subversive (of patriarchal stereotypes) today?

Please, be
               weaker.
Be,
please.
And then will I gift you
a miracle,
                  no problem.
And then I will grow tall --
                              grow big,
will become special.
From a burning house I will carry
you,
still sleepy.
I will dare to do everything unknown,
everything reckless --
will throw myself into the sea,
                                     dense,
                                          sinister,
and will rescue you!..
My heart will demand this of me,
my heart
                   will demand this...
But in fact you are
stronger than me,
                          stronger
and more secure!
You yourself
                     are ready to rescue others
from a deep sadness,
you are not afraid of
                              the swish of a blizzard,
or of a crackling fire.
You won't lose your way,
                                  you won't drown,
malice
you won't amass.
You won't cry
                       and you won't moan,
if you wish not to.
You will become gentle
                                  and you will become flighty,
if you wish it...
For me to be with you,
so secure,
is difficult --
                          very.
Even if in pretense,
                                  even if for a moment --
I'm asking you,
                               timidly, --
help me
to believe in myself,
become weaker.

1962.

Here's one more poem, just to show that the speaker is earnest in his desires. Sixteen years later, it seems that he's found the kind of relationship he was looking for:

"Resound, Love!" (The original text is here.)

I love you, my prize.
I love you, my dawn.
If you don't believe me, try me, --
I will do it all!

Mountains and seas I will cross for you,
The rainbow in the steppe I will light for you,
The mystery of the blue stars I will open for you,
Resound in me, my love!
I sing about how I love you,
I think about how I love you,
I know only one thing, that I love you,
Resound in me, my love!

My life has changed its course,
There had not been such spacious days,
I see you and I become a hundred times
Taller and stronger!

I live only by your smile,
Only by your breath I live.
If this is a dream, then let this dream
Become reality!

Mountains and seas I will cross for you,
The rainbow in the steppe I will light for you,
The mystery of the blue stars I will open for you,
Resound in me, my love!
I sing about how I love you,
I think about how I love you,
I know only one thing, that I love you,
Resound in me, my love!

1978.

Characters not people

2010-03-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

There's a new Jim Shepard interview out there, and here's a preview of it. From this excerpt, it sounds like this interview is particularly successful in bringing across Shepard's singular conversational voice, analytical and chatty at the same time. Where do I get the journal?

I've been reading all kinds of random stuff this week: an essay on abstract and concrete concepts of class (from Andrew Sayer's "The Moral Significance of Class"); a 1979 novella by a Soviet author, Galina Shcherbakova (who died a few days ago); Danzy Senna's "Caucasia"; a few pieces from Tin House's collection of translated contemporary Russian stories, "Rasskazy" (only three or four left -- and then I'm going to write a review of it); the most recent issue of the Paris Review and the AWP journal. Blogs, from one of which I learned that Tim O'Brian thinks that writers these days don't pay enough attention to sentences. Shcherbakova's novella, "You couldn't even see it in your dreams" ("Вам и не снилось") was made into a hugely popular movie in 1981, one of my favorites as a teenager. I had never even known that the movie was based on a literary source, and I can only imagine the joy that my 17-year old self would've experienced upon this discovery. My primary emotion reading this today is extreme discomfort.. I cannot approach it as a model reader, and approaching it as a critic seems completely futile. It would be as absurd as trying to criticize ghosts.

In terms of narrative theory, I'm continuing to think about characters, people on paper, or Homo Factus, as E.M. Forster called them. Suzanne Keen quotes the words of a novelist Jill Paton Walsh: "You can't put actual people into books, because you don't know enough about them." This seems paradoxical, because how can you know anything about fictional characters that don't even exist? Keen explains this further: "Unlike Homo Sapiens, Homo Fictus possesses a mind and feelings that can be rendered accessible to readers of narrative fiction." (59). Her main point in this chapter is to show "the profound difference between real people and fictional characters." (57-8).

The difference is, indeed, profound, but the more I think about it, the more confused I get. Yes, real people are essentially unknowable -- I have no access to anyone's thoughts or feelings except my own (and even that is questionable). Fictional characters are abstractions, they are simplified to a series of traits. The problem is, they exist not only on paper but in the minds of the real people, who tend to interpret the thoughts and feelings of fictional characters in vastly different ways -- and ways that sometimes have very little to do with words on paper. Thinking about this as a writer is even more confusing. Because the minute I create a fictional character on paper, I create this fictional character in my mind -- that is, I alter paper and self at the same instance.

Ontological confusion aside, the practical aspects of this are fairly simple. Sure, fictional characters behave by a series of rules vastly different from those that apply to real people. And the more "real" a character "feels," the more strict and conventional the rules usually are. Moreover, these rules change with time according to our changing tastes (epics to novels, for example) and to our changing understanding of self (and also changing it in the process). The rules (the craft, the technical) are the easiest stuff to learn and to imitate, although they too become daunting because of their number and contradictory nature.

Counterfactual speculations

2010-03-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, now that I'm not traveling, I can go back to my Narrative theory blogging. I'm rereading the chapter of Suzanne Keen's book entitled "People on Paper," where she talks about broad issues related to character. The central questions she asks introducing this discussion about "substantial hypothetical beings" (Baruch Hochman's term for characters) go like this:

"How broad a range of responses to character can be addressed within a formal analysis? Can counterfactual speculations about what characters might have done or said in extratextual situations ever contribute to a formal discussion of character?"

These questions reminded me of an argument I've gotten into recently on a Russian feminist community blog. It's a very lively community, and it's very easy to get sucked into a very intense argument, so I usually try to stay away from it -- but I do get involved sometimes when the discussion turns from activism to literary criticism. In this case, I responded to a post about Soviet texts that reinforced gender stereotypes by posting a poem by a well known Soviet author, Robert Rozhdestvensky. In this poem, the speaker addresses a woman and literally asks her to become weaker so that he would have a chance to be strong and rescue her. "Please, be weaker," he asks his lady, "And then I will grow taller, larger, will become special. I will carry you, still drowsy, out of the burning house" and "I will jump into the sea ... to rescue you." The poem goes on. The way I see it, the speaker basically asks his lady to drown ("at least in pretense") so that he could have a chance to play hero. I interpret this poem unambiguously as reinforcing patriarchal stereotypes on gender roles.

Another community member (she identified herself as a woman) refused to see my point -- she believed that the poem goes against the grain of the patriarchal stereotype in that it represents a strong female character -- and proceeded to engage me in a very involved argument. My opponent interpreted the speaker as an inherently weak man and the woman he was addressing as a dominating and oppressive figure who basically crushed his every wish. In many lines of the blog argument, it became clear that my opponent had an entire alternative narrative constructed in her mind: the speaker and his addressee were a couple on the verge of a breakup, and he would be forced to leave her if she didn't change. He was a weakling and admitting to it, and he thought she was perfect, and he was begging her to stop being so perfect because while she was perfect, he was no match for her.

None of these things were a part of the text: in the poem itself, it's not even clear whether the speaker and the woman he's addressing are romantically involved. The speaker doesn't attribute qualitative judgements neither to himself nor to his addressee (nowhere in the poem does he say that he thinks she's perfect). This story is entirely countertextual, it exists not on the page but in the mind of my opponent. All that we know about the two is best summarized in the speaker's opening request to his lady: "Please, be weaker."

I finally ended the argument by repeatedly asking my opponent to support her argument with textual references -- which she couldn't do, and so the argument fizzled out. But perhaps this is unfortunate, because the more insidious problem lies not in the fact that my opponent created this counterfactual legend in her mind, but the content of her legend itself. And this point I didn't have the patience to address: even according to my opponent's legend, the woman's strength is still her weakness, insofar as it's still unacceptable within the dimensions of this couple's relationship. This woman's perfection is still her failure and it fits very nicely within the patriarchal norms, built along the lines of the neat binary oppositions, strong -- weak, man -- woman, always privileging the strong man.

SPb to SF

2010-03-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

In the last few days of the trip, tiredness has caught up with me. Party on Friday went late with good conversation, lots of wine, and some drama. Woke up late Sat, left the house after dark, drove aimlessly around the city. I fell asleep at the movies (Looking for Eric at Dom Kino) and slipped into a loud argument with my mom for no good reason (she used the word "conspiracy" in reference to Soviet literature and I thought the word didn't fit). Later, my friend Masha visited again, and showed more pictures from her trips to Volkhov, Staraja Ladoga, Novaja Ladoga, and other historical towns and monasteries north of St. Petersburg. Photos filled with general longing. More travel?

Couldn't focus enough to blog, joined twitter instead (as bowlga). Am I now partaking of it all?

After my friend Johnnie kindly dropped us off at the airport at 3:30 am on Saturday night, collapsed on the airplane and slept for 2,5 hours till Frankfurt. Woke up in Frankfurt, went through more security (although no passport control), slept for 12 hours on the plane till San Francisco. Small interruptions. Food, Poets&Writers magazine, An Education (it could've been very good, but wasn't), finished watching "Inglorious Basterds." This movie has to be studied in detail for the subtle ways Tarantino creates tension. He relies on genre forms and music for sure, but that doesn't explain all of it. Why is it when a man simply washes his face, I'm expecting him to turn around and start shooting?

When we arrived in SF, it was sunny and bright and very warm. Took a nap till 5 pm; still couldn't stay up past 9 pm.

Bestuzhevskaya ulitsa

2010-03-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a bright, sunny day and everyone we met seemed happy and optimistic, and today it's snowing again, and the traitorous black ice is getting buried under a fresh layer of snow. In the winter, St. Petersburg becomes impassable for older people who have brittle bones and difficulty walking. Slippery roads, heavy shoes and coats, tall apartment buildings with no elevators, drivers who don't stop for pedestrians, it all adds up to the fact that in the winter most older people try to stay at home as much as possible and leave the house only when absolutely necessary. When I tell the story in the US, it's hard to believe, but three of my grandparents did not leave their apartments for the last ten years of their lives. Yesterday, my aunt Maya specifically asked me to make sure that next time I visit would be in the summer, late spring or early fall, when she doesn't have to wear her winter coat.

A visit to Maya's is always a very sentimental one for me: my parents lived with her during the first years of their marriage, and her apartment is connected with my earliest memories. Today, it's hard to imagine how three adults and two children fit into the two small rooms completely packed with books. Maya had one of the rooms, and the four of us shared another. My brother and I slept in a bunk bed, separated from my parents' bed by a tall bookshelf. I went to kindergarten, while my mom stayed home with my baby brother. I had two friends in kindergarten, a boy I was in love with, Alesha (my parents teased me for years about him by repeating the songs I used to sing about how I was in love with him) and a girl named Vera, who I stayed in touch with because her family also had a dacha near ours. Vera is now a musician and lives in Texas and we are Facebook friends.

For me, this was the idyllic time of my life: I had three adults who spent time with me around the clock and competed for the right to read me fairy tales; my grandparents came for short visits and brought gifts and sweet things; my brother was very young and I could play with him, but I didn't have to be responsible for him; as I was growing up and becoming more independent, I was allowed to play in the yard with my friends. I was completely oblivious to the fact that my parents were unhappy, that the adults were fighting with each other, that living together was very difficult on them. My little world collapsed one winter when I was five years old, when after a two-week stay at a hospital (I went in for an investigation, did I have asthma or didn't I? and then caught pneumonia at the hospital and had to stay there), my parents brought me home -- but not to Maya's place, all the way across town instead, to my mother's parents' apartment. All of our things were there already, including our bunk bed and books.

My parents moved while I was at the hospital! Without giving me any kind of warning! I can only imagine the kind of screaming and shouting I did when I understood the finality of it; I could not forgive them for years; at least, not until three years later, when the six of us (with my grandparents) moved again -- and then I carried the grudge for that. After that, every trip to Maya's -- forty minutes on the subway and thirty on the bus number 107, past the Leningrad Metallichesky Factory where my dad worked, past the boulevard studded with pylons carrying high voltage power lines near where my cousin Paul lived, exit by the large supermarket, walk by my old kindergarten where I had been so happy with Alesha and Vera -- every trip has always been a return to the lost paradise, where it is always warm, where books, food, and love are always plentiful.

Three Borises

2010-03-11T00:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my parents introduced me to three legendary figures of St. Petersburg counter-culture -- three Borises, Boris Ivanov, Boris Ostanin and Boris Roginsky -- writers, essayists, publishers, editors, who work together and separately in various magazines and presses. The two older men (Boris Ivanov is 82 years old) and Boris Ostanin are famous as the founders of the first independent literary prize in Soviet Union -- in 1978, they established "Andrei Bely Prize," named after a very famous avant-garde Russian writer of the 1910s and 20s. The prize existed outside of the Soviet literary establishment (outside the official Writers' Union) and the award amounted to a bottle of vodka, an apple, and a single ruble.

In addition to the prize, Boris Ivanov and Boris Ostanin published the samizdat magazine "Chasi" or "Hours"; and yesterday Boris Ivanov told us: "In 1990 the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union accepted the order about the freedom of press, the very next day, I decided to close the magazine." In a way, they saw their mission completed and did not need to participate in the later proliferation of small presses and publishing houses. They resurrected the Andrei Bely Prize a few years later, when in 1996 and 1997 it became apparent that Eltsin and Perestroika-era government was not succeeding in creating a civic society, a society that is based on the citizens' participation in the public institutions. This inability of the public to control the follow-through of the government actions they see as the main problem of the contemporary Russian society. I can see their viewpoint (although I see some problems with it), and their dedication to the independent literary process is inspiring.

What is also very interesting about all three of them, but especially Boris Ostanin and the younger Boris, Roginsky, is their degree of familiarity with Western culture, contemporary literature, philosophy, and theory. Boris Ostanin (whose university degree is in mathematics) has translated to Russian the works of Jean Genet, Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Carlos Castaneda, and in our conversation he quoted Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Boris Roginsky has written his dissertation on the tragic in the work of Alfred Hitchcock; he also is an author of many essays of literary and political criticism.

It was truly a privilege to meet these men in person, to drink tea with them, and to hope that maybe I can somehow work with them in the future. We'll see about that.

Kids

2010-03-10T05:44:00.001-08:00

My cousin Lena says that there aren't "good" or "bad" schools in St. Petersburg, there are "prestigious" and "not prestigious."

Schools are a problem: to make sure their kids get into a "good" (i.e. the most prestigious) school, the most motivated parents spend the night of April 1st (the day when the paperwork is due) in line to the principal's office. At least, this is how the urban legend goes.

One 6 year old we know is incredibly busy: after kindergarten (administratively, kindergarten is more like daycare, practically it's more like school -- they do math, reading, music, gym, spelling, etc) she goes to dance classes twice a week, music school three times a week, handwriting classes twice a week, and classes that prepare her to pass her school entrance exams three times a week. She couldn't fit us into her schedule, so we met her 3-month old sister instead.

My 12-year old cousin Mark does only one thing after school: swim practice (he plays water polo). This takes him about 5 hours 5 or 6 days a week. Swim practice itself is only 3 hours: they swim a few laps and then practice playing. It takes him an hour to get to the pool -- he takes public transport to get there from school, and more than an hour to get back (usually one of his parents or grandparents comes to pick him up.) He gets home at 9:30 pm and then has to do homework for school (school usually starts at 9:15 am). Mark says that other kids on his water polo team also manage to fit music and chess lessons into their schedule.

Every newborn baby in Russia gets prescribed massage. They say it helps to improve "muscle tone" in babies. Massage makes babies stronger and more relaxed at the same time.

Russian words are very long! So my cousin Misha at the age of two years and three months has developed his own strategy: he pronounces the ends of words. "Danya" for "do svidanya" (good bye), "eba" for "khleba" (give me some bread), "ina" for "mashina" (car). His grandfather Tolya he calls "deda Olya" (grandpa Olya), so when his mother introduced me as "tetya Olya" (aunt Olya), little Misha was extremely confused.

Sport orienteering

2010-03-09T02:10:00.000-08:00

My grandfather Ilya (Elijah) -- my father's father -- was the youngest of four children, he had one brother and two sisters. The oldest was his brother Abram, born in 1908 (I think). He was an officer in the Red Army, a colonel at the end of his career (I believe). In 1944 and 1945 he was a commander of a garrison in a Bulgarian town of Plovdiv after the Red Army took it over from the Nazis.

Abram and his wife Alexandra died a long time before I was born, and I never met them and only know a few family stories about them. I know their three children: Tatiana, Vladimir and Natalia -- and their children and grandchildren. The youngest, Natalia, was the first to immigrate to Israel back in the 1980s. Tatiana, a criminal lawyer during the Soviet times, followed in her footsteps at the end of the 1990s. We met both of them and Tatiana's daughter Sonya in Haifa earlier this year. Tatiana still visits St. Petersburg quite frequently and has business and property here. Natalia, on the other hand, has never been back. Vladimir and his wife Anna stayed in St. Petersburg, along with their daughter Ira, husband Maxim and granddaughters Katya and Natasha.

When we visited yesterday, Vladimir and Anna told us a very cute story about how they first met. After Vladimir graduated from a university in St. Petersburg (he went to the same school as my dad, but ten years earlier), he was sent to work in the Ural mountains (the city of Sverdlovsk -- now Yekaterinburg). He worked in some sort of a factory (this wasn't a part of the story, so I don't know what he did for work), but on top of it he had a hobby: sport orienteering. And coincidentally so did Anna, a Sverdlovsk native; she had entered her first night-time orienteering competition that year. The teams gathered somewhere in the woods, were given flashlights and maps, and were sent on a trek to a pre-specified location. Anna did not go very far: soon, she fell into a swamp. By the time she managed to get out of the mud, the precious time past, and the competition was lost. So she trekked back to the base and went to a spring to wash her boots. She cursed loudly as she worked: "What kind of an idiot invented orienteering at night? What the hell is the point of it?" For Vladimir, this was not his first competition, so he was used to the ordeal. He was also at the spring, cleaning his boots. So when he overheard her curses by the spring, he liked them so much, he decided to talk to her.

He proposed to her after she'd invited him to her house once and fried some potatoes and onions for him. Anna is a famous cook -- as we had a chance to attest yesterday eating her pirozhki and apple pie.

Dad's birthday

2010-03-08T01:32:00.000-08:00

The big event yesterday was my dad's 60th birthday party. It was hosted at the Mukhina Art Academy downtown St. Petersburg, in a neo-Renaissance style hall with painted ceilings and vaulted arches. The guests included my dad's childhood friends, some of whom he knows from 6 and 7 years old, his coworkers and business partners, his more recent friends. We came from all over the world, the US, England, France, Israel, different parts of Russia like Taganrog, Ufa, Moscow.

My mom had been sick with cold all week, two days ago she had to spend a whole day in bed to try to get better. During the party, she kept drinking cognac as a "cure" and to keep warm (the neo-Renaissance hall had no heating). She and my brother and my cousin Masha and many friends and family members participated in the celebration by performing songs and poems in honor of the hero of the day. Usually, Russian (Soviet-style) parties like this are organized by a "tamada" -- a host whose job is to "create the atmosphere" and to pass the microphone from one guest to another as each of them gets up to say (or sing) a toast. "Tamada" is a Georgian word and concept, and there's a fascinating article on Wikipedia that explains the history and the Georgian tradition. Of course, the Russian (Soviet) take on this is somewhat different.

My dad's party didn't use a tamada -- they had to use a professional theatrical director. The guests were too creative for simple toasts, as each one composed a poem, a song or a brief theatrical performance. There was a sketch about the government officials trying to decide how much pension my dad deserved (60 is retirement age for men in Russia); my cousin Masha, my dad, and my brother sang opera and show tunes; my mom channeled a famous poet to read a humorous poem of her own composing; a group of architects from Ufa presented my dad an Australian didgeridoo -- an intricately made long horn -- and tried to play it. In between the toasts, there was an audio-video presentation, arranged from pictures and voice over of my mom and dad telling the stories about their first meeting and different parts of my dad's biography and their life together. On top of everything else, there was lots of food and some dancing.

For me, the event was very emotional. I got to see some of my parents friends whom I remember very well from my childhood but had not seen in ten or more years. Also, many of our relatives were there and even though I was able to exchange only a few words with each of them, I was trying to schedule follow up meetings for the rest of the week. I was also trying to translate the gist of some of the toasts to Dave -- I didn't do a very good job of it; I cannot pay attention to more than one thing at the same time. I did a bit better trying to help Dave to communicate with some of the guests who wanted to ask him about his trip to China or work in the US.

Neither Dave nor I really participated in any of the singing or speech making of the evening. We could've -- we had been given the opportunity to contribute, but we just weren't up to the task. In San Francisco, it was simply too hard to visualize what kind of material would be appropriate for the evening, and by the time we got here, it was already too late and we had too many other plans to come up with anything creative. I regret it, but only slightly -- I'm glad I didn't have to worry about performing and could be all there and make the most out of the brief conversations I had with everyone. I could lead the applause and yell Bravo after every performance. I got to see my dad enjoying every minute of it. That was probably the best part of it all.

Masha's yurt

2010-03-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

My friend Masha can do it all. She can diagnose and repair cars, she can rebuild apartments and country houses, install new and repair old Soviet style electrical wiring, compile topological maps of archeological digs, and fix up old computers; she has had medical training, and is just about to graduate from university with a degree in structural engineering. About three years ago, she participated in a two-month long archeological expedition to Mongolia, where her team worked on unearthing remains of a burial grounds in the steppe. She brought back stories of Buddhist nomadic tribal lifestyle, recipes for making a carcass of meat last for weeks without refrigeration, stories of surviving flooding in the steppe.

During her trip to Mongolia, Masha has established a good working relationship with a team of St. Petersburg archeologists, and for the last two years has been working with them full time. There are several large scale archeological digs going on in St. Petersburg at this time, and Masha has helped to do it all: to excavate and clean artifacts, to document the progress of the digging by measuring and mapping the terrain, to compile budgets and to reconcile paper maps with computer based models. Lately, her work has been forcing her to spend many hours a day in front of a computer screen, and she complains: "I have a bad back," she says, "and this computer work is killing me. I could never have a sedimentary lifestyle, I need to be doing active physical labor all the time." So when her archeological team took over two basement rooms for storage and planning purposes, Masha took over the job of installing a ventilation system. The team had been thinking of subcontracting the job, but when they priced it out, it turned out they couldn't afford to hire anyone. So Masha bought all the necessary parts and put in a couple of 16 hour days to lay the piping and install equipment on her own -- on top of all the other jobs she had to do that day.

When Masha came back from Mongolia, she brought back a bunch of stories and photographs with her; and when I saw her a few months after her trip, she also gave me a souvenir: a tiny model of a yurt made of camel wool. There's a little leather door in the yurt, and when you lift it you can see that the yurt is painted on the inside with miniature furniture. I love picturing myself living inside the yurt -- it brings back to me my childhood dream of sharing a house with Masha and Inna; for years, I dreamed of the possibility of living in a tiny little house that would be only large enough to provide space for me and all of my friends underneath the same roof. As we get older, it becomes so much easier to dismiss these dreams as childish and silly (not the least of the reasons being that all of us have learned the hard way that living together is hard work and can ruin the best of friendships), but I do not want to let them go so easily. These dreams of life in complete union with my friends is probably what keeps bringing me back to St. Petersburg year after year -- and now it is also what makes me long to come back to San Francisco. The yurt is perfect because I can just fold it up and bring it with me.

Dave's blog about new experiences yesterday is here.

Old structures and new

2010-03-06T00:18:00.000-08:00

All foreigners staying in Russia for more than three days must register with the local authorities. About two years ago, the country has adopted a simplified procedure for registering visitors who choose to stay in private homes (hotels have a different procedure, much simpler on the visitor): now the foreigners and their hosts don't need to go to the local police offices and stand in line there, but can register at the post office. The "simplified" procedure requires the host to fill out a very long form by hand twice, then to fill out a short form twice, then to buy and fill out a special envelope, then to make Xerox copies of the visitor's passport, visa, migration card, also to make a copy of the host's passport. All of these documents get stamped and put in that special envelope that is then mailed to the administration of the neighborhood where the host is registered. If you know what you're doing, the procedure is not particularly difficult -- but that's a big "if."

The last time I tried to register Dave in my parents' apartment, it took me two hours to collect all of these necessary pieces of information and to fill out all of the forms (crossing out letters and numbers is not allowed -- every time you make an error you have to start from the beginning). The last time, we went to the post office in the center of the city, a very busy one with the perpetual long line of people waiting for service, and every time we'd stand in line, they would give us one new piece of information (go get the Xerox copies), and then we'd stand in line again and they would give us another piece of information (go make the second copy of the short form). This time, I stupidly forgot my passport at home and so we had to spend the better part of the day in the subway, going back to my neighborhood to pick it up and then coming back downtown to hang out with friends in the evening. But altogether, the experience was not nearly as traumatic because we ended up going to the local post office in my neighborhood, where the woman who worked with us wasn't in a rush and she spoke to me with kindly condescension (oh, so you filled out only one copy of the short form? what, you don't want to keep a copy of it for your own records?). It also helped that this time I had a better idea of what I was doing and was at least partially prepared for the ordeal.

We had dinner with my friends Polina and Kostya at a French restaurant, and then visited my brother's photo studio, Monochrome Loft. The idea behind this business is to rent out space to professional photographers who can make use of the studio's excellent natural light as well as high end lighting equipment that they've installed. Monochrome Loft also hosts lectures and events; on Monday nights my brother teaches yoga to a rapidly growing group of students. The studio is a large space downtown St. Petersburg, capable of hosting several different photo sessions at the same time. My brother (whose name is also Kostya) and his partners have done a great job remodeling: they preserved the texture of the bricks underneath the layer of white paint, laid new wooden floors, paneled the extremely high ceilings, installed new windows. They opened for business in January, and the opening party was a huge success (see video below), and things have been thriving ever since.

Monochrome Loft is thinking of establishing a residency program for visiting photographers; and they already have a relationship with a nearby hostel to provide living accommodations. So if you know any photographers who might be interested in using a modern studio space in St. Petersburg and teaching some guest lectures, please get in touch :)

Dave's account of Friday's events is surprisingly similar.

Airport traffic

2010-03-04T23:03:00.000-08:00

My cousin Paul is a lawyer who specializes in a very new and unusual area: copyright protection law. There are not nearly as many barriers to entry into the law career in Russia as there are in the US: it's a one university degree thing, and one can start practicing at 20 or 22, while still in school. My cousin is not yet 30, but he's worked in the legal departments of several different companies in St. Petersburg and in Moscow. About two years ago he started working for the St. Petersburg offices of a Swedish law firm. This fall he applied and was accepted into an masters' degree program in copyright law in Stockholm university, so that now he's learning everything about the way copyright laws work in the European Union (very differently from the way they work in the US, sometimes completely conflicting in the basics).

The masters' program is targeted specifically for working professionals. The seminars take place on weekends, every other weekend. The bulk of the work comes from independent research and writing assignments, group projects in assembling and delivering presentations. Many of the students reside in Stockholm for the duration, but my cousin is choosing to combine his education with continuing his practice back in St. Petersburg. This means that every two weeks he has to fly to Stockholm and back, using the cheapest most direct flights. Luckily, prices for airfare in Europe are very reasonable; nevertheless, his itinerary is rather strenuous. He flies out of St. Petersburg airport on Thursday nights and travels to Riga, Latvia, where he spends the night. In the morning he takes a direct flight to Stockholm, and then comes back to St. Petersburg on Sunday evenings. Every time he brings back stories of adventures, school and travel related. One of the recurrent thrills of the trip is that the airplane that takes him to Riga is a 40-seat propeller powered one. The noises that it makes are apparently vastly different from the jet engine noises and it takes time until one grows comfortable hearing them at take off.

So yesterday was another school weekend Thursday night, and cousin Paul was off to Riga. His propellers were powered up and ready to go at around 9:40 pm -- and at the same time, Dave's plane from Helsinki was going in for landing. Things came together well last night, and the timing was so perfect that my friends Johnnie and Tanya and I were able to see off cousin Paul and meet Dave with just enough time in between to drive to the nearest mall for a sushi supper. Everything went off without a hitch even despite the fact that earlier in the day it snowed heavily. In the evening, the skies were clear and the airport traffic running ahead of schedule. So much so that Dave reports leaving Helsinki at least half an hour late and he still arrived to St. Petersburg on time. The only thing we missed (getting too enthusiastic about sushi) was seeing the wings of cousin Paul's propeller plane as it took off.

Taste of snow

2010-03-03T15:18:00.000-08:00

Over the years of these trips back to St. Petersburg, I've become an excellent observer of the workings of my own memory. I've been collecting a catalog of certain small things that make me flash to the world of my childhood--and beyond. Trips now remind me of previous trips. My past is never something that's literally behind me; I visualize it more as a reference library, from which I can pull out volumes at will. Certain volumes are more useful than others. Others catch my attention for no apparent reason. The library is cataloged neither based on a chronological order nor on any kind of the alphabet, using, for example, the names of the people my memories are associated with, but based on a complicated emotional signature of each individual memory.

The rain yesterday became ice today, and then midday it snowed again so that when I came out of the apartment building around 5 pm, most of the paths were iced over underneath the fresh layer of snow. Apparently, this pattern has been reoccurring for some days, because on some paths the ice was several inches deep and chunky. Most paths are strewn with sand and salt, but some are not. Walking is a rather slow and precarious business. Both sides of the path are walls of several feet of snow. In certain particularly narrow areas you might get stuck behind the more cautious walkers and need to slow down. Slowing down is good: I finally get off my cell phone and get a chance to look around. Immediately, I remember a ritual: eating several handfuls of fresh white snow on the way home from school. You get so hot running down these paths, bundled up as you are inside a padded coat, a sweater, a shirt and an undershirt. You're sweating even though it's below zero--a perfect recipe for a head cold.

But the heat is not why you eat snow. You eat snow the way you eat everything: you consume the world through its smell and taste and texture. You eat breakfast, dinner and supper, you drink tea and eat jam and biscuits. You eat fruit of the trees and you eat vegetables that grow in your garden. You eat green grass in the spring and acorns in the fall. You make whistles out of inedible acacia pods and you get your nose yellow in the pollen of dandelions. You chew on the bark of spruce twigs while playing card games with friends and you use pine needles as toothpicks. You poke holes in the birch tree with a knife and you suck on the juice of it. In the winter, you get your tongue stuck to the frozen metal railing outside of your apartment building because you are curious to see what white frost tastes like. In the summer, a mosquito flies into your mouth and you're disturbed by swallowing the thing that was so alive a moment ago but it doesn't really taste like anything. When it's windy, you open your mouth and try to taste the wind. When it's raining, you stick your tongue out and you try to catch raindrops with it.

I haven't felt the spring in the air yet (and don't talk to me about astronomical spring that starts only at the end of March--spring is a state of mind); but I have tasted the snow. There was some crisp in it even though it was heavy with water, a touch of sweetness and a clean smooth aftertaste. There was no sediment in it that comes from drinking boiled or filtered chlorinated water. The cleanliness is deceptive, of course: the snow has absorbed all kinds of pollution on its way down, it has absorbed even more as it was lying there in the yard by a very busy street. I wouldn't recommend city snow for a drink of choice, but it's very refreshing in small doses.

"Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900 to 1920: Art, Life and Culture in Russia's Silver Age"

2010-03-02T23:00:00.000-08:00

A review and an interview with the author of a potentially fascinating book on Russia's "Silver Age":
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_03_015805.php

Sounds like a decent introductory text -- although in the theory of "why silver age" at the turn of the century, I would go to contemporary Marxist theory first and European modernism second before I would plunge into the Apocalypse theories and religion. But I guess the Apocalypse might better reflect the way thinking of the individual artists at the time.

Short trip to St. Petersburg

2010-03-02T13:43:00.001-08:00

A straightforward eighteen hour trip from San Francisco to St. Petersburg is decidedly too short. Here's my list of things to do on the plane:

To read
-- 1 novel
-- 1 short story collection
-- 1 history book
-- 3 literary magazines
-- 1 Narrative submission
-- a friend's manuscript

To write
-- 5 letters
-- revise first draft of an English language short story
-- revise Nth draft of my Russian language manuscript

I've read the novel (Alejo Carpentier's "The Kingdom of This World"). I've read one story in one of the lit mags (Paris Review). I've read the Narrative submission. I wrote zero letters. I did finish revising the first draft of a long short story I'm currently calling "Criminals." I got maybe three hours of sleep total. I had 3 meals and a Haagen-Dazs during my layover in Frankfurt. And this is 18 hours? I guess I've also read a couple of newspaper articles saved in my browser. And also a part of Frankfurter Allgemeine (imagine a paper with a full-length book review on the back cover! -- Jonathan Safran Foer's new book).

I was also going to shop for a science fiction novel in German at the airport in Frankfurt, but couldn't find a decent store and then decided against buying some other random novel in German. I can do this on the trip back. I am not sure I actually saw any sci fi at that bookstore, at least not anything other than the German translations of Harry Potter and Twilight books, and I don't know if these technically count as sci fi.

St. Petersburg is cold and wet -- just the way I left it back in October. The only difference is the giant piles of blackened, melting snow everywhere along the roads. The dirt in St. Petersburg is never more apparent as in March after a nice snowy winter, when the slush runs soot black and it's impossible to walk outside without getting mud on your clothes. But the smell of spring is in the air -- and while my sense of smell has been spoiled by the perpetual spring of San Francisco, and so far I smell nothing but exhaust fumes here, -- the spring is usually the time of general elation and unrealistic hopes. It's a good time.

To love poetry

2010-02-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

Lydia Chukovskaya explains:

"If you love poetry, you commit poems to memory right away, and if you cannot memorize them right away -- you won’t let the book out of your hands until you’ve learned by heart the lines that touched you, so that from now on you never have to part from them again: they will be with you while you’re working at the kerosene stove or at the washtub, on the street, in a tram, in a prison cell -- you will continue to repeat them to yourself over and over."

I have not memorized a poem by heart in a long time. Perhaps I don't love poetry enough. Contemporary American poetry seems too intimidating for memorization -- and when you memorize you lose all the complex graphic layout of it. Some of contemporary poetry seems to be meant only to exist on paper. And what would be the point of memorizing poetry? When I was in school, my friends and I used to read poems to each other on the way home from school. I used to read poems to them on the phone, at night. We memorized poetry for Russian and English lessons, and then also performed them at school evenings, birthday parties, etc. When I was very little, my parents coaxed me to read poetry out loud at parties for their friends -- it was a skill to show off.

One thing I'm growing more and more confident about is that to become a better writer, I need to read more English-language poetry. It teaches you to read and use language in a different way -- focus on different types of structures and different ways of producing meaning. Perhaps, it's not just a matter of reading poetry, but of memorizing it and repeating it to myself while I wash dishes or walk to the gym -- until the words and structures become my own, until they become a part of my own vocabulary. It's an intimidating task. I won't start right away.

It's also interesting to note how "the prison cell" is always at the top of Chukovskaya's mind. She speaks from experience.

Chukovskaya on scientists

2010-02-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

One of the things that make Chukovskaya's memoir particularly interesting is its porousness, the way it incorporates many aspects of what constituted "culture" at the time (1930s), what a certain class of people--the Leningrad intelligentsia--were interested in, what concerned them. She had made it her life goal to record this culture, to give its possibility of transcendence, and she stuck with this project from one text to another, from Akhmatova diaries to her own poetry and fiction to her political essays in defense of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky.

The passage below is particularly interesting because it shows the impact of the current breakthroughs in theoretical physics on the life of the society at large; she underlines that even people who were very far from understanding the meaning of the new discoveries in physics were nevertheless involved in public discussions of the implications and practical applications of these discoveries. Physicists, young physicists, were people to know, to socialize with. Hence, her own meeting with a physicist Matvej (Mitya) Bronshtein -- not accidental at all.

"The vague reports of Bronshtein’s rising celebrity had preceded our meeting. I met him for the first time in the spring of 1931. Everyone around me was talking about Matvei Petrovich then, and the kinds of things they said! I’d heard all kinds of tall tales about this rising star, Bronshtein! He was a scientist, a man of letters, a theoretical physicist, an expert in the history of science, a public speaker. He had had a special status in high school as a non-resident student, and every year had passed exams for two or three school years at once. Wunderkind! At the university, too, he had completed his coursework faster than usual. He had started publishing his papers in the Soviet and international journals possibly as early as seventeen years old. They said he studied languages: every month a new language. He had taught himself four languages, but if he wanted to—within a month he could pick up a fifth and a sixth. Fantastic memory. Now Matvei Petrovich was no longer a student, but worked at the Institute of Physics and Technology, was a full-time participant of their famous seminars. In addition to purely scientific work at the Institute known as the Ioffe Institute, he wrote popular articles in the journals of natural history. In a word, not a man—a phenomenon. “The seventh wonder of the world.”

People talked about the formation of the new school of theoretical physics… Alongside Bronshtein, the names of the young—Gamow, Landau, Ivanenko, Ambartsumyan— intermingled with the names of the older, distinguished scientists—Ioffe, Frenkel, Fock, Tamm. The people of letters were uninitiated in the formal sciences and had only vague understanding of who was exactly who and what was exactly what, and where the heart of the matter lay, but they did like to chitchat about science. According to their interpretations, it was not clear whether the young physicists learned from their elders or overthrew their findings, whether the two groups were at war with each other or bound by loving friendship. As it were, everyone expected the young to produce radical discoveries.

Nils Bohr, Rutherford, Dirac… The atomic nucleus, the age and evolution of stars, atom fission, positrons, neutrons, demons, the devil… And of course—Einstein.

At the time, I mingled only within the literary circle. A daughter of a versatile man of letters, myself an editor of a publishing house."

Translating Chukovskaya

2010-02-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

Let me try to post here a few excerpts from the translation I'm working on, Lydia Chukovskaya's posthumously published text -- a long essay, a memoir -- the title of which I think is best rendered in English as "N/A." In Russian, the title is Прочерк, a long dash one puts in an official form when the answer is unknown. Chukovskaya comes to writing this piece from trying to capture her memory of her husband, Matvei Petrovich Bronshtein, who was shot to death in one of Stalin's purges in 1938.

I welcome all comments about the language, the phrasing. This translation is very much a work in progress, and one of my reasons for posting it here is to facilitate the editing process.

Here's Chukovskaya writing about the impossibility of her own writing:

"I started writing this book without any formal goals in mind. Altogether without any goals. This is not an essay, not a novella, not lyric poetry, not journalism… What is this? Memoir? Perhaps. I simply wanted to remember and write down everything I know about my husband, theoretical physicist, Matvei Petrovich Bronshtein, who perished in 1937.

However, the moment I picked up my pen, it turned out that this “simply” is not at all simple.

Anna Akhmatova used to say: “One shouldn’t write memoirs about a person whom one knew barely or not at all, only from afar.” She is probably right. But a person whom one knew not only from afar is also very difficult to represent on paper. For the opposite reason. Too close—you can approach, but you cannot grasp the form. His entirety closes in on you, encompasses you, pushes you aside. The task is particularly difficult if you’re writing decades later. And not at all because time has erased his features from your memory. Nothing like that. The dead differ from the living in that they never die. They are always with us. The years pass—they inhabit our souls all the more securely. Looking back, you ascertain that the one you’ve lost cannot be captured or represented, because he cannot be separated from you. He has coalesced with you. The two of you are inseparable. In the years that have passed, he has inhabited your memory so securely that you can no longer distinguish what part of it is you and what is he. This is all the more astounding because as long as the two of you were both living, you were not at all alike. Still, the years of separation, when the memory was constantly at work within you, have completed their task. Trying to remember him, you inevitably remember yourself. Peering into the distance, straining your eyes in order to see him more clearly, in order to remember, to represent—you stumble upon your own life. I want to write about Mitya, but instead write about myself. I want to write about him—and write about others. A reader expecting a straight-forward memoir under the heading “Matvei Petrovich Bronshtein” will be disappointed. I do not have the right to use his name as the title of what I am now writing. I remember myself with him, him with me, I remember my memory of him, but not Bronshtein on his own."

Zoshchenko, a prelude

2010-02-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

More links. Sean Lovelace of HTMLGiant writes on Mikhail Zoshchenko. I'm actually reading and writing on Zoshchenko myself at the moment, so I should be posting more on him later. 1920s in Soviet Russia was a time of rapid change and social turmoil, and the literature that reflects this time is quite rich. Zoshchenko -- a beloved writer by all generations since -- is one of the few authors from the period whose stories have been translated multiple times and continue to be translated. The problem -- an opportunity for translators -- is that his language is grounded in the colloquial idiom, analogues for which in another language are devilishly hard to find.

Coincidentally, Dave and I just watched a silent movie from the same era, entitled in English Bed and Sofa. The script for it was written by a Formalist literary and film theorist Viktor Shklovsky (who was friends with Zoshchenko at the time and together they belonged to a writer's group known as Serapion's Brothers). The movie was very controversial at the time, as it portrays a non-monogamous relationship between a married couple and their friend. One of the actors, Nicolai Batalov, is a very famous uncle of an even more famous post WWII Soviet actor, Alexei Batalov. The movie also features fascinating scenes of old "wooden" Moscow, a view from the Bolshoi Theatre on the old Kremlin, the wooden streets and houses, the old Cathedral of the Christ the Savior (Храм Христа Спасителя), before it was demolished in 1931 and then rebuilt again in the Putin times.

Completely unrelated: Genine Lentine, a San Francisco poet whom I admire very much, released a collection of poems, Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes. A poem from this collection was featured on Verse Daily.

Room and a Half

2010-01-29T11:09:00.000-08:00

A very good review of Andrey Khrzhanovksy's part documentary/part fictional film about one of Russia's best-known poets, Joseph Brodsky.

I saw parts of this movie back in St. Petersburg, during a presentation at the Akhmatova museum -- the director has been working hard at promoting it. It would be very interesting to see it here in San Francisco -- the context of the viewing does have an impact on the material. In St. Petersburg, I couldn't run away from this fast enough -- but then St. Petersburg is so saturated with Brodsky lore that I enter SOS mode even as a preventive measure. Reading this review, I'm realizing how interesting is at the very least the genre of this film, a documentary with very good sources that relies on fictional elements and cartoon graphics for greater emotional impact.

Vasily Grossmann

2010-01-26T15:51:00.001-08:00

No time to blog. Instead, I'll post more links I've come across online. Sometimes, when I'm particularly busy, I start worrying about the state of my mental catalog, books I've reread a bunch of times, for example: have I allowed any parts of them to escape from my memory? Lately, I've been allowing myself to forget too much.
Good to know that the two Vasily Grossmann novels are available in translation: Life and Fate and Everything Flows. Next time somebody asks me to recommend Russian books to read, these are it.

roger

2010-01-25T17:03:00.000-08:00

Mild cold and time management issues keep me from blogging lately. Should come back to it soon. Meantime, I checked up on some of my past submissions to discover that the print issue of roger: an art & literary magazine with my Pasternak translation is out -- and probably has been out for a while. It's the same translation that was published online at ezra: an online journal of translation before. Still, the print magazine looks nice and I want a copy.

Israel Marginalia

2010-01-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

Back in San Francisco. My plane got in an hour ahead of schedule, at 10 am. This is 8 pm Tel Aviv time, and my goal is to stay up through the night until at least 8 pm San Francisco time. How else to get over the jet lag? It's 4:15 pm right now and I doubt that I will make it. I can't read, I can't write (blogging doesn't count), I certainly can't watch TV. Dave has been making me coffee and chicken apple sausages for energy and now is polishing toothpicks to prop my eyes open. He's the sleep police around here.

Unlike in Ireland and in Poland, where people kept asking us why we were interested in visiting their country, in Israel everyone (including us, eventually) seemed incredulous that this was our first time visiting. This was one of the standard security questions at the airport (both Dave and I got asked this, passing through security days apart from each other): This was your first time in Israel? How come?

My dad lost a nice leather jacket in a taxi cab in Haifa. We tried to drive to a restaurant that day, but Dave's Blackberry was out of juice and our maps were insufficiently marked with traffic flow directions, so we parked the car in front of a random synagogue and then walked to the restaurant and on the way back took a cab to the car. My dad tried to call every Haifa taxi cab company to ask about this jacket -- he had bought it two years earlier in Argentina and was not ready to part with it -- but nothing turned up. The only thing we could remember about the driver was that he was from Tangier in Morocco and that he was listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

We remembered the Tangier bit particularly well because on the road between cities we had been listening to Mark Twain's travelogue Innocents Abroad: an account of his trans-Atlantic journey to "The Holy Land." Tangier is one of the stops he describes in detail:

"Here are five thousand Jews in blue gabardines, sashes about their waists, slippers upon their feet, little skullcaps upon the backs of their heads, hair combed down on the forehead, and cut straight across the middle of it from side to side--the selfsame fashion their Tangier ancestors have worn for I don't know how many bewildering centuries. Their feet and ankles are bare. Their noses are all hooked, and hooked alike. They all resemble each other so much that one could almost believe they were of one family. Their women are plump and pretty, and do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last degree comforting."

This, disturbing -- hence, memorable.

Mike left some spices and a scarf in a hotel room in Jerusalem.

Kostya left his winter hat in another hotel room and suffered for it when he returned to St. Petersburg's -15 C.

We've stayed in three different hotels in Israel and in none of them we were given real bars of soap. Instead of bars, all three hotels (belonging to different chains) offered identical liquid soap dispensers, one or two per bathroom. Sometimes, the bathtub and the sink had separate dispensers and sometimes there was only one. I wonder if this is a cost saving measure to prevent the guests from taking the unused soap bars home. But then on the other hand, two of the three hotels outfitted their rooms with chocolate. Are chocolate bars cheaper than soap?

Every time we come home from a trip, we modify our diet accordingly. After Ireland, I've learned to make soda bread. Coming home from Russia this fall, I've been mastering the Uzbeki plov (a meat and rice dish with spices). Coming home from Israel, I found that Dave has already acquired a tub of hummus twice the size of the one we usually buy. I am also ordering tahini (a sesame seed paste) and dates from the organic delivery service we receive every Tuesday.

Okay, it's 5 pm now. Can I go to bed please?

Tel Aviv family

2010-01-08T21:28:00.000-08:00

These last few days are a mix of aimless wondering and intense meetings with family. Yesterday I missed meeting Vered at the park Gan Meir -- either my Russian cell phone is malfunctioning or I dialed the number wrong -- so instead of hanging out and talking about comparative literature I watched dogs being sold. Right outside the park, on the street of Melech George (or King George) people sit in a row holding their puppies on their laps or tied to the metal fence and advertise the puppies' qualities. "He doesn't bite at all! And she's already toilet-trained and won't stain your couch." Of course, the conversation is happening in Hebrew and there are so many curious customers that I probably wouldn't have understood anything even if I spoke the language.

My family in Israel is divided roughly in two groups: those cousins who came here within the last 30 years from the Soviet Union and the families of my grandparents' first cousins who stayed in the West after the October Revolution and then eventually found their way to Palestine. There was, for example, my grandmother's Margo's father Grisha. He came from a family of eight siblings and they lived in Riga, Latvia. The family was relatively well-off: they owned a chocolate factory and an apartment building. According to the family legend, Grisha was a gambler -- an unsuccessful one, and had to run away from his debts. So he went to Petrograd, leaving behind three small daughters aged 3, 5, and 7 (my grandmother Margo was 3). Grisha's sister Edna was studying in Germany, in Berlin, at the time. She married a doctor and they had two sons, and in 1936 another sister, Annette, came to Berlin to help Edna's family move to Palestine. The third sister, Fanya, went to the United States. Annette though came back to her two sons in Riga and during WWII perished in a concentration camp. One of her sons survived the war (I think because he was in the Red Army) and after the war he married and had two daughters. My father was very friendly with them growing up, he visited them in Riga and they came to Leningrad. In the late 1970s, at the earliest opportunity, both of them picked up and moved to the United States, to Denver. The connection though with Edna's family was lost until Perestroika, when my dad started going to Israel for work. Edna was still alive on my dad's first visit to Israel, but not a few years later when he succeeded in finding her family. Later, Edna's two sons visited my grandmother Margo back in St. Petersburg -- but I was in the US by then and never met them until this week.

The visiting continues even today, when all of us are leaving. One of our cousins told us that one of our ancestors on my mother's mother's side who had come to Palestine back at the beginning of the 20th century had started a kibbutz at the foot of Mt. Gilboa, and there's still that kibbutz and a cemetery with more than 100 graves somewhere out there. This, however, we shall have to leave for another trip. It's much too much too much too much too much.

My dad's strategy of asking everyone in Israel a question in Russian first, before switching to English when necessary, pays off with some fascinating stories. A man we met making puzzles at Nachalat Binyamin market yesterday was from Poland, but spent seven months in "Siberia" when he was nine years old, prosecuted by the Soviet authorities as an agent of the "West," a potential spy. (His parents were exiled too). "Siberia" is really a catch all term for all Soviet exiles: Vologda, the town where this man was exiled to is about 300 miles east of St. Petersburg and 300 miles north of Moscow. Not Siberia. But still.

Another man whose story we got is a cab driver who immigrated 15 years ago from Moscow. In Moscow, he worked as a dental technician (something like a hygienist?) and here he also continues to work as a dental assistant by day, and by night drives a cab to supplement his income. After a few of my dad's questions, this man started telling us why he doesn't regret his decision to move, even though things are hard here, harder for him personally than they were in Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart.

This is also what makes this trip so demanding: at the first prodding, people are telling us their life stories and their family histories. Everyone has a tale of strife and survival to share. Everyone is asking us to share our stories as well, and we're finding ourselves repeating the same phrases over and over and over again. This is one of those things that make Israel, as they say here, "a warm" country, where everyone is interested in your business and has an opinion about it. For the moment being, I'm longing to return to San Francisco (which I've been advertising as a similarly warm place), and take refuge in its relative anonymity and hide behind my desk for some months in a row. As my grandmother Margo claimed, rest is a change in occupation.

Tel Aviv shopping

2010-01-07T21:56:00.000-08:00

Dave has been home for two days already, and his American doctor reluctantly confirmed the Israeli diagnosis even though normally it does not manifest itself suddenly and usually appears in both eyes. Neither of these are the case here, so the doctor asked Dave to come back in a couple of weeks. Dave is already back to work and everyday life. Doing the laundry, picking up packages, heating up Trader Joe's pizzas for dinner. Meantime I'm still in Tel Aviv, eating figs and dates for breakfast, shopping with my parents during the day, and meeting more friends and family in the evening.

Yesterday I spent the morning with my friend Vered whom I know from San Francisco State, a fellow comparatist who is now studying for her Ph.D. in Kent University in England. Vered picked me up at my hotel, and at first we tried to find a post office because I have a couple of letters to mail -- but the one post office we found had its floor and ceiling torn out for some sort of renovation. Then Vered guided us to a Bauhaus Center on Dizengoff street because I expressed an interest in learning something about the history of Tel Aviv's Bauhaus movement. I don't want to call this center a tourist trap -- it's too small even for that & indeed the books and the souvenirs they sell are on par with the books and souvenirs they sell at the NYMOMA. I think there needs to be a special word for the museums where the exhibit space is smaller than the shop space. Here, this was definitely the case: the exhibit was located on the open gallery of the second floor, and the shop occupied the entire first floor. We bought some postcards and cool erasable pens that later turned out to be broken and had to be returned. So next Vered and I opted to do something where our expectations couldn't be foiled and joined Vered's sister, her 4-month old niece, and their friend for breakfast at a cafe in Neve Tzedek. The coffee was delicious, the conversation absorbing, and the baby cheerful despite expanding red mosquito bites on her cheeks.

Tel Aviv is a small big city, the kind of city where once you're out on the street you're bound to run into your neighbor and the guy you went to high school with 15 years ago. Also the kind of the city where everyone is in your business and has an opinion about what you should or shouldn't do to keep your baby from crying or what skirt you should or shouldn't wear. Shopping for clothes has been an easy and a pleasurable experience here. "No, no!" a sales lady is waving her finger at me. I'm afraid I've done something wrong, but she's just trying to be helpful. "This skirt is too narrow for you! Try this one. This color looks better. More wide." She's spreading her arms to indicate that the blue skirt will sit on my hips much better than the brown. I appreciate being told what to do, so I buy accordingly. Most of the clothes I've been trying on here are one-size-fits-all, and it's the kind of size that fits me perfectly. I already own a bunch of shirts to match my new skirts, because every time my mom comes here she ends up buying something for me too. The trick to Israeli fashion I figured out on this trip is to wear short skirts with thick stockings or leggings -- I think this will hold up in San Francisco winter.

Tel Aviv business-like

2010-01-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

On Sunday morning, a work day in Israel, my dad and my brother had a business meeting with their partners, and later the rest of us were also invited to take a tour of their facility. This company designs complex electric cables for airplanes and boats, and then licenses the technology to be manufactured in other countries (i.e. Russia, India, Greece). Dave and I drove to the industrial park called "Airport City," where we joined my dad and my brother who were just coming out of their meeting.

The CEO of the business walked us through the engineering floor, reminding us that they don't do any manufacturing on site, but create the design and set up the assembly line in such a way that they can demonstrate it to their customers and partners so that they, in turn, could implement the same assembly line on their own site. The largest part of the engineering floor was taken up by the 1:1 model of a cable that connects the cockpit of an airplane to all of the the different parts of the fuselage. The central cable and all of its off-shoots are outlined by red tape glued to the cardboard strip, like a great red river absorbing its tributaries. Hard to imagine how many different individual wires are packed in a cable such as this, and the job that involves connecting all the wires to the right buttons on the control panel. Proper labeling is key in this business, and another part of the assembly line that we saw included several intricate labeling machines.

Most of the people whom we meet in Israel are working either in the high-tech or in the service industries or both. My cousin Dasha whom we met later the same day works for a company that provides telephone service primarily between Israel and the United States, and so she has to keep the US hours: her workday starts at 4 pm Israeli time and ends at 11 pm (9 to 5 EST). She has recently 'graduated' from the army and is thinking of traveling abroad, potentially going abroad to work -- one opportunity is to sell the products of the Dead Sea at malls around the world. This company provides young people with visas, housing, and an opportunity to earn percentage off the sales. The job is a hard one, but it's not a bad way of getting to know another country. Dasha already speaks Spanish and French on top of English, Hebrew, and Russian, so a number of countries are vying for her candidacy. She's looking primarily at Europe at the moment. Sales job is a great training for any future diplomat or a world leader -- or a singer, a dancer, a poet, a talk show host or anything else she might aspire to be.

Even later the same day, Dasha, Kostya, Dave, Mike and I met cousin Ryan and his friend Greg at a microbrewery called The Dancing Camel, where we were able to make yet another spectacular connection. One of the bartenders, Ari, went to the same high school in the Philly suburb as Dave, Mike and Ryan, and graduated the same year as Dave and Ryan. After a while, Dave and Ari were able to figure out one or two people they both knew at school -- not an easy thing to do in a graduating class of more than 900. Dave writes more about this on his blog.

The next day, Monday, was much quieter. Kostya and my dad had left Tel Aviv at dawn to fly back to snow-covered St. Petersburg, and Mike and Dave were too hung over and sleep deprived to run into too much trouble. We spent most of the day meandering around the city. Promenaded again from Tel Aviv to Jaffo, climbed the hills of the ancient town, ate the famous hummus at Abu Hassan's, admired art at multiple galleries and even bought a few small pieces at almost reasonable prices, observed surfers crashing into the waves beyond the oldest port in the world, browsed the stalls of the Carmel market and bought a handmade belt at an art market nearby. By the virtue of Dave's Blackberry our path concluded at the doorstep of yet another brewery on Rothschild Boulevard, where everyone had beers including Karen who had a sparkling cider and that counts. Dave went to the airport directly from the brewery, with only a brief stop at the hotel to pick up the luggage and the rental car. Karen, Phil, and Mike departed in the middle of the night a few hours later.

For me, the trip continues for a few more days. Today I have discovered a concept of "medical tourism" and maybe I will try to blog about it soon.

Haifa to Tel Aviv

2010-01-03T22:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday our most important accomplishment needed to be getting from Haifa to Tel Aviv. My dad and my brother are flying back to St. Petersburg at dawn tomorrow, and Dave, Karen, Phil, and Mike are flying out a few hours later -- and they didn't really get a chance to tour Tel Aviv and Jaffo yet. Anyway, we had a room reserved in Tel Aviv and not in Haifa. But there are many different ways of getting from point A to point B. We did it road trip style, caravaned in two cars and used Google Maps on Dave's Blackberry to show us the way. We split the group into two cars based on music preferences, anyone who could possibly imagine themselves enjoying Audioslave and Muse with only occasional Billy Joel and Enrico Iglesias in one car, and those who didn't suffer excruciating agony when deprived of music altogether in the other.

Our drive took us along the coast of the Mediterranean. The shore seemed mostly abandoned in the winter, and on the outskirts of Haifa we drove past Palmhenge: a strip of the beach overgrown with dead leafless palm trees. There was also a bizarre sculpture garden a few kilometers further down the road, thin blocks of sandstone shaped into geometric tin men. "It's much too much too much too much too much," sings Bonaparte in a similarly entitled song. Finally, we turned off the highway at the town called Binyamina and went to the wrong winery. We were going to go to a small family winery called Tishbi, but ended up in the largest Israeli winery called Carmel. It was originally set up by Baron de Rothschild in the 1880s and helped to create Palestine as a place where Jews wanted to settle. At the time, the tour guide told us, it was the largest winery in the world. And the vines came from Kashmir, India (because the French grapes were already diseased at that point).

These days, Carmel Winery owns four different other wineries in Israel and most of the grapes grown on Golan Heights and around Tiberia. Their goal in the last 15-20 years has been to create kosher wine that's respected around the world as good wine (i.e. not like Manischevitz). There are many rules involved in making a kosher wine, and according to our gude, the rules are more complicated in Israel than anywhere else in the world. First of all, they have to donate 10% as a tithe and every 7 years let the vines rest. Of course, this company doesn't literally let the vines rest, but on the holy year they take no profit on their sales. Wine is a holy drink, used to make blessings while reading the Torah, and Only Jews can handle the grapes from the moment they are crushed to the moment they are bottled. The bigger problem is that to keep the wine's kosher status, only Jews can handle the wine once the bottle has been decorked and is being poured. To solve this problem, many wineries "spoil" the wine by heating it -- a pasteurizing process -- before bottling. A damaged wine is not so holy anymore, and can be kosher even if not handled by Jews. But of course pasteurizing the wine that has been aged in oak barrels destroys the effects of aging. So I don't know how the catering companies get around this problem when they want the really good wine: maybe by hiring more Jewish waiters?

After ample tasting, we got back on the road and drove a few more kilometers south back towards Kesaria, Caesarea, Qisaryyia or Quesareia (invent your own combination of letters to go with the sounds). We had unfinished business there: singing at the Roman Theatre. There's a spectacularly well-preserved Roman theatre there (built at the time of Herod two millenia ago), with two cavea (sitting sections, one above the other) and a skena (a stage) with passages underneath (I found a small room equipped with a porcellain bowl surely used as a toilet as far back as the Roman times). The stage and the seating galleries all made of a weathered white stone glittered in the cold winter sunset. A score of tourists climbed to the higher rows of the theatre to enjoy the view of the blue Mediterranean waters and of the birds flying south for the winter. On this peaceful pastoral setting we unleashed our three tenors. My dad sang the song of the Napoletan boatsmen ("Santa Lucia") that he sings at every Roman theatre where he happens to be around the world, an Armenian song "The Swallow" that he's been practicing ever since his trip to Armenia this past August, and a song of Volga boatsmen (I think). Phil sang a theme song from the movie "Exodus." And Kostya sang "O Sole Mio" and Judas's aria from Andrew Lloyd's Weber's "Jesus Christ Superstar." After that we surrendered the stage to the Japanese school girl choir and went to have dinner at a sushi restaurant on the beach.

Our last stop on this road trip to Tel Aviv was Dave's cousin's Ryan basketball game at a kibbutz behind a McDonalds and Ace hardware store. The kibbutz sponsors the basketball team for which Ryan plays now and they were playing a team from Haifa. We showed up a little early, maybe 40 minutes before the game started, and watched the teams warm up, and then only had enough energy to stay for the first half of the game. Ryan's team was winning by about 15 points by the time we left, and later Ryan called to report that they ended up winning by more than 30 points.

Dave's post is here: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2010/01/01032010-time-to-leave-haifa-already.html

Haifa family

2010-01-02T22:33:00.000-08:00

When I was about 6 years old, my parents took me and my brother on our first trip. We went to the Ukraine, to the town of Skadovsk on the Black Sea. The trip was recommended by my mom's second cousin Bella who had traveled extensively in Ukraine. My parents had organized this trip in such a way that we met up with my mom's first cousin Sonya and her daughter Jenya who was about my age. Cousin Sonya, a daughter of my grandmother's favorite baby sister Lisa, with whom my grandmother had survived the blockade of Leningrad, lived with her parents in the Ural mountains, in the city of Sverdlovsk, later renamed Ekatirenburg. Jenya and I and my brother Kostya played together on the beach. Apparently, there was a sort of an amusement park there with little trains you could ride and bumper cars and a Ferris wheel that in Russian is called "the Devil wheel" and also maybe teacups that spun. I only remember this from the pictures that we have at home. Kostya got bit by a jelly fish and almost drowned in the salty water at least once. Jenya and I tried to get into as much trouble as we possibly could, running away from our mothers and pretending we were on a treasure island. There was, in fact, an island that could be seen from the shore, and one time we all took a boat excursion there. The island was called Dzharilgach, and my mom read us stories by a very good Russian children's author, Boris Zhitkov, who wrote about this island. In fact, one of his stories was entitled Dzharilgach -- and it's probably why we all remember this island so well.

My memories of this trip are vivid, but only as vivid as memories of a 6-year old could be: lacking any sort of specificity in details. I saw Jenya one more time about 5 or 6 years later when she and her family passed through Leningrad (St. Petersburg by then) on their way to Israel. Cousin Bella and her husband Mark had left for Israel earlier. And so did my mom's cousin from her dad's side, Gena, and his wife Marina and son Artem, who got a new Hebrew name Ariel upon arrival. And so did a number of my dad's cousins. I've always known that I had more relatives in Israel than back in Russia, but it was an abstract knowledge, a list of names with only vague memories of faces and character. When I came to the States and learned to use the Internet, I've started writing letters to my Israeli cousins. I've kept in touch with Jenya, with Sonya (not Jenya's mother, but a cousin from my dad's side -- I had known her the best, I had spent 2 weeks at their country-house in Ust-Narva in Estonia once and I always came to her birthday parties back in St. Petersburg), with Artem-Ariel. Ariel is a captain in the Israeli army now, stationed near Tel-Aviv. His brother Dani is 16 and still in school. Sonya has a 7-year old daughter and is getting her degree in psychology. She has 1.5 more years of school work to do and then she will need to do an extensive internship. She's already working as a supervisor of a flat where seven mentally challenged young people live on their own. Jenya's brother Misha (who wasn't born yet during our Skadovsk trip) is finishing his service in the army and is looking to go to college in Israel or maybe in the US. The only one we didn't get a chance to meet yesterday was Jenya herself -- who is on a business trip to China right now and will come back to Israel the day after I'm going back to San Francisco.

Dave writes about the details of our excursion to Golan heights and Sea of Galilee with all the family.

A hospital in Haifa

2010-01-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

Dave has a chronic eye condition that starts acting up every few years. The first episode happened about a month or two after he and I started dating. He was prescribed drops that he had to put into his right eye four or five times a day, and in that prehistoric age he was very scared of touching his own eye like that so I had to hunt him down on campus and try to spring the drops on him unawares. I remember we used to meet up at the library downstairs by the vending machines that sold chicken, tuna and egg salad sandwiches and Kit-Kat bars. Dave remembers us meeting up on the second floor of the library, where he could lie down between the stacks. We did the drops on the benches in the quad between the library and the science buildings and on the lawn by the college of business. Also in the dorms, in his or my room. The second episode was a lot less fun, took years to get under control, as a result Dave had to get a cataract removed in his right eye, and that wasn't even the end of it.

The third incident happened today. It began a few days ago when Dave started seeing something that looked like a hair in his right eye, a hair that would not go away. When it didn't go away for three days straight, Dave emailed his ophthalmologist in San Francisco, and she told him that this is a potential emergency and that he should see a doctor right away. The symptom -- its official name is a "floater" -- could be indicative of a condition that, if not treated right away, could lead to blindness. This sounded scary enough that we decided to let our families tour the medieval Jewish city of Tzfat (or Safed) without us and find the best hospital we could. In the morning, we packed up our computers and notebooks, chocolate and fruit and got a taxi that delivered us straight to the doors of a hilltop hospital with a gorgeous view of the Mediterranean. We passed through the metal detector to get into the lobby and then had to navigate Hebrew signs to find the ophthalmology or simply "eineim" department. We had looked up the Hebrew spelling for the word "eye" in advance, but there was almost no need to bother: people in the hospital were friendly enough to speak sign language when they didn't know enough English to answer our questions. We found the right department right away.

I don't know how the system works for the locals, but for tourists it seemed quite streamlined. At the reception desk downstairs we paid 937 shekels (about $250) to be seen by a doctor. They gave us a receipt in English to show to our American insurance company. They also gave us a folder to take up with us to the 5th floor, to the ophthalmology department. The doctor on duty saw us within half an hour. She let Dave explain his medical history, took his basic measurements, put drops in his eyes, and gave him a full exam another half an hour later. Her diagnosis was the worst case scenario with surgery as the only treatment option. She said she would call a more senior doctor. He showed up within 40 minutes dressed in jeans -- it was obviously his day off -- and saw everyone else, all the simpler cases, before he saw us. There was a young boy who needed stitches in his eye after another boy threw a rock at him. There was an older man with his very elderly mother who had very high pressure in her eyes and was possibly developing glaucoma -- the man wore a kippah (a yarmulke) and told us in English that he worried about having to stay in the hospital during Shabbat. There was a couple who spoke Hebrew and Russian, but so quietly that we didn't get to hear what their problem was.

We waited in the lobby. The ophthalmology department shared a floor with the geriatric care department, and we saw all the patients get their lunches: a dish of boiled carrots and green beans and mashed potatoes on the side. The doctors and the nurses each got a cup of chicken soup. A few patients received family visits from large extended family. The Mediterranean shone and sparkled in the large window of the lobby. Dave was suffering not as much from any eye-related discomfort as from the hangover from celebrating the New Year's the night before. He was feeling feverish and nervous, and he wanted to lie down, but there was only a metal chair upholstered in black pleather in the lobby and my shoulder. I twiddled my thumbs. We had a Blackberry with us and were reading Wikipedia articles about Dave's latest diagnosis. It seemed almost certain that surgery would be required but there were options, and after the certain types of surgery Dave would be prohibited to fly for 4 to 6 weeks. We started making mental lists of what we needed to take care of if we were stuck in Israel for the next two months. We could pay bills online. We could ask our neighbor to water our plants. Dave would need to get disability insurance benefits. In the end, it started to seem as not all that bad. We decided we'd use the time to take an intensive course in Hebrew. Hebrew Braille?

Finally the doctor got through all of the straightforward cases and called us in. Both he and the junior doctor who saw us initially spoke very good English. They joked and laughed with each other. They asked us questions about being tourists in Israel. The senior doctor said he was supposed to go to the thermal baths near Hebron today but that his colleague was obviously jealous and didn't want him to go. We laughed, and it helped. Dave let go of my hand and I started breathing regularly again. The senior doctor spent a long time looking into the depths of Dave's eye. At the end, he decided that the condition was not an emergency and that it could wait until we finish our vacation and go back to the US. This was excellent news, so excellent that we weren't even a little bit upset over the vanishing chance to spend the next two months in Israel wading in the Mediterranean and learning Hebrew. We rode the taxi back to the hotel, shared the good news with our families, rested a bit, and then had a large extended family dinner at an Italian restaurant up on the hills not too far from the hospital.

I think the taxi cab drivers who drove us to and from the hospital were the only drivers on this trip who didn't try to rip us off. One turned on the meter without us having to ask for it, and the other one charged us a very reasonable flat fee. Both of them seemed scared to turn towards us, possibly because of the danger that we might sneeze. In the hospital itself, the containers with the liquid anti-bacterial wash were placed on every door, desk and bed without exception. The hospital seemed to be one of the places where the Jewish and the Muslim populations come together to work and for treatment. Hence the metal detectors at the entrance? All of the doctors and the nurses on staff today seemed to be non-religious.

To hear amusing anecdotes from the patient himself, read his blog.

Unfinished

2009-12-31T09:33:00.000-08:00

And so we're approaching the New Year's Eve, the most important event in the Russian calendar, the holiday to make all the other holidays unnecessary, the party to obviate all other parties. My parents have been texting family and friends all day long, inventing clever wordings for standard sentiments of goodwill, something more than the simple We wish you very happy 2010, may it bring you health, happiness and everything that you might desire. The first thing we tried to do when we woke up in Haifa this morning was to reserve a restaurant where to reign the New Year in, but the results of our efforts are unclear. There are too many Russians in this city, all the restaurants are booked solid. All of them were telling us that their outside seating is still available, and that's what we're counting on. Our first choice is a restaurant called Nemo, as in Captain Nemo or Nemo the fish.

Happy New Year.