First day in Rio

Two days ago when we arrived to Rio the weather was sweltering hot. It was at least ten degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the jungle, and almost as humid. Typically, Dave revels in hot weather while I become sluggish and moody, but after the Amazon it seems like we can be Okay anywhere. (I know that this feeling might be short-lived, but I'm riding it while it lasts.) We met our lovely Airbnb hosts Marcelle and Davog, and after some puttering about their apartment went out and spent the second half of the day exploring Rio on foot. We didn't have much luck that day finding anything our guidebook and our friends recommended, and everything we did find was already closed. No matter--getting lost is quickly becoming an art in today's world where google maps chart every major metropolis the world over. We enjoyed meandering about the downtown neighborhoods of Rio, some in greater states of disrepair than others, occasionally stopping to replenish our energy with traditional pão de queijo--a cheese pie, some dried banana, cookies, and nuts. When we reached the top of the hill of Santa Teresa neighborhood, Dave took a power nap on a bench that stood there seemingly for that exact purpose. Little did he know that a few hours later we'd be climbing back to the top of this same hill, lost again on our way home.

We wanted to find the music scene we'd heard about and also a nice place for dinner, but as it turns out, Rio is a huge city (yes, yes, this should've been clear before we set out) and google is not an entirely reliable source of information in Rio (especially since we can hardly read Portuguese). Eventually we had some pizza--but it was a sardine pizza, quite good!--and a couple of drinks in a random place in Lapa. There was music there, but the band stopped playing five minutes after we ordered. It was simply that kind of night. So we occupied ourselves with people watching and making more plans, none of which came to transpire because shortly after leaving the bar, we made another wrong turn and found ourselves hiking up the same mountain we came down a few hours before. And did I mention that Rio was sweltering hot?

Finally, we made it back to Marcelle and Davog's place, took showers, and fell asleep. I woke up around 5 am from the heat. Our hosts have a hammock on the balcony next to our room, and I stepped out there to see if being outside made any difference. It didn't. Air-conditioning isn't very common in average houses in Brazil, and the overhead fan wasn't doing much damage. Dave blissfully slept. I washed my face and lay down again--to read on my Kindle. Eventually, I dozed off and slept on-and-off until 7 am. When we met our hosts for breakfast, they'd already picked up the morning paper with the weather report: apparently, Dave slept through the hottest recorded night in Rio. The temperature reached at 42 Celsius or 107.6 Fahrenheit. It felt like an achievement to not only experience this but to do so with pleasure. And we did--we are--having fun with it all.

O Rio, Rio

Thanks to two early Soviet authors, Ilyia Ilf and Evgenij Petrov, probably every Russian over thirty years old has dreamed of setting foot in Rio de Janeiro. The dream is not a particularly specific one--to a Russian raised behind the Iron Curtain, Rio stood for everything exciting and beautiful that existed in the world completely inaccessible to Soviet citizens. The plot of Ilf and Petrov's great satirical novel, The Twelve Chairs (1927), is predicated on the main character's dream to escape USSR for Rio. Here's a clip from 1976 Soviet movie where great Andrei Mironov terribly overacts and sings an ode to Rio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIc08Hm_jL4. "O Rio, Rio, there's sun and music all around--there's everything one needs for happiness, except... me--I'm not there."

In the 1920s, when Ilf and Petrov's character Ostap Bender dreamed of going there, Rio was a rapidly expanding city - then still the capital of Brazil. The swamps were drained, the population increasing rapidly, great theatres, hippodromes, and hotels were built--the famous Hotel Copacabana opened in 1923. Advertisements for the city must have circulated in all the European newspapers and made it all the way to Soviet Russia--"perhaps I trusted the brochures and pamphlets too much," sings Mironov, impersonating Bender. The lyrics are from the 1970s, but the 1920s novel is the close source material. Rio was the ultimate destination, a combination of a Wild West spirit and Euro-style luxury. Ostap, a Quixotic character of sorts, never got to Rio. Today we are a million miles removed from the era of the Iron Curtain. None of this is at all relevant to our contemporary experience of Rio, and yet I find that it still needs to be mentioned and remembered. The Ostap Bender Rio connection.

Four days on the Amazon

After a night in Manaus, Dave and I spent four days and three nights in the Amazon. Dave did a lot of research ahead of time to find the right tour company to take us into the jungle. Many of the companies seemed to offer very similar packages, and Dave was frustrated trying to differentiate between them. Finally, he settled on Gero Amazon Tours because our guidebook credited Gero for giving back to the community and for being very conscientious about the environment. When we got to Manaus, one of the guides picked us up from the airport and drove us to our hotel--we were booked to spend one night in town before heading out into the jungle. One of the first things we learned about the operation was the Gero was a man, the owner of the business, and that currently he was away from the area, visiting his parents. Later, it came out that he went to visit his mother in another part of the Amazon--in the process of getting his business off the ground, he hadn't seen his mother in over twelve years.

In the morning of our first jungle day, we got picked up at the hotel and driven to the port of Manaus on the Rio Negro. From there, we took a boat to the "meeting of the waters," the place where two great rivers, one that originates in the mountains of Peru and another that originates in Columbia, come together to form one great Amazon. The rivers are so different in their current, depth, temperature, and consistency that they flow side by side for six kilometers before the waters mix together. The line in the water is very clear, it's like stepping from a shaded area--the dark Rio Negro--into the light, the mud-colored Solimões river. Solimões carries more sediment than Rio Negro, and therefore supports more biodiversity within its waters and in the surrounding jungle. From this cross-over point, the boat took us upstream on the Solimões, to a small village of about hundred familes. There we boarded a bus, and our guides drove us for about an hour down a paved two-lane road--an Amazon highway--before at some point turning onto a dirt road for another twenty or so minutes. The dirt of the dirt road was of bright red color--thick clay, and the scenery was mostly family houses surrounded by plantations and farms (not at all the jungle the way we'd imagined it). Most of the houses in this area stood on stilts because in the high season the river rises about 12-14 feet. In the river itself we also saw houseboats--houses built on top of giant logs. These logs, we learned, are quite expensive and anyhow, cutting down big trees in the Amazon can now lead to very large fines and/or jail sentences. The farms that we passed varied from multi-hectar banana plantations to cattle farms to patches of land with overgrown fruit trees. The level of income seemed to vary significantly. On the way, our guides delivered passengers they had picked up in the village--a woman with kids and groceries, another single woman, coming back from work in the village or on the plantation.

At the end of the long bus ride we reached another river port, this one even smaller than the one before--it took us a few days to realize that it was a different river that, perhaps, connects to the greater Amazon in high season, but not necessarily. From that point on, another twenty-minute speedboat ride deposited us at the lodge at the end of what the guides called "a lake," but to us looked like a thin water channel hidden in the grass. There are two seasons in the Amazon, the wet and the dry. It started to rain bigtime on the day of our arrival, but the water had been rising steadily for a few weeks already. It reaches the high point at the end of June and beginning of July. Then it slowly starts to dry up, and in October-November, the guides told us that they had to walk for about a mile down the clay path at the bottom of the lake to get to the lodge.

Altogether our trip to the lodge took about four hours (no walking required). We were about 100 kilometers south of Manaus. We arrived to the lodge two days before Christmas. Gero was away--for the first time since the lodge had been built--and everything the guides did had a slightly improvised quality to it. Not because they didn't know what they were doing--all of them grew up on the Amazon, and some even came from this very same lakeside community--but because they regarded Christmas as their biggest holiday of the year and were preparing to party. Gero's absence clearly shook them out of their routine and added looseness to everyone's mood. Christmas was the guides' favorite holiday of the year, and they were ready to party.

It took us a few trips up and down the river to understand something about the spirit of this lakeside community. At first, focused on trying to spot all the toucans, hawks, vultures, and colibri flying around, caimans hiding in the grass, and in the muddy water dolphins, piranhas, and flying fish, we hardly even paid attention to the houses that stood high up on the shores, each on stilts, each with a motor boat or two pushed into the mud at the makeshift dock down below. Returning after an evening dolphin-spotting trip, we noticed that some of the houses had Christmas lights lit up. A few months before, the government had connected this community to the power grid by running a line from one of the central villages. Before that, some of the houses--although not all--used generators for power. They had electric light, fridges, TVs, satellite dishes, cell phones (although cell phones don't work in the jungle, but they still use them to store pictures and videos), but no computers yet because no Internet, and no power tools of any significance that we noticed. (Of course, these will come in short order).

The shores of this lake seemed to be populated by various members of the same family--or maybe a few several families. Our guide pointed out two churches standing on opposite shores, one Catholic, one Protestant, both looking quite new. There's a small school for the little kids and Gero and the guides are planning to build a bigger school for the community this year. To get to school, the bigger kids right now have to take the boat to a village about 30-40 minutes away, and they only can get there when the water's high enough (approximately January to September).

On the second day (or was it still the first day?), trying to hide from thunder and lightning that hit us in the middle of another monkey or sloth-spotting expedition, we took cover in a "jungle bar"--a floating house, whose owner runs a bar and something of a general store for the village. Our guide led us in the purchase of beer and proceeded to play a few rounds of pool with the bar owner and a couple of other guys whiling away the rainy hour. The general store carried corn chips, baby powder, deodorant, products of feminine hygiene, jars of Spam, breakfast rolls, frozen hot dogs, instant coffee, tape, raisers, band-aids, and in addition to beer also sweet wine and rum. In the corner of the room stood a TV set covered that day by a cloth, but on Christmas day--on what became an obligatory stop-over at the jungle bar for our guide--we saw it uncovered and playing a DVD track that seemed to go along with the music.

Christmas in Brazil is celebrated by a big family dinner on Christmas Eve and a public show or a party (in Rio) on Christmas day. (The Christmas Day spectacular in Manaus was, oddly enough, produced by an Orlando, FL-based entertainment company, Hardrive productions). Because the guides were partying--and our guide, the charismatic Lucivaldo, best of all--we got invited to an after-dinner Christmas Eve party at another local bar, in the middle of what is quickly becoming a new village--right next to the new school and the Catholic church. The family who runs this bar was also celebrating the birthday of their mother, grandmother, and probably a great-grandmother, who turned sixty-six. The centerpiece of the party was a giant red and white Christmas/birthday cake and crazy dancing to the music off a CD that contained about five or so tracks, repeated on a loop. An hour before midnight, the family members started to toast the matriarch, and it immediately became clear that to reach the age of sixty-six is a very significant event in this community. Lucivaldo told us that she was among the five or six oldest women here. She was crying the whole time as she was receiving congratulations, any several of her family members broke down in tears in the middle of their speeches.

It's hard to remember in retrospect what we'd expected coming to the Amazon. Probably, the endless jungle. The crazy cool and scary animals. The great river, as big as the sea. The tribal people living deep in the jungle and drinking ayahuasca. There's lots to say about all of that, and in much greater detail than I'm able to do at the moment. It's clear that the Amazon is changing rapidly and unstoppably. After leaving the jungle, in Manaus airport, we met a man who works for an American company that's drilling for oil in the Amazon. On the other hand, the guides who grew up in the area, told us that as of seven or so years ago, the new government created stricter laws targeted against people who were messing with the old growth jungle, and not only did the government establish the laws, but they also started to follow through and prosecuting people on the environmental charges. Yes, we spotted as many empty beer cans and plastic bottles on the sides of the river as caiman and sloths and monkeys put together, but Lucivaldo told us that every year in the dry season he and Gero's other guides survey the grounds and pick up all the metal and plastic that they can find. It was weird to me, by the end of the third day, how much at home I felt in the jungle--and that despite the heat and humidity, and the rain and the constantly damp clothes, and the mosquitoes, ants who found their way to pieces of candy and chocolate at the bottom of my purse, and the potentially dangerous animals. The Amazon felt not altogether different from the Russian countryside where I spent my summers growing up. But this is a topic for another time.

For Dave's experience of the Amazon and Brazil, please read his blog here: http://blog.bewilder.com/. He's got more stories to tell and he's also got photos!

From SF to Manaus

Travel day yesterday. We crossed a couple of continents and landed, after a brief stop in Panama City, in Manaus, the city that advertizes itself as--and probably is--the gateway to the Amazon. The city largely owes its existence to the rubber boom at the end of the 19th Century, when the industrialization of production of rubber created immense fortunes, and also when a lot of local population was displaced and forced to work on the plantations. We didn't know any of these things yesterday and are learning everything as we go along.

Little things strike me as we travel. The airport in Panama City resembled nothing more than a Los Angeles Grayhound station: everything about the airport, for example, the bathrooms, is similar to a US airport (all the toilets and the sinks, for example, are likely made by same company), but slightly shabbier. In front of the gate, we were surrounded by families with dozens of children, all munching homemade snacks and sipping soda. Possibly because most of our travel is to Europe, we expect the foreignness (in practical terms) to start right away as soon as we cross the border; here, even if the announcements were made in Spanish first and English second, the sense of being abroad was for me largely lacking. We didn't leave the airport in Panama City, of course.

The airport in Manaus is more like a giant warehouse (and still nicer than Pulkovo, that cramped and smoked through gateway to St. Petersburg)--not particularly fancy, but functional. It took us less than fifteen minutes to get our passports stamped and receive our luggage. Then we battled with the ATM machine to receive local currency in the amount that we need (more than it was willing to give us). A guide from the company that will take us to the Amazon today met us at the airport and delivered to the hotel--an unexpected and lovely bonus.

As soon as we got to the hotel, and after spending another half hour checking email, we went out. It had gotten dark early, but it was still balmy. The presence of the forest is felt everywhere in the city. We walked the straightest way possible through downtown to Teatro Amazonas--the main attraction, a salmon pink neo-baroque theatre built by the rubber barons. There was a show in progress on the theatre's magnificent staircase--a rehearsal of a Christmas spectacular. A bunch of bored kids in angel wings danced to the right and to the left, and wiped off sweat from their foreheads after every move. We satisfied ourselves with enough feelings of strangeness and foreignness for one day by getting funky-flavored ice creams (acai was one flavor I tried) and returned to the hotel.

Litcrawl Reading

It's Litquake week in San Francisco -- 850 authors reading at 163 events all around town. And Saturday is Litcrawl, a reading extravaganza that happens in three phases from 6 to 9:30 pm. If you aren't local and thinking when's the best time to visit San Francisco, the weekend of Litcrawl is always a good choice. The city goes mad for literature!

This year, I'll be reading at an event hosted by my friend, a wonderful writer Peg Alford Pursell. The reading is called "Tzara's Hat" and is inspired by Dada art. A few weeks ago, Peg has gathered all the readers in her home for a live writing session. Each of us came up with a word that we wrote down on a scrap of paper, and then we went around pulling these words from a hat and writing for three to five minutes on each word. The idea was to come up with a complete piece of flash fiction in that time--a piece of fiction that included each of these words in the order pulled from the hat. We would then revise these flashes before the actual reading.

I know writing from prompts is popular among poets and among some (experimental) groups of fiction writers. I have not had much experience with it in my own writing--when I started, I would set out prompts for myself, but they were vague (write something funny!) and I never held myself very strictly to the formality of it. This exercise turned out to be a lot of fun--in an odd way, the story ideas I came up with were based on memories from deep within my subconsciousness, experiences and feelings I had not thought of in many years. I enjoyed this exercise very much.

We'll be reading from 6 to 7 pm on Saturday, October 13, at Four Barrel, a coffee shop at 375 Valencia Street. More details are here, on the Litcrawl site. Please come and hear us read these stories, and be as surprised as we were when we shared first drafts with one another about how different these stories turned out and how wonderfully they represent each writer's strengths and interests. Here's a hint: our list of words included "popcorn" and "alien" :)

Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods

One great book I read during this trip was Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods. Published by innovative & Other Stories Press in London, UK, this is a wise and humorous send-up of contemporary corporate culture. The plot--the top layer of meaning--has to do with an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman Joe, who, unable to sell a single Encyclopedia, starts a business capitalizing on his erotic fantasy. He imagines having sex with women stuck leaning out of the window and whose upper body is invisible to him. He conceives of "lightning rods," a contraption that he installs in office buildings to provide top salesmen necessary "release"--and hires women to service these contraptions accordingly. It's a naughty book, a book fully aware of the feminist critique of the masculine gaze that disassembles a woman into discrete body parts (breasts, buttocks, legs, vagina), accepts this property of the gaze for granted and pushes it to its practical limits. Men are constantly thinking of sex--why not provide them with a practical option to satisfy their desires, as a part of Sexual Harassment policy, no less? DeWitt pokes fun at the legalese and euphemistic language of corporate America, lightheartedly picks at the commonplace understanding of male sexuality, and touches at issues of power and domination and the nature of personal and professional success.

Lightning Rods was written in the late 1990s and it took more than a decade for it to find the right publisher. Finally, New Directions in the US and & Other Stories in the UK took up the book. & Other Stories is a two-year old innovative press that aims to publish primarily works in translation but also a few English-language originals. I've heard about it for the first time from my friend Yvette, who became a member of their team of readers. The press aims to bring out four books a year and asks readers to subscribe like they would to a magazine. I joined after examining the titles they already brought out--and a couple of weeks after I subscribed one of their books, Deborah Levy's Swimming Home, was longlisted, and then shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I haven't read this one yet, but I definitely look forward to reading more books from their exciting catalog.

How to Survive in a Walled City

1. Survey your premises. Know where all the gates are.
2. Know the gate nearest to you at all times.
3. In addition to the gates, there must be hidden passages, underground tunnels, ways of scaling the walls. Rats find a way in.
4. Get out of town at the earliest opportunity.
5. A walled city is much better looking from the top of the nearby hill. The last time this city was bombed only twenty years ago.
6. Many people find a walled city a curious tourist destination. They might form a crowd and obstruct your way out by day. Get out into the wilderness in the early morning and don't come back until the cruise ships have moved on.
7. If you're starting to feel aggressive toward your neighbors, escape to the nearest hill to get some fresh air. Buy a cactus. Anything green will help soothe your nerves.
8. If you're feeling claustrophobic in the middle of the night, it's Ok to take a walk to the nearest gate to make sure it's still open. It's Ok to smuggle ice cream from the outside. Nobody will demand that you pay tax to cross the draw bridge.
9. Practice diving and swimming. The sea is close enough. Know your terrain. Can you jump from the wall and survive?
10. Leave at your earliest convenience. Move on. Anywhere with less walls will do.

Zagreb--Ljubljana--Trieste--Split

--Post inspired by Diocletian, the only Roman emperor who, as the legend goes, retired of his own volition, returned to his native province here in Split, and spent the last years of his life tending a vegetable garden.

Remember grade school? For me, every quarter used to start with copying down a schedule of classes for each day, and in addition to that I also created "regimes" for my extracurricular activities. Wake up at 7 am, read for an hour, then go to school, then after school come home and play guitar for an hour, draw or play with my brother, do homework, then read for an hour before sleep. These regimes were invariably proven bogus on the very first day I tried to execute them. No matter what I'd set out to do, and for how long, once I actually got into an activity, it was impossible to stop by the clock, and if I'd happened on a good book, I could read all night without stopping at all.

These regimes were never, ever effective. They aggravated me immensely. Even if reading was the next thing on the list--and I lived to read--I couldn't pick up a book knowing that it would be but a short hour before I would have to put it down. The discreet time unit, and the knowledge that the end would come sooner rather than later, made reading impossible. I couldn't get fully immersed into the world of the book if I had to keep looking at the clock all the time. Without the clock, I lost all track of time. "Do you know how late it is?" I can still remember my grandmother's disturbed expression when she got up in the middle of the night and found me still awake. If I tried to curb my reading after an hour, it was all pointless. I could reread one page ten times without getting much out of it, my mind preoccupied with the unfairness of it all. Why couldn't people just be left alone, and sit on couches and read all day long?

Oddly enough, the habit of making these regimes stuck. I'm still at it. Every half a year or a year or so, I start outlining the schedule of my new life. Long trips usually serve as inspiration -- sometimes I draft a new routine on the flight back. You'd think that over the years my regimes should've gotten better or more realistic, but no such thing. On paper, I can get up at 7 am, go to bed at midnight, and fit in between everything from work and writing to studying German and French, going to the gym, going out with friends, and taking a casual dinner with Dave -- all in one day. Energized after two weeks away, I imagine that I could do all of it with a smile on my face and never get tired.

We're traveling across south-east Europe this week. We've visited four countries in as many days, and today alone crossed two borders. Dave pre-planned most of the trip, and all we need to do now is to stick as closely to the plan as possible. Check into hotels, check out, eat breakfast, lunch, dinner (or dinner at 2 pm and supper at 8 pm to accommodate my parents' mealtimes), pick up and drop off car, get on a bus tomorrow within a certain window of hours, and then continue on with the plan in the next town. There's a huge comfort in having this time-table to follow -- no matter how intense it is, and no matter that if we can't get everything in we end up cutting into sleep time to accomplish more. Part of the comfort for me is that Dave did all the prep work here. It's the difference between being given a schedule of classes to copy and having to design a regime for myself. But even then it's only a comfort for a couple of days or so. Then the schedule begins to oppress. I want to skip the bus, forget about seeing all the amazing and fascinating sights that we're seeing, and spend an entire day at a hotel and read. To forget about all the schedules in the world. This is clearly the beginning of a vacation, the first third. By the end of the two weeks, no doubt, I'll be drafting another regime, dreaming up another lifetime of pursuits and accomplishments.

It's London time, baby!

We leave home, as always, in a rush. Dave has checked off everything on his list; I obsess about little things that don't matter. The new odd smell in our hallway: where did that come from? It smells as if our next-door neighbors who used to smoke pot now switched to smoking rat tails.

We catch our taxi driver on Duboce Street an hour and a half before departure. He senses our stress level right away and takes off with a "yee-haw!" Swerving in and around rush hour traffic, he makes noises of a jockey priming his horse to win by a head. For now, Dave and I are both still plugged in, checking our email, the latest news. Deaths at the US embassy in Lybia, anti-American protests all over the Muslim countries. Have you heard what Romney said? How will this play out for the November election?

Arrive to the airport with minutes to spare. The trunk of the taxi cab won't open. The driver rams into the trunk with enough force to roll the car down the street, but the trunk remains closed. He hands me the key, asking me to keep it turned in the lock, while Dave pushes the trunk, and the driver is inside the cab, tugging at the lever. Then Dave tugs at the lever and the driver pushes the trunk. I'm thinking--what power tools could we use here? Suddenly the trunk pops open.

The routine of travel: a succession of mini-dramas. Tension is built into the time-tables and the temporary ceding of agency. What will be done to us next? How will we react--and will our reactions escalate or diminish the incident, will they affect the rest of the trip? How we cope with the vagaries of travel is determined by our character, and not even our individual characters, but of this joint entity that we represent--a traveling duo. Travel as performance art, and we're students of the genre.

It's a vacation!

We're the very last in line to check in to London. While I worry that we might miss our flight, my parents whom we're meeting in Zagreb, miss theirs. They finally arrive to Zagreb sans mom's luggage, which will now have to travel on and catch up with us (hopefully) in Ljubljana.

Dave and I spend the afternoon in London. A long layover allows us to take Heathrow Express to Paddington, and from there we go to Southwark, roam for an hour through the galleries at the Tate Modern museum, and explore--why not?--the embankment outside with the gorgeous view of the Millennium Footbridge across the Thames, St. Paul's cathedral, London Bridge, and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. We end up at the Borough Market, where we buy sweets and a fish pie to share. Then we return to the airport and, finally, after a short delay, fly to Zagreb.

Transformed Visions: Dave sleeps at the Tate Modern in London

My parents stayed up to wait for us at the hotel. As they tell the story of their missed flight, they're laughing. Why are they laughing? It couldn't have been a pleasant experience. But we're all safe, and together, the experience of being together heightened by our surroundings: a country and a city we've never been to before, and although its history is tied in to the geopolitical events that place me on the other side of the globe from my parents, none of us have any particular reason to be here.

"I was in Zagreb twenty years ago," my dad reminds us.

"Did the place change since then?"

"I can't remember. I remember only the man on the horse--he's still out there, on the square."

Dave and I have already glimpsed the statue from the cab, and perhaps tomorrow we'll get a chance to study it closer. Meantime, it's a comfort to be finally going to bed (it's been a thirty-something-hour day for Dave and me) and to fall asleep knowing that my parents are sleeping in the next room.

For Dave's reflections on our travel experiences, read Dave's blog.

Where Does the Sea Flow

Last year, a young Russian filmmaker, Vitaly Saltykov made a movie based on one of my short stories, and now this movie has made it to the short list of Manhattan Short Film Festival. Here's an interview with the director, where he talks about the filming process and the actors, one of whom is a star of Russian screen, Oksana Akinshina. The movie is making something of a news in Russia because it turned out to be the first Russian film to be selected for this festival. It's also notable as one of the few Russian films made with private, not state, funds.

(I'm credited in the movie and in the interview as Olga Grenetz, because that's how I'm published in Russia)

The movie has to do with a mother-daughter relationship. The girl is a precocious child, and the young mother is having a hard time relating to her. The movie differs from my story in one aspect: according to the movie, the daughter was conceived as a child of rape, while in the short story I had chosen to present two short scenes in medias res, without any background about the characters. It has been a fascinating—if not an entirely comfortable—experience to see how the story evolved in adaptation, but watching the completed film, I admire Vitaly's vision and wisdom that it took to create a fully independent work of art.

Here's the trailer with English subtitles:



Manhattan Short Film Festival will take place from September 28 until October 7, 2012 on three hundred screens around the world. In California, it will play in Fresno, Modesto, Point Arena, and Redding. Look up the venues closest to you here. And here's the webpage for the movie. The story, by the way, is one of the few stories I'd written in Russian, and haven't yet reworked in English. It's a part of my second Russian-language collection published by Limbus Press in 2010, The Keys From the Lost House.

Narrative Tumblr

At Narrative Magazine, we've started a new Tumblr site -- a great new way to rediscover stories, photo galleries, comics, and other media from our archives, and also a platform where we can engage with and comment on current events. Lately, most of my blogging energy has been going into collaborating on this project and magazine's other social media efforts. Check it out!

More travel blogging to come soon -- Dave and I are heading to Croatia end of September :)

H. Porter Abbott's The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Because I have to return this book to the library today and don't want to forget. Abbott introduces a useful term with no precise definition, narrativity.

Narrativity: A disputed term, used here to mean the degree to which a text generates the impression that it is a narrative. Prince coined the term "narrativehood" to refer to the bare minimum required for a narrative to be recognized as a narrative.

Also, this:

Do we need more than one event for there to be narrativity?

She ate lunch. Then she drove the car to work.

In this instance, the additional event does not help a great deal. . . . Narrativity is a matter of degree that does not correlate to the number of devices, qualities, or, for that matter, words that are employed in the narrative.

Brooding, she ate lunch. Then she drove the car to work.

The addition of that one simple word, "brooding," does much to augment narrativity -- that is, the feeling that now we are reading a story. And this may simply be because the word itself is more common to narrative than it is to ordinary discourse. Or it may be because the word gives depth to the character.

Another useful distinction that Abbott makes is between levels of interpretation. He defines three: 1) intentional readings -- that is, trying to recreate the work of the implied author. "The novelist Paul Auster put it simply: 'In a work of fiction, one assumes there is a conscious mind behind the words on the page.'" 2) symptomatic readings -- what does a text tell us about the implied author and the world in which he lived that the author didn't specifically mean to be in the text. A frame different from that with the intention of the implied author; a symptomatic reading can take psychological, feminist, cultural materialist, or any other theoretical lens. 3) adaptive readings. Probably a lot of this happens in writing workshops. I really admire that Abbott highlights the validity of this process -- this is what happens to any attentive and passionate reader. "There is a line one can cross in doing interpretation, on the other side of which one is no longer supporting a reading from an analysis of the evidence but creating a reading by adaptation. But since some degree of creation is a part of all interpretation, finding this line puts us in yet another gray area."

Lovely book. As always, with theoretical texts, I make the mistake of trying to read from the beginning to the end. Ran out of time and got only to Chapter 10. Now have to give this one back to the library -- I think next on my agenda is Umberto Eco's Interpretation and Overinterpretation.

A Letter from a Reader

Today I got a letter from Elea Carey, an editor at A River & Sound Review, a magazine that published my story The Third Place. The story had to do with one gesture of compassion and empathy that one train passenger extended to another. Elea wrote:

"I was taking the train from Reno to SF (Emeryville, actually). To get time alone with no wifi, no kids, no sick father, and no dogs to walk was a total blessing. I was enjoying it by writing an extra long and detailed journal entry when, just as we came out of a tunnel near Donner Pass, the woman in the seat behind me burst into tears. The train car got very quiet but no one moved to do anything. I sat for a moment, then I closed my computer and went back to her  and said, "Tell me about it.""

Small gestures count a great deal, I think. And they take a great deal of courage.

Bus ride to Arizona

On Wednesday night it became clear that my gamble failed. Instead of going down, the prices for the last-minute airfare to Phoenix kept climbing. One way tickets were now being sold for over $650. I had promised Dave that I would join him for the weekend part of this trip, and would visit with him his aunt and his childhood friend. Dave and I have been together for fifteen years, our relationship lasting in a large part because we know how to have a good time together. But lately I've been so focused on my work and writing that I've been putting in fifteen-hour days, including weekends. To pry me away from my books and the computer is becoming increasingly difficult. Dave goes to an annual conference in Scottsdale, and after the conference he takes time to hang out with Bill and Jen and their kids, and with aunt Linda and uncle Stan. I have met Bill and Jen twice, briefly, at our wedding and then at theirs. Linda and Stan used to come to San Francisco to visit Stan's son Brad, but last year Brad moved away to Las Vegas, and I see Linda and Stan once a year, during annual family Thanksgiving in New York. I promised Dave I would go on the trip, but procrastinated on buying the tickets. Dave didn't insist; he probably thought I was trying to bail. After all, I do have an endless reading list.

Things got more intense when my friend Toni, who lives in London, emailed that she is in San Francisco for a couple of days, and wants to have lunch together. I asked her to have breakfast together instead, and we met Thursday morning at cafe Tartine. Dave texted me to say that it was official: the prices for Friday morning flight weren't going down. He was surprised and pleased, I think, when I told him I would take the bus. I did some research, and the price was right: $110 to Phoenix, but everything else about the trip seemed outrageous. I would have to leave San Francisco Thursday night, and would arrive to Phoenix after a 17,5 hour ride at 3:30 pm on Friday. I laughed when I looked at the itinerary on the screen, and then realized: I could do it. Why not? I could read on the bus, and using my new fancy Asus EeeePad, I could even write on the bus. Yes, sleeping on the bus wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world, but I've done it often enough in college, going between Rochester, NY and NYC, and I have to say that airplane seats aren't all that much more comfortable. The only thing that stopped me from considering the option was that nobody I know in San Francisco ever takes the bus anywhere. Flights to Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix are generally cheap enough, and road trips on the West Coast do take a long time. Things are more spread out. There are mountains to cross.

So, on Thursday morning, I packed my overnight bag, and ran out to meet Toni for breakfast. It was raining in San Francisco, which was annoying because I had to wear boots and pack sandals for the desert. I also had to take my umbrella, which as of that morning, has come undone in three places and was almost but not entirely useless. I ran five long blocks to cafe Tartine, where Toni was already waiting for me. The place was packed, as usual, and they didn't have the one thing Toni wanted on the menu. We got pastries, and talked about everything we could talk about in 45 minutes. She was telling me about visiting her mother and sister in Hungary, and also that her husband Eric and she are planning a big neighborhood party in London for the Queen's anniversary of fifty years being a queen. Eric and Toni are planning a gigantic potluck for the neighbors and lots of games and charades for the kids. She invited me to visit, and I would love to, but, but, but.

As I ran out of the cafe, I realized I left behind my umbrella. I looked for it for a couple of minutes, but somebody must've grabbed it. I happily let it go. The rain had all but stopped, and I didn't need a broken umbrella with me in Arizona. At 10:30 am, not much later than usual, I was at work, where the first order of business was to pay for my Greyhound ticket online. I did, and texted Dave, and soon Dave replied that he bought the return tickets -- by air, arriving to San Francisco at 1 am Monday morning, but first class. Gambling on airfare results in the oddest itineraries. Work went very well after this. I cleared my inbox from 60 down to 30 messages, no small feat after a week of not much progress. At 6:30 pm, I went to a reading -- a monthly reading series, InsideStoryTime, organized by James Warner, Yanina Gotsulsky, and Ransom Stephens, where they feature five or six different writers each month. Yanina was reading a part from her novel, an event I didn't want to miss. I've known her for three years, and haven't heard her read before. She selected a very dramatic chapter, in which her protagonist meets the man of her dreams, count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy :) The setting is a train car between Moscow and Leningrad in the late 1980s, which makes the scene all the more bold and fascinating -- and also seemed all the more relevant because of my current predicament. Yanina's reading reminded me that in the 1980s in the Soviet Union one couldn't just hop on a train (or a bus) and travel to another city. One had to have a reason for travel, special travel papers, and on arrival had to register either with the hotel, or if visiting relatives, with the local police department. I think that's how it was. These rules still apply to the foreigners visiting Russia today.

After the reading, I walked to the bus station. It was no longer raining, and the evening was quite warm. I walked through the touristy Union Square, where young people had flocked from all over the Bay Area to start celebrating St. Patty's day early. I crossed Market Street into SOMA, where people with badges on their chests were getting out from some after-conference parties and looking for more parties. This was the most physically challenging part of the trip, navigating through crowds of slow-moving people with two overpacked bags on my shoulders. One tipsy man, not watching where he was going, barely avoided collision and exclaimed, "Oh, shit!" It's a character trait really, not "Oh, sorry!" or "Excuse me," but -- "Oh, shit!"

I don't know when the current Greyhound terminal in San Francisco was constructed -- and aren't they building a new one? -- but it looked shiny and new. A small, enclosed waiting room in front of a large parking lot for buses. I seem to remember taking a bus to Los Angeles several years ago from a different terminal -- a grungy, run-down place that seemed to have not been renovated since the 1960s. This was different. I had an e-ticket, and so was able to get in line immediately after a very brisk security bag search. The line consisted primarily of Japanese and Indian students going to LA, hardly anybody older than me. The kids sat on the floor waiting to get on board. Direct bus routes from San Francisco go to Northern California, Los Angeles, and outside of California only to Las Vegas and Reno. I didn't see neither Portland nor Seattle on the board. Nor, for that matter, Phoenix or Tucson -- to get to Arizona, I had to go to LA first. Which was fine by me. I slept for most of that ride, disturbed only by the stops the bus was making: San Jose, Gilroy, etc, etc -- I remember the stops, but was too sleepy to register the names of the towns.

We arrived to Los Angeles at 6 am, and my transfer to Phoenix was at 7 am. The bus station in Los Angeles is larger than San Francisco, includes a cafe on premises (in San Francisco there were only vending machines, where I bought a bottle of water). I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, and then read, waiting for the bus to arrive. The crowd at the bus station in Los Angeles was very different. A lot of Mexicans, white men wearing cowboy hats, elderly couples, single parents with unhappy teenage kids. The bus took off half-empty, but started filling up as we made the first stops on the outskirts of LA. Soon, the driver announced that 51 out of 55 seats were full. Greyhound was in demand! The sun rose as we left the urban area behind, and for the last three hours I've been watching the landscape change slowly. Well-irrigated green fields and pastures have disappeared, slowly giving way to low-lying shrubs. At some point, I noticed mountains on my left -- a wall of sharply outlined reddish-brown rock -- and later, mountains on the right as well. The road we're on doesn't have much of a slope, but I can see two parallel lines of mountains intersecting ahead of us. An illusion of perspective, or are we actually going to cross a mountain range to get to Arizona? The landscape is all sand and intermittent brush, but no cacti yet. And the sky is blue. It was foggy in LA, almost as humid as in San Francisco, and it might have even drizzled while I slept. But there isn't much humidity in the air now. I wish I had a map or a 3G phone with me now, to be able to pinpoint the geography of where I am. This is my version of the American dream, I guess: for a $110, you get on the bus, and you go wherever you like. Why haven't I thought of this before? Why don't I travel to Arizona every, well, every other weekend?

It's good to know that Dave is going to be there when I get off the bus in Phoenix.

Lit mags and Adam Bellow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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"

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

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.