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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.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Meet the Internet
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.
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.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Gulf of Finland
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Travel mode
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Mice Might Help
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).
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).
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Galich on Pasternak, my translation
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!
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!
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Prieto on Mandelshtam (and Pasternak)
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Guest blog post on Well-Read Donkey
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.
"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.
Friday, May 21, 2010
The cute Ray Bradbury
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Narrated monologue or free indirect discourse
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.
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.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Daniil Kharms and other coincidences
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!
And another piece:
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.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Jim Shepard on video
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.
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.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Psycho-narration
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":
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Blok's "You walk by, unsmiling"
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.
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
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."
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."
Monday, April 5, 2010
an excerpt from “Broken Glass Park”
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..
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..
Thursday, April 1, 2010
A classic from Fyodor Tyutchev
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)
Nor measured by the common mile:
Her status is unique, without kind –
Russia can only be believed in.
(Translation by Alex Cigale)
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Robert Rozhdestvensky
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Characters not people
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Counterfactual speculations
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.
"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.
Monday, March 15, 2010
SPb to SF
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.
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.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Bestuzhevskaya ulitsa
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.
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.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Three Borises
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.
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.
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