After up to two hours clicking away on the Rosetta Stone every day, I wake up in the middle of the night with Russian words running through my head. Not only do I hear the words, I also see the accompanying picture and the written words.
Last night I woke up counting in Russian. Adine, dvey, tre...this blog doesn't do cyrillic as far as I know.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Saturday, September 8, 2007
I'm going back to Russia...
.in January.
I just got a 4 month leave from work to go back to Russia to study the Russian language.
Would I be going to Russia in January had I not gone to SLS this past summer? Nope.
So, this time I plan to go to Kazan, in the Republic of Tatarstan, and take Russian language classes.
I just got a 4 month leave from work to go back to Russia to study the Russian language.
Would I be going to Russia in January had I not gone to SLS this past summer? Nope.
So, this time I plan to go to Kazan, in the Republic of Tatarstan, and take Russian language classes.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Sunset from Smelt Bay
Great sunset, he says to us as we're about to leave the beach. The show is just about over and the stragglers from the neighbourhood who don't get a direct view from their oceanside decks have been walking the beach to catch the sunset, the first "good" one in several weeks because of the rain and overcast weather.
Yes, we agree, beautiful.
Too bad, he adds, now that he has our attention, that all that beauty is caused by chemtrails.
Chemtrails? Oh oh.
Yeah, he says, they're spraying the skies with chemicals to stop global warming, or maybe they're spraying the skies with anti-depressants to keep us all more or less happy.
I'm not sure what to think about either of these theories, or to take them as seriously as I take the fact that "Canada" is selling depleted uranium to the United States.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Birdwatching
Sitting on a lawnchair and looking towards the south, I saw a large, dark bird hunched on a branch of a fir tree. A raven, I thought. Or an eagle, maybe. I didn't really pay too much attention to this silouetted figure as both ravens and eagles are common on Cortes Island, so much so that I have become less excited about their appearances as they glide overhead, screaming as they clutch a mole or mouse in their claws -- or, in the case of the raven, a sandwich stolen from someone's lunchbox.
Well, I'm sitting in the heat towards the end of the day, when the sun is losing the greatest power and the sun's rays offer the memory of heat more than heat itself, and I notice this hunched shape on the tree, and mention it to Steve. What do you think that is, I ask him, a raven or an eagle?
I don't see anything, he answers, and continues to suck on the stub of a Bandi cigar and work on the cryptic crossword.
If there is a drama unfolding out there in my yard, I want to be fully part of it, so I keep looking at the fir tree until I realize that there is more than one of these hunch-shaped birds sitting in the tree. There are two, three, no five. I count them, and the more I look, the more of them I see until I count up to nine birds hunching in the trees in a small grove of cedar, fir, and spruce trees just to the left of where I am sitting, and about 100 feet away from me. The sun has not set, and in fact we haven't even begun to plan our evening's trek to watch the sunset, but the sun is less intense than it has been all day, and the birds, whatever they are, seem to be settling down into the branches. And with that many of them, I know they are not eagles. And I've never seen ravens stay that still, or remain that quiet, for that long, so I know they are not ravens, either. And the body shape isn't right either, anyway. So, I keep watching, and then notice glimmers of bright red, the colour of blood, on their necks, and then I recognize these nine black shapes on the trees 100 feet away from me are turkey vultures.
They're turkey vultures, I tell Steve. Nine of them.
Nine turkey vultures sitting in trees, looking down at one spot, can mean only one thing. Death. Because these vultures aren't swooping to the ground, I can't tell where this dead thing might be, but it's pretty certain that it is not far from where these vultures are hunching and surveying the land below. But they are just sitting there, and one of them has even opened his wings like a thunderbird and is soaking up the last of the sun.
The blackberries are starting to come out, which means weeks of picking ahead of us, unless it starts to rain and they get bogged down. We plan our walk down Hayes Road, past several banks of blackberry bushes and straight on to a public beach access where I can look for my daily piece of beach glass and water polished pieces of oyster shell art. We will pick our way down to the beach, watch the sunset, and then pick our way back up home again.
We get enough berries to satisfy our immediate berry gluttony, and then some for breakfast. Steve lies against a rock on the beach, too tired after a day of spreading plastic over the fibreglass insulation, riding his bike, swimming, and walking, to look for beach glass or polished oyster shells, so it's up to me to find this stuff, which is for my own amusement anyway.
Back at the property, one 2-centimetre by 2.3-centimetre piece of beach glass (clear) later, the vultures are still vulturing, and Steve pushes through the salal and oregon grape to find the dead thing, because by now the vultures are swooping down from the branches and into the brush and staying there before swooshing up again. But, he can't find anything and this morning I go out there and look for myself, girding myself for the possibility of finding a dead person, or a dog, or a cat. But, I find a fawn, its head bent backwards and its four legs folded into each other, looking as if it had died while sleeping, curled into a ball. There are a few holes pecked into the fawn, but mostly the botflies are having their day, and the vultures, who are still hanging around, fly off as I enter the scene, circling while I investigate.
There is of course nothing to be done, now that I know that there is no need to bring in the police, so I leave the vultures to their business, making a note to myself to return to the scene to collect the bones.
Well, I'm sitting in the heat towards the end of the day, when the sun is losing the greatest power and the sun's rays offer the memory of heat more than heat itself, and I notice this hunched shape on the tree, and mention it to Steve. What do you think that is, I ask him, a raven or an eagle?
I don't see anything, he answers, and continues to suck on the stub of a Bandi cigar and work on the cryptic crossword.
If there is a drama unfolding out there in my yard, I want to be fully part of it, so I keep looking at the fir tree until I realize that there is more than one of these hunch-shaped birds sitting in the tree. There are two, three, no five. I count them, and the more I look, the more of them I see until I count up to nine birds hunching in the trees in a small grove of cedar, fir, and spruce trees just to the left of where I am sitting, and about 100 feet away from me. The sun has not set, and in fact we haven't even begun to plan our evening's trek to watch the sunset, but the sun is less intense than it has been all day, and the birds, whatever they are, seem to be settling down into the branches. And with that many of them, I know they are not eagles. And I've never seen ravens stay that still, or remain that quiet, for that long, so I know they are not ravens, either. And the body shape isn't right either, anyway. So, I keep watching, and then notice glimmers of bright red, the colour of blood, on their necks, and then I recognize these nine black shapes on the trees 100 feet away from me are turkey vultures.
They're turkey vultures, I tell Steve. Nine of them.
Nine turkey vultures sitting in trees, looking down at one spot, can mean only one thing. Death. Because these vultures aren't swooping to the ground, I can't tell where this dead thing might be, but it's pretty certain that it is not far from where these vultures are hunching and surveying the land below. But they are just sitting there, and one of them has even opened his wings like a thunderbird and is soaking up the last of the sun.
The blackberries are starting to come out, which means weeks of picking ahead of us, unless it starts to rain and they get bogged down. We plan our walk down Hayes Road, past several banks of blackberry bushes and straight on to a public beach access where I can look for my daily piece of beach glass and water polished pieces of oyster shell art. We will pick our way down to the beach, watch the sunset, and then pick our way back up home again.
We get enough berries to satisfy our immediate berry gluttony, and then some for breakfast. Steve lies against a rock on the beach, too tired after a day of spreading plastic over the fibreglass insulation, riding his bike, swimming, and walking, to look for beach glass or polished oyster shells, so it's up to me to find this stuff, which is for my own amusement anyway.
Back at the property, one 2-centimetre by 2.3-centimetre piece of beach glass (clear) later, the vultures are still vulturing, and Steve pushes through the salal and oregon grape to find the dead thing, because by now the vultures are swooping down from the branches and into the brush and staying there before swooshing up again. But, he can't find anything and this morning I go out there and look for myself, girding myself for the possibility of finding a dead person, or a dog, or a cat. But, I find a fawn, its head bent backwards and its four legs folded into each other, looking as if it had died while sleeping, curled into a ball. There are a few holes pecked into the fawn, but mostly the botflies are having their day, and the vultures, who are still hanging around, fly off as I enter the scene, circling while I investigate.
There is of course nothing to be done, now that I know that there is no need to bring in the police, so I leave the vultures to their business, making a note to myself to return to the scene to collect the bones.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Identity
I feel like I am very far away from St Petersburg, now, living in a place where I put my baseball cap on backwards, don't wash my hair for days in a row by choice, where I walk on forest paths instead of concrete...
We're sleeping in a tent, cooking in a camper, washing in a lake, walking down to see the sunset every night at Smelt Bay, and eating a lot of spinach salad. The pug toddles around the property, and luckily we have a sawdust covered meandering path between the cabin, which we are getting ready for drywalling, and the camper, where pug spends most of his time watching for stray bits of food to fall his way. I concern myself with important things like "is there any beach glass here on this beach?" or "should I close my eyes while I am lying in the sun, or keep them open?", or, "pass me another beer, would ya?" The pug just looks at me, though, when I say this, and I have to get up and go over to the camper where the Swedish made propane fridge looks after chilling the Argentinian beer that was on sale. Take one out. Put another one in. Adjust my baseball cap. Think about ... nothing.
I realized this morning that I could take my laptop to the power shed across the road and sit on a rock next to a plug and write. But six pileated woodpeckers flew through the yard, and I forgot about writing. I briefly thought about the Russian soul and came up with a blank. The Russian soul? What is?
We are almost out of bread.
I want to build a round domed building on the property. I imagine myself sitting in the middle of it, and I imagine windows all the way around, and rain falling in the middle of winter.
What does it mean, to grade a paper?
We're sleeping in a tent, cooking in a camper, washing in a lake, walking down to see the sunset every night at Smelt Bay, and eating a lot of spinach salad. The pug toddles around the property, and luckily we have a sawdust covered meandering path between the cabin, which we are getting ready for drywalling, and the camper, where pug spends most of his time watching for stray bits of food to fall his way. I concern myself with important things like "is there any beach glass here on this beach?" or "should I close my eyes while I am lying in the sun, or keep them open?", or, "pass me another beer, would ya?" The pug just looks at me, though, when I say this, and I have to get up and go over to the camper where the Swedish made propane fridge looks after chilling the Argentinian beer that was on sale. Take one out. Put another one in. Adjust my baseball cap. Think about ... nothing.
I realized this morning that I could take my laptop to the power shed across the road and sit on a rock next to a plug and write. But six pileated woodpeckers flew through the yard, and I forgot about writing. I briefly thought about the Russian soul and came up with a blank. The Russian soul? What is?
We are almost out of bread.
I want to build a round domed building on the property. I imagine myself sitting in the middle of it, and I imagine windows all the way around, and rain falling in the middle of winter.
What does it mean, to grade a paper?
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Like the Last Episode of the Sopranos
I don't care what you think, he tells me on the phone yesterday, just tell me what you did.
Okay. Those words, an inaccurate quotation from my brother, who I shall call Donald the Guileless in this blog, jerked me back to the Dashboard of this blog, mostly because he also said that reading the last entry in my blog was like watching the annoying last episode of the Sopranos, and that he felt abandoned.
Well, I wanted to tell him, not much happens up here on Forbidden Plateau, despite the promise of the name.
Of course he knows, Donald the Guileless, that not much happens up here, having once admonished me for living in such an out of the way community. But I think he was frustrated when he said that, having become lost on the one road that leads to where I live.
But in a way he's right. Not that I abandoned anyone who may have been reading this blog, but that I abandoned the trip to Russia, because it is now, I realize, that the comparisons are starting to happen. Now, when I drive into town, or walk down Forbidden Plateau Road, or shop in a grocery store, walk into a museum, look into the water of a river, answer my email -- now, when I do those things, I am thinking of Petersburg, and what things were like in Petersburg.
But oh, I won't tell you what I think, I'll just get on with things. Like my morning walk.
The story goes like this:
I now wake up every morning, my legs shuffling around in the bottom half of the bed, anxious to get themselves pounding on concrete, the way, I think, they pounded on the concrete of Petersburg, to the point that my hips ached. I'm missing that aching feeling, and when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I want to do is get outside and walk on the concrete sidewalks.
I have had to settle for the pavement of Forbidden Plateau Road, spurning the spongey wooded paths of Nymph Falls Park and opting for the harsh density of road. It's like this: when I walk in the woods, I keep imagining, smelling even, the musk of a black bear, or hearing the connivings of a cougar, and now that the pug is too old to come on walks with me, I have no bear or cougar bait, becoming instead the potential main target for any predator. When I walk the paths, I am in a state of constant arousal, the hair on the back of my neck sticks up, and I keep looking behind me, or into the woods, for the bear or the cougar.
The thing is, I've discovered, when I walk on the road, I don't imagine cougars or bears stalking just out of sight and sound. I figure they are deeper in the woods staying away from the roar of motors. Not that there are that many cars on my road -- I counted 1 this morning, and 3 yesterday morning -- but that there is the potential for cars. And, I tell myself, the bears and the cougars know that.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trawling for good "walking" music on iTunes. I sat in the Comox Grind, drank coffee, and looked through the iMixes for music that I could listen to while walking up the side of Forbidden Plateau. I found the Nike sports mixes, and scrolled through those, but only found stuff claiming to urge me on to build bigger muscles, including one mix of "college" cheers. Nope. No college cheers for me. And no buff.
Why do I need walking music? Forbidden Plateau, right outside my front door, is more or less flat, and when I turn right at the end of my driveway, it continues flat for a short while, then gradually it begins to climb at a greater and greater incline...but really, it is gradual. There are a couple of places where the incline is even greater, then it flattens out again, then begins to climb again. It's actually ideal for walking, and would be even more ideal with music that has a number of different "paces" in it. So I looked through the iMixes to see if I could find something designed for Forbidden Plateau. I did find something that had a number of tunes by Styx on it, but I think Styx must be one of those bands from the 80s that I never really paid much attention to, being too busy with children and school to pay much attention to rock.
So, no Styx. No downloads.
This morning, though, when I woke up, my legs already walking at the bottom of my bed, also already playing in my head was El Norte, from Gotan (anagram for Tango) Project's album Lunatico. When that finished, I started to "hear" a few other tunes from that album, and then I realized that I had discovered great walking tunes. And that I already had them. I jumped (yes, I mean jumped) out of bed and pulled on the sweaty walking clothes that I had left in a heap on the floor after yesterday's walk. Sneaking past my deaf pug so that he would not awaken and feel bad about being left behind, I left the house plugged into my iPod, and started to walk.
(Get this: Amor Porteno, the first song on the album, is perfect for starting up the walk. A relatively slow pace, it is not so intrusive that you feel you have to slow down to stick with it. And because the words are in Spanish (no giving it the good old college try, here), if you don't know Spanish, you can imagine anything you want. After a few warmup minutes of Amor Porteno, you get Notas, perfect for walking to. Diferente moves it up another notch, but don't be deceived by the awkward beginning 30 seconds or so. When she starts singing, you are with her and walking, and when the bandoneon starts to play, you'll be swinging your arms and singing along, in Spanish.)
I'm walking along and then the left side of my headset begins to cut out, and I immediately fly into a "fuckin' technology" rage that is way out of proportion to the problem -- compared to the results of no hot water or only dirty hot water or only dirty cold water pouring out of the shower head in Petersburg, a broken stereo channel would appear to be minor, and I started to feel abashed about my simmering anger at Apple, at the makers of my headphones, and then found it curious how I could be so accepting (if also somewhat annoyed) of not having clean hot water, but apoplectic at not being able to hear Gotan Project in stereo. (Is this too close to being a thought?)
I had to fiddle with the plug and learned that if I don't plug the headset all the way into my iPod, the stereo miraculously works again, but then I have to hold the headset and iPod in a certain way at a certain angle...ha! What problems, I think, but immediately STOP thinking, since I am supposed not to be thinking, because if I think too much, I will have nothing to write about. Look, I tell myself. Look at what's happening around you on Forbidden Plateau Road, and writer about that.
Criminal is playing on my iPod by this time, which I am holding in front of me the way that an orthodox priest holds a holy book out in front of him as he comes into the main part of the cathedral from behind the iconostasis. I am a holy woman, blessing the world with my iPod, and nothing is happening out there. Nothing. There is a slight breeze. The clouds are moving in and soon the sun will be covered. Yesterday two deer walked out of the woods in front of me and with their almond shaped deer eyes watched me walk closer until I had penetrated their comfort zone, and they moved off silently. No deer today, and I walked up to the new subdivision, Views of Forbidden Plateau, to the pace of tango, and stopped.
No thinking, I think, remembering Donald the Guileless' instruction. No thinking. I turn around and head back down the hill. The bandoneon is frantic with the notes of La Viguela, a drama not matched by the environment around me.
As I approach a curve in the road, a dog appears from the other direction. He is black and grey, walks with purpose, his head, which is framed by a black mane, is looking down, so he doesn't see me. He looks, I don't know, military, in a black and grey sort of way. A few seconds later, two more dogs appear, twins, short haired, butterscotch, long tailed dogs with square noses. The three dogs are playing some sort of game; they've done this before, I can tell, by the way the three of them stop and stand still when they notice me coming. The three of them stop so still and stand and watch me coming towards them, and the black one moves off to the left, off the road, to stand on some grass. He looks suspicious of me. And while he doesn't look threatening, he does look as if he wants to question me about me presence here on his road. Domingo starts to play on my iPod, giving me confidence, and I quicken my pace and walk towards the dogs. Who will move?
The black and grey military dog continues to move up and around to my left, and as I pass him he will be able to close in behind me, and it occurs to me that it would be ironic if I were to be mauled to death by three dogs. So much for my love of dogs, I think, and just as I'm picturing what people would think if they found me mauled to death by dogs, and what would happen to the dogs who would be accused of such an atrocity, the two butterscotch dogs start wagging their ridiculous tails and grinning. They are happy to see me: a break in their usual people-free routine, I'm thinking, and they are anticipating a cookie, or a pat on the head, and their bodies start to be wagged by their tails and their rib cages look like rubber as joy infuses every ounce of their dog-being-ness and all thoughts of having my tibula dragged off into the woods disappear and I turn to the military dog, who is still eyeing my suspiciously, from behind me, now, and apologize to him for distracting his two goofy friends, who probably are the main reason he has any fun at all, and I keep walking, now to the gentle piano of Paris, Texas -- and the two goofy dogs disappear up a driveway before I get to them and I walk the rest of the way home, getting to my own driveway just before Alice Blue Gown starts to play and my left headphone starts to crackle.
And that's what happened on Forbidden Plateau today. Nothing. As I write this El Norte is playing. It seems a good concluding statement as the bandoneon whips around, playing with the driving bass.
Okay. Those words, an inaccurate quotation from my brother, who I shall call Donald the Guileless in this blog, jerked me back to the Dashboard of this blog, mostly because he also said that reading the last entry in my blog was like watching the annoying last episode of the Sopranos, and that he felt abandoned.
Well, I wanted to tell him, not much happens up here on Forbidden Plateau, despite the promise of the name.
Of course he knows, Donald the Guileless, that not much happens up here, having once admonished me for living in such an out of the way community. But I think he was frustrated when he said that, having become lost on the one road that leads to where I live.
But in a way he's right. Not that I abandoned anyone who may have been reading this blog, but that I abandoned the trip to Russia, because it is now, I realize, that the comparisons are starting to happen. Now, when I drive into town, or walk down Forbidden Plateau Road, or shop in a grocery store, walk into a museum, look into the water of a river, answer my email -- now, when I do those things, I am thinking of Petersburg, and what things were like in Petersburg.
But oh, I won't tell you what I think, I'll just get on with things. Like my morning walk.
The story goes like this:
I now wake up every morning, my legs shuffling around in the bottom half of the bed, anxious to get themselves pounding on concrete, the way, I think, they pounded on the concrete of Petersburg, to the point that my hips ached. I'm missing that aching feeling, and when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I want to do is get outside and walk on the concrete sidewalks.
I have had to settle for the pavement of Forbidden Plateau Road, spurning the spongey wooded paths of Nymph Falls Park and opting for the harsh density of road. It's like this: when I walk in the woods, I keep imagining, smelling even, the musk of a black bear, or hearing the connivings of a cougar, and now that the pug is too old to come on walks with me, I have no bear or cougar bait, becoming instead the potential main target for any predator. When I walk the paths, I am in a state of constant arousal, the hair on the back of my neck sticks up, and I keep looking behind me, or into the woods, for the bear or the cougar.
The thing is, I've discovered, when I walk on the road, I don't imagine cougars or bears stalking just out of sight and sound. I figure they are deeper in the woods staying away from the roar of motors. Not that there are that many cars on my road -- I counted 1 this morning, and 3 yesterday morning -- but that there is the potential for cars. And, I tell myself, the bears and the cougars know that.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trawling for good "walking" music on iTunes. I sat in the Comox Grind, drank coffee, and looked through the iMixes for music that I could listen to while walking up the side of Forbidden Plateau. I found the Nike sports mixes, and scrolled through those, but only found stuff claiming to urge me on to build bigger muscles, including one mix of "college" cheers. Nope. No college cheers for me. And no buff.
Why do I need walking music? Forbidden Plateau, right outside my front door, is more or less flat, and when I turn right at the end of my driveway, it continues flat for a short while, then gradually it begins to climb at a greater and greater incline...but really, it is gradual. There are a couple of places where the incline is even greater, then it flattens out again, then begins to climb again. It's actually ideal for walking, and would be even more ideal with music that has a number of different "paces" in it. So I looked through the iMixes to see if I could find something designed for Forbidden Plateau. I did find something that had a number of tunes by Styx on it, but I think Styx must be one of those bands from the 80s that I never really paid much attention to, being too busy with children and school to pay much attention to rock.
So, no Styx. No downloads.
This morning, though, when I woke up, my legs already walking at the bottom of my bed, also already playing in my head was El Norte, from Gotan (anagram for Tango) Project's album Lunatico. When that finished, I started to "hear" a few other tunes from that album, and then I realized that I had discovered great walking tunes. And that I already had them. I jumped (yes, I mean jumped) out of bed and pulled on the sweaty walking clothes that I had left in a heap on the floor after yesterday's walk. Sneaking past my deaf pug so that he would not awaken and feel bad about being left behind, I left the house plugged into my iPod, and started to walk.
(Get this: Amor Porteno, the first song on the album, is perfect for starting up the walk. A relatively slow pace, it is not so intrusive that you feel you have to slow down to stick with it. And because the words are in Spanish (no giving it the good old college try, here), if you don't know Spanish, you can imagine anything you want. After a few warmup minutes of Amor Porteno, you get Notas, perfect for walking to. Diferente moves it up another notch, but don't be deceived by the awkward beginning 30 seconds or so. When she starts singing, you are with her and walking, and when the bandoneon starts to play, you'll be swinging your arms and singing along, in Spanish.)
I'm walking along and then the left side of my headset begins to cut out, and I immediately fly into a "fuckin' technology" rage that is way out of proportion to the problem -- compared to the results of no hot water or only dirty hot water or only dirty cold water pouring out of the shower head in Petersburg, a broken stereo channel would appear to be minor, and I started to feel abashed about my simmering anger at Apple, at the makers of my headphones, and then found it curious how I could be so accepting (if also somewhat annoyed) of not having clean hot water, but apoplectic at not being able to hear Gotan Project in stereo. (Is this too close to being a thought?)
I had to fiddle with the plug and learned that if I don't plug the headset all the way into my iPod, the stereo miraculously works again, but then I have to hold the headset and iPod in a certain way at a certain angle...ha! What problems, I think, but immediately STOP thinking, since I am supposed not to be thinking, because if I think too much, I will have nothing to write about. Look, I tell myself. Look at what's happening around you on Forbidden Plateau Road, and writer about that.
Criminal is playing on my iPod by this time, which I am holding in front of me the way that an orthodox priest holds a holy book out in front of him as he comes into the main part of the cathedral from behind the iconostasis. I am a holy woman, blessing the world with my iPod, and nothing is happening out there. Nothing. There is a slight breeze. The clouds are moving in and soon the sun will be covered. Yesterday two deer walked out of the woods in front of me and with their almond shaped deer eyes watched me walk closer until I had penetrated their comfort zone, and they moved off silently. No deer today, and I walked up to the new subdivision, Views of Forbidden Plateau, to the pace of tango, and stopped.
No thinking, I think, remembering Donald the Guileless' instruction. No thinking. I turn around and head back down the hill. The bandoneon is frantic with the notes of La Viguela, a drama not matched by the environment around me.
As I approach a curve in the road, a dog appears from the other direction. He is black and grey, walks with purpose, his head, which is framed by a black mane, is looking down, so he doesn't see me. He looks, I don't know, military, in a black and grey sort of way. A few seconds later, two more dogs appear, twins, short haired, butterscotch, long tailed dogs with square noses. The three dogs are playing some sort of game; they've done this before, I can tell, by the way the three of them stop and stand still when they notice me coming. The three of them stop so still and stand and watch me coming towards them, and the black one moves off to the left, off the road, to stand on some grass. He looks suspicious of me. And while he doesn't look threatening, he does look as if he wants to question me about me presence here on his road. Domingo starts to play on my iPod, giving me confidence, and I quicken my pace and walk towards the dogs. Who will move?
The black and grey military dog continues to move up and around to my left, and as I pass him he will be able to close in behind me, and it occurs to me that it would be ironic if I were to be mauled to death by three dogs. So much for my love of dogs, I think, and just as I'm picturing what people would think if they found me mauled to death by dogs, and what would happen to the dogs who would be accused of such an atrocity, the two butterscotch dogs start wagging their ridiculous tails and grinning. They are happy to see me: a break in their usual people-free routine, I'm thinking, and they are anticipating a cookie, or a pat on the head, and their bodies start to be wagged by their tails and their rib cages look like rubber as joy infuses every ounce of their dog-being-ness and all thoughts of having my tibula dragged off into the woods disappear and I turn to the military dog, who is still eyeing my suspiciously, from behind me, now, and apologize to him for distracting his two goofy friends, who probably are the main reason he has any fun at all, and I keep walking, now to the gentle piano of Paris, Texas -- and the two goofy dogs disappear up a driveway before I get to them and I walk the rest of the way home, getting to my own driveway just before Alice Blue Gown starts to play and my left headphone starts to crackle.
And that's what happened on Forbidden Plateau today. Nothing. As I write this El Norte is playing. It seems a good concluding statement as the bandoneon whips around, playing with the driving bass.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The Sicilian Mushroom Farmer & Life When Nothing Happens
Can't sleep. It's 1 am, Toronto time, and after a hot bath (but not hot enough) and a few hours of sleep, I woke up suddenly at midnight and lay around on my bed and played the "can I fall asleep again" game, and then when I lost at that, started to "measure" the width and length of my bed by trying to see if I could reach my arms and my feet , one to each side and end of the bed. If you know what I mean. Essentially what that means is that I have to see if I can reach my left arm to the left side of the bed, my right arm to the top of the bed, my right foot to the right side of the bed and my left foot to the bottom of the bed. If I can manage to do that, then I have "won" and then must think of something else to do before getting up to check a minor fact about St Petersburg in my guide book. Something about a tower. So I lie in bed for a bit longer and watch a circle of orange light pulsating on the ceiling just above the desk; it's the reflection of the orange hibernation light on my laptop, and eventually I am lulled into getting about and telling you about the Sicilian mushroom farmer.
He was sitting in my aisle seat on the flight from Milan, the flight that I booked six months ago to ensure that I would get an aisle seat so that I could stretch out my legs from time to time and ensure that I don't get swollen ankles. So, he's sitting in my seat when I get on the plane, and when I point this out to him, and his long greasy grey hair, he moves into his best "look how generous I'm being to you and letting you have the window seat" mode, and insists that I take the window seat.
No. I say, pointing to my boarding pass. I get the aisle seat.
No. He says, pretending not to understand that he is in the wrong seat. I get the aisle seat.
No. I say. You window, me aisle.
One of the flight attendants notices the imbroglio and appears and the two of them start to speak in Italian.
Madame, the flight attendant says to me. This gentleman would like to sit at the aisle seat. Would you mind changing places?
Yes, I say. I would mind. (A month practicing proactive and reactive aggression in Russia has served me well).
Another rapid conversation in Italian and the gentleman in my seat, the one with pants whose waist is too small to fit around his real waist and is therefore cinched around his hips with a tight belt, into which is stuffed a generic cotton short sleeved shirt, he gets up and pouting, I kid you not, he was pouting, goes to the back of the plane where he sat in another aisle seat, also not his own, yelling many words, none of which I could understand except for one which sounded suspiciously like "tourist". In my imagination I constructed his anger something like this: this is Alitalia, I am Italian, I should get what I want on my national airline, but instead the better seat goes to the tourist...
Hm. If you can call row 34 a good seat.
To add to this commotion, there was a family of 5: two parents and three children who had been engaged in armed combat since before getting in the boarding line in the terminal, whose seating assignments would have ensured a continuation of: the two boys arguing about which one of them wanted or didn't wanted to get along with the other; one of the boys grabbing on to his youngest sister's long unkempt hair and pulling it over her head and giving her a "hairdo" by tying the strands into knots; the other boy grabbing on to the suduku puzzle between his brother's teeth and flapping it until it tore, then denying he had done anything wrong; the littlest sister, of course, as the youngest in the group, was doing nothing wrong. Ha ha. Oh, I forgot to mention the parents, a couple in their late thirties, perhaps, good parents, Torontonians, probably make a lot of money, tired from their three weeks with three children in Italy and trying really hard to keep it all together: you know, polite to one another, making logical "corrections" to their children's behavior, smiling at one another, talking about their plans for tomorrow, when, apparently, all three children were heading off to summer camp (hm, I wonder why?).
So anyway, this family of five was to be separated from one another, and while I could see in the parents' eyes some sense of relief at the prospect of not having to sit with these three children (who, by the way, were actually quite funny), combined with the knowledge that really, they could not in good conscience impose these three on the kindness of strangers. So, when they got on the plane, while one flight attendant was managing me and the mushroom farmer, another was trying to rearrange things so that this family of 5 could all sit in closer proximity to one another.
MEANWHILE, in another part of the plane, a couple from somewhere had sat together in two seats that were together, husband and wife, and seemed to think it was logical to expect that that was okay, since the two seats that they HAD been assigned, in completely different parts of the plane from where they were sitting, were not together, and they wanted to be together. This meant that the two women who were assigned to those seats had on their own decided to sit in two seats that were empty when they got on and found their seats full.
MEANWHILE, in yet another part of the plane a man is yelling at a woman with whom he had agreed to switch seats, because when he got to the seat that he had agreed to switch into, he found that the seat back was broken and could not recline, and he did not want to sit in a broken seat, and wanted his original seat back. She did not.
AND, towards the front the plane, another man who was separated from his wife by seat assignment but not by emotion, was lobbying yet another flight attendant to get his seat switched to beside his wife, but the person on one side of his wife did not want to switch, and the person on the other side agreed to switch, but not to the middle seat in the middle aisle, which is where said man wanted to switch from.
In short, what we had on Alitalia 652 from Milan to Toronto was one great big logic puzzle and so the amusement for the hour, while I sat in my aisle seat and wondered if the seat next to me would remain empty, was to watch the flight attendants work this all out with diplomacy and without losing their tempers.
We left about 30 minutes later than scheduled, and by the time the plane took off (and by this time I was thinking, "please don't let me die with this group of people"), sitting beside me was an Italian man who refused to look at me (somehow I had been presented to him as evil and uncooperative, but how could I have explained to him I had just been in Russia for a month?) as we taxied down the runway and who made several hundred signs of the cross in rapid succession, concluding each by kissing his fingertips and bending his head ever so slightly towards the seat back in front of him.
Half an hour later my man with the long hair wanders back to the aisle beside me, the stub of a partly smoked cigar stuck into his mouth. Unlit, of course. He gestures to the guy who has been stuck beside me and indicates that he wants his seat back, so guy beside me jumps up and leaps over me (he is small and agile) and I get up to let pouty back in where he sits with this cigar butt in his mouth and looks sideways at me from time to time. I ignore him, using my best cool aloofness face.
But you know, the guy is a character. I can see that.
I had ordered a "vegetarian" meal which on Alitalia means that you get a lot of vegetables, both in salad form and cooked. On Air Canada it just means you don't get anything at all, same as the omnivores. Vegetarian and other specialty meals come first, and the flight attendants run up and down the aisles with these meals, trying to match food preference to seat occupant, a task made much more difficult by the seating changes at the beginning of the flight. But I am one of the earlier matches, since my seat has not been changed and I am easy to find. I eat my boiled spinach, boiled carrots, and boiled rice. Mushroom farmer beside me checks his watch. I eat my pickled carrot, pickled radish, pickled asparagus tips. Mushroom farmer checks his watch. I drink my water. Checks his watch again, and lifts slightly out of his seat to look around to see why I have food and he does not. I eat my cheese and cracker. Mushroom farmer calls out to flight attendant, demanding to know why I and others around me have food and he does not. I eat my bun dipped in olive oil. I look at him. He is checking his watch as I look (and continues to check his watch every ten minutes during the 8 1/2 hour flight), and then looks back at me, rolls his eyes, and makes a motion with his right hand than I can only describe what you would do if you wanted in a charades game to indicate that you were pantomiming a movie. So, he does that, and I come to realize over the course of the flight that he does that to express his reaction to things he does not like. So, he did it that first time to indicate that he thought this whole business of distributing food was stupid.
He did it again when they put his meal in front of him, at which time he took the cigar stub out of his mouth and put it into a cigarette box which he kept in a small kitten decortaed paper gift bag on the floor by his feet. And every time he did this motion with his right arm, he would look at me and roll his eyes.
It wasn't long before I realized why he needed an aisle seat. He is restless. Every20 minutes or so he would need to get up and walk up and down the aisle. As soon as he finished his meal, he was impatient to get rid of his tray and so jumped up and grabbed both his tray and mine and took them to the back. Without asking me, by the way. He just took it. I hadn't even had my yogourt, and pouf! Off with the tray!
Three hours into the flight he asks me in Italenglish where I am going and where I have been. I respond in Englitalian and so we begin our relationship, an abashed truce, wherein I discover that he is a Sicilian Porcino farmer on his way to Toronto to help some Canadian mushroom farmer be a better one. A mushroom consultant?
I find out that he is divorced, had one daughter who died, and that Sicily is 300 kilometres across. His name is Tore, short for Salvatore. We communicate using the maps provided in the Alitalia travel book, drawing lines, question marks, happy faces, exclamation marks, and stick figures.
Just over the halfway mark in the flight, I offer to trade seats with him. He is driving me crazy by getting up and down so often, and although it is not a bad thing for me to get up out of my seat so many times as it will help to prevent my ankle from swelling up to the size of an avocado, I really want to sleep so that jet lag won't interfere with my time in Ottawa. So I offer to switch seats, and he is so happy that after we make the switch, he grabs my left hand and I expect him to kiss it, but no, he flips it over and reads my palm.
Five hours into the flight, after having "smoked" his cigar a few times in between putting it into the cigarette box, he once more removes the cigar stub and puts it into the cigarette box, but this time he pulls another short and stubby cigar out, this one in a wrapper, and unwraps it, and puts it in his mouth. I'm just not sure what to think or say about this.
Six hours into the flight he sees my iPod, and asks if it is a phone. No, I tell him.
Seven hours into the flight he asks me if he needs a phone card to make a phone call.
No, I say. You probably just need a couple of coins.
Do you have a cellphone, he asks.
Yes.
May I use it.
....um, yes, okay.
He wants to use my cellphone as soon as we get off the plane, but I'm not really wanting to hang back in the corridor while he chats away on my cellphone. No, I say. Wait.
We get to the immigration line up, and he wants to use my phone there. No, I say, as I have heard a security guard yell at someone for using their cellphone in the line. Wait until you get through customs, she says. So, I tell him no. I don't want to get yelled at, especially not at customs.
So, he sticks to me through customs. Almost walks up to the the customs officer with me, and so I have to yell at him to stay behind the red line. And it feels good, that, to yell.
We walk a bit further, and as a Canadian I am allowed through a short line, but as a non-Canadian he must go through immigration. Another direction. He tries to follow me through the Canadian line. No, I yell. Go there. And I point. Looking firm and pissed off.
He goes where he is supposed to and I go where I am supposed to and while standing finally on Canadian indoor-outdoor-carpet-covered concrete by the luggage carousel, I phone Steve.
After 15 minutes of waiting, my Sicilian Mushroom Farmer arrives, disheveled and frantic looking, and I hand him my phone. His luggage tumbles onto the carousel while he is on the phone; mine still hasn't come. He talks. Hands me the phone. Asks me if I want money. No. I say. Please go now. I think. Please just go.
He grabs my hand again, I think to shake it, but no, he kisses my hand and turns away and is gone. I spend another hour frittering around trying to find the free shuttle to my hotel only to discover it doesn't run on weekends (??). Grab a taxi, get to the hotel, and eventually lie on my bed and think about the times during my trip when I just lay on my bed, or sat in a chair, and when nothing happened and how I don't write about the periods of time when nothing happens, and so my trip sounds like a series of non-stop events. Most of the time, time just passes by, and I do stuff that is ordinary and mundane, uneventful. Nothing really happens. Then, every once in a while something does happen. But when nothing is happening, I can do mundane things like make wallpaper patterns move, or watch light shows on the insides of my eyelids.
He was sitting in my aisle seat on the flight from Milan, the flight that I booked six months ago to ensure that I would get an aisle seat so that I could stretch out my legs from time to time and ensure that I don't get swollen ankles. So, he's sitting in my seat when I get on the plane, and when I point this out to him, and his long greasy grey hair, he moves into his best "look how generous I'm being to you and letting you have the window seat" mode, and insists that I take the window seat.
No. I say, pointing to my boarding pass. I get the aisle seat.
No. He says, pretending not to understand that he is in the wrong seat. I get the aisle seat.
No. I say. You window, me aisle.
One of the flight attendants notices the imbroglio and appears and the two of them start to speak in Italian.
Madame, the flight attendant says to me. This gentleman would like to sit at the aisle seat. Would you mind changing places?
Yes, I say. I would mind. (A month practicing proactive and reactive aggression in Russia has served me well).
Another rapid conversation in Italian and the gentleman in my seat, the one with pants whose waist is too small to fit around his real waist and is therefore cinched around his hips with a tight belt, into which is stuffed a generic cotton short sleeved shirt, he gets up and pouting, I kid you not, he was pouting, goes to the back of the plane where he sat in another aisle seat, also not his own, yelling many words, none of which I could understand except for one which sounded suspiciously like "tourist". In my imagination I constructed his anger something like this: this is Alitalia, I am Italian, I should get what I want on my national airline, but instead the better seat goes to the tourist...
Hm. If you can call row 34 a good seat.
To add to this commotion, there was a family of 5: two parents and three children who had been engaged in armed combat since before getting in the boarding line in the terminal, whose seating assignments would have ensured a continuation of: the two boys arguing about which one of them wanted or didn't wanted to get along with the other; one of the boys grabbing on to his youngest sister's long unkempt hair and pulling it over her head and giving her a "hairdo" by tying the strands into knots; the other boy grabbing on to the suduku puzzle between his brother's teeth and flapping it until it tore, then denying he had done anything wrong; the littlest sister, of course, as the youngest in the group, was doing nothing wrong. Ha ha. Oh, I forgot to mention the parents, a couple in their late thirties, perhaps, good parents, Torontonians, probably make a lot of money, tired from their three weeks with three children in Italy and trying really hard to keep it all together: you know, polite to one another, making logical "corrections" to their children's behavior, smiling at one another, talking about their plans for tomorrow, when, apparently, all three children were heading off to summer camp (hm, I wonder why?).
So anyway, this family of five was to be separated from one another, and while I could see in the parents' eyes some sense of relief at the prospect of not having to sit with these three children (who, by the way, were actually quite funny), combined with the knowledge that really, they could not in good conscience impose these three on the kindness of strangers. So, when they got on the plane, while one flight attendant was managing me and the mushroom farmer, another was trying to rearrange things so that this family of 5 could all sit in closer proximity to one another.
MEANWHILE, in another part of the plane, a couple from somewhere had sat together in two seats that were together, husband and wife, and seemed to think it was logical to expect that that was okay, since the two seats that they HAD been assigned, in completely different parts of the plane from where they were sitting, were not together, and they wanted to be together. This meant that the two women who were assigned to those seats had on their own decided to sit in two seats that were empty when they got on and found their seats full.
MEANWHILE, in yet another part of the plane a man is yelling at a woman with whom he had agreed to switch seats, because when he got to the seat that he had agreed to switch into, he found that the seat back was broken and could not recline, and he did not want to sit in a broken seat, and wanted his original seat back. She did not.
AND, towards the front the plane, another man who was separated from his wife by seat assignment but not by emotion, was lobbying yet another flight attendant to get his seat switched to beside his wife, but the person on one side of his wife did not want to switch, and the person on the other side agreed to switch, but not to the middle seat in the middle aisle, which is where said man wanted to switch from.
In short, what we had on Alitalia 652 from Milan to Toronto was one great big logic puzzle and so the amusement for the hour, while I sat in my aisle seat and wondered if the seat next to me would remain empty, was to watch the flight attendants work this all out with diplomacy and without losing their tempers.
We left about 30 minutes later than scheduled, and by the time the plane took off (and by this time I was thinking, "please don't let me die with this group of people"), sitting beside me was an Italian man who refused to look at me (somehow I had been presented to him as evil and uncooperative, but how could I have explained to him I had just been in Russia for a month?) as we taxied down the runway and who made several hundred signs of the cross in rapid succession, concluding each by kissing his fingertips and bending his head ever so slightly towards the seat back in front of him.
Half an hour later my man with the long hair wanders back to the aisle beside me, the stub of a partly smoked cigar stuck into his mouth. Unlit, of course. He gestures to the guy who has been stuck beside me and indicates that he wants his seat back, so guy beside me jumps up and leaps over me (he is small and agile) and I get up to let pouty back in where he sits with this cigar butt in his mouth and looks sideways at me from time to time. I ignore him, using my best cool aloofness face.
But you know, the guy is a character. I can see that.
I had ordered a "vegetarian" meal which on Alitalia means that you get a lot of vegetables, both in salad form and cooked. On Air Canada it just means you don't get anything at all, same as the omnivores. Vegetarian and other specialty meals come first, and the flight attendants run up and down the aisles with these meals, trying to match food preference to seat occupant, a task made much more difficult by the seating changes at the beginning of the flight. But I am one of the earlier matches, since my seat has not been changed and I am easy to find. I eat my boiled spinach, boiled carrots, and boiled rice. Mushroom farmer beside me checks his watch. I eat my pickled carrot, pickled radish, pickled asparagus tips. Mushroom farmer checks his watch. I drink my water. Checks his watch again, and lifts slightly out of his seat to look around to see why I have food and he does not. I eat my cheese and cracker. Mushroom farmer calls out to flight attendant, demanding to know why I and others around me have food and he does not. I eat my bun dipped in olive oil. I look at him. He is checking his watch as I look (and continues to check his watch every ten minutes during the 8 1/2 hour flight), and then looks back at me, rolls his eyes, and makes a motion with his right hand than I can only describe what you would do if you wanted in a charades game to indicate that you were pantomiming a movie. So, he does that, and I come to realize over the course of the flight that he does that to express his reaction to things he does not like. So, he did it that first time to indicate that he thought this whole business of distributing food was stupid.
He did it again when they put his meal in front of him, at which time he took the cigar stub out of his mouth and put it into a cigarette box which he kept in a small kitten decortaed paper gift bag on the floor by his feet. And every time he did this motion with his right arm, he would look at me and roll his eyes.
It wasn't long before I realized why he needed an aisle seat. He is restless. Every20 minutes or so he would need to get up and walk up and down the aisle. As soon as he finished his meal, he was impatient to get rid of his tray and so jumped up and grabbed both his tray and mine and took them to the back. Without asking me, by the way. He just took it. I hadn't even had my yogourt, and pouf! Off with the tray!
Three hours into the flight he asks me in Italenglish where I am going and where I have been. I respond in Englitalian and so we begin our relationship, an abashed truce, wherein I discover that he is a Sicilian Porcino farmer on his way to Toronto to help some Canadian mushroom farmer be a better one. A mushroom consultant?
I find out that he is divorced, had one daughter who died, and that Sicily is 300 kilometres across. His name is Tore, short for Salvatore. We communicate using the maps provided in the Alitalia travel book, drawing lines, question marks, happy faces, exclamation marks, and stick figures.
Just over the halfway mark in the flight, I offer to trade seats with him. He is driving me crazy by getting up and down so often, and although it is not a bad thing for me to get up out of my seat so many times as it will help to prevent my ankle from swelling up to the size of an avocado, I really want to sleep so that jet lag won't interfere with my time in Ottawa. So I offer to switch seats, and he is so happy that after we make the switch, he grabs my left hand and I expect him to kiss it, but no, he flips it over and reads my palm.
Five hours into the flight, after having "smoked" his cigar a few times in between putting it into the cigarette box, he once more removes the cigar stub and puts it into the cigarette box, but this time he pulls another short and stubby cigar out, this one in a wrapper, and unwraps it, and puts it in his mouth. I'm just not sure what to think or say about this.
Six hours into the flight he sees my iPod, and asks if it is a phone. No, I tell him.
Seven hours into the flight he asks me if he needs a phone card to make a phone call.
No, I say. You probably just need a couple of coins.
Do you have a cellphone, he asks.
Yes.
May I use it.
....um, yes, okay.
He wants to use my cellphone as soon as we get off the plane, but I'm not really wanting to hang back in the corridor while he chats away on my cellphone. No, I say. Wait.
We get to the immigration line up, and he wants to use my phone there. No, I say, as I have heard a security guard yell at someone for using their cellphone in the line. Wait until you get through customs, she says. So, I tell him no. I don't want to get yelled at, especially not at customs.
So, he sticks to me through customs. Almost walks up to the the customs officer with me, and so I have to yell at him to stay behind the red line. And it feels good, that, to yell.
We walk a bit further, and as a Canadian I am allowed through a short line, but as a non-Canadian he must go through immigration. Another direction. He tries to follow me through the Canadian line. No, I yell. Go there. And I point. Looking firm and pissed off.
He goes where he is supposed to and I go where I am supposed to and while standing finally on Canadian indoor-outdoor-carpet-covered concrete by the luggage carousel, I phone Steve.
After 15 minutes of waiting, my Sicilian Mushroom Farmer arrives, disheveled and frantic looking, and I hand him my phone. His luggage tumbles onto the carousel while he is on the phone; mine still hasn't come. He talks. Hands me the phone. Asks me if I want money. No. I say. Please go now. I think. Please just go.
He grabs my hand again, I think to shake it, but no, he kisses my hand and turns away and is gone. I spend another hour frittering around trying to find the free shuttle to my hotel only to discover it doesn't run on weekends (??). Grab a taxi, get to the hotel, and eventually lie on my bed and think about the times during my trip when I just lay on my bed, or sat in a chair, and when nothing happened and how I don't write about the periods of time when nothing happens, and so my trip sounds like a series of non-stop events. Most of the time, time just passes by, and I do stuff that is ordinary and mundane, uneventful. Nothing really happens. Then, every once in a while something does happen. But when nothing is happening, I can do mundane things like make wallpaper patterns move, or watch light shows on the insides of my eyelids.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Interface and Milan
For the past month I've been working on the Russian interface when using this blog software, and now that I'm in Milan, everything is in Italian. Funny, but driving into Milan seemed like coming home, that's how much more similar Italy is to North America than Russia.
I went to take a taxi to my hotel, but the driver told me it would be 75 euros, and I wasn't that desparate, so found a bus for 5 euros and then took a taxi for another 10...I have to do the reverse in the morning, and early, and my only glimpse of Milan will have been from bus or taxi windows, as I'm not inclined to wander around my neighbourhood on my own.
The city does have a nice feel to it, although even at 8 pm as I drove in things seemed shut down. There must be sections of the city that are a bit more lively than what I saw, but maybe not. But there is that good feel in the air, despite 29 degrees celcius.
I'm putting off getting into the shower for as long as possible. No tub in this room, but I'm alone!, the room is clean, clear hot water pours out of the taps, and my bed has sheets with a bearable threadcount.
The Italian music on the radio in the background is a bit over the top, but I've got my iPod...
Oh, I just sashayed through customs at the Malpensa airport; I went through some doors that said EU residents only, and the bored customs agent stamped my passport without looking. It was all too easy. I hope they let me out again tomorrow.
I went to take a taxi to my hotel, but the driver told me it would be 75 euros, and I wasn't that desparate, so found a bus for 5 euros and then took a taxi for another 10...I have to do the reverse in the morning, and early, and my only glimpse of Milan will have been from bus or taxi windows, as I'm not inclined to wander around my neighbourhood on my own.
The city does have a nice feel to it, although even at 8 pm as I drove in things seemed shut down. There must be sections of the city that are a bit more lively than what I saw, but maybe not. But there is that good feel in the air, despite 29 degrees celcius.
I'm putting off getting into the shower for as long as possible. No tub in this room, but I'm alone!, the room is clean, clear hot water pours out of the taps, and my bed has sheets with a bearable threadcount.
The Italian music on the radio in the background is a bit over the top, but I've got my iPod...
Oh, I just sashayed through customs at the Malpensa airport; I went through some doors that said EU residents only, and the bored customs agent stamped my passport without looking. It was all too easy. I hope they let me out again tomorrow.
Vodka Toasts and Midnight on the Neva
I thought that my last entry was going to be my last entry, but as it turns out, I couldn't sleep last night after the two hour midnight cruise down the Neva for the opening of the bridges. This is just an excuse for a party, a big one, and the Neva, especially in the open area between the Hermitage and Hare Island (where the Peter and Paul Fortress is), is filled with dozens of flat bottom tour boats which in turn are filled with mostly inebriated tourist groups. The boats leave from various locations along the canals, where the boats tie up at the foot of the stone staircases that are built right into the canal structure. As the boats putter along the canals, people stand around on the back of the boat or sit in a sunken covered area at the front. Most people drink, and there is an onboard bar more than happy to keep you drinking beer or vodka.
The drunker people get, the higher the stakes, and that's not because they may fall overboard, which is always a possibility, I guess, but doesn't seem to happen that I could see, but because as the boat passes under some of the lower canal bridges, people need to be aware enough of their surroundings to know when it is in their best interest to duck, and how low. Some boat personnel are pretty good at warning their passengers to duck, but the guy on our boat last night left us to our own devices, and I'm assuming that lawsuits launched by unwary "Americans" as a result of concussing under a bridge are laughable.
So, we ducked our way along the canals and under the bridges, and although there had been a downpour a couple of hours earlier that flooded the floor of the Dagastini restaurant I had been eating at, and had soaked everything in my shoulder pack, which I had left on the floor by my feet, by the time we got to the midnight boat ride, the rain had stopped and I was able to demonstrate the Canadian way of opening beer bottles with no twist top -- using my teeth.
In the area between the Hermitage and Hare Island is a huge water fountain embedded in the river, and at night the fountain is lit by lights and a laser light show. The building exteriors are also lit up by bright lights, and along the roads and bridges that surround the mid-river lighted fountain hundreds of people stand around to watch the light show and the dozens of canal boats that churn gallons of diesel fuel exhaust into the Neva.
Okay, now, back to the world of showers. I have not had a hot shower for more than a week now, but every morning I turn on the hot water tap in the shower, just in case the hot water has been turned on since the last blue person emerged from the shower room. The other morning when I turned on the hot water, water the colour of coffee and the consistency of diesel oil poured out into the bottom of the stall, and before long the crib of the stall was filled with cold, black water. I watched it pour out, fascinated with what I was seeing, and it looked like the water that might come pouring out of a tap at home if the well was about to run dry and the pump was pumping the watery sludge at the bottom of the well. After a few minutes, the water did not start to run clean, nor did it start to run hot. So I turned off the hot tap and resigned, turned on the cold tap and began my morning ablutions.
Some mornings I just can't face it.
The good news is that tonight I will be in Milan, which I believe has hot running water, and will have a single room, by myself, and will lie on the double bed and watch the night fall from my window at a regular time.
You are invited to a vodka party at my place. I now have the full routine and practices for correct toasting procedures, and since I have had the pleasure of eating and drinking Russian for the past month, I want to share it with you. To prepare, you need to get some good Russian vodka (Smirnoff is not Russian) and throw it into the freezer. Leave it there until I get home. Then, when I get home, Steve is going to make some rye bread, and I will make some blini, borsch, pickled herring, pickled pickles, pickled garlic, pickled cabbage, pickled onion greens, and pickled eggplant, and a radish/cucumber salad. And I will make some great pastries and we will eat all this food and drink all the vodka (except I don't like vodka, so I will have to pretend -- I'll show you how, though) and make the toasts in the proper fashion, and then I will repeat all the stories that I have told you on the blog and bore you silly. I'll even show you my slides!!! ha! PErhaps I may have a few insights into the Russian soul, and the impact of the switch in drinking habits among Russians from vodka to beer. I have statistics and everything! And I will do screenings of Russian movies, and am already on the hunt for soviet era movies starring a bizarre looking woman named Lola...
And, of course I'll have all the SLS gossip which won't interest you in the least because you weren't here and don't know the players, so that will stay stored within my imagination for the time being.
It's about noon here for me now, and my plane leaves at five. I still have money left, so I'll go and blow it on a lunch and some souvenirs, then off to the airport at 2 pm...
love
Anne
The drunker people get, the higher the stakes, and that's not because they may fall overboard, which is always a possibility, I guess, but doesn't seem to happen that I could see, but because as the boat passes under some of the lower canal bridges, people need to be aware enough of their surroundings to know when it is in their best interest to duck, and how low. Some boat personnel are pretty good at warning their passengers to duck, but the guy on our boat last night left us to our own devices, and I'm assuming that lawsuits launched by unwary "Americans" as a result of concussing under a bridge are laughable.
So, we ducked our way along the canals and under the bridges, and although there had been a downpour a couple of hours earlier that flooded the floor of the Dagastini restaurant I had been eating at, and had soaked everything in my shoulder pack, which I had left on the floor by my feet, by the time we got to the midnight boat ride, the rain had stopped and I was able to demonstrate the Canadian way of opening beer bottles with no twist top -- using my teeth.
In the area between the Hermitage and Hare Island is a huge water fountain embedded in the river, and at night the fountain is lit by lights and a laser light show. The building exteriors are also lit up by bright lights, and along the roads and bridges that surround the mid-river lighted fountain hundreds of people stand around to watch the light show and the dozens of canal boats that churn gallons of diesel fuel exhaust into the Neva.
Okay, now, back to the world of showers. I have not had a hot shower for more than a week now, but every morning I turn on the hot water tap in the shower, just in case the hot water has been turned on since the last blue person emerged from the shower room. The other morning when I turned on the hot water, water the colour of coffee and the consistency of diesel oil poured out into the bottom of the stall, and before long the crib of the stall was filled with cold, black water. I watched it pour out, fascinated with what I was seeing, and it looked like the water that might come pouring out of a tap at home if the well was about to run dry and the pump was pumping the watery sludge at the bottom of the well. After a few minutes, the water did not start to run clean, nor did it start to run hot. So I turned off the hot tap and resigned, turned on the cold tap and began my morning ablutions.
Some mornings I just can't face it.
The good news is that tonight I will be in Milan, which I believe has hot running water, and will have a single room, by myself, and will lie on the double bed and watch the night fall from my window at a regular time.
You are invited to a vodka party at my place. I now have the full routine and practices for correct toasting procedures, and since I have had the pleasure of eating and drinking Russian for the past month, I want to share it with you. To prepare, you need to get some good Russian vodka (Smirnoff is not Russian) and throw it into the freezer. Leave it there until I get home. Then, when I get home, Steve is going to make some rye bread, and I will make some blini, borsch, pickled herring, pickled pickles, pickled garlic, pickled cabbage, pickled onion greens, and pickled eggplant, and a radish/cucumber salad. And I will make some great pastries and we will eat all this food and drink all the vodka (except I don't like vodka, so I will have to pretend -- I'll show you how, though) and make the toasts in the proper fashion, and then I will repeat all the stories that I have told you on the blog and bore you silly. I'll even show you my slides!!! ha! PErhaps I may have a few insights into the Russian soul, and the impact of the switch in drinking habits among Russians from vodka to beer. I have statistics and everything! And I will do screenings of Russian movies, and am already on the hunt for soviet era movies starring a bizarre looking woman named Lola...
And, of course I'll have all the SLS gossip which won't interest you in the least because you weren't here and don't know the players, so that will stay stored within my imagination for the time being.
It's about noon here for me now, and my plane leaves at five. I still have money left, so I'll go and blow it on a lunch and some souvenirs, then off to the airport at 2 pm...
love
Anne
Friday, July 13, 2007
Last Russia Blog Entry?
I am ready to leave. I'm not packed, yet, not phyically, but my brain is full, and I'm ready to get on that plane tomorrow and head off home and back to hot shower land.
So, this is my last post, at least from Russia, and after I tell you about the Beckett play I saw last night, I will be done. I am going on a midnight boat ride tonight through the canal system for the opening of the bridges, but unless the boat sinks, I won't report on it. The boat will putter around the canals and river system, get to a certain point, wait for the bridges to open, and then all the boats will together go under the open bridges. It will be dark out mostly, there will be the bright lights of the city along the embankments, and much drinking and merriment will be had by all, including the mosquitoes.
I will go home and pack.
But last night I went with Christina to a play at the Peter and Paul fortress which is on Hare Island. The theatre was no Mariinsky, and for that I liked it much better. Something much more appealing to me about a group of artists performing a Beckett play (called Sans Parole) in a space at the base of the tower on the fortress wall facing the river, a wall originally built to defend St Petersburg, than about a group of artists performing Eugene Onegin at the Mariinsy, which is what I went to see on Wednesday night.
The P & P theatre space was small and dank and cool, like a wine cellar. It was the first time I had been cold since I have been here and we sat on chairs more comfortable than those in the Mariinsky and watched a two hour, two man performance that was physically challenging to the actors who did not flinch during the whole two hours. They were amazing, and of course this was a great performance to go to because it was all in pantomime and language not necessary. As interesting as the performance itself was the experience of buying tickets for it. When we turned up, about half an hour before the performance, we first asked a woman about buying tickets. She looked quite concerned, and called over another gentleman, who arrived with a clipboard and a list of names. He asked for our names, asked how we had heard about the play, then told us to pay 400 rubles. Christina looked dubious; she didn't want to pay that much, and I asked, incredulous, "each?", and then he looked at us and said, "no, together", so we payed our 400 rubles total, got our tickets and then went back outside to eat yet another blini, this one with apricot jam, and watch as construction workers tamped down some dirt before beginning to reinstall a brick pathway. The whole of the Peter and Paul fortress grounds and many of the buildings are being reconstructed, and, in fact, much of Petersburg is in reconstruction. There are hundreds of these massive buildings throughout the city which were once "great" homes, and then became apartments during soviet times. And fell apart. Deteriorated from the outside and inside.
While we ate our blini and drank water, we noticed that in fact our tickets should have been 400 each, but I guess the guy figured we would walk away if he had charged us that much, so, halved the price, and everyone was happy. And the play was fabulous, and probably one of the highlights of my SLS time as I was completely engaged by Beckett AND the venue AND the actors.
Between the Hermitage visit and the P&P visit, I did a lot of walking yesterday, and this morning I woke up not very rested. I think the combination of so much walking and so little nutrition is vile and I'm surprised that I have not become ill while here. But maybe my body is saving illness for later, kind of like sticking it out while teaching, then getting sick over the December break. I listened to Crime and Punishment for a couple of hours this morning, on my iPod, and realized that my experience of this novel is greatly enhanced by knowing where the Hay Market is, and what streets Roskolnikoff walked along. However, because I'm "listening" to this novel rather than reading it, I also realize that I don't really know how to spell his name.
Great novel, though.
You should read it.
Anne
So, this is my last post, at least from Russia, and after I tell you about the Beckett play I saw last night, I will be done. I am going on a midnight boat ride tonight through the canal system for the opening of the bridges, but unless the boat sinks, I won't report on it. The boat will putter around the canals and river system, get to a certain point, wait for the bridges to open, and then all the boats will together go under the open bridges. It will be dark out mostly, there will be the bright lights of the city along the embankments, and much drinking and merriment will be had by all, including the mosquitoes.
I will go home and pack.
But last night I went with Christina to a play at the Peter and Paul fortress which is on Hare Island. The theatre was no Mariinsky, and for that I liked it much better. Something much more appealing to me about a group of artists performing a Beckett play (called Sans Parole) in a space at the base of the tower on the fortress wall facing the river, a wall originally built to defend St Petersburg, than about a group of artists performing Eugene Onegin at the Mariinsy, which is what I went to see on Wednesday night.
The P & P theatre space was small and dank and cool, like a wine cellar. It was the first time I had been cold since I have been here and we sat on chairs more comfortable than those in the Mariinsky and watched a two hour, two man performance that was physically challenging to the actors who did not flinch during the whole two hours. They were amazing, and of course this was a great performance to go to because it was all in pantomime and language not necessary. As interesting as the performance itself was the experience of buying tickets for it. When we turned up, about half an hour before the performance, we first asked a woman about buying tickets. She looked quite concerned, and called over another gentleman, who arrived with a clipboard and a list of names. He asked for our names, asked how we had heard about the play, then told us to pay 400 rubles. Christina looked dubious; she didn't want to pay that much, and I asked, incredulous, "each?", and then he looked at us and said, "no, together", so we payed our 400 rubles total, got our tickets and then went back outside to eat yet another blini, this one with apricot jam, and watch as construction workers tamped down some dirt before beginning to reinstall a brick pathway. The whole of the Peter and Paul fortress grounds and many of the buildings are being reconstructed, and, in fact, much of Petersburg is in reconstruction. There are hundreds of these massive buildings throughout the city which were once "great" homes, and then became apartments during soviet times. And fell apart. Deteriorated from the outside and inside.
While we ate our blini and drank water, we noticed that in fact our tickets should have been 400 each, but I guess the guy figured we would walk away if he had charged us that much, so, halved the price, and everyone was happy. And the play was fabulous, and probably one of the highlights of my SLS time as I was completely engaged by Beckett AND the venue AND the actors.
Between the Hermitage visit and the P&P visit, I did a lot of walking yesterday, and this morning I woke up not very rested. I think the combination of so much walking and so little nutrition is vile and I'm surprised that I have not become ill while here. But maybe my body is saving illness for later, kind of like sticking it out while teaching, then getting sick over the December break. I listened to Crime and Punishment for a couple of hours this morning, on my iPod, and realized that my experience of this novel is greatly enhanced by knowing where the Hay Market is, and what streets Roskolnikoff walked along. However, because I'm "listening" to this novel rather than reading it, I also realize that I don't really know how to spell his name.
Great novel, though.
You should read it.
Anne
Thursday, July 12, 2007
live from the Hermitage
To rest my feet and my eyes and my brain, I have come down to the cafe and services level of the Hermitage where a nice german man gave me his leftover minutes at the internet cafe. Beats paying, every time.
I'm here alone, thank god, as it's hard enough aggressively elbowing my way through the hoards of tour groups who follow plastic sunflowers or rolled newspapers held up in the air by their "leaders". I stand in on the odd explanation, but generally find it more interesting to take my own personal "discovery" tour of the place, which means I run around in circles and see many of the same things twice (often without realizing it, I'm guessing) and probably missing a lot of things too. so be it. Really, you can't come to the Hermitage once.
But I'm blogging from here because I can. And Betty wanted me to tell her what the Hermitage smells like, and all I can say (and I've been taking in nostrils-full from time to time as I move through the rooms) is that much of it smells like sweet water, mould/mold (?), damp air...and it was not until I got to the floor with Picasso, Matisse, Gaugin, Cezanne, and Monet that the odors became less dense, much lighter, airy. Somewhat matching my mental state which seemed to deteriorate the more nursing madonnas, speared and bleeding, and dying, saints, gored pigs, horses and yowling dogs that I saw...so, the antidote is some contemporary art I think, not here that I can find although somewhere in this maze is an exhibit of Dennis Hoppers photography. Hollywood stars I think, and since he sniffed all that stuff in Blue Velvet, maybe I will identify more with his aesthetic. It's not that I can't admire the art of painting; I just am not a consumer of such embedded darkness surrounded by bucolic scenery and winged cherubs.
So, having said all that and horrified the asethetes among you, I will go now and see if I can find a print of Monet's Waterloo Bridge. I just ate a horrid slab of carbohydrates covered with tomato sauce worse than anything I ate in Havana called by the name of pizza, and a bottle of water. Thus, I will not faint.
gotta go. the ticker on my timer is ticking.
Anne
I'm here alone, thank god, as it's hard enough aggressively elbowing my way through the hoards of tour groups who follow plastic sunflowers or rolled newspapers held up in the air by their "leaders". I stand in on the odd explanation, but generally find it more interesting to take my own personal "discovery" tour of the place, which means I run around in circles and see many of the same things twice (often without realizing it, I'm guessing) and probably missing a lot of things too. so be it. Really, you can't come to the Hermitage once.
But I'm blogging from here because I can. And Betty wanted me to tell her what the Hermitage smells like, and all I can say (and I've been taking in nostrils-full from time to time as I move through the rooms) is that much of it smells like sweet water, mould/mold (?), damp air...and it was not until I got to the floor with Picasso, Matisse, Gaugin, Cezanne, and Monet that the odors became less dense, much lighter, airy. Somewhat matching my mental state which seemed to deteriorate the more nursing madonnas, speared and bleeding, and dying, saints, gored pigs, horses and yowling dogs that I saw...so, the antidote is some contemporary art I think, not here that I can find although somewhere in this maze is an exhibit of Dennis Hoppers photography. Hollywood stars I think, and since he sniffed all that stuff in Blue Velvet, maybe I will identify more with his aesthetic. It's not that I can't admire the art of painting; I just am not a consumer of such embedded darkness surrounded by bucolic scenery and winged cherubs.
So, having said all that and horrified the asethetes among you, I will go now and see if I can find a print of Monet's Waterloo Bridge. I just ate a horrid slab of carbohydrates covered with tomato sauce worse than anything I ate in Havana called by the name of pizza, and a bottle of water. Thus, I will not faint.
gotta go. the ticker on my timer is ticking.
Anne
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Freud & the Queen of Thailand
Blog July 11, 2007
I feel a slight sense of urgency right now, and woke up in the middle of the night and several times in the early morning feeling a bit panicked about what I have not yet done, and have not yet written about. In terms of the “not yet done”, I managed to get to the point where I can let go of feeling that I need to do what I have not yet done. That’s a relief. I have done a lot, I have thought about many things. Although just when I think I have no more room for anything else, something else “happens” that causes me to think. I’m starting to remind myself of the person who once said to me, frustrated with some proclamation I had made, “the problem with you Anne, is that you think too much.” That was a long time ago, and I must have been struck by the sentiment that it IS possible to think too much, because until that moment, it had never occurred to me. Think too much? I still haven’t wrapped my mind around that one, and that must have been about 20 years ago, in Calgary.
So, my urgency about needing to see the last few sights that I “should” see has subsided this morning, but my sense of needing to “record” what has not yet been recorded was not so easily quelled, so I found myself this morning writing a list of points that need to be made. The list is long, incomplete, and I don’t dare go out and experience anything else before catching up on this writing; I don’t want to get ahead of myself, have so much to say that it will never be said.
I know that some people are reading this blog; you send me emails, like cheerleaders, or something, responding to some small story or suggestion I’ve made, and I love those emails. The other thing that happens while I’m writing the blog is that I think of particular individuals reading particular sentences, and it’s an interesting way to be communicating. On the down side, I wonder if the blog sounds like one of those group Christmas letters, and if it does, would someone please write and tell me, and I will stop immediately. The other consideration I have to make is the fact that soon this Russiannie trip will be over, and thus, the blog. Being able to write in this way, so consistently, has been helpful to me. It has ensured that I’ve kept up to date with my notes, and it has helped me to identify what really has struck me. It has also helped me to distinguish between what is private and therefore not bloggable (I may have been too conservative in this respect) and what is public and open to all. So, for instance, I have not written about individual characters (and there are many of them) except in fairly general ways; and with a few exceptions, have not written about my “self”. Well, I just think the narrator of this piece and the random comments made by the narrator are “self” enough. Don’t you?
Anyway, I just have a few more days left here, and on Saturday as the sun is rising in British Columbia, I’ll be heading to Milan for a night of hot showers and a comfortable bed. On Sunday I fly to Toronto and spend a night there in a generic hotel near the airport; on Monday night I fly to Ottawa where I’ve planned my plane to arrive somewhat before Steve’s does, so that I’ll be in the airport to meet him when he gets there. Yeah! Then, it’s a week in Ottawa with Steve’s family.
So, there, you see that while I have seldom written about the future, here I am, writing about the future, which tells me that I’m ready to move on, that I have let go of needing to “do” certain things before I leave. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I won’t be doing anything else. I am most certainly doing a few more things, but won’t bore you with the details of the future any more than I already have; I’ll focus on the recent past.
Saturday afternoon was different from all other afternoons I’ve had here, and since nothing was planned in terms of lectures or workshops, a few of us headed out to see the mosque. We headed out at about 12:30, and since it had been my idea to go to the mosque, which is not far from the Peter and Paul Fortress, I was the navigator. To get there we had to cross the kissing bridge and the Field of Mars (google it, you’ll get the Wikipedia version of Russian history, better than my summary of National Geographic’s tour book) and then over the Trinity (Troiksa) Bridge which crosses the Neva. It was windy out, but the sun was shining, and while I had had a huge cheese omelet at Zoom earlier in the morning and was not hungry and had been prepared for a long walk to many places on this other island, others in the group were hungry and much needing their first Americano with milk for the day. I capitulated to the group (see my earlier blog entry about traveling alone) and found myself, after seeing the blue mosaic exterior of the locked mosque, sitting in a small dark uniquely Russian bar. There were few others in the bar, and at first the bartender eyed us suspiciously; I’m not sure he wanted us to be there. But we ordered from the menu (with Christina’s help – she speaks Russian and is writing an amazing book set in Georgia – not the American Georgia – look for it in about a year or two, I’m guessing) and soon a variety of small plates of pickled whatever arrived and since I had already eaten this massive omelet, I just ordered a “Homestyle” beer.
Mistake.
This “Homestyle” beer, a dark but not syrupy beer, was the best beer I have ever tasted, and so I felt compelled to mention that to Peter, who was in the process of considering whether or not to order a beer. “Try this”, I suggested, holding out my glass to him. “That is good,” he said, and got one for himself. Christina and Charlotte, neither of whom are big drinkers, let alone beer drinkers (like me, except when I’m traveling – and I’m planning to travel more now, so I can drink more beer), become curious when Peter and I each order another beer after agreeing with one another several times that yes, this beer is very good and deserves another taste. So they decide to have a taste from our second beer, and then they each order one of these beer from the bar and now the four of us are drinking large glasses of “Homestyle” beer and ordering plate after plate of very greasy and one-step-up-McDonald’s French fries, demolishing each plate. The salt makes us thirsty and eager for more beer; the beer makes us hungry and eager for more fries, and we are caught in a loop that we cannot escape, and the bartender even smiles, really really slightly, which in Russia is equivalent to uproariously laughter. And, well, we just get really, um, well, really really, happy, until we decide it’s time to go, and because none of us has a watch, and because of the white nights when the sun doesn’t set until midnight or so, we have no idea what time it is, so we walk out and back past the entrance to the Peter and Paul fortress where we see one sick-looking duck floating around in a pond filled with algae and floating garbage. At first we thought it was dead, but then it moved a wing tip, and we took pictures of this duck. The picture I took is more pathetic than the original experience, and over the Trinity Bridge we went and then Peter decides we need to go to a Dagastani restaurant and keeps luring us with the promise of it being “just two more minutes”, or “just around the next corner”, until I just couldn’t walk any farther away from where I am staying, so dropped out of the race for a good meal (besides, I was still full from the omelet and the fries, and didn’t really understand how everyone could be so famished, but they were, and I wasn’t) so, I went back to my room and passed, I mean, fell asleep.
Getting to my room, however, means getting past the woman at the door. I know there is a name for this person, this woman who sits at the front doors of lodgings and gives and takes the room key. Somewhere behind where she sits is often a small room with a bed, and she may be reading a newspaper or doing a crossword puzzle if she is sitting up at the desk by the door when you come and go. Or, she may be watching a small television, or listening to a static radio. Regardless, she does not experience the intrinsic joy of work so much promoted by North American organizational developers, and probably would not respond well to having someone come to her place of work to help her improve her attitude. Regardless of how grim these women usually are, I like them, and can even imagine doing that kind of work: sitting at a desk at the entrance of places, and not exactly monitoring anything except the comings and goings, and watching, invisible mostly, who is doing what, and when. And, of course, having the key that controls the re-entry into private space.
These women, as I said before, do not do their work with joy. When I enter the dormitory building, I need to tell her what room I am staying in, and then she checks a small gray box mounted on the wall to see if the key is there or if my roommate has already come in and gone to the room. Before I can get into the building, however, I may need to ring a bell if she has decided to lock the doors to the building, usually when she is in the back room resting or watching television. She does not being disturbed. For anything, at any time of the day, by anyone. She is just grim. Never smiles, and occasionally yells. One time, as I was leaving the building after having just given her my key and having ensured that I did not smile, not even an inch, she yelled at me as I started to open the first door. I can’t even reproduce here what she said, but she was frowning and yelling at me in Russian. I stopped walking. Stood still. What had I done? What was she anticipating that I was about to do? I looked at her, trying to turn the vertical wrinkles on my face into a question mark. And trying not to look annoyed, but calm. She yells agains, and then gesticulates to me that I will have to slide the lock across before I can get out. You are yelling at me that I have to unlock the door? I keep my face as impassive as possible and nod brusquely (first time in my life I have ever used the word “brusquely”). I slide the lock, open the door, and slam it behind me. I know that she will respect that.
After I went to St Isaac’s cathedral (which is now a museum, but used to be used as storage for vegetables, and photographs inside the museum show that the square in front used to be a field of cabbages), and while standing behind the cathedral between the cathedral grounds and Decembrist square, where poses the famous statue of the Bronze Horseman, I watched to find out why several policemen had stopped all the traffic from entering or crossing the street that runs along one side of Decembrist square. The traffic had apparently been stopped for a while, and the drivers of the cars, who had as little idea of why they had been stopped as I did, sat in their cars, occasionally starting a round of horn blowing to indicate to the policemen that they were ready to move on, and to please get the traffic going again. But the traffic sat still like that for at least 15 minutes, and so I felt it would be worth it to stick around to see why. Maybe I would be part of history in the making or something, and while I have this idea that maybe collective amnesia about history might be an intriguing thought experiment (“we must remember history so that we do not repeat our mistakes” is not exactly working, is it?), I also think that being an active participant in something that might be part of an official history of some kind might be okay. To have my life reduced to something like: my great grandmother was a war bride, or, my great great aunt on my father’s side was the first woman to…well, you know what I mean. Likely neither collective amnesia nor my presence as a historical detail will happen, but I can always imagine. So, I stuck around, and eventually a motorcade came rushing by, free of the constraints of the usual chaotic Petersburg traffic, and in this motorcade of mostly back limousines with darkened windows, one of the vehicles had a small yellow and red flag on it, and I remembered that I had heard that the Queen of Thailand had been visiting Peterhof a few days earlier, and that Peterhof had been closed early for her state visit. So, was this the Queen of Thailand? When ambulances roar through the city streets, no one budges. There is no law requiring a motorist move aside to let an ambulance go through, or if there is a law, no one obeys. A head of state, however, who is probably in excellent health if he or she is travelling to a foreign land, gets free passage. Okay, the comparison is facile, but you just notice these things.
Well, and while I am on the subject of traffic, I’ll just tell you that cars and pedestrians have an uneasy relationship, and I’ve come to think of walking as a kind of “buyer beware” proposition. If, as a walker, you don’t anticipate every possible move of every possible motorist, you are likely to “buy it” and find yourself in one of those ambulances whose sirens sound like they are resigned to the fact that they are ineffective.
So, once again in Decembrist square and finding myself face-to-buttocks with Peter the Great’s horse, I see the many, many newly wed couples getting photographed (are these the same couples who also go to the kissing bridge, or do some go to the kissing bridge and some to Peter the Great’s stallion (and it IS a stallion, I assure you from my examination of this impressive, anatomically correct steed)?) in the most bizarre positions and combinations and permutations of hand holding, branch waving, body twisting, tongue extending…well, it’s as if this is the bride’s one day to be a fashion model. So, job tip, if you are thinking of a career change: come to St Petersburg and set up shop as a wedding photographer, and be prepared to be as edgy as possible. You’ll make a living, I’m guessing, and it even occurred to me to set up shop while I’m here, but my 4.2 megapixel Canon sure hot camera is not up to the task, which is why I also bought a CD with 2100 digital photographs of St Petersburg on it, none of which I assume will be photographs of weddings of people I don’t know.
A final story for today, and that’s the story of yesterday, the trip to the Dream Museum. Otherwise known as the Freud museum, and billed as the 3rd Freud museum in the world, the two others being in Venice and London. It made me want to design a Lacan museum, and in a note to myself, I need to find out if there already is one. The St Petersburg Freud museum is designed to be mostly conceptual, and relies on the imagery from Freud’s dreams and dream analysis for its subject. But first, most appropriately, to get to the museum, we descended deep into the St Petersburg subway system, a descent perhaps equaled by the long and deep tunnels into London’s tube, but I don’t know for sure. It seemed like the escalator was going down for a long long time, and quickly, and I had gotten separated from everyone else I was traveling with (there were 15 of us trying to “keep together” in the subway, and that was a bit of a challenge, as we have all started to look Russian ourselves, we just sort of blended it…), so I waited at a crossroads, and yes, they turned up, which was a good thing, as it was the first time I had not taken my map and guidebook with me when going out.
The subway train moves really really quickly and makes horrendous noises, similar to the sounds made by the mill next to the campground in Merritt, which are reminiscent of some demonic factory whose task is to manufacture human suffering. No one talks in a St Petersburg subway, and I think that’s because you are all wondering if you are going to meet your death in this underground bullet, either from plunging head first into a train coming mistakenly towards you on the same tracks, or from an unexplainable electrical failure leading to fire and oxygen depletion (oxygen, I’m guessing, has a short half-life down there); and you also wonder how the Chechnyan situation is going, and whether any disgruntled terrorist has decided that today is the day…and so I think that everyone on a St Petersburg subway is not talking because they are busy planning their own response to oxygen depletion, sending mental messages to their loved ones, considering just how pissed off they will be in the afterlife to have been forced there too early, unprepared, unfinished…we all become little existentialists down there in the subway system, and so when we arose from the train at our stop, only to be stopped, en masse, by a grumpy police officer who wanted, arbitrarily to know who we were and where we were going, none of us really cared. I mean, what could he do? He only had a small club in his hands, and there were 15 of us. We could have taken him on and made small work of him in minutes. Luckily Dmitry was with us, the only one among us able to talk “police speak”, which is a specialized form of Russian, and involves a combination of politeness and firm resolve resulting in confidence. The policeman was angry because one of our number had taken a photograph of one of the mosaics in the subway station, and he wanted to fine all of us, or just her, I’m not sure, was never clear. A discussion between the police officer and Dmitri went on for a few minutes, maybe 6 or so, and then the officer went over to the woman who had taken the picture, and demanded 100 rubles from her (about 4 dollars). The funny part of all this is that she just looked at him, really offended, and said no. And then looked to the rest of us and said, I’m not giving this guy money just so that he can walk away with it in his own pocket. No way. And the police officer backed down, probably because his partner had much earlier walked away from what she probably knew was a stupid situation and he had no support, and he waved us on, and on we went to the Freud Museum where we saw sexually explicit drawings done by students of Freudian studies (I think – I was never clear about who did the drawings); a photo essay about Freud’s life; a series of drawings based on the images from Freud’s dreams; and a dark room in which are suspended a variety of images, letters, mirror fragments…all related to dreams.
Well, okay, that was the dream museum. I see that now when I am writing about it, the most interesting part of the trip for me was the subway ride there, and then the subway ride back, when Dmitri forgot which stop to get off at, and so we went too far, got off the train, backtracked, and then got out and walked…and the descent into this mania-factory was foreshortened and I went home to my room where I fell asleep and dreamed.
I still have not told you about Kostia and Masha Pentium, Lola and the Transvestite, the Scarlet Sails, or the two-tailed dog. But I’m done for now. I’m actually feeling really faint, and I think I probably need to go and find an omelet and see if I can get this blog entry sent off.
Bye,
Annie
Music from Zoom: tomorrow will be the 22nd century
I feel a slight sense of urgency right now, and woke up in the middle of the night and several times in the early morning feeling a bit panicked about what I have not yet done, and have not yet written about. In terms of the “not yet done”, I managed to get to the point where I can let go of feeling that I need to do what I have not yet done. That’s a relief. I have done a lot, I have thought about many things. Although just when I think I have no more room for anything else, something else “happens” that causes me to think. I’m starting to remind myself of the person who once said to me, frustrated with some proclamation I had made, “the problem with you Anne, is that you think too much.” That was a long time ago, and I must have been struck by the sentiment that it IS possible to think too much, because until that moment, it had never occurred to me. Think too much? I still haven’t wrapped my mind around that one, and that must have been about 20 years ago, in Calgary.
So, my urgency about needing to see the last few sights that I “should” see has subsided this morning, but my sense of needing to “record” what has not yet been recorded was not so easily quelled, so I found myself this morning writing a list of points that need to be made. The list is long, incomplete, and I don’t dare go out and experience anything else before catching up on this writing; I don’t want to get ahead of myself, have so much to say that it will never be said.
I know that some people are reading this blog; you send me emails, like cheerleaders, or something, responding to some small story or suggestion I’ve made, and I love those emails. The other thing that happens while I’m writing the blog is that I think of particular individuals reading particular sentences, and it’s an interesting way to be communicating. On the down side, I wonder if the blog sounds like one of those group Christmas letters, and if it does, would someone please write and tell me, and I will stop immediately. The other consideration I have to make is the fact that soon this Russiannie trip will be over, and thus, the blog. Being able to write in this way, so consistently, has been helpful to me. It has ensured that I’ve kept up to date with my notes, and it has helped me to identify what really has struck me. It has also helped me to distinguish between what is private and therefore not bloggable (I may have been too conservative in this respect) and what is public and open to all. So, for instance, I have not written about individual characters (and there are many of them) except in fairly general ways; and with a few exceptions, have not written about my “self”. Well, I just think the narrator of this piece and the random comments made by the narrator are “self” enough. Don’t you?
Anyway, I just have a few more days left here, and on Saturday as the sun is rising in British Columbia, I’ll be heading to Milan for a night of hot showers and a comfortable bed. On Sunday I fly to Toronto and spend a night there in a generic hotel near the airport; on Monday night I fly to Ottawa where I’ve planned my plane to arrive somewhat before Steve’s does, so that I’ll be in the airport to meet him when he gets there. Yeah! Then, it’s a week in Ottawa with Steve’s family.
So, there, you see that while I have seldom written about the future, here I am, writing about the future, which tells me that I’m ready to move on, that I have let go of needing to “do” certain things before I leave. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I won’t be doing anything else. I am most certainly doing a few more things, but won’t bore you with the details of the future any more than I already have; I’ll focus on the recent past.
Saturday afternoon was different from all other afternoons I’ve had here, and since nothing was planned in terms of lectures or workshops, a few of us headed out to see the mosque. We headed out at about 12:30, and since it had been my idea to go to the mosque, which is not far from the Peter and Paul Fortress, I was the navigator. To get there we had to cross the kissing bridge and the Field of Mars (google it, you’ll get the Wikipedia version of Russian history, better than my summary of National Geographic’s tour book) and then over the Trinity (Troiksa) Bridge which crosses the Neva. It was windy out, but the sun was shining, and while I had had a huge cheese omelet at Zoom earlier in the morning and was not hungry and had been prepared for a long walk to many places on this other island, others in the group were hungry and much needing their first Americano with milk for the day. I capitulated to the group (see my earlier blog entry about traveling alone) and found myself, after seeing the blue mosaic exterior of the locked mosque, sitting in a small dark uniquely Russian bar. There were few others in the bar, and at first the bartender eyed us suspiciously; I’m not sure he wanted us to be there. But we ordered from the menu (with Christina’s help – she speaks Russian and is writing an amazing book set in Georgia – not the American Georgia – look for it in about a year or two, I’m guessing) and soon a variety of small plates of pickled whatever arrived and since I had already eaten this massive omelet, I just ordered a “Homestyle” beer.
Mistake.
This “Homestyle” beer, a dark but not syrupy beer, was the best beer I have ever tasted, and so I felt compelled to mention that to Peter, who was in the process of considering whether or not to order a beer. “Try this”, I suggested, holding out my glass to him. “That is good,” he said, and got one for himself. Christina and Charlotte, neither of whom are big drinkers, let alone beer drinkers (like me, except when I’m traveling – and I’m planning to travel more now, so I can drink more beer), become curious when Peter and I each order another beer after agreeing with one another several times that yes, this beer is very good and deserves another taste. So they decide to have a taste from our second beer, and then they each order one of these beer from the bar and now the four of us are drinking large glasses of “Homestyle” beer and ordering plate after plate of very greasy and one-step-up-McDonald’s French fries, demolishing each plate. The salt makes us thirsty and eager for more beer; the beer makes us hungry and eager for more fries, and we are caught in a loop that we cannot escape, and the bartender even smiles, really really slightly, which in Russia is equivalent to uproariously laughter. And, well, we just get really, um, well, really really, happy, until we decide it’s time to go, and because none of us has a watch, and because of the white nights when the sun doesn’t set until midnight or so, we have no idea what time it is, so we walk out and back past the entrance to the Peter and Paul fortress where we see one sick-looking duck floating around in a pond filled with algae and floating garbage. At first we thought it was dead, but then it moved a wing tip, and we took pictures of this duck. The picture I took is more pathetic than the original experience, and over the Trinity Bridge we went and then Peter decides we need to go to a Dagastani restaurant and keeps luring us with the promise of it being “just two more minutes”, or “just around the next corner”, until I just couldn’t walk any farther away from where I am staying, so dropped out of the race for a good meal (besides, I was still full from the omelet and the fries, and didn’t really understand how everyone could be so famished, but they were, and I wasn’t) so, I went back to my room and passed, I mean, fell asleep.
Getting to my room, however, means getting past the woman at the door. I know there is a name for this person, this woman who sits at the front doors of lodgings and gives and takes the room key. Somewhere behind where she sits is often a small room with a bed, and she may be reading a newspaper or doing a crossword puzzle if she is sitting up at the desk by the door when you come and go. Or, she may be watching a small television, or listening to a static radio. Regardless, she does not experience the intrinsic joy of work so much promoted by North American organizational developers, and probably would not respond well to having someone come to her place of work to help her improve her attitude. Regardless of how grim these women usually are, I like them, and can even imagine doing that kind of work: sitting at a desk at the entrance of places, and not exactly monitoring anything except the comings and goings, and watching, invisible mostly, who is doing what, and when. And, of course, having the key that controls the re-entry into private space.
These women, as I said before, do not do their work with joy. When I enter the dormitory building, I need to tell her what room I am staying in, and then she checks a small gray box mounted on the wall to see if the key is there or if my roommate has already come in and gone to the room. Before I can get into the building, however, I may need to ring a bell if she has decided to lock the doors to the building, usually when she is in the back room resting or watching television. She does not being disturbed. For anything, at any time of the day, by anyone. She is just grim. Never smiles, and occasionally yells. One time, as I was leaving the building after having just given her my key and having ensured that I did not smile, not even an inch, she yelled at me as I started to open the first door. I can’t even reproduce here what she said, but she was frowning and yelling at me in Russian. I stopped walking. Stood still. What had I done? What was she anticipating that I was about to do? I looked at her, trying to turn the vertical wrinkles on my face into a question mark. And trying not to look annoyed, but calm. She yells agains, and then gesticulates to me that I will have to slide the lock across before I can get out. You are yelling at me that I have to unlock the door? I keep my face as impassive as possible and nod brusquely (first time in my life I have ever used the word “brusquely”). I slide the lock, open the door, and slam it behind me. I know that she will respect that.
After I went to St Isaac’s cathedral (which is now a museum, but used to be used as storage for vegetables, and photographs inside the museum show that the square in front used to be a field of cabbages), and while standing behind the cathedral between the cathedral grounds and Decembrist square, where poses the famous statue of the Bronze Horseman, I watched to find out why several policemen had stopped all the traffic from entering or crossing the street that runs along one side of Decembrist square. The traffic had apparently been stopped for a while, and the drivers of the cars, who had as little idea of why they had been stopped as I did, sat in their cars, occasionally starting a round of horn blowing to indicate to the policemen that they were ready to move on, and to please get the traffic going again. But the traffic sat still like that for at least 15 minutes, and so I felt it would be worth it to stick around to see why. Maybe I would be part of history in the making or something, and while I have this idea that maybe collective amnesia about history might be an intriguing thought experiment (“we must remember history so that we do not repeat our mistakes” is not exactly working, is it?), I also think that being an active participant in something that might be part of an official history of some kind might be okay. To have my life reduced to something like: my great grandmother was a war bride, or, my great great aunt on my father’s side was the first woman to…well, you know what I mean. Likely neither collective amnesia nor my presence as a historical detail will happen, but I can always imagine. So, I stuck around, and eventually a motorcade came rushing by, free of the constraints of the usual chaotic Petersburg traffic, and in this motorcade of mostly back limousines with darkened windows, one of the vehicles had a small yellow and red flag on it, and I remembered that I had heard that the Queen of Thailand had been visiting Peterhof a few days earlier, and that Peterhof had been closed early for her state visit. So, was this the Queen of Thailand? When ambulances roar through the city streets, no one budges. There is no law requiring a motorist move aside to let an ambulance go through, or if there is a law, no one obeys. A head of state, however, who is probably in excellent health if he or she is travelling to a foreign land, gets free passage. Okay, the comparison is facile, but you just notice these things.
Well, and while I am on the subject of traffic, I’ll just tell you that cars and pedestrians have an uneasy relationship, and I’ve come to think of walking as a kind of “buyer beware” proposition. If, as a walker, you don’t anticipate every possible move of every possible motorist, you are likely to “buy it” and find yourself in one of those ambulances whose sirens sound like they are resigned to the fact that they are ineffective.
So, once again in Decembrist square and finding myself face-to-buttocks with Peter the Great’s horse, I see the many, many newly wed couples getting photographed (are these the same couples who also go to the kissing bridge, or do some go to the kissing bridge and some to Peter the Great’s stallion (and it IS a stallion, I assure you from my examination of this impressive, anatomically correct steed)?) in the most bizarre positions and combinations and permutations of hand holding, branch waving, body twisting, tongue extending…well, it’s as if this is the bride’s one day to be a fashion model. So, job tip, if you are thinking of a career change: come to St Petersburg and set up shop as a wedding photographer, and be prepared to be as edgy as possible. You’ll make a living, I’m guessing, and it even occurred to me to set up shop while I’m here, but my 4.2 megapixel Canon sure hot camera is not up to the task, which is why I also bought a CD with 2100 digital photographs of St Petersburg on it, none of which I assume will be photographs of weddings of people I don’t know.
A final story for today, and that’s the story of yesterday, the trip to the Dream Museum. Otherwise known as the Freud museum, and billed as the 3rd Freud museum in the world, the two others being in Venice and London. It made me want to design a Lacan museum, and in a note to myself, I need to find out if there already is one. The St Petersburg Freud museum is designed to be mostly conceptual, and relies on the imagery from Freud’s dreams and dream analysis for its subject. But first, most appropriately, to get to the museum, we descended deep into the St Petersburg subway system, a descent perhaps equaled by the long and deep tunnels into London’s tube, but I don’t know for sure. It seemed like the escalator was going down for a long long time, and quickly, and I had gotten separated from everyone else I was traveling with (there were 15 of us trying to “keep together” in the subway, and that was a bit of a challenge, as we have all started to look Russian ourselves, we just sort of blended it…), so I waited at a crossroads, and yes, they turned up, which was a good thing, as it was the first time I had not taken my map and guidebook with me when going out.
The subway train moves really really quickly and makes horrendous noises, similar to the sounds made by the mill next to the campground in Merritt, which are reminiscent of some demonic factory whose task is to manufacture human suffering. No one talks in a St Petersburg subway, and I think that’s because you are all wondering if you are going to meet your death in this underground bullet, either from plunging head first into a train coming mistakenly towards you on the same tracks, or from an unexplainable electrical failure leading to fire and oxygen depletion (oxygen, I’m guessing, has a short half-life down there); and you also wonder how the Chechnyan situation is going, and whether any disgruntled terrorist has decided that today is the day…and so I think that everyone on a St Petersburg subway is not talking because they are busy planning their own response to oxygen depletion, sending mental messages to their loved ones, considering just how pissed off they will be in the afterlife to have been forced there too early, unprepared, unfinished…we all become little existentialists down there in the subway system, and so when we arose from the train at our stop, only to be stopped, en masse, by a grumpy police officer who wanted, arbitrarily to know who we were and where we were going, none of us really cared. I mean, what could he do? He only had a small club in his hands, and there were 15 of us. We could have taken him on and made small work of him in minutes. Luckily Dmitry was with us, the only one among us able to talk “police speak”, which is a specialized form of Russian, and involves a combination of politeness and firm resolve resulting in confidence. The policeman was angry because one of our number had taken a photograph of one of the mosaics in the subway station, and he wanted to fine all of us, or just her, I’m not sure, was never clear. A discussion between the police officer and Dmitri went on for a few minutes, maybe 6 or so, and then the officer went over to the woman who had taken the picture, and demanded 100 rubles from her (about 4 dollars). The funny part of all this is that she just looked at him, really offended, and said no. And then looked to the rest of us and said, I’m not giving this guy money just so that he can walk away with it in his own pocket. No way. And the police officer backed down, probably because his partner had much earlier walked away from what she probably knew was a stupid situation and he had no support, and he waved us on, and on we went to the Freud Museum where we saw sexually explicit drawings done by students of Freudian studies (I think – I was never clear about who did the drawings); a photo essay about Freud’s life; a series of drawings based on the images from Freud’s dreams; and a dark room in which are suspended a variety of images, letters, mirror fragments…all related to dreams.
Well, okay, that was the dream museum. I see that now when I am writing about it, the most interesting part of the trip for me was the subway ride there, and then the subway ride back, when Dmitri forgot which stop to get off at, and so we went too far, got off the train, backtracked, and then got out and walked…and the descent into this mania-factory was foreshortened and I went home to my room where I fell asleep and dreamed.
I still have not told you about Kostia and Masha Pentium, Lola and the Transvestite, the Scarlet Sails, or the two-tailed dog. But I’m done for now. I’m actually feeling really faint, and I think I probably need to go and find an omelet and see if I can get this blog entry sent off.
Bye,
Annie
Music from Zoom: tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Jesus
a small detail on the side of the Church on spilled blood...at the site of the Decembrist uprising in 1825 
Blog
July 9, 2007
July 10, 2007
I started to write this blog on the 9th, but somehow I just couldn’t. I think I’m really tired, and although I had intended to go to the Hermitage today, it didn’t “work out” as they say in Russia. This idea of intention and the impact of circumstance is strong here, and it works for me…I intend to use the expressions my self, and have already started. I’m not sure if I will ever get to the Hermitage while I’m here, and that would be scandalous to me, so must find a way to skip something else and go there.
I’m sitting in a small restaurant called Zoom, which is just around the corner from where I am staying at the Herzen University dormitory. My dormitory room is small, and I share it with Allison, with whom I always have interesting conversations at the end of the day. We have very separate days, which makes it all the more interesting at the end of the day, as we have done such different things.
There is so much to do here.
We can’t open our window because of the mosquitoes, so our room has become quite the little stew pot of humidity. I’ve taken to wrapping myself in the lightest of sheets, and probably look like I’m on my way to a toga party. Or that I am a returned ghost, which is a more likely scenario here: there are many ghosts in St Petersburg, as the city is built on the bones of those who built it, and of course the rivers are filled with the bones of those who disagreed (or who were seen to disagree). Yes, I’m sure I must look like a ghost.
I had this thought the other day: so many of the buildings here are decorated with angels and cherubs and various birds that I imagined that all the wings of those beings suddenly became inspired and the whole city lifted up into a gust of wind and sailed over the Gulf of Finland, and then dropped, where it hovered and continued thriving. I think that’s how odd this city seems to me; it could be anywhere suspended over anything, going about its insulated business and just – humming.
But also yesterday I went for another walk, a shorter one this time, and visited Peter’s Summer Garden/Winter Palace. I liked that his palace was small, two storeys, and a simple design, by a Dutch architect, a kind of pragmatic place constructed to house his pragmatic curiosities. The house is close to where the Neva meets a canal, and probably when he lived there his view across the Neva to the right would have been of a flat field, or marsh, no buildings.
I also found the “emblem” for my trip, a small print of a St Petersburg cityscape, over which is superimposed an image of a bizarre looking canine; in tiny writing on the print are several Russian words whose meanings I don’t know, and for some reason, that tiny bit of absurdity, the odd dog, is a meaningful synecdoche of my experience. I’ve never quite taken to the Maryushka dolls, and in fact learned (from the award-winning lecturer in my untranslatable Russian class) that they were introduced by the Japanese in the early 20th century. So, a tiny absurd print made by a Russian artist appears to by my emblem: not the dolls; not the lacquer boxes which are pretty but just that; not the fur hats, which will fade in the Vancouver Island rain; not the birch boxes etched with Church of Spilled Blood; not the ubiquitous icons for sale at every street corner and in every cathedral.
So the music in this café, Zoom, is even better than the rock music of the other place I used to go, until I got tired of the ever-present green “reserved” signs placed on the tables to keep us “Americans” down to a small percentage of their clientele. I can tell when I’m not wanted, and despite the Cyrillic alphabet, can read the signs. And hey, that’s a whole other experience I am going to write about once I get home (I’ve been taking notes), and that is the experience of traveling as an American, because that’s essentially what I am when I am here with an American-identified group…an American. That’s exacerbated in my mind by the fact that most of my American friends refer to themselves as coming from “America”, thereby claiming the whole category of “America” for themselves, and leaving me to work out for myself how I am to distinguish my north American-ness from their American-ness. It’s an odd feeling, but I’m working on an essay with a working title called “Once Upon A Time I Knew an American” and it’s about that, and of course other things. What I’m getting at here is that the experience of being here in Russia, with mostly Americans (there are other Canadians, of course, but we are a minority), is as noteworthy as the experience of being in Russia. One of the things that I have been feeling about being Canadian while so far away from Canada – I can get Canadian news by checking the online Canadian newspapers – is the impact of the looming possibility of a common “North America” on the various senses of North American identity. Most of the time I don’t think about stuff like that, or when I do start to think am usually precluded from finishing by my limited contexts.
I’ve come up with a travel motto for myself: travel often and alone, stay long, live simply.
I have my eye focused on a small cabin on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland. The dream of that cabin is vivid; the feelings associated with the dream are even stronger.
July 9, 2007
July 10, 2007
I started to write this blog on the 9th, but somehow I just couldn’t. I think I’m really tired, and although I had intended to go to the Hermitage today, it didn’t “work out” as they say in Russia. This idea of intention and the impact of circumstance is strong here, and it works for me…I intend to use the expressions my self, and have already started. I’m not sure if I will ever get to the Hermitage while I’m here, and that would be scandalous to me, so must find a way to skip something else and go there.
I’m sitting in a small restaurant called Zoom, which is just around the corner from where I am staying at the Herzen University dormitory. My dormitory room is small, and I share it with Allison, with whom I always have interesting conversations at the end of the day. We have very separate days, which makes it all the more interesting at the end of the day, as we have done such different things.
There is so much to do here.
We can’t open our window because of the mosquitoes, so our room has become quite the little stew pot of humidity. I’ve taken to wrapping myself in the lightest of sheets, and probably look like I’m on my way to a toga party. Or that I am a returned ghost, which is a more likely scenario here: there are many ghosts in St Petersburg, as the city is built on the bones of those who built it, and of course the rivers are filled with the bones of those who disagreed (or who were seen to disagree). Yes, I’m sure I must look like a ghost.
I had this thought the other day: so many of the buildings here are decorated with angels and cherubs and various birds that I imagined that all the wings of those beings suddenly became inspired and the whole city lifted up into a gust of wind and sailed over the Gulf of Finland, and then dropped, where it hovered and continued thriving. I think that’s how odd this city seems to me; it could be anywhere suspended over anything, going about its insulated business and just – humming.
But also yesterday I went for another walk, a shorter one this time, and visited Peter’s Summer Garden/Winter Palace. I liked that his palace was small, two storeys, and a simple design, by a Dutch architect, a kind of pragmatic place constructed to house his pragmatic curiosities. The house is close to where the Neva meets a canal, and probably when he lived there his view across the Neva to the right would have been of a flat field, or marsh, no buildings.
I also found the “emblem” for my trip, a small print of a St Petersburg cityscape, over which is superimposed an image of a bizarre looking canine; in tiny writing on the print are several Russian words whose meanings I don’t know, and for some reason, that tiny bit of absurdity, the odd dog, is a meaningful synecdoche of my experience. I’ve never quite taken to the Maryushka dolls, and in fact learned (from the award-winning lecturer in my untranslatable Russian class) that they were introduced by the Japanese in the early 20th century. So, a tiny absurd print made by a Russian artist appears to by my emblem: not the dolls; not the lacquer boxes which are pretty but just that; not the fur hats, which will fade in the Vancouver Island rain; not the birch boxes etched with Church of Spilled Blood; not the ubiquitous icons for sale at every street corner and in every cathedral.
So the music in this café, Zoom, is even better than the rock music of the other place I used to go, until I got tired of the ever-present green “reserved” signs placed on the tables to keep us “Americans” down to a small percentage of their clientele. I can tell when I’m not wanted, and despite the Cyrillic alphabet, can read the signs. And hey, that’s a whole other experience I am going to write about once I get home (I’ve been taking notes), and that is the experience of traveling as an American, because that’s essentially what I am when I am here with an American-identified group…an American. That’s exacerbated in my mind by the fact that most of my American friends refer to themselves as coming from “America”, thereby claiming the whole category of “America” for themselves, and leaving me to work out for myself how I am to distinguish my north American-ness from their American-ness. It’s an odd feeling, but I’m working on an essay with a working title called “Once Upon A Time I Knew an American” and it’s about that, and of course other things. What I’m getting at here is that the experience of being here in Russia, with mostly Americans (there are other Canadians, of course, but we are a minority), is as noteworthy as the experience of being in Russia. One of the things that I have been feeling about being Canadian while so far away from Canada – I can get Canadian news by checking the online Canadian newspapers – is the impact of the looming possibility of a common “North America” on the various senses of North American identity. Most of the time I don’t think about stuff like that, or when I do start to think am usually precluded from finishing by my limited contexts.
I’ve come up with a travel motto for myself: travel often and alone, stay long, live simply.
I have my eye focused on a small cabin on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland. The dream of that cabin is vivid; the feelings associated with the dream are even stronger.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Blog July 7, 2007
Title: Masha?
I’m not sure how long it has been since my last entry, but I’m trying something new, sitting in my room with my laptop and typing, and hoping I will be able to cut and paste from here to the blog when I get to a high speed later.
Details.
I’m thinking, though, that maybe it’s been a few days, and I need to gather my thoughts back to Wednesday or so. But on Tuesday, I had intended to go to a number of lectures after my morning poetry class, but instead was distracted by something else, the details of which I have no memory. Oh, this is a good lesson to me about note-taking. My notes only say that I skipped the evening faculty reading because I had felt sick and had gone to bed…and slept. So, the afternoon is a blank to me, and maybe I slept all afternoon.
Well, I haven’t actually been slavishly reporting on the mundane details of every day anyway, so I’ll skip now to this second half of the program which is amazingly already half over. I experienced the first two weeks here in a kind of slow moving, intense dream like state, but after some of my new “friends” left (I think about half of the participants left, and half stayed on for the whole month), and another 50 new people arrived, and the new sessions started, everything was starkly different. Time started moving much more quickly. SP stopped being just a dream, and started to become more real, although still unattainable, and if SP were a lover, he would be a distant one, one whom I would feel concurrently compelled and reluctant to ask: what are you thinking?, that horrible question we have all asked and then immediately regretted: what are you thinking?
As I wake out of the dream, I find myself attending a series of lectures about Russia given by… the name is not there. I have to sit in the front of the classroom (I’m a back-of-the-classroom resident by habit and preference) because otherwise I can’t hear the deep register of his voice over the banging metal door just outside and over the uncareful footsteps on the squeaking wooden floor, or even over the rustling of paper or polite muffled coughs in the classroom; regardless of my hearing challenges and having to sit in the front of the class, I attend these lectures where I am not being workshopped in any way form or manner (no chalk board, no flipchart, no cozy chats about who we are and where we come from…god I hate that shit) and listen to his amazing-note-free lectures about Russia. So, he comes into the class the first day, introduces himself, outlines the topics of his six lectures, and begins to talk. His talks include a “thesis”, of sorts, a number of stories and examples, both from history and from his personal experience, that illustrate what he means, and then a conclusion that slides neatly into an introduction for the next lecture topic. The topics he’s covering are the untranslatable Russian expressions that provide insight into the Russian “character”; Russian Orthodoxy and its differences from Roman Catholicism; the Petrine influence on Russian culture, especially St Petersburg; Russian literature as a phenomenon of the aristocracy (until Chekov); Communism; and finally, Russian drinking.
He began the 1st lecture with a Russian drinking song, one that he feels suggests something of the nature of the Russian character (always, of course, with reminders that we are not to reduce our understanding to such stereotypes, but that we are speaking in broad strokes), and the song goes like this,
(and I’m thinking you should imagine a group of, probably men, good friends, sitting around a table, a bottle of vodka in the middle. Before beginning the song, they should down, together, a shot of vodka. And at the end of each line, they should do the same. This is my addition to the story and should by no means be taken as historically or folklorically accurate)
If you drink, you will not buy a house
If you don’t drink, you will not buy a house
So, it is better to drink and not buy a house
Than it is to not drink and not buy a house.
(then all men should break out in great laughter, and start to tell stories to one another, tales of a sort, I’m thinking, but again, that’s my addition).
So, I missed Friday afternoon’s lecture on the Petrine influence on Russian culture, mostly because I woke up on Friday with this enormous need to get out on my own, walk as far away as I could in a direction I had never been, and spend the day with my own thoughts. That’s what I did, after checking my stupid guidebook (I’m going to start a group on Facebook, if there isn’t one already, a group “Against the Use of Guidebooks”). Okay, so I was looking through my guidebook to see where I might want to go when I read the following: “If you want to experience the maritime quality of Vasilevsky (one of the SP islands), you have to depart from its more lively eastern end and head to its bracing and remote-seeming western shores.”
I’m a sucker for the word “bracing”, and I think it reminds me of those children’s books I read when I was a kid, books about a group of Scottish children who wore sensible shoes and knee socks and “braced” themselves for walks along rocky crags. I think I always thought of those children as having strong knees and having bramble scratches on their legs, and that there was something essentially healthy about getting cut and scratched while walking in bracing weather. Or something like that. And of course I grew up in a “bracing” climate myself…so maybe I was seduced by the proposition: “if you want to experience the maritime quality”. Yeah, I thought, I do want to do that. Of course this guide book provided no further information except a map, so I figure out where I would have to go and started walking. I guess I had walked about two ½ hours when I realized that I would have to turn back (not that I have to worry about nightfall here, but I do have to consider the fact that I’m not actually capable of walking on concrete, regardless of the quality of my shoes, for much more than a few hours, without having the muscles in my legs seize up. Or, as happened one day, inexplicably, having my ankles swell to the size of tennis balls. And then there is the problem of bathrooms. I am really going to have to invent some solution to quick and easy urination for women. In any case, I did not get to that maritime quality or the “bracing and remote-seeming” part of the island, not even close. But I did see a bunch of ships and loading cranes and rough looking men bathing their feet in the Neva and I saw a high metal fence topped with rolled barbed wire, and another high fence topped with razor wire, and those on a beautiful tree lined street, and a beautiful firehall with a great statue of firefighters outside. So, my walk took me six hours, and that meant that I could walk only half-way to bracing and remote, or half-way away from lively. I ended up having a really late lunch at a German restaurant, so had a (large) great unfiltered beer, salad, and salted pretzels…sat on the terrace outside and let my legs recover and then pretty much staggered back to my room where I slept for two hours, having missed my afternoon lecture on Peter I.
Despite my truancy, these lecturers, by this lecturer who delivers what he promises, are the best part of the program, for me, so far. Well, that and the Dmitri walks.
Linda H., you would have also chosen to go on a walk entitled “Gender and Cyber”, especially since the advertised walk, “The petersburg artist as the creative parasite”, which you also would have signed up for, had been changed to the former. Blah blah blah…badly expressed former sentence. Whatever. You know what I mean.
So, I have to tell you about a Dmitri walk. Every Dmitri walk is different, yet they all pretty much follow a similar pattern. I’ll see if I can capture that here. Dmitri is, well, I don’t know who he is. He is Dmitri. He organizes these walks, two a week, for the full month, so has set up 8 walks. He seems nervous, sweats a lot while he talks, wears black t-shirts and thick glasses. Steps away from you when you step towards him. Is passionate about his subject, but, and this is important, aware of the provisional nature of passion, or something like that. He seems to be an observer type, who observes, watches, synthesizes, analyzes, and then even is aware of the I want to say “false”, but that is not the right word, it’s more like, he is aware of his awareness of things and maybe it’s actually the “humor” of taking anything very seriously. Yes, I think that captures what I think he is about. Serious, and then aware of the humor of being serious. So, regardless of whether that is what he intends, that is how I experience him, and that is why I love to go on Dmitri walks, because the walks are like a physical/kinesthetic expression of that blend of the serious and the humorous.
The first Dmitri walk I went on was the first Tuesday I was here. It’s funny, but I don’t even remember where we were supposed to go, because I never actually got there, and I’ll have to check my notes to find out what the topic was. Maybe I’ll do that right now. Hang on.
Nope. Can’t find my notes. But we are setting out on a walk, scheduled from 2:30 to 4. There are other things I need to do at 4. I’m still jet lagged. We leave as a group of 10 or so from the Herzen Inn and go and stand at a street corner across the street from the Inn where Dmitri begins to talk, in a very low voice, in a fairly thick Russian accent, beside the roaring of traffic (another challenge for my hearing, as you can guess) about…St Petersburg as a mythical city. He begins by saying that we will walk for 30 minutes to our destination, 30 minutes back…and my inner arithmetician tells me that leaves another half hour AT the destination. So, after 40 minutes of St Petersburg as a mythical city, during which time we get yelled at for standing too close to the entrance of a Versace shopping plaza, and then freeze to death standing in the shade about 3 feet from a sunny spot, we set out on a walk. I am dubious about our ability to get to our destination and back in the remaining 50 minutes, but I stick with the plan because, I’m, well, curious, to see what will happen. I mean, already I can’t remember the last time I’ve been yelled at, and here I am in a new country where I know none of the rules of engagement, even less of the language, I don’t know the layout of the city, I’m jet lagged, and I am at the mercy of someone who seems oblivious to space, temperature, time, and sound. What could be better? There is something to add to this: he is interesting to listen to and I find myself grateful for having the read the Russian formalists many years ago in Calgary. And, of course, it REALLY helped having read about the 4th dimension just before coming here, because in this instance, and in many others, I now have a place to put the incomprehensible: oh, I think, when I don’t know what to think. I must be in the fourth dimension. And I start to look around for Daniil Kharms.
Or Filonov. The painter.
So, we start walking and get to the cathedral where Nabakov’s funeral was held. By this time it is raining, the street corner we are standing on is noisier than the earlier one, and I can’t hear anything. It is, when Dmitri has finished speaking, 3;45, and he begins walking again, and we are crossing the yard in front of the Hermitage, heading for a bridge that will take us to our destination. I say to Sandra, who is walking beside me, that we are going to cross the bridge, that there is a fair amount of walking yet to do. Oh, oh, and the two of us agree that between the walking and the standing and the straining to hear over the traffic noise and the advance of time, we can’t continue, so we slip back and take the short way back to the hotel and …. Do what each of us needs to do.
Now, you would think that that would be the end of the Dmitri walks, right, for me? Wrong. There is something about his perspective, something about what he talks about, and how he talks about it, and the absolute unpredictability of what will happen and where we will go that is equally compelling as the beautifully predictable and organized lectures that I described earlier. It’s like, dare I say it, it’s like yin and yang, well, no, I wish I could come up with a better analogy for those differences and why they work together, but I can’t. I only know that for me, I am equally entranced with both approaches, and I think that’s because both approaches leave me an enormous amount of space to do with the information, the concepts, the experiences, what I will do with them, without having to publicly process or share what or how I think or know. My reactions are tied to my most recent years plowing through the doctorate, taking “workshops”, learning how to “facilitate”, “connecting”, “networking”.
So, last night I went to the Georgian restaurant with Charlotte and we talked about writing, and the writing life, and listened to the guy wearing tight black leather boots and a black tunic with gold trim, a dagger tucked provocatively into the belt cinching his portly mid-section, and listened to him sing Georgian songs to a Karaoke machine.
I had gone to Charlotte’s room to say hello and to see if I could use her phone, and we had intended to go to see Noah Richler, but both realized how tired we were and couldn’t imagine another long walk to the Nabokov museum (can you imagine, being too tired to go to the Nabokov?) so went to an Armenian restaurant first, who told us they had no room, but then we stood outside and watched while they let others in after us…? Well, at least they didn’t yell at us, although I have to say that I probably won’t ever mind getting yelled at again, as I’m used to turning my back on being yelled at, now, for what seem to me to be the smallest of offences: not having correct change, wearing sandals, wanting “still” instead of “gaseous” water, and heck, you guys know me, and you know I’m not exactly rude by nature, or obnoxious, or whatever, so I know you ‘re not thinking that Anne the asshole is finally getting her due.
So the Georgians were kind enough to let us in.
Tired, now, and it’s Saturday, and I’m meeting a few people a bit later to walk up to the mosque.
Love,
Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you about Masha, and the Gender and Cyber walk. You’ll love Masha, really, I promise you. In the meantime, check out the following: http://digbody.atlant.ru
Ha ha this is so funny. In one my lectures I heard about the expression, “I intend” to do something, and what that means in Russian. I had intended to tell you about Masha, but, well, other words interceded, got in my way, and Masha will have to wait, because while I am enjoying writing, I really need to get going out in the world again, to the mosque, to wherever else the walk to the mosque really takes me, so that I can write again. Masha will have to wait, but Masha has already happened, so there’s plenty of time for that…
Title: Masha?
I’m not sure how long it has been since my last entry, but I’m trying something new, sitting in my room with my laptop and typing, and hoping I will be able to cut and paste from here to the blog when I get to a high speed later.
Details.
I’m thinking, though, that maybe it’s been a few days, and I need to gather my thoughts back to Wednesday or so. But on Tuesday, I had intended to go to a number of lectures after my morning poetry class, but instead was distracted by something else, the details of which I have no memory. Oh, this is a good lesson to me about note-taking. My notes only say that I skipped the evening faculty reading because I had felt sick and had gone to bed…and slept. So, the afternoon is a blank to me, and maybe I slept all afternoon.
Well, I haven’t actually been slavishly reporting on the mundane details of every day anyway, so I’ll skip now to this second half of the program which is amazingly already half over. I experienced the first two weeks here in a kind of slow moving, intense dream like state, but after some of my new “friends” left (I think about half of the participants left, and half stayed on for the whole month), and another 50 new people arrived, and the new sessions started, everything was starkly different. Time started moving much more quickly. SP stopped being just a dream, and started to become more real, although still unattainable, and if SP were a lover, he would be a distant one, one whom I would feel concurrently compelled and reluctant to ask: what are you thinking?, that horrible question we have all asked and then immediately regretted: what are you thinking?
As I wake out of the dream, I find myself attending a series of lectures about Russia given by… the name is not there. I have to sit in the front of the classroom (I’m a back-of-the-classroom resident by habit and preference) because otherwise I can’t hear the deep register of his voice over the banging metal door just outside and over the uncareful footsteps on the squeaking wooden floor, or even over the rustling of paper or polite muffled coughs in the classroom; regardless of my hearing challenges and having to sit in the front of the class, I attend these lectures where I am not being workshopped in any way form or manner (no chalk board, no flipchart, no cozy chats about who we are and where we come from…god I hate that shit) and listen to his amazing-note-free lectures about Russia. So, he comes into the class the first day, introduces himself, outlines the topics of his six lectures, and begins to talk. His talks include a “thesis”, of sorts, a number of stories and examples, both from history and from his personal experience, that illustrate what he means, and then a conclusion that slides neatly into an introduction for the next lecture topic. The topics he’s covering are the untranslatable Russian expressions that provide insight into the Russian “character”; Russian Orthodoxy and its differences from Roman Catholicism; the Petrine influence on Russian culture, especially St Petersburg; Russian literature as a phenomenon of the aristocracy (until Chekov); Communism; and finally, Russian drinking.
He began the 1st lecture with a Russian drinking song, one that he feels suggests something of the nature of the Russian character (always, of course, with reminders that we are not to reduce our understanding to such stereotypes, but that we are speaking in broad strokes), and the song goes like this,
(and I’m thinking you should imagine a group of, probably men, good friends, sitting around a table, a bottle of vodka in the middle. Before beginning the song, they should down, together, a shot of vodka. And at the end of each line, they should do the same. This is my addition to the story and should by no means be taken as historically or folklorically accurate)
If you drink, you will not buy a house
If you don’t drink, you will not buy a house
So, it is better to drink and not buy a house
Than it is to not drink and not buy a house.
(then all men should break out in great laughter, and start to tell stories to one another, tales of a sort, I’m thinking, but again, that’s my addition).
So, I missed Friday afternoon’s lecture on the Petrine influence on Russian culture, mostly because I woke up on Friday with this enormous need to get out on my own, walk as far away as I could in a direction I had never been, and spend the day with my own thoughts. That’s what I did, after checking my stupid guidebook (I’m going to start a group on Facebook, if there isn’t one already, a group “Against the Use of Guidebooks”). Okay, so I was looking through my guidebook to see where I might want to go when I read the following: “If you want to experience the maritime quality of Vasilevsky (one of the SP islands), you have to depart from its more lively eastern end and head to its bracing and remote-seeming western shores.”
I’m a sucker for the word “bracing”, and I think it reminds me of those children’s books I read when I was a kid, books about a group of Scottish children who wore sensible shoes and knee socks and “braced” themselves for walks along rocky crags. I think I always thought of those children as having strong knees and having bramble scratches on their legs, and that there was something essentially healthy about getting cut and scratched while walking in bracing weather. Or something like that. And of course I grew up in a “bracing” climate myself…so maybe I was seduced by the proposition: “if you want to experience the maritime quality”. Yeah, I thought, I do want to do that. Of course this guide book provided no further information except a map, so I figure out where I would have to go and started walking. I guess I had walked about two ½ hours when I realized that I would have to turn back (not that I have to worry about nightfall here, but I do have to consider the fact that I’m not actually capable of walking on concrete, regardless of the quality of my shoes, for much more than a few hours, without having the muscles in my legs seize up. Or, as happened one day, inexplicably, having my ankles swell to the size of tennis balls. And then there is the problem of bathrooms. I am really going to have to invent some solution to quick and easy urination for women. In any case, I did not get to that maritime quality or the “bracing and remote-seeming” part of the island, not even close. But I did see a bunch of ships and loading cranes and rough looking men bathing their feet in the Neva and I saw a high metal fence topped with rolled barbed wire, and another high fence topped with razor wire, and those on a beautiful tree lined street, and a beautiful firehall with a great statue of firefighters outside. So, my walk took me six hours, and that meant that I could walk only half-way to bracing and remote, or half-way away from lively. I ended up having a really late lunch at a German restaurant, so had a (large) great unfiltered beer, salad, and salted pretzels…sat on the terrace outside and let my legs recover and then pretty much staggered back to my room where I slept for two hours, having missed my afternoon lecture on Peter I.
Despite my truancy, these lecturers, by this lecturer who delivers what he promises, are the best part of the program, for me, so far. Well, that and the Dmitri walks.
Linda H., you would have also chosen to go on a walk entitled “Gender and Cyber”, especially since the advertised walk, “The petersburg artist as the creative parasite”, which you also would have signed up for, had been changed to the former. Blah blah blah…badly expressed former sentence. Whatever. You know what I mean.
So, I have to tell you about a Dmitri walk. Every Dmitri walk is different, yet they all pretty much follow a similar pattern. I’ll see if I can capture that here. Dmitri is, well, I don’t know who he is. He is Dmitri. He organizes these walks, two a week, for the full month, so has set up 8 walks. He seems nervous, sweats a lot while he talks, wears black t-shirts and thick glasses. Steps away from you when you step towards him. Is passionate about his subject, but, and this is important, aware of the provisional nature of passion, or something like that. He seems to be an observer type, who observes, watches, synthesizes, analyzes, and then even is aware of the I want to say “false”, but that is not the right word, it’s more like, he is aware of his awareness of things and maybe it’s actually the “humor” of taking anything very seriously. Yes, I think that captures what I think he is about. Serious, and then aware of the humor of being serious. So, regardless of whether that is what he intends, that is how I experience him, and that is why I love to go on Dmitri walks, because the walks are like a physical/kinesthetic expression of that blend of the serious and the humorous.
The first Dmitri walk I went on was the first Tuesday I was here. It’s funny, but I don’t even remember where we were supposed to go, because I never actually got there, and I’ll have to check my notes to find out what the topic was. Maybe I’ll do that right now. Hang on.
Nope. Can’t find my notes. But we are setting out on a walk, scheduled from 2:30 to 4. There are other things I need to do at 4. I’m still jet lagged. We leave as a group of 10 or so from the Herzen Inn and go and stand at a street corner across the street from the Inn where Dmitri begins to talk, in a very low voice, in a fairly thick Russian accent, beside the roaring of traffic (another challenge for my hearing, as you can guess) about…St Petersburg as a mythical city. He begins by saying that we will walk for 30 minutes to our destination, 30 minutes back…and my inner arithmetician tells me that leaves another half hour AT the destination. So, after 40 minutes of St Petersburg as a mythical city, during which time we get yelled at for standing too close to the entrance of a Versace shopping plaza, and then freeze to death standing in the shade about 3 feet from a sunny spot, we set out on a walk. I am dubious about our ability to get to our destination and back in the remaining 50 minutes, but I stick with the plan because, I’m, well, curious, to see what will happen. I mean, already I can’t remember the last time I’ve been yelled at, and here I am in a new country where I know none of the rules of engagement, even less of the language, I don’t know the layout of the city, I’m jet lagged, and I am at the mercy of someone who seems oblivious to space, temperature, time, and sound. What could be better? There is something to add to this: he is interesting to listen to and I find myself grateful for having the read the Russian formalists many years ago in Calgary. And, of course, it REALLY helped having read about the 4th dimension just before coming here, because in this instance, and in many others, I now have a place to put the incomprehensible: oh, I think, when I don’t know what to think. I must be in the fourth dimension. And I start to look around for Daniil Kharms.
Or Filonov. The painter.
So, we start walking and get to the cathedral where Nabakov’s funeral was held. By this time it is raining, the street corner we are standing on is noisier than the earlier one, and I can’t hear anything. It is, when Dmitri has finished speaking, 3;45, and he begins walking again, and we are crossing the yard in front of the Hermitage, heading for a bridge that will take us to our destination. I say to Sandra, who is walking beside me, that we are going to cross the bridge, that there is a fair amount of walking yet to do. Oh, oh, and the two of us agree that between the walking and the standing and the straining to hear over the traffic noise and the advance of time, we can’t continue, so we slip back and take the short way back to the hotel and …. Do what each of us needs to do.
Now, you would think that that would be the end of the Dmitri walks, right, for me? Wrong. There is something about his perspective, something about what he talks about, and how he talks about it, and the absolute unpredictability of what will happen and where we will go that is equally compelling as the beautifully predictable and organized lectures that I described earlier. It’s like, dare I say it, it’s like yin and yang, well, no, I wish I could come up with a better analogy for those differences and why they work together, but I can’t. I only know that for me, I am equally entranced with both approaches, and I think that’s because both approaches leave me an enormous amount of space to do with the information, the concepts, the experiences, what I will do with them, without having to publicly process or share what or how I think or know. My reactions are tied to my most recent years plowing through the doctorate, taking “workshops”, learning how to “facilitate”, “connecting”, “networking”.
So, last night I went to the Georgian restaurant with Charlotte and we talked about writing, and the writing life, and listened to the guy wearing tight black leather boots and a black tunic with gold trim, a dagger tucked provocatively into the belt cinching his portly mid-section, and listened to him sing Georgian songs to a Karaoke machine.
I had gone to Charlotte’s room to say hello and to see if I could use her phone, and we had intended to go to see Noah Richler, but both realized how tired we were and couldn’t imagine another long walk to the Nabokov museum (can you imagine, being too tired to go to the Nabokov?) so went to an Armenian restaurant first, who told us they had no room, but then we stood outside and watched while they let others in after us…? Well, at least they didn’t yell at us, although I have to say that I probably won’t ever mind getting yelled at again, as I’m used to turning my back on being yelled at, now, for what seem to me to be the smallest of offences: not having correct change, wearing sandals, wanting “still” instead of “gaseous” water, and heck, you guys know me, and you know I’m not exactly rude by nature, or obnoxious, or whatever, so I know you ‘re not thinking that Anne the asshole is finally getting her due.
So the Georgians were kind enough to let us in.
Tired, now, and it’s Saturday, and I’m meeting a few people a bit later to walk up to the mosque.
Love,
Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you about Masha, and the Gender and Cyber walk. You’ll love Masha, really, I promise you. In the meantime, check out the following: http://digbody.atlant.ru
Ha ha this is so funny. In one my lectures I heard about the expression, “I intend” to do something, and what that means in Russian. I had intended to tell you about Masha, but, well, other words interceded, got in my way, and Masha will have to wait, because while I am enjoying writing, I really need to get going out in the world again, to the mosque, to wherever else the walk to the mosque really takes me, so that I can write again. Masha will have to wait, but Masha has already happened, so there’s plenty of time for that…
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Progressive Nostalgia
I may do a botch up job of this, but here goes anyway. progressive nostalgia, which I mentioned a few days ago, has to do with the neo-marxist perception that the real Marxism of Russia, of the Leninist type, was the good kind of marxism, and that Lenin's early death and the subsequent Stalin years were a hideous interruption of the possibility of the political and cultural utopia imagined by Lenin.
or something like that.
there is a group of independent intellectuals here who call themselves neo marxists and whose project it is to promote neo marxism, a return to the ideas of Lenin and promote them as a viable alternative to Putin's brand of capitalism, which, they fear, is taking Russia in the wrong direction.
In the first session here I attended a series of six seminars given by one of those neo marxists, Alexandr Skidan, who, along with a group of women activists who write and produce plays (among other activities), provided us with a glimpse into their view of a neo Marxist Russia, which reminds me of the days when as a Carleton University student I was recruited into a group of Marxist Leninists to run for student council. I came eerily close to winning, but did not, a "theme" that has continued throughout my life. You know, coming second. I think someone has written an essay about "coming second". We all hear about the person who came first; who comes second? Are they that much worse than the one who came first?
Well, anyway, that is a digression. From neo marxism, and superficially at least neo Marxism sounds similar to the Marxism in Canada in the early 70s, but with an edge of urgency, because certainly in the streets here it feels urgent, crazy, unfettered, out of control. But this out of controlness may be no more urgent than the out of control ness that I see in my own country, just less familiar in its details: the youth here are wearing designer jeans that are not only faded, but also heavily although symmetrically wrinkled. I've seen many many young men and women with punctured skin, "cutters", whose cuts are not merely sliced randomly into their bodies but have become an art form in themselves, an art that is reinscribed in their faded, wrinkled jeans, which are also symmetrically slashed.
My neo Marxist showed us two movies: Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and Sokoluv's "Russian Ark". I had tried to watch "Mirror" before I came here, but was not able to get it; I had seen "Russian Ark" twice before, and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage (I'm avoiding it, I think, I feel overwhelmed by the thought of its huge size and the knowledge that if I spend 1 1/2 minutes at each picture, it would take me 8 years to see everything assuming nothing changes during those 8 years, I'm avoiding this immensity because I know when I get there I will have to make choices, and what choices would I make, although I read that Dennis Hopper has an exhibit of B&W photographs dating back as far as the 60s and so that might be a place to start), and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage, watching Russian Ark after two weeks in the city where it was made was a powerful experience and helped me to understand another layer to my reluctance to visit the Hermitage, which is that it is a homage not just to art, to civilization, but also to privilege, and that is where I stumble. yes, I can stand in front of "great" art and then I start to spin off into a consideration of how that "great" art is made possible, how it is conserved, stolen, bought and sold and then I get all fucked up about that. So you can see, maybe, why I'm deferring my visit to the Hermitage; however, I WILL go, because I couldn't bear to go back home and have to respond "no" to the question: did you visit the Hermitage?
Give me a Malevich, for whom art had an earthly, immediate purpose. For whom art was not "beauty" or "not beauty", but for whom art was "true" or "false", and because I know that is what I look for in art, I find beauty for beauty's sake to be, on the surface, beautiful, and then, upon consideration, to be repulsive to me in an essential way that I haven't yet been able to define, or even completely identify or describe.
I visited a soviet style cafe last week with Dmitri, on a Dmitri walk, one of the other things I "promised" to tell you about. Besides the short stocky waitress who was wearing a shiny tight blue dress trimmed with white tubing and a small same-blue-and-tubing cap on her head, there were several pieces of "art" on the wall: clumsy oil paintings: of ships tossing on the sea, bowls of fruit, men at work; all "bad" art, all representative of nothing except their awareness of themselves as "paintings".
And so I'm also thinking: what is it like to live in a place that others visit not for what it is now, but for what it used to be? Petersburg is and was a dream city, an iconoclast's fabrication that came to being because the iconoclast had both "vision" and power. But I can see that all this European grandeur is in juxtaposition to "Russianness". In most of the rest of Russia, the homes and public buldings are made of wood; I noticed this somewhat when I went to Novgorod last Saturday, and this session's first lecture on untranslatable Russia confirmed that perception for me. So when you go out of Petersburg you see, not street after street of European style building, but many small wooden homes (with a backdrop, I must admit, of rows and rows of concrete soviet style apartment blocks).
But maybe my question was not fair: we visit Petersburg for what it used to be, expecting that what it is now will somehow be a continuation of what it used to be. And so I see other tourists standing in front of Peterhof, or in front of Church of the Spilled Blood, wanting to have their pictures taken with Citizens dressed up in 19th century costumes. I don't see people standing up to have their pictures taken with the legless, handless, beggars lining the sidewalk outside the Vladmir mother of God Icon church; the last time I was there, there were at least 8 of them. Hey, not that i think that would be a good idea, but I see that one is the shadow of the other, and haven't quite decided which is the shadow and which is casting the shadow. The rich did nothing right, the poor did nothing wrong.
Progressive nostalgia is the term used to describe the project of those neo Marxists I described earlier. PG is working against the democratizing machine in Russia, a machine that will inevitably lead to there being many more people with broken fingers begging outside the cathdrals (at least, you will say, at least the cathedrals are open, are no longer storing vegetables, or being used as icerinks...but there is a tradition of using cathedrals as storage for vegetables in Russia, established long before the soviet times, a kind of beautiful metaphor, don't you think, of having a town's nutritional sustenance stored where they also go for spiritual sustenance?). Despite this project, this insistence on the evils of capitalism, there are very few "progressive nostalgics", and most people are just too excited about versace, or macdonalds, or ... well, words fail me here, because I realize that I don't know the names of those expensive labels that are all over the place here, but let me say this: everywhere on every street in my neighbourhood there are stores with heavy security at the doors, men in suits wearing headsets, whose job it is to intimidate you into not stealing the goods, into not even entering to look unless you know you are also going to buy, and in those stores are brand name sunglasses, purses, shoes, suits, hair products, chocolates...all packaged like fetishes.
This week I also started the poetry workshop. The instructor, Jorie Graham, was in a car accident in France last week, suffered a concussion, and was not able to come, so we have a "substitute", although I hesitate at using that word. The class is great, and I realize, because I've received emails of complaint from you, that I haven't spent much time describing the workshops and the people, and the thing is, well, I've spent two weeks just trying to get a handle on the city itself which dwarfs everything else around it, a city of stops and starts, and everytime you set out to go anywehre, you bump into a canal or a river and have to go in a different direction for a while until you can cross a bridge and re-set your course and of course the street signs are in cyrillic...but the poetry workshop, well, I really do love poetry, I love writing it, I love reading it, I love talking about it, and I love talking to the people who are writing it. Poems are really like eggs, I think: small, condensed, nutritious, tasty. And when I sit in front of uncracked poem ...
My roommate is Allison, from the US originally, and then in Hong Kong for 2 years, and now in London for the past 5, and is quirky eccentric, a HISTORIAN (yikes!), a fiction writer, young enough to be my daughter (it's okay, Lorraine, you are still my best daughter). We get along well, and seem to share the need for many hours of sleep each night and each have the ability not to annoy the other. Well, we are so seldom in the room at the same time, there is so much going on that we have no need to be there except to sleep. But it works well, and every morning one or the other of us does reconnaissance on the shower: "halleluia" is code for "hot water", and absence of code means "you may as well stay in bed until the last minute".
Food: I've had questions about food. Breakfast is included in the price of the accommodation; however, frequently they "run out" of food which turns out not to be such a bad thing as breakfast is: a glass of orange juice, 1/2 cup of coffee, a plastic container of yogurt, and a cake wrapped in cellophane. Okay, it's not as bad as the soldiers' WWI rations, but I've been to the markets around here, and I know they could do better. On a good day, instead of cake we get blini's, or crepes, which are usually good, but really sweet, and there is never enough cofffee to wash it all down.
So, I've given up on breakfast, and since they've brought a tiny refrigerator into the dorm where I'm staying, I can buy my own yogurt and my own blueberry juice (I HATE orange juice) and Allison bought some bread, and I bought some more Linden honey (oh, my god, that's good honey) and so breakfast is now okay, although there are many crumbs in my bed. Lunch is usually an option, and dinner is usually borsch, which is great just about everywhere I've tried it. One place, the Lenin Cafe, serves a hot borscht covered with a slab of baked bread. I'm not describing that very well, but I think that the bread is baked right on the top of the ceramic soup bowl, and that the whole thing is done in the oven. very good.
other than that, just about everything comes with mayonnaise, and while the younger women scrape it all off, I generally welcome the chance to eat the fat with impunity. There is a Georgian restaurant I've been to a few times that offers a "businessman's lunch" with a set menu: soup, salad, and some sort of meat with a starch, and that's about 130 rubles. Don't ask me how much that is in dollars, I have no idea. i just keep spending my money.
At dinner time, the Georgian restaurant makes this amazing dish called (and Steve, you take note, because I want you to make this for me some time) Drunken Chicken. It is an amazing boneless chicken stuffed with walnut paste and dried apricots and soaked in some sort of alcohol (maybe vodka?) and is so good. Well, I'd have to say that Georgian food in general seems to have a bit of a leg on over Russian food, so maybe a Georgian cookbook?
I've also been to an Italian restaurant, and although the lasagna i had was good, the valpolicella i shared with Ann was even better. I've also been to an Armenian restaurant, which I remember nothing of, so can only assume it was mediocre (oh, yes, I remember! Wow! how wrong I am. I had this amazing bread dish which was boat-shaped dough, baked with an egg in the middle, and cheese. Disgusting in terms of nutritional value, but I could see coming home after a hard day in the Armenian fields and chowing down to 2 or 3 of these. I also went to a cafe called the Idiot, but do not remember. on those days when I don't want to be around others, I just go to the blini place and get a couple of blinis, usually the one with jam, which means that i get this lovely crepe smoothered in blueberries, yum.
So, I'm not suffering for food. It's just all different, and I'm craving a carrot, hoping for carrot juice, and while I did find a "juice bar", it's more expensive than water, which is more expensive than pop, which is more expensive than coffee, which is more expensive than beer, which is more expensive than vodka.
I hope I've answered all your email questions. The protest seems to have passed by, but then I just realized that the guy in the booth next to me has left, and i suspect that what I was hearing wasn'tr eally a protest, but the yells of disgruntled video game characters. My hands are feeling grubby from this keyboard as I have been here for a couple of hours, minus 11 minutes.
Love you, and love you,
Anne
or something like that.
there is a group of independent intellectuals here who call themselves neo marxists and whose project it is to promote neo marxism, a return to the ideas of Lenin and promote them as a viable alternative to Putin's brand of capitalism, which, they fear, is taking Russia in the wrong direction.
In the first session here I attended a series of six seminars given by one of those neo marxists, Alexandr Skidan, who, along with a group of women activists who write and produce plays (among other activities), provided us with a glimpse into their view of a neo Marxist Russia, which reminds me of the days when as a Carleton University student I was recruited into a group of Marxist Leninists to run for student council. I came eerily close to winning, but did not, a "theme" that has continued throughout my life. You know, coming second. I think someone has written an essay about "coming second". We all hear about the person who came first; who comes second? Are they that much worse than the one who came first?
Well, anyway, that is a digression. From neo marxism, and superficially at least neo Marxism sounds similar to the Marxism in Canada in the early 70s, but with an edge of urgency, because certainly in the streets here it feels urgent, crazy, unfettered, out of control. But this out of controlness may be no more urgent than the out of control ness that I see in my own country, just less familiar in its details: the youth here are wearing designer jeans that are not only faded, but also heavily although symmetrically wrinkled. I've seen many many young men and women with punctured skin, "cutters", whose cuts are not merely sliced randomly into their bodies but have become an art form in themselves, an art that is reinscribed in their faded, wrinkled jeans, which are also symmetrically slashed.
My neo Marxist showed us two movies: Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and Sokoluv's "Russian Ark". I had tried to watch "Mirror" before I came here, but was not able to get it; I had seen "Russian Ark" twice before, and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage (I'm avoiding it, I think, I feel overwhelmed by the thought of its huge size and the knowledge that if I spend 1 1/2 minutes at each picture, it would take me 8 years to see everything assuming nothing changes during those 8 years, I'm avoiding this immensity because I know when I get there I will have to make choices, and what choices would I make, although I read that Dennis Hopper has an exhibit of B&W photographs dating back as far as the 60s and so that might be a place to start), and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage, watching Russian Ark after two weeks in the city where it was made was a powerful experience and helped me to understand another layer to my reluctance to visit the Hermitage, which is that it is a homage not just to art, to civilization, but also to privilege, and that is where I stumble. yes, I can stand in front of "great" art and then I start to spin off into a consideration of how that "great" art is made possible, how it is conserved, stolen, bought and sold and then I get all fucked up about that. So you can see, maybe, why I'm deferring my visit to the Hermitage; however, I WILL go, because I couldn't bear to go back home and have to respond "no" to the question: did you visit the Hermitage?
Give me a Malevich, for whom art had an earthly, immediate purpose. For whom art was not "beauty" or "not beauty", but for whom art was "true" or "false", and because I know that is what I look for in art, I find beauty for beauty's sake to be, on the surface, beautiful, and then, upon consideration, to be repulsive to me in an essential way that I haven't yet been able to define, or even completely identify or describe.
I visited a soviet style cafe last week with Dmitri, on a Dmitri walk, one of the other things I "promised" to tell you about. Besides the short stocky waitress who was wearing a shiny tight blue dress trimmed with white tubing and a small same-blue-and-tubing cap on her head, there were several pieces of "art" on the wall: clumsy oil paintings: of ships tossing on the sea, bowls of fruit, men at work; all "bad" art, all representative of nothing except their awareness of themselves as "paintings".
And so I'm also thinking: what is it like to live in a place that others visit not for what it is now, but for what it used to be? Petersburg is and was a dream city, an iconoclast's fabrication that came to being because the iconoclast had both "vision" and power. But I can see that all this European grandeur is in juxtaposition to "Russianness". In most of the rest of Russia, the homes and public buldings are made of wood; I noticed this somewhat when I went to Novgorod last Saturday, and this session's first lecture on untranslatable Russia confirmed that perception for me. So when you go out of Petersburg you see, not street after street of European style building, but many small wooden homes (with a backdrop, I must admit, of rows and rows of concrete soviet style apartment blocks).
But maybe my question was not fair: we visit Petersburg for what it used to be, expecting that what it is now will somehow be a continuation of what it used to be. And so I see other tourists standing in front of Peterhof, or in front of Church of the Spilled Blood, wanting to have their pictures taken with Citizens dressed up in 19th century costumes. I don't see people standing up to have their pictures taken with the legless, handless, beggars lining the sidewalk outside the Vladmir mother of God Icon church; the last time I was there, there were at least 8 of them. Hey, not that i think that would be a good idea, but I see that one is the shadow of the other, and haven't quite decided which is the shadow and which is casting the shadow. The rich did nothing right, the poor did nothing wrong.
Progressive nostalgia is the term used to describe the project of those neo Marxists I described earlier. PG is working against the democratizing machine in Russia, a machine that will inevitably lead to there being many more people with broken fingers begging outside the cathdrals (at least, you will say, at least the cathedrals are open, are no longer storing vegetables, or being used as icerinks...but there is a tradition of using cathedrals as storage for vegetables in Russia, established long before the soviet times, a kind of beautiful metaphor, don't you think, of having a town's nutritional sustenance stored where they also go for spiritual sustenance?). Despite this project, this insistence on the evils of capitalism, there are very few "progressive nostalgics", and most people are just too excited about versace, or macdonalds, or ... well, words fail me here, because I realize that I don't know the names of those expensive labels that are all over the place here, but let me say this: everywhere on every street in my neighbourhood there are stores with heavy security at the doors, men in suits wearing headsets, whose job it is to intimidate you into not stealing the goods, into not even entering to look unless you know you are also going to buy, and in those stores are brand name sunglasses, purses, shoes, suits, hair products, chocolates...all packaged like fetishes.
This week I also started the poetry workshop. The instructor, Jorie Graham, was in a car accident in France last week, suffered a concussion, and was not able to come, so we have a "substitute", although I hesitate at using that word. The class is great, and I realize, because I've received emails of complaint from you, that I haven't spent much time describing the workshops and the people, and the thing is, well, I've spent two weeks just trying to get a handle on the city itself which dwarfs everything else around it, a city of stops and starts, and everytime you set out to go anywehre, you bump into a canal or a river and have to go in a different direction for a while until you can cross a bridge and re-set your course and of course the street signs are in cyrillic...but the poetry workshop, well, I really do love poetry, I love writing it, I love reading it, I love talking about it, and I love talking to the people who are writing it. Poems are really like eggs, I think: small, condensed, nutritious, tasty. And when I sit in front of uncracked poem ...
My roommate is Allison, from the US originally, and then in Hong Kong for 2 years, and now in London for the past 5, and is quirky eccentric, a HISTORIAN (yikes!), a fiction writer, young enough to be my daughter (it's okay, Lorraine, you are still my best daughter). We get along well, and seem to share the need for many hours of sleep each night and each have the ability not to annoy the other. Well, we are so seldom in the room at the same time, there is so much going on that we have no need to be there except to sleep. But it works well, and every morning one or the other of us does reconnaissance on the shower: "halleluia" is code for "hot water", and absence of code means "you may as well stay in bed until the last minute".
Food: I've had questions about food. Breakfast is included in the price of the accommodation; however, frequently they "run out" of food which turns out not to be such a bad thing as breakfast is: a glass of orange juice, 1/2 cup of coffee, a plastic container of yogurt, and a cake wrapped in cellophane. Okay, it's not as bad as the soldiers' WWI rations, but I've been to the markets around here, and I know they could do better. On a good day, instead of cake we get blini's, or crepes, which are usually good, but really sweet, and there is never enough cofffee to wash it all down.
So, I've given up on breakfast, and since they've brought a tiny refrigerator into the dorm where I'm staying, I can buy my own yogurt and my own blueberry juice (I HATE orange juice) and Allison bought some bread, and I bought some more Linden honey (oh, my god, that's good honey) and so breakfast is now okay, although there are many crumbs in my bed. Lunch is usually an option, and dinner is usually borsch, which is great just about everywhere I've tried it. One place, the Lenin Cafe, serves a hot borscht covered with a slab of baked bread. I'm not describing that very well, but I think that the bread is baked right on the top of the ceramic soup bowl, and that the whole thing is done in the oven. very good.
other than that, just about everything comes with mayonnaise, and while the younger women scrape it all off, I generally welcome the chance to eat the fat with impunity. There is a Georgian restaurant I've been to a few times that offers a "businessman's lunch" with a set menu: soup, salad, and some sort of meat with a starch, and that's about 130 rubles. Don't ask me how much that is in dollars, I have no idea. i just keep spending my money.
At dinner time, the Georgian restaurant makes this amazing dish called (and Steve, you take note, because I want you to make this for me some time) Drunken Chicken. It is an amazing boneless chicken stuffed with walnut paste and dried apricots and soaked in some sort of alcohol (maybe vodka?) and is so good. Well, I'd have to say that Georgian food in general seems to have a bit of a leg on over Russian food, so maybe a Georgian cookbook?
I've also been to an Italian restaurant, and although the lasagna i had was good, the valpolicella i shared with Ann was even better. I've also been to an Armenian restaurant, which I remember nothing of, so can only assume it was mediocre (oh, yes, I remember! Wow! how wrong I am. I had this amazing bread dish which was boat-shaped dough, baked with an egg in the middle, and cheese. Disgusting in terms of nutritional value, but I could see coming home after a hard day in the Armenian fields and chowing down to 2 or 3 of these. I also went to a cafe called the Idiot, but do not remember. on those days when I don't want to be around others, I just go to the blini place and get a couple of blinis, usually the one with jam, which means that i get this lovely crepe smoothered in blueberries, yum.
So, I'm not suffering for food. It's just all different, and I'm craving a carrot, hoping for carrot juice, and while I did find a "juice bar", it's more expensive than water, which is more expensive than pop, which is more expensive than coffee, which is more expensive than beer, which is more expensive than vodka.
I hope I've answered all your email questions. The protest seems to have passed by, but then I just realized that the guy in the booth next to me has left, and i suspect that what I was hearing wasn'tr eally a protest, but the yells of disgruntled video game characters. My hands are feeling grubby from this keyboard as I have been here for a couple of hours, minus 11 minutes.
Love you, and love you,
Anne
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