Annie's Russia Blog

Learning Russian

2007-09-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

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.

I'm going back to Russia...

2007-09-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

.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.

"the maple"

2007-08-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

...and this is "the maple".

yet another sunset

2007-08-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sunset from Smelt Bay

2007-08-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Birdwatching

2007-08-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Identity

2007-08-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

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?

Like the Last Episode of the Sopranos

2007-07-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

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.

The Sicilian Mushroom Farmer & Life When Nothing Happens

2007-07-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Interface and Milan

2007-07-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Vodka Toasts and Midnight on the Neva

2007-07-14T00:18:00.000-07:00

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

Last Russia Blog Entry?

2007-07-13T01:39:00.000-07:00

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

live from the Hermitage

2007-07-12T03:46:00.000-07:00

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

Freud & the Queen of Thailand

2007-07-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

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

Jesus

2007-07-10T02:26:00.000-07:00

a small detail on the side of the Church on spilled blood...at the site of the Decembrist uprising in 1825

a wedding photographer

2007-07-10T02:25:00.000-07:00

on the kissing bridge, this wedding photographer was wild

2007-07-10T01:13:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-07-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

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…

Progressive Nostalgia

2007-07-03T04:22:00.000-07:00

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

Peterhof

2007-07-01T10:59:00.001-07:00

I've put an offer in on this little gem on the Baltic...location, location, location...

Peterhof

2007-07-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

I've put an offer in on this little gem on the Baltic...location, location, location...

The Baltic behind us, the rest of the world ahead

2007-07-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

Mich, me, and Charlotte

on the kissing bridge

2007-07-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

guy taking photograph by fountain

2007-07-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

July 1 - Thinking in Russian

2007-07-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

It seems sort of funny that I am celebrating Canada Day in Russia before you are celebrating it in Canada.

Okay, so I'm not exactly celebrating, I'm just sitting now in the "office", an English type pub across the street from the Herzen Inn where most of the SLS activity takes place. I've finally figured out how to get my laptop to "work", using the wireless here. It's more expensive to get access to wireless than it is to sit in that grotty pornography peek show of an internet cafe that I usually go to, but slightly more pleasant as there is non stop rock music playing here, a combination of 60s 70s and 80s rock from England and NA, and loud, and if I can get out of here before say 11 pm, it should be before the fights start and I won't have to pick my way through the pools of blood.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but only a little.

It's Sunday night, and today I spent wandering around the inner core of the city, doing nothing. It's the first day since I've been here that I have had nothing planned for me, and I spent it wandering through the market, visiting the Church of Our Savior of the Spilled Blood, drinking coffee...fairly boring stuff. So, I'll get to the story.

What's the story today? I actually don't really feel like writing, but I'll tell you about the necessity of finding your inner babushka.

Or was I going to tell you about neo-Marxism? Progressive nostalgia? Don't think I can do any of that, as my brain seems to have turned off. It's like the system is down.

So, I'll waste our time by telling you that I am about to finish the last of my antibiotics and I'm terrified that in another week that horrible abcess will return and I'll have nothing. I'll have to leave Russia, then, lest the infection travel through my bloodstream.

Oh, and this morning I wondered if we were at war, as I first heard and then saw military jets flying over Petersburg. I meant to check the news, but it is so hard to get news here, except news of Petersburg. So, I spent the rest of the day just wondering about that, but no more military jets flew overhead, and no tanks rolled through the streets (thereby necessitating the erection of yet another commemorative plaque), so I feel secure that when I go to bed later tonight I will not have to first rehearse stop drop and roll...oh no, that's the thing to do for if you catch on fire. Well, anyway, that thing you older folks had to do at school during the Cuban missile crisis.

Hide under your desks to avoid nuclear dust. As if that would have worked.

Tomorrow I start another session of new courses, and will have poetry and another section of "untranslatable Russia", a series of lectures by a Russian expert who will explain the current Russian obsession (and thus my current obsession) with weddings - among other things.

Okay, so in my wanderings I got to the "kissing bridge", the bridge over the Fontanka canal where newlyweds go to get serenaded by some guy playing a french horn while they kiss (this in the shadow of the domes of the Church of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood) and then they cross the bridge (and if the bride is not heavier than the groom, he will carry her) and then everyone jumps up and down on the bridge and many photographs are taken, and the bride wears a long white gown, carries flowers, and the guests, which are generally small in numbers, sing a song and laugh, and everyone laughs and smiles while the flat bottomed tourist boats putter by under the bridge trying to avoid the idiots on jet skiis who are trying to spray water up to the bridge where they hope to soak the wedding guests and all this observed by tourists who have just run the gamit/gamut/gammit/gambit? of the market stalls where everyone will lower their prices, just for you, and where if you are not careful the gypsies will direct their children to grab on to your pant leg like gibbons until you either give them money or kick them off.

I'm hoping I will never have to kick a child, but I've heard stories from reliable people. The alternative is, in case you are drawing in your collective breaths, losing everything in your purse/travel pouch/pocket/money belt/hidden pocket. Like, um, your passport and stuff like that which if you do lose it the guys at the customs as you are trying to leave get cranky about, especially since there is this tiny little piece of paper that got stamped when you entered the country which you have to carry with you at all times and if you don't and you get stopped, i've heard tell nice things do not happen.

Okay, so this morning I'm in the shower, well, sort of in the shower. It's like this. It's day 4 or 5 with no hot water, and while I was able to get away with not washing my hair for a couple of days, this morning I was insane with my dirty hair, so forced myself to hold my head under the shower spray. The thing is, when I DO wash my hair, it doesn't really help that much, as the water is so dirty - and I have to make sure I keep my lips shut tightly as I don't want any little beavers to climb in there and take up residence in my gastro intestinal system - but even if I could keep my mouth open, my hair would still be dirty, and it has by now acquired the consistency of dry straw and I've pretty much given up on it, or caring about it. My clothes, too, by the way, are disgustingly dirty, because I've been too busy to find out which 3 minutes of which days the laundry lady is open to receiving laundry (but that's a whole other story) and because I live far away from the laundry lady, I'm not real keen about carrying a bag of dirty laundry around with me all day. I think you get the picture, right?

Anyway, I'm in the shower this morning trying to aim the shower spray at my armpits when suddenly I realized that I was thinking in Russian. I know, you are not believing me right now, you're thinking, no fuckin' way, Anne, you're not. But I swear, it's the truth, I starting thinking in Russian, but even stranger than actually thinking in Russian was the fact that I had no idea what I was thinking about, because it was all in Russian. And now you really don't believe me, but I'm not going to say another thing about it, because that's the absolute truth: I was thinking in Russian and I didn't understand my own thoughts, had no idea what I was thinking about, and really, if you believe me just a little bit (and it's totally true) isn't that just the most amazing thing?

So, I have another shower story, if you haven't logged off. Are you with me? Okay, here goes. So, I'm in the shower, well, standing outside the shower stall and have moved on from my armpits and down to my legs, which are covered with mosquito bites (which I have allergic reactions to, and which become very gross-looking - I'll spare you those details), and I think: Okay, god (yep, I start bargaining with god), okay, like it's like this: god, if you make this water hot, I will move to Russia, I will learn what my Russian thoughts mean, I will join the Russian orthodox church, heck, I'll even become one of those babushka's who spends her time scraping the wax from the floor around the burning candles, or I'll sell the holy water to the supplicants who come with their empty pop bottles...god, I will give up everything just for 15 minutes of hot water.

And, this is true, I swear, absolutely upon the icon of the holy mother, after I set the terms of my bargain, the water got colder.

So I got dressed, covered my festering mosquito bites with a pair of tights, and headed off into petersburg to find out what would happen.

Okay, so here's another story: the location of a present day McDonald's in Petersburg is where during the soviet years the "poets" would gather. So, the thing is that the poets and artists and essayists were generally assigned to the job of street sweeper, and they took many breaks in those days, when there probably wasn't as much broken glass on the streets, but I may be wrong about that; anyway, they congregated in this one cafe. The word "cafe" is a bit of a stretch, since coffee was not available in russia, so when they gathered in this cafe, they would drink tea made in one cup with 6 teabags so that it would be strong, and on a table in the cafe would be a large bowl of soup, but no spoons. And these street sweepers, upon entering the cafe, would thrust their firsts into the soup, first to demonstrate their defiance and second to scoop up a handful of soup to drink.

The line up for the tea was always long and slow, and the writers would break out into spontaneous bursts of poetry, oral recitations of just made up verse, or verse that they had previously "composed" and memorized. As the story goes, each artistic group had it s own table: artists sat with artists, poets with poets, etc. And, the kgb, because these subversives all gathered in the same place, had their table, too, where they sat drinking strong tea and surveying. Not that any of it was a secret from anyone.

So, anyway, that's a Dmitri story. I told you I was going to tell you about Dmitri, and that's one of his stories. But there's more about Dmitri, and more stories, and more about progressive nostalgia, and neo Marxism.

Love,

wedding dresses in store window

2007-07-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

if you look closely you can see my reflection in the bottom of the window...I particularly like the dress on the left

Legs

2007-07-01T08:46:00.000-07:00

There are many legs in Petersburg

Perseus

2007-07-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

dog necropolis

2007-07-01T08:37:00.001-07:00

This is where Catherine the Great buried her dogs

2007-07-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

Statue in Russian State Museum

2007-07-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Roads We Did Not Choose

2007-06-30T11:49:00.001-07:00

Last night I had to choose between going to see a Becket play done in pantomime or to see a 2 woman play about the experiences of women who had been sent to the gulag. I decided on the gulag, and despite the play being in Russian, we had been given a copy of the script and I found myself weeping.

But, I'm very tired right now, and there is another entry, a bit longer, just below this one. Tomorrow, though, I'll tell you about Dmitri, neo Marxism, progressive nostalgia and The Roads We Did Not Choose.

Good night,

Annie

Three days without hot water

2007-06-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I realize that's hardly news, but it's the truth. Today is "turnaround" day, and all those who were here for two weeks have headed off to the airport, and those who are staying for four are feeling self-satisfied and maybe a bit smug that we are, despite the lack of hot water.

No pugs, today. About ten of us piled on a bus for Novgorod, about 120 miles south of Petersburg, and had the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable tour guide ever, and she hauled us around to monasteries, fortresses, cathedrals and statues where she told us about, well, pretty much the whole history of Russia, beginning with Ruric, who was the Russian prototype. Apparently he was from Sweden, and was called to the area of Novgorod to settle a dispute, and stayed, and somehow out of all that, Russia began. As you can see, I don't really understand how history works, but there is this amazing commemorative statue in the Kremlin in Novgorod that tells the history of Russia up to 1894 or thereabouts.

We walked past the river, and over the river, where Ivan the Terrible threw all the dead bodies of the people he killed when he plundered the town for its riches (the town of Novgorod was a major thoroughfare to Constantinople, a wintering-over spot for northerners on their way south, so the Novgorodians, like any good tourist town, exploited the fact that they could notcontinue on their journeys because of the frozen river and lake). The blood has long since disappeared, and across the river from where we stood gazing at the seven cathedrals built by the merchants to store their wares, just beneath the fortress wall, were a number of beach volley ball games being played on imported sand.

Okay, I'm pretty sure my history is wobbling here, so don't qyote me on any of that. The high points of the day were the monastory outside of Novgorod, a 10th century cathedral, and the Museum of Wood Building with original houses, churches, a chapel, and a well, all made from aspen wood and all amazingly adorned with a combination of christian and pagan symbols.

Amazingly adorned. How's that for vague?!?!? Pictures to come, and I'm really sorry that I have not yet figured this out. You would like the pictures, especially the one I took of the bride pounding the side of the church with her arm while being photographed by the official wedding photographer, and while her husband stood by holding her flowers...wedding parties come to this Museum of Wooden Buildings to have their photographs taken, and to get married, so we got to see a variety of practices related to the pagan aspect of the wedding, including the woman who precedes the bride and groom down a path, sweeping the path of evil with a broom.

Lots of birch trinkets for sale here, and bells to ward off evil, and some carved troll looking guy who sits in kitchens and hides stuff from people. Okay, I didn't get all the details, not really, but let's just say I'll be happy to get back to my own kitchen and not have to worry about living in a "black house" which was one in which no chimney was installed so as to avoid having to pay a chimney tax. So, while the annual outlay of money was reduced by letting the smoke from your chimney empty into your home and rise up into the children's sleeping area instead of directly out of the chimney and into the air, the mortality rate of children was extremely high; however, for the more practically minded, on the up side, "black houses", the ones permeated with soot, lasted longer because wood eating bugs never moved in.

Novgorod was a welcome relief from the craziness of Petersburg; not only were prices cheaper there, I also learned that Russians DO smile and can walk at a slowish pace and without wearing stilettos.

Of course as many couples seem to be marrying in white in Novgorod as are marrying in white in Petersburg, and i don't know if it is coincidence, but it seems as if everyone wants to get married, and the weddings look small. ONe wedding party I saw today at the Museum of Wooden Building (which, by the way, is a small village of original buildings, the church complete with a full set of bells and a bell ringer playing "tunes") included the bride and groom, a couple of women dressed up in folk dress who were blocking their way into the park and yelling at them, and some guy dressed up as a soldeier and yelling back...

Speaking of soldiers, don't tell Zoa, but I bought him three small soldiers, Russian soldiers, to add to his collection of green plastic soldiers. They are very cute, made of metal, and so quite heavy. Is he still playing with his soldiers? Oh, will somebody send me news of Zoa? I really miss him, and found myself watching children today, in Novgorod. I don't watch the children in Petersburg, as they seem to harsh, the lines on their faces already drawn too tightly.

Here it is, with only 5 minutes left in my time, and I haven't answered your emails or told you one thing about Friday, yesterday. I love getting your emails, and I'm positively hungry for them by the time I make it to an internet connection. I still haven't managed to get my computer going, so needless to say this blog thing is the only writing I'm doing, but oh mi gosh, I don't think I can write about all this in any meaningful way because every day is just so full of sights and images and impressions and I'm very "curious" about what the long view will look like.

I'm also amazed that I am only half way through this journey.

Dostoevsky

2007-06-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

well, Dostoevsky, yes, and other things, too.

It's Thursday night for me, and probably Thursday morning for the rest of you, and I'm getting ready to go back to my dorm room and to bed. Lucky for me I have had a couple of days in a row of hot water for a shower, which means that I feel mostly normal during the day.

Wednesday: the regular non-fiction workshop in which we looked at Ann's essay about New York City being the laboratory for Barnard students, and then the cities of Russia being the laboratory for Ann's life. Should I tell you that Ann remembers the night that Stalin died because it was the first night of many she spent with a socialist partner who shall remain nameless? That that first night was a celebration, of sorts, of that death, and of many other deaths and then hope for the future. Her essay, of course, was not about that night, but about the contributions made by Russia to the defeat of the German army in World War Two, and the challenges of urban design in Russia's new cities during the soviet period: Petersburg, Odessa...Ann first came to Petersburg as an intourist in 1970, and her stories, well, her stories are hers to tell. She left this morning on an early plane.

The afternoon involved a viewing of Russian Ark and brief lecture about it by poet, essayist, and "intelligentsia" neo-Marxist Alexandr Skidan. Further discussion on Friday. I'll let you know, but am guessing that the discussion will centre around the director's "blindness" to the soviet period and the function of the European guest who is shown around the Hermitage by the unseen narrator. The European guest, Marquis de Gonstine, who in 1940s published the most vile book ever written about Russia, was played by a Russian actor (Sergei Dryden?) who is the husband of the woman who owns the space (coffee shop, bookstore, art gallery) where we watched the movie.

The Russian reading at the Anna Akhmatova Museum, Sergey Gandlevsky and Leonid Kostyukov. The former a poet whose translations were first read by Matvei Yankelevich and then who himself recited them from memory. Just stood up and recited his poems, short and long, all of them, word for word, no crib notes, and in the tradition of the soviet poets who did that out of necessity, out of the need not to be arrested for their written work. When asked what his favorite alcohol was, Sergey responded that he drinks to become drunk, not for the good taste, so he doesn't care what alcohol he drink. However, given the choice, he would select cognac over cologne, but he does not care what brand of cognac.

And then the Dostoevsky Museum with Allison today, and the Vladimir Mother of God Icon Cathedral, the first and last parish that D worshipped in as a Petersburger.

But of course all this is just stuff. You don't care about that stuff, do you? I mean, what could it possibly mean to you to have me list what I did, where I went? It's all meaningless until it has a personal stamp on it, until there is a story. So, here is the story.

Next to the Dostoevsky Apartment Museum is a market, an indoor market. I said to Allison, let's just go in an look, because I could see from outside that there were some vegetables piled up in pyramids, and so we went in and there were more vegetables piled up in precarious pyramids and more types of vegetables than I have seen anywhere in any restaurant in Petersburg and I practically danced down the aisled, taking photographs of gerkins and cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, bunches of lettuce. And then the white, white cheeses packaged in brie or camembert like rounds but probably what I think of as russian feta, deep fried cheese sticks, mounds of yellow and red pears, limes, apples, carrots, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, cherries...and the market smelled fresh and fruity and clean not with the rotting vegetation smell of an equatorial market but of the lively and alive vegetation smell of freshly picked and brisk air ripened pure nutrient. I had to pull out my camera, as if I had stumbled upon something I had never seen before, and I took pictures of swollen garlic bulbs, dried apricot, dates, figs, and Allison she just touched my shoulder and laughed.

I bought a small tub of linden honey, why linden honey, I don't know, there must have been 20 different kinds of honey, Steve, each a different golden yellow and thick and sweet in a honey sweet way, and she held out a small stick with honey dripping off and she was laughing at me because I think she could tell how excited I was at seeing all this real food in one place and before I had finished tasting one kind of honey she handed me another stick oozing honey and I kept trying honey after honey and she kept laughing at me and I kept dreading when the honey samples would stop coming and I bought a small amount of honey that I will eat...some time. Russian honey. Steve, I will try to bring some home.

But the real story is the pug, the German pug, the fat german pug who was so fat that his bulbous eyes were almost lost in his facial folds and even un-neutered he spread himself lazy on the concrete floor of the market, maybe hoping that some scrap of vegetable would fall his way, and so I took his photograph and his owner posed him for me, he was so fat that he barely moved, just looked out from inside his body through those ridiculous fat eyes, and his name was Faroud. From Germany and the women selling vegetables and fruit thought I was crazy taking pictures of a fat dog in a market but what could be better than honey, fresh cherries, a fat pug, and talking a kind of hectic Germanic-Russian--English sprinkled with the desperation of French and Spanish prepositions and nouns -- and what did the pug care, really, he just wanted me to pat him, well, no he just wanted to stretch out on the cool concrete floor.

So you can see, maybe, that the staid museum veneration of a great writer was a bit of a letdown after the pug and the honey, and while I was interested in wandering around Fyodor's 6 room apartment and reading about how his gambling addiction was his undoing and his wife's devotion his reconstruction, there was no mention of a dog, and unlike Cathy the Great he spent much of his time writing and thinking. Well, maybe that's unfair to compare him to C the G; she collected Italian Greyhounds, being an Italophile what with all that rococo and Greco Roman statuary.

But Fyodor moved every few months, and this apartment museum was the last apartment he lived in; he died, a very heavy and stubborn smoker, of emphysema, and there is a tobacco tin in his apartment on which his daughter inscribed the date of his death: January 28: Papa died today, it says.

Daniil Kharms

2007-06-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

Highlights: this is a quick one (aren't you relieved?) because I have only bought a half hour on the internet and need to answer my email, but spent most of this afternoon at a soviet style cafe across the street from the russian absurdist poet Daniil Kharms, a cafe nicknamed the Kharms cafe.

i really need to get home to read an essay about soviet architecture before my 10 am class, but I will try to get back to you soon. I skipped the Banya to attend a lecture on russian absurdism...i gues that pretty much tells the story, my story: given the choice between the body and the mind, I choose the mind...

go figure, i still haven't learned.

Annie

Graduation Night

2007-06-24T06:17:00.001-07:00

After dinner of pike and boiled potatoes at the Idiot cafe last evening, the highlight of which was a toast taught to us by our resident southern belle, Cleila - here's to heat: not the kind that drops shacks and shanties, but the kind that drops slacks and panties - oh, and I detect a trace of encoded classism and racism - I headed back to my dorm hoping for hot water and a cool breeze. Neither was available, so I sat in my room and worked on my computer until it died (my converter is not working, and my computer not accessible to me, making working really difficult - well, impossible.) so then I listened to music on my mp3 player until that died, and then i tried working on my palm pilot, but then that died...

oh, so I checked for hot water again, but there was none, and the water cooler in the hall was empty...

but before all that was a trip to Club Revolution, a "new" nightclub just off Nevsky Prospekt that is a section of a converted shopping arcade, many floors and subsections of dark areas lit by black lights, back rooms with movie projectors, small areas with small bars on several levels with a small stage on one "central" level where a dj or other entertainer might set up. The key to visualizing this place are the following: low ceilings; small areas with concrete floors; many discontinuous serpentine, not-to-code stairways; a high area at the very top of all this that is small, surrounded by windows and providing of a view of the rooftops of petersburg. This top room is where the readings last night were, three winners of previous writing contests for SLS. I found my way over there with Peter the poet from NYC. And then a group of women went to the Idiot where we were overcharged for mediocre food.

This morning i was up early to catch a tour bus to head out to Peterhof. That trip was good; the sun was hot, the weather good, and best of all, I got out to the country and stood on the Baltic Sea and waved at Finland. Took many pictures, but because of my dead computer battery, have no way to include these here. Peterhof is Peter the G's summer palace, replete with fountains and lots of rococo stuff which is amazing to look at and stunning to contemplate that Stalin pretty much left it all alone and that it was not until the Nazis moved in that the palace was robbed, burned, torn up. But, all that is history that you can read in better and more accurate detail in your lonely planet. what i came away from the experience with was the appreciation for the forest and parkland that surrounds the palace and extends to the sea. The rest of it seems to be so much frippery, kind of a disneyland prototype, games for bored adult children to play. now we wander through and look at the games but don't play them.

But getting up early this morning to take the 30 minute bus ride out to peterhof was made more interesting by the fact that last night was the mass graduation party on the Hermitage square. Millions, yes millions, of young petersburgians come into teh city centre for this "celebration" which is essentially a huge drunk, and this morning on my way to catch the tour bus i stepped over and around unconsciously drunk teenagers, evaded those who were still tottering around clutching beer or vodka bottles, and watching where I was walking lest I step in the ubiquitous streams of urine that flowed as steadily as the alcohol. Garbage and broken bottles were everywhere, and the park that I sat in the other morning to eat breakfast becasue my restaurant had "run out" of food, was filled with probably hundreds of young people in various stages of dress, consciousness, and sexual arousal. I suppose you might say this part of the city had a carnival atmosphere; yet, at the same time, which was just before 8 am, there was a team of hundreds (and those were just the ones I saw in my relatively short walk from the dorm to the bus) of maintenance workers dressed in lime green safety vests, sweeping the shattered glass and debris into dustbins and then into green garbage bags, which were already lining the streets. While two drunken teenagers clutched one another beneath the safety of a park bench, a man or woman would be patiently scooping up the broken beer bottles that had led to this embrace. Meanwhile, up and down Kazanskaya Prospekt moved a couple of street cleaners, you know those machines that have circular brushes and which spray water? Those street cleaners were spraying water on the streets and brushing up the urine and debris on the streets.

Well, I know that Betty wanted me to tell her what the Hermitage smells like, but I haven't been there yet, so I'll tell you Betty, on June 24 (or whateve date it is right now, I've lost track) 2007, the streets of Petersburg flowed with urine, which I suppose is a fair trade and a lot more bearable than having them flowing with blood.

When I returned from Peterhof this afternoon, there were still people standing in the streets with garden hoses as they sprayed.

that's it for today. of note: on the way out of the city I saw block after block of highrise apartment buildings, and then some mansions of the nouveau riche (not sure what term they use here for those guys. it's not the oligarchs, but probably the generation behind the oligarchs, the younger children of the oligarchs who learned by watching to stay out of the politics of the nation) and then the highlight: the Baltic.

I stuck my fingers in the Baltic and tasted, but it did not taste salty.

love,
Anne

The Sisters Karamazov

2007-06-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

it's probalby too soon to be writing anything new, but write I will, since this is when I have some time. Tonight is "graduation" night when graduates celebrate in the square outside the Hermitage, but before I go and check out that party, which I suspect will be like the Calgary Stampede in hyperdrive, Slavic version, I'm heading off to a concert of music given by a group of young up and coming conservatory students. I have an address and little else.

I spent the day at Catherine's Palace in Pushkin, a rococo monstrosity painted cyan in the town of Pushkin, just south of Petersburg. We were a small group of 18 or so stumbling through a series of rooms in the upper hall, and saw the main staircase, which we climbed up to get to the upper floor where we walked through two dining rooms, one of which was decorated with huge paintings of dead game; a portrait gallery, decorated with "substandard" Italian stye family portraits; and the amber room, decorated with panels of yellow and orange amber. Most rooms are in the Rococo style, as Catherine, Peter I's wife who originally built the palace as a gift for her husband, had a penchant for the style. Everywhere are cherubs, ornate busts decorated with vines, thick bellied angels and gold leaf; gold, green and yellow foil; and by the time you get to the rooms decorated by Catherine the Great, you move into the neoclassical style, which is much more plain and easier on the eyes and the modern psyche, despite the continued use of cherub heads.

The palace was inhabited by the Nazis during the 900 day seige, and the interior burned. Everything you can see there today is a reproduction created from photographs, including the paintings on the ceilings which had been painted originally by Italian masters, but which were reproduced by Russian painters. The ceiling paintings appear to be representations of the nobility enjoying a happy existence in heaven, surrounded by angels and cherubs and pastel coloured clouds and blue sky.

Outside the palace is a great park which includes two bathhouses (banyas) a lake, several versts worth of trails, a church and a pyramid shaped tomb where Catherine buried her dogs.

The church is now a restaurant.

All this is good, but more interesting to me, still, are the buildings and people that I see from the window of the bus to and from the palace. Our guide tells us that Russians do not visit this palace, as adults, unless they are ill. If I understood her correctly, people who are suffering from exhaustion or mental deterioration can visit a doctor and ask to be prescribed a week off, and will be sent off to the selo for a week's worth of rest, where they can visit the interior rooms and roam in the gardens. As far as I know, they do not also get presscribed shock therapy, or heavy doses of sedatives, but I'm pretty sure if I were able to spend a week roaming the gardens, contemplating the statues of Perseus holding a disembodied head in her right hand, I might start to feel a bit better about life.

School children, as well, get to visit the Palace. Other than that, no one has time, or money. The average monthly income for a Petersburgian is $400.

Mich has decided that when she returns to Ottawa, she's going to start work on a novel whose working title is "Punishment and Crime". Turns out Mich and I were both in Lanark House residence at Carleton at the same time, which means, technically, that we "went to school together" in the early 70's, although neither of us can remember the other.

Despite my being able to sleep last night, I am exhausted and feel that by the end of tomorrow I will be ready to actually do some work. I've "dropped" one of my classes, and will be down to just one of them, and will be able to focus on things other than running around; so, Andrew, if you can hang on for a few more days, I'll be getting to your work tonight and then tomorrow (that means probably Monday in HK).

On Tuesday afternoon, Larissa, I'm heading to the banya for a good steam bath. I don't think there are any massage therapists around, and although I've seen several advertisements for "24 hour massage", I don't think that the people who are offering this service are RMT's. I'm suspicious about the various options that are available to have with that massage, as they don't seem to fit my usual expectations; besides, given the general feel of the place, I'd be suspiscious if I saw any sign of "hot stones", fearing that I might get my head smashed in instead of getting my back warmed.

So I have nothing in particular of note to add today. A trip to the country side has it's pleasures, but does not offer much in the way of writing material, unless you want me to go on about the statues and the gold and the size of the rooms: it's all beautiful, and at some point I just stopped taking photographs and started to react the same way when I drove down the St Lawernce Seaway: If I see another quaint southern ontario town on the banks of the St Lawrence river, I'll gag.

At a certain point in my life, I think when I was in kindergarten or grade one and first learned that each year of a person's life has a number, like 1959, or 1964, and so on, I realized that I would in a future year be able to look back at my self from a previous year, and I remember that when I realized that, I made a vow to myself to remember back to myself as a six year old from when I was 50. I remember choosing 50 because at that time it amazed me that I could ever be 50, and be able to look back on a younger person. It's a funny thing to remember, that little child talking to the future adult; most of the time we think in terms of the adult talking back in time to the child that we used to be. But I remember talking to the future adult, asking her to talk to me from when she was 50. Was that the Fourth Dimension?

And of course on my birthday, my 50th birthday, a few years ago, I had a little chat with my self, said "hi" to the kid.

Life expectancy in Russia is 54 for men and 58 or so for women.

There are more than 20 memorials to Lenin in this city of Leningrad; none to Stalin, not any more. There used to be more than 50 memorials to Lenin, and who knows how many to Stalin?

Two Russian wolfhounds just pranced by across the street.

Bye.

solstice

2007-06-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

Had a great dinner with Charlotte and Mich at an Azherbijanian restaurant, complete with scented water-tobacco burning hookahs at the table. The food and service was great, and I tried another different russian beer, this one called Tinkah. that's not the correct spelling, but this keyboard that i am using although it includes the cyrllic letters, is not set up to be used that way. not that I can see anyway.

i think I am developing a taste for the beer, and it's damned good. Well, David, since I know you are reading this, the next time you're picking up your Canadian at the Toronto beer store, check to see if there's any russian stuff there, and i won't worry about getting any at the duty free.

I had lamb, which was fabulous, potatoes, roasted vegetables, and beer.

last night was solstice, and the first night of the white nights festival. the city did not sleep, not that it does anyway, but last night was even more lively, and apparently it will become even livelier over the next 10 days, especially either tomorrow or sunday, when every student who is in any kind of course "graduates" and they parade down the Nevsky Prospekt, which is closed for the occassion, wearing even more revealing clothing than usual and sashes which say "graduate".

i have to admit i retreated to my room for solstice. i am so tired by the end of the day from running around to museums, cathedral mass, and dinner, that i decided not to go on the midnight boat ride along the canal. oh, but they set those up for us every few days, and there will be more.

in an email to me, Nancy said that a friend of hers was envious that I was to be in St Petersburg for a month, and included a few warnings: watch out for the swarming gypsies, who target tourists, espectilaly women, and have a trick of throwing a baby at you so that you will put out your arms to catch it, thereby dropping your purse. well, most everyone who's reading this will no that i have this nifty little over-the-shoulder bag that requires no arms to carry, purchased with just that warning in mind. however, while i have not seen any such swarming gypsies, i have heard that George Elliot Clarke, eminent Canadian poet from Halifax and now Toronto, was swarmed by four men while walking down the Prospekt with his wife. George was walking minding his own business when suddenly a man stepped right in front of him and stuck his face into his. George turned to go another direction, and another man right there, right in hs face. He turned then to his left, and a third man blocked his way with a menacing glare. And he turned behind to find yet a fourth man blocking him, at which point he just pushed through and rejoined his wife. The men's purpose was to warn him, threaten him; but they did not accosst his wife, although I'm sure they could have.

I heard today that many high ranking officials have been murdered on the prospekt and in fact there are bullet holes in some of the plate glass windows of stores. Additionally, it is not unusual for us to see, while walking along a side street off the prospekt, a smashed in car window, recently minted, or piles of glass beads on the street.

this afternoon I went to a screening of Tarkovsky's movie Mirror, an autobiographical film about his life as a young boy. don't rush out to watch it unless you have a high tolerance for ambiguity, or unless your russian history is impeccable. our guide through the experience, Alexandr Skidan, provided some annotations that made the movie comprehensible, and on Monday we will be discussing the film in terms of the inclusion of passages from Pushkin's letters and scenes from Dostoyevsky. interesting stuff, and I'm hooked.
the screening was in a tiny room that was part of a small independant book publisher in petersburg that started out 20 eyars ago publoishing essay ss only\ The space they inhabit serves as a press that now publishes full length books, screens avant garde films, has art galleery, bookstore, and readings. Each room of the space is very small, and down a narrow sti\rcase and into a space that in canada would not pass fire codes, but it had the feel of secrecy about it which may or may not be necessary any more or again. it's hard to say.

so, bacvk to Nancy's fr4iend, who told Nancy he was envious that I would be here for a month. It is easy for me to understand why he would say that. I've been here a week, and have spent this first week just watching, really, watching and allowing myself to step into the pace of the moving hoards of people who call the Prospekt their home. i just now feel as if i can walk without tripping, and have put out my intuitive feelers enough to sense the complexity and variety of the characters who are out there. Faceless and numberless people are now starting to separate into types, and i can tell a tourist, like myself, at a glance, and that s before they speak english or german or italian. i'm tempted to go more fully undercover, and put on a long dark skirt and envelope my head in a babushka, as I feel, like in most countries i'm familiar with, that women over 50 move invisibly among those who matter more. i like it. imagine what i could do with that disguise? certainly I would avoid standing in the tunnels that go under the prospekt and down to the subways where i would sing russian folk songs with a plastic bucket at my feet; i don't see much interest in that, or in standing at entrances to restaurants that serve russian national dishes, handing out discount coupons for their food. rather, i would stumble quickly but with a slight hobble down the street and onto the bus, where I would pause before stepping up into the bus (no "kneeling" buses here, in St Petersburg, let me tell you in this city for the young) and wait for some slightly younger woman to rush over to help me up the steps, help from the next generation of babushkas who have not yet realized that they are that, who are still young enough to be regretting the stillettos they have stopped wearing because of bunyans and too many turned ankles. yes that['s the other thing i noticed, just walking and watching: turned ankles. one of those amazons striding along and then pop, over she goes like one of those dolls that are held together with string on the inside, but who collapse when you push the base.

so, what i wanted to say really, here was that a week in St Petersburg would be like going to a ballet and listening to the overture and then leaving before the ballet began. I haven't even been the hermitage yet, i'm still digesting the modernists, wanting more tarkovsky, lectures from the russian scholars here who are showing me the mythology of petersburg, the facade, the dreamworld of peter I that has been added to by successive layers of russian imagination. So i understand Nancy's friend's envy, because to have been in petersburg for a week is to KNOW to absolutely know that you have not been in petersburg at all.

i suspect that being here for a month will bring even greater certainty about the insubstantiability of petersburg. already i want to come back.

no blood on the streets this morning.

love you all, Anne

a few more observations (okay, it does go on a bit, but this is for me, too)

2007-06-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it's the packs of howling and snarling dogs wandering the night streets, or the raging fires in the garbage bins, or the men in dark suits and glasses that were taking my picture in the restaurant yesterday at lunch time, or the pools of coagulated blood on the sidewalks and doorsteps that I must step around in the mornings on my way to breakfast, but there is something about Petersburg that is, well, different from my little house on that pacific island.

How quiet Vancouver Island is. How quaint. How safe. How calm. Yesterday, while I sat in the "park" across from the Kazanski cathedral to eat my breakfast of yogurt and apple/cherry tart, and while I took in the fact that I was sharing the space with those who had not yet awakened from their nights' sleep on the benches around me, several piles of relatively fresh dog shit, the remains of a whole chicken, and a dead rat, I realized that of the many things I could possibly be missing (Steve, Judith, Larissa, Lorraine, Zoa, Brendan, a hot shower, a good meal, a comfortable bed, fresh air, a mosquito free existence, hugs, Milton, the cats, Steve, Steve, Steve, and Steve...and then my colleagues and the familiarity that comes along with them), I am missing nature. Here, in the heart of Petersburg, there is no nature. Well, none other than the above mentioned park (and others in similar vein, and all surrounded by cement and pastel coloured European facaded buildings) and the rivers running through the river. But the rivers too are bound by concrete and although I have seen men standing on bridges to reel a hook from a line in hopes of catching a fish, my imagination does not go so far to imagine that a fish could actually survive in such a murky river. Well, no floating condoms yet, but plenty of empty water bottles and paper wrappers can be seen bobbing alongside the boats that take us tourists through the canal system.

But heck, I bet you want to know about the howling dogs, don't you? It's absolutely true. Every night after I put on my blinders (and more about that metaphor another time) and lull myself into the half sleep that is just barely possible when all the dusk-falling and its sleepy time cues are missing, I hear, off in the distance, and sometimes closer, and sometimes moving away, a pack of what sound to be about 6 dogs. There is a great commotion of snarling and biting and yowling, and I can imagine the flying specks of blood and saliva as these dogs move through the streets, searching for the stray cats (is it true? did there used to be four kittens running around the garbage bin outside my dorm, and now there are three? ).

Digression: right now I'm in the grotty internet cafe, the one with the "booths" for internet privacy. teh booths, I may have mentioned before, have curtains, so that you can use the cameras that are in them with impunity. When I have used those computers, I have been treated with random pornography sites that pop up out of nowhere and treat me to the basest tastes of the public internet user, and those usually involve child pornography.

Flash to the Nevsky Prospekt. Many of the young women on Nevsky Prospekt look like, well, what in my town might be described as hookers. Petersburg is a young city; most of the od people have died or moved away, and what is left is a young crazy city. So making my way down Nevsky Prospekt at any hour of the day or night is challenging because even those very tall blonde russian women wearing stilletos and very tight jeans (and oh, did I mention their breasts?), those women are moving quickly. They are on their way to somewhere, and someone told me that that somewhere is on the way to being married before they reach 23...or it's too late. Or something like that. Some of them marry quickly and then immdiately divorce, as it apparently is less shameful to be single after a divorce than to be single because never having married. In any case, there they are, in their tight white jeans, tight bodice enhancing and revealing shirts or blouses, push out bras, striding like amazons along the Prospekt. Can these women really be the future babushka, the woman who sits in every room of the Russian State Museum ensuring that no one touches or breathes on the painting by Filono or Maleich. These women wearing flat shoes, patterned skirts, blunt cropped short hair, and stern faces...did they used to be the young women of Petersburg striding their own version of the fashion statement? I guess it's the stilettos and the breasts that get me. I mean, given how short I am in comparison, this does mean that I spend a great deal of my time not only dodging around their quick pace, but also around their breasts...I don't have to avert my eyes, I have to wear safety glasses.

So, back to the internet cafe. Today I've asked for a computer facing the window that looks out to Kazanskya Prospekt. This means I can watch what's going on outside (the guy with dreads on his cellphone, pacing up and down in front of me and screaming at the person on the other end, the woman in the silver lame - is there any such thing? - the silver lame mini-dress and black and silver stilettos, a cigarette as long as her stiletto heel is tall, in her left hand...and on these computers, at least, there are no pornography pop ups - it's public, and I can be pretty sure, I hope, that...

The fire in the garbage bins? Yesterday morning on my way to class (?) I noticed, oh, I don't know, maybe 30 foot flames rising out of the garbage bin, and the accompanying smell of burning garbage. I suspected a smell of burning meat, too, so maybe that's where that fourth kitten disappeared to (sorry Larissa, but these kittens, well, they just get into everything, and thus probably also garbage cans). Astonishingly to me, and to some of the other NAmericans here, everyone seemed to blythly go about their business. And so I did too. Oh, a raging fire in a garbage bin, I will be able to say the next time I pass one. And not then wonder how to call a fire truck.

Men in dark suits, you ask? Steve, I know you are wondering about that one, and will be asking me to take the next bus out of here. Essentially, it goes like this: sitting in a restaurant yesterday at noon having lunch with two Canadian friends. Two men, wearing dark suits and sunglasses (yeah, I know, I know, how undercover can you get, how subtle?) sitting two tables away taking pictures. When I looked at them directly, which happened to be while the camera was aimed directly at our table, the guy with teh camera turned away and took a photograph of the ceiling.

So, is this just a Petersburgian taking pictures of tourists? And he just happens to look like a thug?

Its the pools of coagulated blood that I find the most curious. Every morning since I have come here I have seen blood on the streets. Sometimes the same blood hangs around for a few days, which means the packs of wandering dogs are not finding them and cleaning them up. But I have heard stories from the young men who are here and frequenting the bars that bar fights are not uncommon, and heard one story from a guy who turned a corner to find a guy bashing another guy's head into the concrete sidewalk, while the victim's girlfriend stood by smoking a cigarette and crying at them to stop. He finally stopped, and the victim got up and went into the bar with his girlfirend while the attacker went to his car, opened the trunk, removed his shirt, tossed it in, and then pulled out a clean one, put it on, went into same bar.

Or there is the guy from our program who spilled a beer on a russian bar patron and the patron responded by punching him in the face and knocking him out.

Okay, so Steve, you need to know that I'm not hanging out in bars, although I gotta tell you that the food situation here is so sketchy that I have started having a beer for each of lunch and dinner instead of eating. I've found it to be much cheaper and more reliable. It's also thirst quenching. Perhaps it also helps me to sleep better.

So, those pools of blood on the streets are interesting inscriptions from the Petersburg locals and the more adventurous of our group (there are 100 of us here) and are already starting to feel normal and now have begun merely to add resonance to the name of the Cathedral about 4 blocks away, the Church of the Spilled Blood. I haven't been there yet. I'm saving that, but it is a major tourist attraction, so it holds little attraction for me. So far.

Today I went to the Russian State Museum with Ann, a woman from Greenwich Village, 75 yrs old. She is director of an institute of urban design in the village, and as a young reporter was the first person to have interviewed Andy Warhol, who, at the conclusion of the interview, gave her a piece of his which was a two sided painting of a 2 dollar bill. She is currently working on the 2nd edition of a book on the history of design, which WW Norton is publishing once she includes the material on Russian design. Well, she is fascinating to spend time with, but not because of those things, but because she is just plain old fun. And, of course, we share in interest in the same time: early 20th century, so were both heading to the avant garde section of the museum where she wanted to see Kandinsky and I wanted to see. I saw...work by Filonov, a piece entitled King's Feast, another Cosmos, Shock Workers (Masters of Analytic Art), Dairy Maids, Peasant Family, Live Head, Formula of Spring. He was working in the early 20th century doing Cubist types of things while Picasso was hanging around with Gertrude Stein in Paris doing his Cubist thing. Interested in looking up more about Filonov. I also saw several pieeces by Malavich, and I want to also see if Linda Dalrymple Henderson mentions either of these two painters in her book, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. I know she has a chpater on Russian art, but I did not get to read it before I had to send it back to the Museum.

Speaking of Fourth Dimensions, I feel in a way as if I have stumbled upon one here in Petersburg. It does seem like a Fourth Dimension, a European-like city, architecturally, inhabited by grim-faced Russians. No helmet laws here, Steve, for any kind of bike (I say this now because a woman just blasted by, helmetless, on a motorcycle), and what would be the point, really, of having helmet laws in a city that does not fix its potholes?

And so missing nature is looking at my photographs of Cortes Island sunsets, the little cabin which by now is no longer covered with a tarp but with scadding, the beach at Smelt Bay, swimming in Hague Lake, lying in the sun, listening to nothing except the beating of my own heart. And maybe a raven. I was feeling strange for a while the other day, and wondering what was the cause, and then I realized it was the absence of nature. Yes, I am deeply immersed in culture, but what is culture without nature? Well, it's locked doors, stiletto heels, blood on the streets, packs of nocturnal dogs.

Speaking of ravens. The ravens in Petersburg sound different from the ones on Vancouver Island.

Russia

2007-06-19T05:56:00.000-07:00

So, last night I took a 1 1/2 hour russian course and now I am fluent. well, maybe not fluent, but at least i can start to read signs and know what they say. luckily there are enough imported english words and then words with latin roots that I can recognize and translate. I know now that there is an invitro fertilixation clinic here in Petersburg, although i have no reason or desire to visit it.

observations of today: watched a young mother teach a pre-walking baby with bunny ears on her yellow hat how to kick a can onto the street from the sidewalk. That is what people do here: drop their bottles and cans onto the street. And, in downtown Petersburg at least, someone comes along dressed in lime green coveralls with a broom and dust thingy and sweeps them up and into a trash can.

don't smile in Russia: you will be thought to be a simpleton or to have some nefarious purpose. this suits me well; as I don't smile much anyway.

don't count on street lights to clear the roads for safe pedestrian passage. this of course is a good match for my neurotic street crossing behaviour.

last night i got caught in a notorious petersburg downpour. of course i brought no umbrella or raincoat, so i got wet trying to find an unlocked entrance to the university compound. it took me an hour as at one point i backtracked and then had to re-backtrack in this pouring rain. I was carrying a plastic container of some sort of cabbage salad I had purchased in the 24 grocery convenience store, but it leaked and my salad filledwith rainwater, so I tossed it in the garbage (and did notkick it into the street). well, wet is an understatement. i was soaked through to my skin by the time i found the entrance and found my way to the residence building. luckily my roomate was still up despite the late hour so i didn't have to awaken her to let me in the room forwhich there is only one key.

the best news of many days is that therewas hot water for a shower for the first time snce i've been here. i had been warned about the possible lack of hot water, so was prepared fr it, bt this morning i woke up to find hot (if brown and stinky) water pouring out of the shower head. coincidentially this is the first day that I have felt "human".

i'm disappointed that I have not yet figured out how to post my photographs here, but i have not taken very many yet. i feel as if I am still trying to orient myself, and my picture taking has been random and likely either dull or predictable. Kristie wanted me to take pictures of the poeple that I am meeting, so I'm trying to do that. but mostly i'm interested in the dogs of petersburg, because while i don't see many during the day, i can hear them in the middle of the night...and it sounds like packs of dogs roaming the streets while engaging in internicene battles. I can hear the snarling and barking and howling, and the gnashing of teeth. the next day there is no evidence of these packs of dogs, so either Iam hearing ghosts or the dogs of petersburg are noctural, waiting until the push of people subsides.

and then, larissa, there are the cats. i've seen a few cats, most of them filthy but obviously well fat, ad i suspect that is due to the rat population. there are several cats loitering around the Hertzen campus, and they are robust muscle-bound body-building cats whose striding pecs speak of their confidence. i haven't really interacted with any of them, as there is the possibility of rabies....but i've taken a couple of pictures of cats.

and then there was the generic dog lying on the front step of the hermitage this morning. he was just lying there on his side, surrounded by hundreds of people coming and going, and he looked like he was dead, or at least in a deep sleep, and i figure he was sleeping there because it was safe from the wandering hoards of yowling dogs he travels with and fights with at night. it was safe - people just stepped around him. Some looked at him, others just ignored him. i took his picture. will post when and if i can.

this afternoon i attended a lecture on the "fire and flood mythology of Petersburg", which was essentially a lecture about how petersburg was first conceived as Peter I imaginary construct and whose european designed buildings were merely a facade for his idea of utopia...a facade, of course, with no substance. the writers of petersburg, first Gogol, PUshkin and Dostoevski and then others, including most recently Bitov in his "Pushkin House" have created and then explored the substance of the mythology that grew out of this facade.

and so on. i didn't bring my notes with me, but the lecture was great and the lecturer will be giving another 7 lectures while I am here on various aspects of russian literature, and i'm in for those.

Culture shock has not set in, and I'm not sure why. I feel very comfortable here although the white nights are somewhat of a trickster as I am never able to tell what time it is. So, i don't get my "go to bed now" cue from the dusk; thre is no dusk, just daylight until 1 am and then night until 3 or so, and then sun again. i hve never seen the sun fall so deeply into the sky and skit there, so different from say Fiji...

oh my...

2007-06-17T05:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm here.

First impressions: some of the buildings similar to the Spanish era buildings in Havana. Wide boulevard streets, open spaces, no crush of people, or high density housing, relatively clean air with a whiff of the Baltic, but not salt smell, just moist. Moist. Without being humid. People walk fairly slowly down the streets. Young women wearing tight, stylish clothing (although nothing like the men and women off all ages I saw in the Milan airport) and stylish shoes...no "crocs" here.

I've just returned from a two hour tour of the vicinity around where I am working and staying, and have seen the hotspots of St Petersburg tourism.

I'll start with the present and work backwards. I'm sitting in an internet establishment which is essentially a long narrow room with several computers in it. I've paid ahead for an hour, so that I can catch up on my email, facebook, and this blog, and I've been assigned to a small cubicle with keyboard and monitor, the latter of which is embedded into a wooden frame. This computer has skype capability and a camera and headphones. And, it is high speed.

I'm hungry, but there is a free reception this evening, and if last evening's welcome reception is any indication, the food will be great.

The tour of St Petersburg was essentially a tour of the cathedrals, museums, galleries, and Other Places of Historical And Tourist Interest, including a gift shop that had a wide selection of amber, gilded babushkas, and gold-leaf and hand painted decorated lacquer boxes, one of which I was immediately drawn to, only to discover it was 1200 american dollars. Each section of this gift shop has its own expert salesperson, and I was immediately provided with a mini-lecture on the purpose, origina, and devleopment of the lacquer boxes by a young man called Daniil who reminded me of Ilya Kurakin from, oh, was he the russian sidekick on mission impossible?. The one I chose but did not buy had a gold embossed painting of a Turk on a flying carpet. Beautiful, delicate in blues, pinks, and of course, gold.

So I've had a surface introduction to the highlights, including a visit into the Cathedral of St Nicholas, an "active" church replete with icons, gold reliquary, genuflecting russian women wearing babushkas (I had to cover my head with my jacket, reminiscent of my childhood when having joined a RC daycamp, I made daily trips into the RC church to pray with my French catholic friends, my head covered with a square of toilet paper which I had to hold on my head with my hand), and legless war veterans outside in wheelchairs, fully dressed in their battle fatiques, and begging.

Inside, many women and children move around from icon to icon and as they approach and move away from each icon, they cross themselves many times, bow their heads, and approach the icon where they touch their forheads against the icon, and also, in the case of the "picture" icons, they kiss the representation of baby Jesus. Women must have their heads covered, and most of the women wore colorful square scarves which are folded in half to create a triangle which they then tie over their head. As they leave the church, they also turn back to the door they have just exited and make the sign of the cross and bow down, different women to differing degrees.

St Nicholas is the patron saint of mariners, and of course, St Petersburg having originally been built by Peter the Great, who was an enthusiastic mariner, it makes sense that there would be a cathedral named for St Nicholas...and, of course, the Neva River ties into the Volga, and goes out to the Baltic.

I am staying in the student0residence of the Herzen University, which means that I am a 10 minute walk from where most of the seminars are, as well as 10 minutes from breakfast. This, of course, was the cheapest housing option available to me, and while my room is somewhat reminiscent of a cell, it is an adequate retreat from everything else I'm doing here, since the university buildings form a barrier between the inner courtyard where the residence is, and the very busy Nevski Prospeckt, which runs alongside. So, I could hear no street noise from my room, and was only awakened by the sound of miniature chainsaws diving through my room, which turned out to be mosquitoes. Since Steve is not here with me to run around the room ki9lling every last one of them, I just let them fly around all night, and kept myself covered with my sheet, which wasn't particularly effective, as I woke up with mosquito bites on the bottoms of my feet. But I have learned my lesson, and will start to use the Deep Woods Off that Steve bought for me before I left. And I will keep the window closed at all times.

The room is sparse, and while I lay awake last night in the bright lights of 12:30 am, the sun just setting, I stared at the ceiling and estimated that the room I'm sharing with Allison from London England but originally from the US is about 8 x 10 feet. It includes two narrow beds; well, one narrow bed and another bed that is even narrower. A stand up wardrobe with four shelves and 4 hangers, two bedside tables, a chair, and a television are the only things in the room. We share a bathroom with 8 other people, but there is likely never going to be a shower line up, as there is no hot water. I'm glad I cut my hair.

How to Shower When There is No Hot Water
First you turn on both the hot and cold water taps, Just In Case the hot water should begin to flow. Then, you tell yourself that you can do it, that you can put your whole body under the stream of cold water pressing out of the rusty shower head. So, you take off all your clothes and stick a leg in. Well, okay, just a foot, and then you have this idea that if you just stick your head under the falling water, you can wash your hair without having your lips turn blue. So, you do that, and then you wash each of your feet, separately, and then your armpits, and then whatever other part of your body it occurs to you to wash, and you leave the shower room without having had a shower, but feeling somewhat as if you can face the rest of the world without the rest of the world running away screaming.

I was met at the airport by two tall, high cheek-boned Russian women in their twenties. They both wore tight clothes, well, really tight clothes, and had an expansive uncovered space between the bottom of their T-shirt and the top of their hip high jeans. They both had long blond hair that came to wispy points, and were aware and helpful. Coming through the terminal had been easy, although the escalotor down stopped while I was on it. I descended into a mass of recent arrivals from Milan (my plane) and London, and we all pressed forward towards the 4 possible exits. I had a couple of forms to fill out, which, when I arrived, were taken away from me, along with my passport, to be registered by the police at a cost of 300 rubles, or 18 USD. Iam now without a passport or visa, and am hoping not to get arrested. One guy from Kenya was stopped at customs and sent back to Kenya because there was an anomoly with his visa...I think there was a comma in the wrong place. They plopped him right on the next plane out of Russia, and I'm guessing that not many questions are asked in these situations.

gotta go!

Toronto Pearson

2007-06-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

So, I am in Pearson Airport at gate 174 waiting for my plane, which leaves in about 3 hours. I came very early to check in, because I hate it when unforseen problems create last minute chaos, so I was here 5 hours before check in, and of course everything went smoothly. My passport, the ticket I had bought by myself online, the visa - all passed muster, as they say, and here I am sitting in the departure lounge with my Starbucks coffee and my laptop.

When I woke up early this morning, my heart was beating rapidly and I had a lump in my throat. I was feeling a combination of excitement and fear, and the certain feeling that I would forget the laundry that I had put in the dryer earlier this morning, or my wallet or passport, at David and Karon's...but no, I think my neurotic comprehensive and deliberate planning and organization have paid off. Everything is where it should be, and it all fits, although in London I had to dump the obscenely awkward red suitcase large enough to store human cargo and replace it with two smaller brown bags.

The posts that follow beneath this one are short, and include a couple of photographs from the 3 days I spent in Toronto.

My heart is no longer beating like a hummingbird's, and I have a gallon of water packed in my carryon bag, ready for the upcoming travel marathon.

Feet

2007-06-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

Karen and I went for a long walk along the waterfront, and here she is soaking her feet with that ubiquitous smile on her face.

My Hot Dog bun

2007-06-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

Here is my first night's bed, the one with the slow leak...and David wrestling with it

Linda!

2007-06-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

here you are, linda! I cropped the photograph a little bit but I like the effect.

two women

2007-06-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

I liked these two women, who were waiting to cross the same street, but who maintained a wide distance from one another. The similarities between them in terms of clothing and purses are far overcome by their differences.

gentleman with coffee on Bay street

2007-06-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

I took a picture of this gentleman, and he must be called a gentleman, because of his pinstriped suit, immaculate looks, and straight posture. He seemed "out of time" from most of the other people walking by, or sitting down for coffee outside from where I was sitting.

Queen & Bay, June 14 2007

2007-06-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

Here is an impossible photograph that miraculously came out of my camera. Old City Hall is in the background, including the spire to the left of the photograph. Just below the spire you can see the left curved tower of new city hall, and to the right of that, the curved building which is the right hand side of the City Hall building. The top right hand corner of the photograph, where there are a few circular looking objects, is a photograh of the signs outside of where I was sitting with Linda. Of course, this photograph is spatially impossible, but aesthetically interesting.

eMilton

2007-06-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

Man & Dog on Queen Street West

2007-06-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

On the Edge of Etobicoke

2007-06-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

I fell into the deep well of St Thomas Ontario for a few days, but I've recovered now after a nutritious dinner with David and Karon, and a long walk along the waterfront with Karon. It's 31 degrees in Toronto, and humid, but the breeze was blowing in off the lake, and the boardwalk was filled with rollerbladers, cyclists, walkers, runners. Notable was the guy on a bike wearing what looked to be a heavily padded shirt on which the design was metal plating.

Sailboats, at least 100 of them, were in the lake closer to downtown Toronto, and beside where we were walking the dragon boat races were ongoing.

Last night I slept on an airbed with a slow leak, so every couple of hours I woke up to find the tops of the totes on which the airbed was placed poking into my back, and my body enveloped in two large puffs of air mattress. Luckily it's an electric air mattress, so all I had to do was press a little button and it filled up with air again. I slept well, though.

Pictures at 11.

Samuel de Champlain with Astrolabe

2007-06-07T16:47:00.000-07:00

This is the only photograph I took today. As soon as I took it, the batteries in my camera died. So this is it. It's that explorer, the French one. His statue is up on Nepean Point, facing up river in the direction he headed.

Of note from today: I wore a bright yellow rainjacket that I had bought from London Drugs for 15 dollars, and I hated it so much (it just felt wrong) that I left it in the coat check at the Museum of Civilization.

Have Visa, Will Travel

2007-06-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

Now, I think I'll head off to the Museum of Civilization and see what, exactly, is meant by that word and what all the fuss is about.

National Art Gallery

2007-06-06T15:30:00.001-07:00

this is the National Art Gallery in Ottawa as seen from the bench just outside the Nicholas Hoare book store on Sussex Drive. You can sort of see the spider just to the right of center.

So, the Nicholas Hoare bookstore is one of those bookstores that just has all the good stuff and NONE of the filler...the opposite of Chapters, which has 90% filler and a bit of the good stuff.

I bought Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (it's okay, Steve, I bought it in paperback, so it wasn't so expensive).

And Betty, as I wandered through the NAG, I kept making myself aware of the smells I was smelling. I have to admit, mostly I detected the odor of soap, but in the George Clutesi room, I smelled the scent of fresh paper.

I saw one exhibit, Betty, in which this woman takes personal objects that are worn or carried close to the human body, and puts them outside, inserting a bee hive into them. Over the years, honey comb accumulates on and around the objects, and her piece on display was a dress almost completely covered with honeycomb. The blurb that accompanied the piece talked about "inter-species collaboration" in art. For some reason, I thought of you and thought you'd like that.

So, I apologize for this photograph. It's pretty lame compared to the ones I saw on the racks in the Byward Market (on my way back to Home Sweetland Home, the B&B I'm staying at in Sandy Hill), which somehow managed to insert a field of tulips between the gallery and the road...how do they do that? I didn't see any flippin' tulips!

Chelsea Eats Paper

2007-06-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

And Brian claims she is the devil.

statue of "peacekeeping" soldiers now out of date

2007-06-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame Cathedral spire

2007-06-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

you should see the inside

Spider Outside of National Art Gallery

2007-06-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

I refrained from getting the T-shirt

Can it really be this easy?

2007-06-06T07:12:00.001-07:00

Where's the catch?

I got up early this morning and went down to breakfast to find one other B&B guest there. Brian and Sid's dog, Chelsea, had stolen a table napkin and was running up and down the hall with it in her mouth, and the other guest was too polite, I guess, to say anything.

After he had made our breakfasts, Brian sat at the table with us and asked me what I was up to in Ottawa. - Going to the Russian Consulate, I told him, to get a visa.

-Oh, he says, looking pleased. That's just down the street. And he tells me to walk up to Laurier Avenue, about two blocks from the B&B, turn right, and walk another few blocks until I come to Range Road, then turn right there. And here I had been expecting another $30 taxi ride.

It's cold in Ottawa today, but I set out, following Brian's instuctions. The consulate opens its doors at 9:30, and I'm standing outside at 9:10. No chance, of course, of an early opening, so I wander down to the edge of the Ottawa River and am surprised to find a rich population of Mallards, gulls, and even a couple of cormorants sunning themselves, facing east, sitting on rocks in the middle of the river's flow. I hear the unmistakable sound of red-winged blackbirds, and one of them lands on the walkway next to me, looks up at me, and mouths some incomprehensible message, it's beak opening and closing, opening and closing, before it flies off again into the river grass.

There seem to be a few extra cars in the parking lot across from the consulate, so I go back to stand outside the door at 9:20. At exactly 9:30, the door is opened electronically from within, and the five of us enter the building together. First thing I see is a row of Babushkas, bright blue, standing on a ledge. The receptionist points me to the "teller" behind a smouldering grey window, and I tell him I'm applying for a visa, and ask him what he wants first. - Passport, visa application, invitation, photograph, photocopy of passport information page...and $210 for 24 hour processing. I sign something, get a little blue card from the guy behind the glass, and am told to come back tomorrow.

It's 9:35, and I walk back up Somerset Street to Sweetland and am back in my room by 9:45.

So I have the rest of the day to work, catch up on my sleep, and then figure out where I am in relation to the rest of the city, the one that I used to know.

Tomorrow, it's pick up the visa and then work, visit a museum, relax...

Arriving in Ottawa

2007-06-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

It wasn't until I stood in the Ottawa airport watching some guy take all the red suitcases off the carousel, and then replace them when he realized they weren't his, that I was hit by the realization that I have started my journey. Even the 3 hour stopover in Calgary hadn't really sunk in, probably because I was moping over my aching gums.

But when I got off the plane in Ottawa and saw the bilingual signs in the airport, I started to feel the familiarity of the place which only grew as the taxi drove me down the airport connector and onto Bronson Avenue. Bronson Avenue! And there! There is Carleton University! The #1 bus, wasn't it, that went from Carleton up to Bank Street and down all the way to the Parliament buildings and then further still into Vanier? And we're turning onto...oh, it's the entrance to Colonel By Drive. And there is the canal, where I skated, and the apartment building where Flora McDonald used to live.

The memories come in unexpected fragments, and as they pop in I wonder if they are truly memories or if they are memories of dreams. Yes, that's it. I have had dreams all these years, dreams I have not remembered until now, dreams that take place in all these Ottawa locations. Because I haven't been able to keep active memories of Ottawa alive in my life. I mean, who has time to remember everything in their past, so I assume that's what my dream life is designed for: to sift through, update, review, re-file all those memories so that they remain in some form.

But to what purpose? To serve as scaffolding for the present, a kind of structure upon which to attach new memories?

I can't say that the memories are intense, or loaded with emotion, positive or negative. I have a mostly neutral reaction to seeing the places. I see a street corner and remember an orange cat I once had who was kidnapped by a man who lived alone in a second floor room in a boarding house across the alley from where I was living. The neighbourhood kids came and told me where Andy was, and then offered to steal him back for me. I agreed, and within hours Andy was sitting in my kitchen asking for more cat food.

Now I'm sitting in my B&B room, not far from the University of Ottawa. The room is small, maple floors, yellow trim on the walls, a green and yellow flower-decorated quilted bedspread on the bed, with baby blue satin pillows. There is a sink in the corner, and a television installed on a retractable arm over by the window. On the wall behind me is a framed print of a boy walking through deep snow, pulling his sled and accompanied by a tri-colour collie. Behind them are several dairy cows on the other side of a page wire fence. The snow is falling thickly.

I am grateful that I have wireless internet in this room.

Leaving for Ottawa on the 5th...

2007-06-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

Riddled with dental pain, I am also in the final throes of packing. I'm supposed to take a Norton anthology of literature with me, which is probably the heaviest and bulkiest item I'm taking. Jorie Graham wants us to bring this for the poetry workshop, because, we are told, we are going to be memorizing some poems...I hope I can choose an imagist poem, or perhaps I'll pretend to memorize one of Shakespeare's sonnets, one that I have already memorized. What I should do, though, is memorize part of Paradise Lost...something dark and dramatic about Satan.

I went to a "packing" seminar at a travel store the other day, and learned what sorts of plastic containers I need to use for packing small amounts of shampoo in my carry-on. And I learned (well, had it confirmed) that I never want to go on a cruise where I'll have to wear ex-officio clothing that is so heavily treated with chemicals that I will be immune from the sun's rays and from spilled olive oil, which apparently just rolls off ex-officio clothing. And, of course, keep me away from those plastic sandals "that go with slacks or an evening dress". Nor do I want to go anywhere where I'll be lounging around in the hot sun all day and then pulling my floral wrap around my bathing suit to go to dinner.

Cool luggage, though. I wonder if I can jelly-roll the binders of writing portfolios that I have to take with me, or my laptop?

Bob T. showed me an article in the most recent issue of Geist, written by a playwright who went to SLS in St Petersburg for 8 days last year. Her article was cynical about Russia, and dismissive of the value of the seminars. Well, it didn't exactly make me feel excited about going. On the other hand, the sorts of things that bugged her about her experience are just the sorts of things that I'll probably absorb into my pores : smirking Russian women wearing knock-off Gucci sunglasses who dismiss the war-maimed with a casual wave of a hand, a race through Leningrad in a Lada, a room at the Herzen University Inn described as a "cell" - I mean, what better digs to have while in Russia, but something best described as a cell.

The highlight of her trip was the cab ride back to the airport at its conclusion, during which the cabbie talks about the death of Russia, or something like that.

But truly, I am moving into that pre-trip zone, the place that urges me to stay home, to curl up into my own bed with a book by a familiar author, the place that tells me I'm crazy, I'm not well enough prepared, I have too much to do to get ready, I will never be ready enough, I will forget crucial tools. And then that other familiar response to the pre-trip zone that says that none of the things that I think I will need for my journey will matter once I am on the journey, because it is, after all a journey. Maybe all I really need is the plane ticket and a credit card or two, maybe a change of clothes and a notebook. The rest is all trappings, designed to create the illusion of security or control. If I don't bring a Norton Anthology with me, will I not be able to find a poem to memorize? Are there no books in Russia? In St Petersburg? And why would I want to memorize a poem that's included in that anthology? If it is in that anthology, am I really interested in it? In memorizing it? I'd rather bring John Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, and memorize some poetic prose in that. In fact, now that I've thought of it, that's what I'm going to do.

Invitation

2007-05-29T11:42:00.001-07:00

I now know what my name looks like in the Cyrillic alphabet. I can't reproduce it here, but I DO now have my invitation, and when I arrive in Ottawa next week, will be a few steps closer to getting my visa.

What are these very ugly, dry, red spots all over my face?

Got Passport!

2007-05-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

what more can I say? I got my passport, painlessly, no lines, no hassle. Well, other than the hassle involved over the past few weeks.

Changed flight plans from Comox to Ontario; I'm now going to Ottawa instead of London, and earlier than planned, and even that change only cost me $68 so it's not all bad.

The consulate in Ottawa may or may not be open on June 11, the day before the Russian national holiday of the 12th, when it most certainly will be closed. They will know, the woman on the phone told Steve, "maybe, by end of May".

consulate hours

2007-05-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

Not only all that from the previous post, but the consulate will definitely be closed on the 12 June which is a Russian national holiday, and maybe also the 11th (the Monday before the 12th). So. Talk about getting down to the wire. I may end up not getting out of the country and owing a lot of people a lot of money for nothing...

my headache just got worse.

Anne

Visa and Invitation

2007-05-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

After the passport is in my hands, I have to get an invitation to get to Russia. Once I have an invitation, I can apply for a visa. To apply for my visa, I have to go to Ottawa. Not the consultate in Toronto, the one in Ottawa, even though I'll be in Toronto, am flying out of Toronto. So, I fly to London, Ont, go to Ottawa, get my visa, go back to Toronto, and then fly out. Huh? you say? Really? You have to do all that?

I wonder why I have such an excruciating headache!

Help.

Diseases

2007-05-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

According to my insurer, I might want to get inoculated against the following:

Japanese encephalitis
measles, mumps, rhubella
Hep A & B
Typhoid
Rabies (however, I had been planning to stay away from belfries)
tetanus

Yes, this is all very pleasing.

"Invitation" and Visa for Russia

2007-05-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

To get a visa, I need an invitation. To get an invitation, I need to ... what? I'm still working on that. I could have got one easily from SLS had my passport arrived in time, but now it's too late. So I'm on my own. Great. More challenges. The fastest way to get a visa is to turn up at 9:30 am at a Russian consulate and get same day service. I think I can do that in Ottawa, Montreal, and maybe Toronto, but I'm not sure. It's hard to get clear information. I guess it has turned out to be a good thing that I'm going to Ontario for a couple of days before I leave.

How am I feeling about all this? Well, perhaps somewhat overwhelmed. I would rather be spending my time writing and editing and reading Daniil Kharms, not fretting about documentation. But I guess this is all part of traveling. And there I though I was being so smart by sending my passport application off for renewal in what I figured was LOTS of time! Ha! The joke's on me, and luckily I am pleased to have jokes played on me, especially when they involve my assumptions being overturned by reality.

Passport Woes (Almost Over)

2007-05-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

I have heard from the Victoria passport office and I have an appointment for next Thursday to pick up my completed passport. I guess the Gatineau office faxed my application to Victoria, and it's as "easy" as that! Ha. I can't believe the feeling of relief I had when I answered the phone to talk to the Victoria passport office person, who was amazingly nice!

Okay, so my trip to Russia will then no longer be jeopardized by not having a passport. Passport means I can get an invitation, which means I can get a visa...oh, now I have to figure out how and where to get a visa...

Lunch with Jim and Anna Akhmatova

2007-04-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

This is what lunch with Jim is like: he asks questions, makes provocative statements that fly out of his mouth and orbit randomlylike so many scintilla around the space that roughly defines where we are talking. Before I can respond to a question or a comment, he has moved on to another topic, equally provocative. By the end of our lunch, my mind is reeling and spinning, and I want to keep talking.

I recently read about the Latin word for raindrop, also used to describe the water that falls from an overflowing gutter. That image of raindrops falling from an overflowing gutter comes close to describing how I feel, Jim, after talking to you. Yes, we captured some of the ideas, we stopped some of the flow long enough to consider, to converse, but so much of what you introduced spilled over the top and was reabsorbed into the ground. Maybe like those ideas that "wake up the writer", but don't wake him up quite enough so that he is sitting at his desk; those ideas just get reabsorbed back into the ether.

Where, he asks (asks Jim), are the female Russian writers? (I can tell, and in fact you tell me, that you have been perusing the suggested reading list for the seminars.) Good question. Where are they? Other than Anna Akhmatova, Jim, and Nina Berberova, I haven't found any. Not that I have been looking in particular for the women, I've just been reading whatever I find, and I have not found many women. Akhmatova survived the Stalin years, in part by memorizing her poetry so that there would be no written record of anything that could be construed as anti-Stalinist. Berberova, also writing during the early 20th century, wrote, among other things, The Ladies of St Petersburg, a book of short stories, available through the VIRL. Akhmatova is a poet, an amazing poet. I'm just now reading slowly through her poetry and biography and have not much to say about it. (As for the Russian women, I've had to learn what I can from Tolstoy's Anna and Kitty, and the women characters in Pasternak and Gogol and Chekhov and Dostoyevski, but I'm sure you'll agree, that's not the same. I mean, after all, Anna dives under the carriage of a train, and Kitty, well, she rusticates herself to the countryside with a pedant)...But now that I'm thinking about Anna Akhmatova, I'm remembering something that I read in the preface to the translation of her poetry by Judith Hemschemeyer.

Here is a quotation from Hemschemeyer's preface: "The act of translating, as anyone who has tried it will attest, entails sacrifices. For the music and the delicious web of connotations of the original one substitutes, if one is lucky and patient, a verbal equivalent that conveys the tone and the meaning and some kind of music of its own. The music of a translation is not the original music, of course." (13)

I like this passage because it reminds me that everything written is a translation that suffers from similar discrepancies between the music as conceived in the mind of the maker, and what is actually written down. All making, including writing, becomes a translation, which is at best a "verbal equivalent" of whatever mood, tone, idea, concept, image, sound, etc, etc, that a maker is attempting to reify in words.

So, is every act of making an act of translation? Hemschemeyer goes on to talk about the differences between English and Russian grammars, and the challenges those differences pose to the translator, and that discussion, too, is fascinating to read. This book, too, is available in the VIRL, and worth getting if only for the preface. Hemschemeyer herself is a bit of a character, apparently, beginning her Preface in the following way:

"In 1973 I read a few of Anna Akhmatova's poems in translation in the American Poetry Review and was so struck by one of them that I decided to learn Russian in order to read them all...three years later, when I could read the Russian..." (1). Three years, Judith? You learned Russian well enough in three years to be able to read poetry?

Well, that's enough for now, but I'll conclude the post with a Works Cited list: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, Edited and Introduced by Roberta Reeder. Zephyr Press, Boston, 2006.

The Ladies from St. Petersburg, Nina Berberova.

An Art Project - "keep the artist alive, drive"

2007-04-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

Ja Witcomb, an Emily Carr art student completing his final year at the Emily Carr program at North Island College, has created a final fundraising project entitled "keep the artist alive".

From his letter: "I will be putting my trust in the Comox Valley to see if my community will directly support me as a practicing artist. I will be canvassing businesses and residents for donations of support to help sustain myself and my art during my last semester at school. Through basic interaction with my community, I hope to gain a broader understanding of how art and artists are valued and appreciated.

Everybody who participates becomes a part of the art. No donation is too small. Artist-made t-shirts are available as gifts...for monetary donations of $15.00 or more."

to donate: phone Ja at 250 792 0226, email him at jawdraws@shaw.ca. Visit his website at www.jawit.com

Maxim Gorky and The Man Who Loved Owls: notes to self

2007-04-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

My reading this weekend has included reading Maxim Gorky's diary excerpts. An early chapter of this book is devoted to "fire" and he writes descriptions of fire that include describing a growing fire using images of bugs and snakes. Might be useful rereading for "Burning Time".

I finished writing the first draft of The Man Who Loved Owls, and after rereading that draft, after reading Gorky, I felt the inadequacies of my story. After I got over feeling inadequate, I reread the story again, and found a few places where I could build the story. I can see what it needs, and will have to focus on a couple of crucial sections of the story: the final conversation that the Man has with the Owl, a more developed role for the poet, and a justification for why the Man is living in the Poet's barn.

I would like to finish first drafts of On First Meeting Sainkho; Dr. Kaj Bothund; Metaphor, Metonymy and Synecdoche: an Essaie; Anglican Church Hymnal; Mavis' Painting; Pullers; Return to Petersburg; The Maker; The Poet. And, I really should get back to A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity.

Letters from Iceland

2007-04-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not writing this from Iceland, but I watched the movie Away From Her last night, and in that movie Gordon Pinsent is reading passages from the book, Letters from Iceland, to his Icelandic and Alzheimer's stricken wife.

I was attracted by what seemed to be a series of disconnected observations by Auden, and I am now curious to read the book.

Passport application and writing spilling out

2007-04-11T17:43:00.000-07:00

I'm fretting about my passport application. I sent it in on February 28, and their automated reply to my panicked message about when I could expect to get it tells me to phone them 15 days before my flight date...how am I supposed to get my Visa and "letter of invitation" processed without a passport? Why aren't they putting more staff on to process the increased traffic in passport applications?

And today I printed out everything I've written since October. Well, almost everything. I have to work through it all and figure out what I'm going to workshop, and that means working through a few hundred pages of fiction and poetry and essaies and pulling out what needs the most work. Or should I pull out what needs the least work? And, I have to keep writing. Not that I can stop that. Every day I "wake up the writer" and have to keep writing. Amazing. I can see that I shouldn't fight this, because I'm sure there will be times when I am not writing and am grateful for the reams of material that I have to work on. Right now it just feels as if I'm writing "too much" and I feel as if I'm surrounded by piles of raw writing that I will never possibly be able to get to.

So Far

2007-04-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

St Petersburg preparations

February 18, 2007
Today I watched Man with a Movie Camera.
I am reading Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and listening to Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. I have purchased the latter from audible.com, and am listening to all 33 hours of it on my iPod. However, listening to a book on an iPod is a tricky business, as I have this tendency to be lulled to sleep by even the most vivacious reading voice, if I do not get lured to the consideration of ideas suggested by the narrative I am listening to. The former happened last night, and although I began listening to AK at hour two, I woke up at hour six, not recalling any details at all of the story, and so had to find the spot where I must have fallen asleep, which I believe was when Kitty realized at the ball that Vronsky and Anna were attracted to one another, and that Vronsky was not after all going to ask her to marry him. The last I remember is Kitty’s horror and humiliation at having had her long, adoring and loving gaze into Vronsky’s face met by his remote and unresponsive face.

The former problem, the one whereby I find myself, when meant to be listening to a story being read to me, thinking about something completely different and unrelated to the story, a something likely suggested by some idea or image or event from the story which has sent me off into my own reveries. This latter problem happens so frequently that I wonder that it doesn’t happen to others, and how can it not? I wonder if I have some problem with my attention, my focus. Why do I drift away from what I know are excellent stories, read by even more excellent readers. To avoid drifting off and having to rewind my way back to where I became lost in my own story, I keep checking myself as I begin to wander, remind myself to pay attention to the story. The former problem, of falling asleep, is a bit more easily solved: adhering to the “rule” that I not listen to the iPOD while horizontal!

February 22, 2007
It happened again; I fell asleep just after Anna succumbed to Vronsky’s overtures, and is hanging off the side of a chair, apparently just having been debauched. I wake up a few chapters later as she is telling him that she is pregnant.

I can’t read right now; I’m sick with a cold. Not so horrible that I couldn’t go to for a massage today, though, with Larissa. While she was massaging behind my right ear, I imagined myself walking up a set of stairs inside a tall black tower, and when I got to the top of the tower, I looked back and felt myself getting a massage, but I wasn’t inside my body. It was great. I decided to walk back down the stairs and rejoin. Larissa told me that as she was massaging that part of my head, she smelled cigarette smoke. Trippy.

Does Tolstoy conclude every chapter with a pithy sentence that comments on how the chapter is to be understood, or comments on what is going to be read next? He doesn’t use many descriptions of things in his writing; rather, he describes what people do, and what they think, and what they say. I must listen for his descriptions of things, because I don’t think that there are many; maybe occasionally a brief description of a person.

I watched Russian Ark the other night, a Sukorov movie. I also watched the documentary about the making of the movie, and think I should also watch the movie again, this time with the voice over commentary, which I’m guessing might explain much of what I’m seeing. I remember watching the movie a few years ago, and not really understanding it at all, so when I saw it the other night and could understand who was who and why they might be there, I felt as if I have learned at least a little bit about Russian history. But I’m also aware that there is so much more to learn.

As I get ready for this trip, I experience a combination of excitement, seriousness, and sometimes fear. The excitement comes from the prospect of being able to go somewhere I have always wanted to go, but have not really had a reason to go, other than my own curiosity. This situation, going to a place for a reason, and for a long enough time that I might actually begin to get the feel of the city, is ideal for me, although going for even longer would be even more ideal. The seriousness comes from my need to learn as much from this trip as possible. I don’t want to “miss” anything. I want to know as much about Russia, its history, its literature, the city of St Petersburg, before I go, so that what I learn when I get there can add to that basic knowledge.

This feels like a serious thing to me, because there is a part of me that doesn’t want to blow this. By blowing it I mean that I don’t want the trip to arrive without me having put adequate thought and effort into my preparations such that when I get there I am underprepared and then perhaps overwhelmed by what I see and hear and experience. I want to have accumulated a ground of knowledge upon which to build my experiences. I also have the memories of having returned from places without having fully experienced them, so that when I return my memories are thin, incomplete, insubstantial, and cause me to wonder if I was actually in the place that I visited. Writing is one way to “capture” experience, and since this trip to St Petersburg is centered around writing, then maybe I will be able to live and relive the experience. The fear that I feel about going to this conference is the fear associated with being overwhelmed. There will be a lot of people around me, many activities, a “coming and going of feet”, to use Olive Schreiner’s words.

Will I get overwhelmed, over-stimulated? I am aware that I need to be aware of the ways that I can avoid getting overwhelmed, overtired, over-stimulated. And then I need to plan for ways and strategies to manage that tendency to get overwhelmed. I don’t need to do everything; nor do I need to avoid everything.

Those are the things I’m thinking about right now. And now, I need to go and watch a documentary about Stalingrad.

February 28, 2007
Standing in the lineup in the grocery store today, I tried to look at the world around me through the eyes of a traveler. I tried to see the people around me and their activities as if I had never seen them before, as if their activities were meaningless, had no context. It was not difficult, really. I noted that the man in front of me in the line-up paid $114.17 for his cart of groceries, and that he had opened one fruit stick for his daughter to eat while pushing her around in the cart.

I pretended that I didn’t know what a fruit stick was, that I didn’t recognize the wrapping, and was puzzling through a problem-solving exercise, imagining that I was already in Russia, trying to decode and understand what was going on around me. This made me think about how much I assume I know what is going on around me on a daily basis. I decode automatically, ignoring or attending to the activities around me from a practiced distance, not really needing to decode much except to ensure that I can safely cross a street or turn a corner without hitting someone or something. I decode to ensure my basic survival, and the familiar packaging of day to day living has nothing to do with my survival. Does it?

. Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore is one of the books that Dan mentions in an email, so I have ordered it for a read. Is this a post-Russia read? I’m intrigued by the prospect of entering into another research intense year after I come back. Will it be too soon, though? Will I, in preparing for Greece, forget to fully “process” what I have observed in Russia? We’ll see where this goes, if anywhere. If nowhere, then perhaps I can build my own course…a travel writing course to Russia? Hah! Not many goddesses and heroines in Russian literature and history, unless you count Catherine the Great, or even poor Anna Karenina, who is more likely a martyr than a heroine.

And here I go, sliding into a discussion of Anna Karenina, who is about to be squeezed into oblivion by the selfish and self-serving actions of Vronsky and Karenin. As I think of Anna right now, I imagine her as a tiny barque, barely breaking through the tumultuous surface of wide ocean on which she is floating, as the waves of her passion, in response to the possessiveness misinterpreted by her as love, cut across her bow, her stern, so that she is now leaning leeward, and now starboard, about to sink without ever really knowing the name of the sea. It’s painful for me to read her, painful to hear her confusion, her helplessness, her ignorance.

Tonight I went to the SLS website http://www.sumlitsem.org/russia/ and started to read the biographies of the faculty and guest lecturers who will be in St. Petersburg, and I began to fret a bit that most of them appear to be younger than I am. That isn’t in itself a problem, except for the fact that it reminds me that I have not pursued my writing as perhaps I should have. But, I keep going, I keep writing, feeling somewhere that as long as I keep writing now, I will be still writing when I get there, and will have developed by then some stronger sense of myself as a writer that I can build on from there. Writing, writing: this is perhaps the most I have written in many, many years, perhaps ever, as I try to write daily, as I practice this discipline, as I let come what will come, not worry about the ideas, thoughts, words, phrasing, just writing and then observing how the activity of writing, of trying to express in this way what I have seen or been thinking, how that activity of writing then feeds back to my observations and makes them the observations of a writer, that person who lives inside of me and who has hidden somewhere behind my heart, lurking, waiting, frightened.

The more of a writer I become, the more I recognize my self, the self to whom I made that commitment described by Donald Justice in his essay on oblivion. Yes, and writing despite the possibility of oblivion, that is the promise now. Yes, my desire, my need to write, is, has been perverted by wanting to be read, to be published, to make a living from writing. But that is a perversion, and that is all. Writing is something that I needed to do when I was younger, it was a form of survival and beyond survival, a form of existence, a way to inscribe, literally, myself into the world. While others see themselves reflected in their friends, their sports, their dancing, their politics, even their mirrors, I can see myself inscribed only in my writing. That is where I show up, when I recognize myself, the particular order of words, delimited vocabulary that speaks my name to me, turns of phrase that I recognize from things I have said, or thought, or written before. In my writing, yes, that is where I am a madwoman, and so that is where I should live so that I don’t become mad. And in here, only, will I escape the perversions that I spoke of earlier, the perversions that contort writing from making a life to making a living.

Still, though, I struggle with that part of me that says: you can’t do this, you will give up, you are not good enough, and on and on. I am frightened. I have never been frightened about this, in this way, before. Not a terror kind of fright, but the kind of fright that comes with standing on the brink of something. As I engage in this, I wonder if I have the stamina. Energy. It’s a stamina and energy thing. Discipline. I can read my writing and think, yes, okay, you can write adequately. But, I can look at my practice of writing and think, yes, okay, maybe you can write adequately, but writing well means writing frequently, and growing my writing means feeding it. Do I have the stamina for this? Or, will I be able to swing myself through the trees from where I am now to another, higher treetop? That’s what I want to see. I want to see development and growth. In myself, in my writing. In my understanding of what it takes, and in my understanding of what I need to do to make this happen for myself.

What do I see? I see writing. Poetry and essays, mainly. Go back to the Ekstasis website and get that book of essays that I saw there. Keep writing essays. Note to self…etc.

March 1, 2007
Tonight, well, tonight. What reflection? I sat in the tub tonight thinking about my trip, this after reading a passage in Doctor Zhivago which stopped my breath, and I had to stop reading, just so I could think about it.

In answer to the challenge of the desolation brought by death into the life of the small community whose members were slowly pacing after him, he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funneling downwards, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty. He realized, more vividly than ever before, that art has two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

And two pages earlier:
Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor of death; everything in the world, each thing in it, was named in his dictionary. He felt he was on an equal footing with the universe…now he listened to the service as if it were a personal message to him, affecting him directly. He attended to the words and expected of them a clear meaning, as of any other serious communication.

These two passages stopped me as I read them, and I couldn’t read any further. That is what happens now, as I’m reading. I’ll read something, and I’ll have to stop, as if any more reading may negate what I have just read, or worse, maybe, accumulate more beauty on top of what of I have just read; in either case, I’ll lose the voice that has spoken to me, the words that have been spoken, and the feelings that I have been communicated with about things that I understand, that I experience, that I long myself to speak about, write about, but can’t. It’s as if, in some strange way, Pasternak, as I read him, is teaching me how to write. Is that possible? I feel as if I am reading this novel, and Anna Karenina, as if I am deliberately taking lessons on how to write a novel.

Another thing I realized for the first time as I was reading
Doctor Zhivago is that Yura is a poet. Why did I not already know that? ‘”A candle burned on the table, a candle burned…” he whispered to himself – the confused, formless beginning of a poem; he hoped that it would take shape of itself, but nothing more came to him.’ So, I read this, and I think: this is a novel about a poet. Are there other novels about poets? Have I read them? I think this is a brilliant way to write a novel, poetry, philosophy – all in the same breath. A novel about a poet.

Probably the simplest idea, but as I continue to read this novel I continue to feel as if I am being taught how to write:
When his mother had died ten years earlier he had been a child. He could still remember his tears of inconsolable grief and terror. In those days his self was not important to him. He could hardly even realize that such a being as Yura existed on its own or had any value or interest. What mattered then was everything outside and around him. From every side, the external world pressed in on him, dense, undeniable, tangible as a forest, and the reason why he was so shaken by his mother’s death was that, at her side, he had lost himself in the forest, and now suddenly found her gone and himself alone in it.

This is a brilliant description of the experience of self in childhood and a familiar and therefore startling description of the impact of the loss of a mother on a child.

Reading Pasternak makes me want to write. I want to write a novel about a poet, a novel that includes poetry, philosophy, and a story: the story of a person, a contemporary person, who is in life, who is a poet. This novel tells me that such a novel has been written. And I’m not even intimidated by the fact that it has already been written. It’s as if the novel is instructing me by its very existence.

Those were my thoughts after I stopped reading Pasternak earlier today. That, and oh yes, the thought that Tolstoy is also teaching me. What I learn from both of them is what I conceptualize as “blocking”. They seem to write in blocks of story; several short (?) or what I remember as short chapters, each somewhat self contained, and followed by another chapter that may go to a completely different set of characters, situations. He is telling me: just keep reading, have faith, you will get it. These apparent gaps are not gaps. What did I picture? With Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I pictured a storyteller picking out highlights of peoples’ lives, people who live apart from one another and it’s as if I’m flying, sailing, soaring overhead and then occasionally dropping in to a particular set to watch what is going on there, with which characters. Once we have found out what we need to, we can leave, and go and visit some other characters elsewhere. Sometimes we stay for a long time, working alongside Levin as he mows with Titus, or ponders how he should live the rest of his life: the husband of a peasant woman, or of a cultured lady; sitting with Vronsky as he does his quarterly accounting which results in him having to sell his horses…sometimes the visits are shorter, as Anna writes and then tears up letters to her husband, changes her mind about what to do.

Tolstoy’s blocking seems to be “bigger” than Pasternak’s; I wonder if Pasternak took instruction from reading Tolstoy. But while Tolstoy is large and epic, Pasternak is tighter, and his blocking is denser, shorter, and his observations deeper (oh, I hate that word “deeper”, but what I mean is that his characters’ concerns, especially Yura’s and Lara’s, transcend the social concerns of an Anna Karenina or a Kitty – even if I did laugh out loud when I read about her particular attraction to the good works of teaching criminals to read – and, for me, at least, hold a greater interest: Pasternak’s attention to how the individual is to solve the problems of the soul, in part exemplified by the quotations I have chosen above, is more compelling than Tolstoy’s focus on the individual’s concern with social standing). Maybe I shouldn’t be too judgmental about that, though. Is there a difference in the development of the self, of the individual, at that time and place, that I should be aware of? And/or are their respective goals different? Pasternak is, after all, writing about a poet. Tolstoy, at least as far as I can tell so far, is not.

So, here I am, wedged between Tolstoy and Pasternak, and reading so slowly that I feel I shall never finish reading either one.

Observation: I have never in my life written so consistently (not this blog writing, but the other, "real" writing) and with so much interest. What I notice is that my writing is changing, my thinking about my writing (and about writing in general) is changing, and when I am working on what I now think of as “blocks” is changing. Somehow, the patchwork, the many many blocks that I am working on, will combine. This is not unfamiliar to me. When I think of the book of Merville poems that I wrote a few years ago, I realize that I wrote in blocks, in different genres, and that I mixed them up and moved them around.

As I began A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity I started doing the same thing, and even for my dissertation I did the same thing. I shouldn’t be, and am not, really, surprised, that I am doing the same thing again. The difference, now, is that I have Boris and Leo standing in the shadows (and I know they are there for me: they have written Kitty, and Anna, and Lara…) with cheerleading pom poms, and they’re jumping up and down calling: go, go, go! Oh, the thought of that makes me laugh and cry at the same time.

I understand this now, I understand that they would, if they could, cheer on the living. That is, after all, what they are all about as writers, they are people who have meditated on death and created life, and they know intimately about that meditation, its importance, its continuance. They want others to write, as they wrote. Their generosity in this matter is epic. They don’t want me to be satisfied with a little story. They want rivers in my writing.

Listen to me! Writing about what they want me to write about! Boris and Leo.

March 6, 2007

Now, back to Russia preparations!

It has been a slow few days, and I find the most difficult thing is to keep on top of my teaching work, AND continue to prepare for the travel by reading and writing. It’s not impossible, but it is a challenge, and sometimes I don’t have much to say, but feel I must continue to keep this journal and to write the “creative” writing. But I haven’t done any new creative writing for a while. I think I should try harder to do the creative stuff in the mornings and the journals in the evenings. That means that I need to go back to hauling my laptop back and forth to work. And then I need to ensure that while I am at work I am also doing work there, so that when I am at home I’m not fretting about the work that I haven’t done at work.

March 21, 2007
Last night I read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog, a 1925 novel in which a physician, Philip Philipovich Preobrayhensky, whose main interest is rejuvenation scoops a mongrel from the streets of Moscow and switches the dog’s pituitary gland and testicles with those of a man recently dead. The dog soon thereafter begins to speak, stand upright, wear human clothes, demand a name other than “Sharik”, and to get married. It is only when the dog, who decides to name himself Poligraph Poligraphovich, comes home with a betrothed, that the doctor and his assistant, Iva Arnoldovich Bormenthal, decide to put things to a close, and at the end of the novel, the dog turned man begins to turn back into a dog again, having, we assume, had his pituitary gland returned to him.

Today at work Helena told me about the subways in St Petersburg, which when you descend deep under the marshes above give the appearance of being not a subway train but a bank of elevators. When the subway arrives, the elevator doors open and people exit and enter. It is forbidden to take photographs in and around subways.

Brent told me about the show trials, and that is something that I need to read more about, but what I gathered from what he said is that they were the “trials” that some of the people around Stalin were forced to endure leading up to what they knew would be a death sentence. I had been telling him about the documentary I watched last week about the millions of people whom Stalin had had executed and how that prior to their execution their photographs had been taken and subsequently stored in the archives in Moscow. Now, looking through those photographs, it is like looking at the modern day equivalent of the “death mask”.

The documentary I watched also told the story of a woman who when she was seven years old had been selected to present flowers to Stalin. A year later, Stalin decided that the girl’s mother should be executed in case she were to decide to leverage favors from him as a result of her daughter’s connection with him. Press coverage had been extensive and a sculptor had created a statue of Stalin and the girl. In fact, 2 million copies of the sculpture had been distributed throughout Russia. Stalin not only ordered the death of the girl’s mother, but also the execution of the sculptor.