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…
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Progressive Nostalgia
I may do a botch up job of this, but here goes anyway. progressive nostalgia, which I mentioned a few days ago, has to do with the neo-marxist perception that the real Marxism of Russia, of the Leninist type, was the good kind of marxism, and that Lenin's early death and the subsequent Stalin years were a hideous interruption of the possibility of the political and cultural utopia imagined by Lenin.
or something like that.
there is a group of independent intellectuals here who call themselves neo marxists and whose project it is to promote neo marxism, a return to the ideas of Lenin and promote them as a viable alternative to Putin's brand of capitalism, which, they fear, is taking Russia in the wrong direction.
In the first session here I attended a series of six seminars given by one of those neo marxists, Alexandr Skidan, who, along with a group of women activists who write and produce plays (among other activities), provided us with a glimpse into their view of a neo Marxist Russia, which reminds me of the days when as a Carleton University student I was recruited into a group of Marxist Leninists to run for student council. I came eerily close to winning, but did not, a "theme" that has continued throughout my life. You know, coming second. I think someone has written an essay about "coming second". We all hear about the person who came first; who comes second? Are they that much worse than the one who came first?
Well, anyway, that is a digression. From neo marxism, and superficially at least neo Marxism sounds similar to the Marxism in Canada in the early 70s, but with an edge of urgency, because certainly in the streets here it feels urgent, crazy, unfettered, out of control. But this out of controlness may be no more urgent than the out of control ness that I see in my own country, just less familiar in its details: the youth here are wearing designer jeans that are not only faded, but also heavily although symmetrically wrinkled. I've seen many many young men and women with punctured skin, "cutters", whose cuts are not merely sliced randomly into their bodies but have become an art form in themselves, an art that is reinscribed in their faded, wrinkled jeans, which are also symmetrically slashed.
My neo Marxist showed us two movies: Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and Sokoluv's "Russian Ark". I had tried to watch "Mirror" before I came here, but was not able to get it; I had seen "Russian Ark" twice before, and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage (I'm avoiding it, I think, I feel overwhelmed by the thought of its huge size and the knowledge that if I spend 1 1/2 minutes at each picture, it would take me 8 years to see everything assuming nothing changes during those 8 years, I'm avoiding this immensity because I know when I get there I will have to make choices, and what choices would I make, although I read that Dennis Hopper has an exhibit of B&W photographs dating back as far as the 60s and so that might be a place to start), and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage, watching Russian Ark after two weeks in the city where it was made was a powerful experience and helped me to understand another layer to my reluctance to visit the Hermitage, which is that it is a homage not just to art, to civilization, but also to privilege, and that is where I stumble. yes, I can stand in front of "great" art and then I start to spin off into a consideration of how that "great" art is made possible, how it is conserved, stolen, bought and sold and then I get all fucked up about that. So you can see, maybe, why I'm deferring my visit to the Hermitage; however, I WILL go, because I couldn't bear to go back home and have to respond "no" to the question: did you visit the Hermitage?
Give me a Malevich, for whom art had an earthly, immediate purpose. For whom art was not "beauty" or "not beauty", but for whom art was "true" or "false", and because I know that is what I look for in art, I find beauty for beauty's sake to be, on the surface, beautiful, and then, upon consideration, to be repulsive to me in an essential way that I haven't yet been able to define, or even completely identify or describe.
I visited a soviet style cafe last week with Dmitri, on a Dmitri walk, one of the other things I "promised" to tell you about. Besides the short stocky waitress who was wearing a shiny tight blue dress trimmed with white tubing and a small same-blue-and-tubing cap on her head, there were several pieces of "art" on the wall: clumsy oil paintings: of ships tossing on the sea, bowls of fruit, men at work; all "bad" art, all representative of nothing except their awareness of themselves as "paintings".
And so I'm also thinking: what is it like to live in a place that others visit not for what it is now, but for what it used to be? Petersburg is and was a dream city, an iconoclast's fabrication that came to being because the iconoclast had both "vision" and power. But I can see that all this European grandeur is in juxtaposition to "Russianness". In most of the rest of Russia, the homes and public buldings are made of wood; I noticed this somewhat when I went to Novgorod last Saturday, and this session's first lecture on untranslatable Russia confirmed that perception for me. So when you go out of Petersburg you see, not street after street of European style building, but many small wooden homes (with a backdrop, I must admit, of rows and rows of concrete soviet style apartment blocks).
But maybe my question was not fair: we visit Petersburg for what it used to be, expecting that what it is now will somehow be a continuation of what it used to be. And so I see other tourists standing in front of Peterhof, or in front of Church of the Spilled Blood, wanting to have their pictures taken with Citizens dressed up in 19th century costumes. I don't see people standing up to have their pictures taken with the legless, handless, beggars lining the sidewalk outside the Vladmir mother of God Icon church; the last time I was there, there were at least 8 of them. Hey, not that i think that would be a good idea, but I see that one is the shadow of the other, and haven't quite decided which is the shadow and which is casting the shadow. The rich did nothing right, the poor did nothing wrong.
Progressive nostalgia is the term used to describe the project of those neo Marxists I described earlier. PG is working against the democratizing machine in Russia, a machine that will inevitably lead to there being many more people with broken fingers begging outside the cathdrals (at least, you will say, at least the cathedrals are open, are no longer storing vegetables, or being used as icerinks...but there is a tradition of using cathedrals as storage for vegetables in Russia, established long before the soviet times, a kind of beautiful metaphor, don't you think, of having a town's nutritional sustenance stored where they also go for spiritual sustenance?). Despite this project, this insistence on the evils of capitalism, there are very few "progressive nostalgics", and most people are just too excited about versace, or macdonalds, or ... well, words fail me here, because I realize that I don't know the names of those expensive labels that are all over the place here, but let me say this: everywhere on every street in my neighbourhood there are stores with heavy security at the doors, men in suits wearing headsets, whose job it is to intimidate you into not stealing the goods, into not even entering to look unless you know you are also going to buy, and in those stores are brand name sunglasses, purses, shoes, suits, hair products, chocolates...all packaged like fetishes.
This week I also started the poetry workshop. The instructor, Jorie Graham, was in a car accident in France last week, suffered a concussion, and was not able to come, so we have a "substitute", although I hesitate at using that word. The class is great, and I realize, because I've received emails of complaint from you, that I haven't spent much time describing the workshops and the people, and the thing is, well, I've spent two weeks just trying to get a handle on the city itself which dwarfs everything else around it, a city of stops and starts, and everytime you set out to go anywehre, you bump into a canal or a river and have to go in a different direction for a while until you can cross a bridge and re-set your course and of course the street signs are in cyrillic...but the poetry workshop, well, I really do love poetry, I love writing it, I love reading it, I love talking about it, and I love talking to the people who are writing it. Poems are really like eggs, I think: small, condensed, nutritious, tasty. And when I sit in front of uncracked poem ...
My roommate is Allison, from the US originally, and then in Hong Kong for 2 years, and now in London for the past 5, and is quirky eccentric, a HISTORIAN (yikes!), a fiction writer, young enough to be my daughter (it's okay, Lorraine, you are still my best daughter). We get along well, and seem to share the need for many hours of sleep each night and each have the ability not to annoy the other. Well, we are so seldom in the room at the same time, there is so much going on that we have no need to be there except to sleep. But it works well, and every morning one or the other of us does reconnaissance on the shower: "halleluia" is code for "hot water", and absence of code means "you may as well stay in bed until the last minute".
Food: I've had questions about food. Breakfast is included in the price of the accommodation; however, frequently they "run out" of food which turns out not to be such a bad thing as breakfast is: a glass of orange juice, 1/2 cup of coffee, a plastic container of yogurt, and a cake wrapped in cellophane. Okay, it's not as bad as the soldiers' WWI rations, but I've been to the markets around here, and I know they could do better. On a good day, instead of cake we get blini's, or crepes, which are usually good, but really sweet, and there is never enough cofffee to wash it all down.
So, I've given up on breakfast, and since they've brought a tiny refrigerator into the dorm where I'm staying, I can buy my own yogurt and my own blueberry juice (I HATE orange juice) and Allison bought some bread, and I bought some more Linden honey (oh, my god, that's good honey) and so breakfast is now okay, although there are many crumbs in my bed. Lunch is usually an option, and dinner is usually borsch, which is great just about everywhere I've tried it. One place, the Lenin Cafe, serves a hot borscht covered with a slab of baked bread. I'm not describing that very well, but I think that the bread is baked right on the top of the ceramic soup bowl, and that the whole thing is done in the oven. very good.
other than that, just about everything comes with mayonnaise, and while the younger women scrape it all off, I generally welcome the chance to eat the fat with impunity. There is a Georgian restaurant I've been to a few times that offers a "businessman's lunch" with a set menu: soup, salad, and some sort of meat with a starch, and that's about 130 rubles. Don't ask me how much that is in dollars, I have no idea. i just keep spending my money.
At dinner time, the Georgian restaurant makes this amazing dish called (and Steve, you take note, because I want you to make this for me some time) Drunken Chicken. It is an amazing boneless chicken stuffed with walnut paste and dried apricots and soaked in some sort of alcohol (maybe vodka?) and is so good. Well, I'd have to say that Georgian food in general seems to have a bit of a leg on over Russian food, so maybe a Georgian cookbook?
I've also been to an Italian restaurant, and although the lasagna i had was good, the valpolicella i shared with Ann was even better. I've also been to an Armenian restaurant, which I remember nothing of, so can only assume it was mediocre (oh, yes, I remember! Wow! how wrong I am. I had this amazing bread dish which was boat-shaped dough, baked with an egg in the middle, and cheese. Disgusting in terms of nutritional value, but I could see coming home after a hard day in the Armenian fields and chowing down to 2 or 3 of these. I also went to a cafe called the Idiot, but do not remember. on those days when I don't want to be around others, I just go to the blini place and get a couple of blinis, usually the one with jam, which means that i get this lovely crepe smoothered in blueberries, yum.
So, I'm not suffering for food. It's just all different, and I'm craving a carrot, hoping for carrot juice, and while I did find a "juice bar", it's more expensive than water, which is more expensive than pop, which is more expensive than coffee, which is more expensive than beer, which is more expensive than vodka.
I hope I've answered all your email questions. The protest seems to have passed by, but then I just realized that the guy in the booth next to me has left, and i suspect that what I was hearing wasn'tr eally a protest, but the yells of disgruntled video game characters. My hands are feeling grubby from this keyboard as I have been here for a couple of hours, minus 11 minutes.
Love you, and love you,
Anne
or something like that.
there is a group of independent intellectuals here who call themselves neo marxists and whose project it is to promote neo marxism, a return to the ideas of Lenin and promote them as a viable alternative to Putin's brand of capitalism, which, they fear, is taking Russia in the wrong direction.
In the first session here I attended a series of six seminars given by one of those neo marxists, Alexandr Skidan, who, along with a group of women activists who write and produce plays (among other activities), provided us with a glimpse into their view of a neo Marxist Russia, which reminds me of the days when as a Carleton University student I was recruited into a group of Marxist Leninists to run for student council. I came eerily close to winning, but did not, a "theme" that has continued throughout my life. You know, coming second. I think someone has written an essay about "coming second". We all hear about the person who came first; who comes second? Are they that much worse than the one who came first?
Well, anyway, that is a digression. From neo marxism, and superficially at least neo Marxism sounds similar to the Marxism in Canada in the early 70s, but with an edge of urgency, because certainly in the streets here it feels urgent, crazy, unfettered, out of control. But this out of controlness may be no more urgent than the out of control ness that I see in my own country, just less familiar in its details: the youth here are wearing designer jeans that are not only faded, but also heavily although symmetrically wrinkled. I've seen many many young men and women with punctured skin, "cutters", whose cuts are not merely sliced randomly into their bodies but have become an art form in themselves, an art that is reinscribed in their faded, wrinkled jeans, which are also symmetrically slashed.
My neo Marxist showed us two movies: Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and Sokoluv's "Russian Ark". I had tried to watch "Mirror" before I came here, but was not able to get it; I had seen "Russian Ark" twice before, and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage (I'm avoiding it, I think, I feel overwhelmed by the thought of its huge size and the knowledge that if I spend 1 1/2 minutes at each picture, it would take me 8 years to see everything assuming nothing changes during those 8 years, I'm avoiding this immensity because I know when I get there I will have to make choices, and what choices would I make, although I read that Dennis Hopper has an exhibit of B&W photographs dating back as far as the 60s and so that might be a place to start), and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage, watching Russian Ark after two weeks in the city where it was made was a powerful experience and helped me to understand another layer to my reluctance to visit the Hermitage, which is that it is a homage not just to art, to civilization, but also to privilege, and that is where I stumble. yes, I can stand in front of "great" art and then I start to spin off into a consideration of how that "great" art is made possible, how it is conserved, stolen, bought and sold and then I get all fucked up about that. So you can see, maybe, why I'm deferring my visit to the Hermitage; however, I WILL go, because I couldn't bear to go back home and have to respond "no" to the question: did you visit the Hermitage?
Give me a Malevich, for whom art had an earthly, immediate purpose. For whom art was not "beauty" or "not beauty", but for whom art was "true" or "false", and because I know that is what I look for in art, I find beauty for beauty's sake to be, on the surface, beautiful, and then, upon consideration, to be repulsive to me in an essential way that I haven't yet been able to define, or even completely identify or describe.
I visited a soviet style cafe last week with Dmitri, on a Dmitri walk, one of the other things I "promised" to tell you about. Besides the short stocky waitress who was wearing a shiny tight blue dress trimmed with white tubing and a small same-blue-and-tubing cap on her head, there were several pieces of "art" on the wall: clumsy oil paintings: of ships tossing on the sea, bowls of fruit, men at work; all "bad" art, all representative of nothing except their awareness of themselves as "paintings".
And so I'm also thinking: what is it like to live in a place that others visit not for what it is now, but for what it used to be? Petersburg is and was a dream city, an iconoclast's fabrication that came to being because the iconoclast had both "vision" and power. But I can see that all this European grandeur is in juxtaposition to "Russianness". In most of the rest of Russia, the homes and public buldings are made of wood; I noticed this somewhat when I went to Novgorod last Saturday, and this session's first lecture on untranslatable Russia confirmed that perception for me. So when you go out of Petersburg you see, not street after street of European style building, but many small wooden homes (with a backdrop, I must admit, of rows and rows of concrete soviet style apartment blocks).
But maybe my question was not fair: we visit Petersburg for what it used to be, expecting that what it is now will somehow be a continuation of what it used to be. And so I see other tourists standing in front of Peterhof, or in front of Church of the Spilled Blood, wanting to have their pictures taken with Citizens dressed up in 19th century costumes. I don't see people standing up to have their pictures taken with the legless, handless, beggars lining the sidewalk outside the Vladmir mother of God Icon church; the last time I was there, there were at least 8 of them. Hey, not that i think that would be a good idea, but I see that one is the shadow of the other, and haven't quite decided which is the shadow and which is casting the shadow. The rich did nothing right, the poor did nothing wrong.
Progressive nostalgia is the term used to describe the project of those neo Marxists I described earlier. PG is working against the democratizing machine in Russia, a machine that will inevitably lead to there being many more people with broken fingers begging outside the cathdrals (at least, you will say, at least the cathedrals are open, are no longer storing vegetables, or being used as icerinks...but there is a tradition of using cathedrals as storage for vegetables in Russia, established long before the soviet times, a kind of beautiful metaphor, don't you think, of having a town's nutritional sustenance stored where they also go for spiritual sustenance?). Despite this project, this insistence on the evils of capitalism, there are very few "progressive nostalgics", and most people are just too excited about versace, or macdonalds, or ... well, words fail me here, because I realize that I don't know the names of those expensive labels that are all over the place here, but let me say this: everywhere on every street in my neighbourhood there are stores with heavy security at the doors, men in suits wearing headsets, whose job it is to intimidate you into not stealing the goods, into not even entering to look unless you know you are also going to buy, and in those stores are brand name sunglasses, purses, shoes, suits, hair products, chocolates...all packaged like fetishes.
This week I also started the poetry workshop. The instructor, Jorie Graham, was in a car accident in France last week, suffered a concussion, and was not able to come, so we have a "substitute", although I hesitate at using that word. The class is great, and I realize, because I've received emails of complaint from you, that I haven't spent much time describing the workshops and the people, and the thing is, well, I've spent two weeks just trying to get a handle on the city itself which dwarfs everything else around it, a city of stops and starts, and everytime you set out to go anywehre, you bump into a canal or a river and have to go in a different direction for a while until you can cross a bridge and re-set your course and of course the street signs are in cyrillic...but the poetry workshop, well, I really do love poetry, I love writing it, I love reading it, I love talking about it, and I love talking to the people who are writing it. Poems are really like eggs, I think: small, condensed, nutritious, tasty. And when I sit in front of uncracked poem ...
My roommate is Allison, from the US originally, and then in Hong Kong for 2 years, and now in London for the past 5, and is quirky eccentric, a HISTORIAN (yikes!), a fiction writer, young enough to be my daughter (it's okay, Lorraine, you are still my best daughter). We get along well, and seem to share the need for many hours of sleep each night and each have the ability not to annoy the other. Well, we are so seldom in the room at the same time, there is so much going on that we have no need to be there except to sleep. But it works well, and every morning one or the other of us does reconnaissance on the shower: "halleluia" is code for "hot water", and absence of code means "you may as well stay in bed until the last minute".
Food: I've had questions about food. Breakfast is included in the price of the accommodation; however, frequently they "run out" of food which turns out not to be such a bad thing as breakfast is: a glass of orange juice, 1/2 cup of coffee, a plastic container of yogurt, and a cake wrapped in cellophane. Okay, it's not as bad as the soldiers' WWI rations, but I've been to the markets around here, and I know they could do better. On a good day, instead of cake we get blini's, or crepes, which are usually good, but really sweet, and there is never enough cofffee to wash it all down.
So, I've given up on breakfast, and since they've brought a tiny refrigerator into the dorm where I'm staying, I can buy my own yogurt and my own blueberry juice (I HATE orange juice) and Allison bought some bread, and I bought some more Linden honey (oh, my god, that's good honey) and so breakfast is now okay, although there are many crumbs in my bed. Lunch is usually an option, and dinner is usually borsch, which is great just about everywhere I've tried it. One place, the Lenin Cafe, serves a hot borscht covered with a slab of baked bread. I'm not describing that very well, but I think that the bread is baked right on the top of the ceramic soup bowl, and that the whole thing is done in the oven. very good.
other than that, just about everything comes with mayonnaise, and while the younger women scrape it all off, I generally welcome the chance to eat the fat with impunity. There is a Georgian restaurant I've been to a few times that offers a "businessman's lunch" with a set menu: soup, salad, and some sort of meat with a starch, and that's about 130 rubles. Don't ask me how much that is in dollars, I have no idea. i just keep spending my money.
At dinner time, the Georgian restaurant makes this amazing dish called (and Steve, you take note, because I want you to make this for me some time) Drunken Chicken. It is an amazing boneless chicken stuffed with walnut paste and dried apricots and soaked in some sort of alcohol (maybe vodka?) and is so good. Well, I'd have to say that Georgian food in general seems to have a bit of a leg on over Russian food, so maybe a Georgian cookbook?
I've also been to an Italian restaurant, and although the lasagna i had was good, the valpolicella i shared with Ann was even better. I've also been to an Armenian restaurant, which I remember nothing of, so can only assume it was mediocre (oh, yes, I remember! Wow! how wrong I am. I had this amazing bread dish which was boat-shaped dough, baked with an egg in the middle, and cheese. Disgusting in terms of nutritional value, but I could see coming home after a hard day in the Armenian fields and chowing down to 2 or 3 of these. I also went to a cafe called the Idiot, but do not remember. on those days when I don't want to be around others, I just go to the blini place and get a couple of blinis, usually the one with jam, which means that i get this lovely crepe smoothered in blueberries, yum.
So, I'm not suffering for food. It's just all different, and I'm craving a carrot, hoping for carrot juice, and while I did find a "juice bar", it's more expensive than water, which is more expensive than pop, which is more expensive than coffee, which is more expensive than beer, which is more expensive than vodka.
I hope I've answered all your email questions. The protest seems to have passed by, but then I just realized that the guy in the booth next to me has left, and i suspect that what I was hearing wasn'tr eally a protest, but the yells of disgruntled video game characters. My hands are feeling grubby from this keyboard as I have been here for a couple of hours, minus 11 minutes.
Love you, and love you,
Anne
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