Get Myself Together

It’s all over like steps in the first snow.

Sometimes it takes a chance meeting with a stranger for one to realize something that should have been obvious all along. During the Grand Tour of American Airports Not-to-be-missed [to paraphrase what my good ol’ friend M. – not to be confused with my former more handsome half M. – in Yekat used to say about all them little towns and villages in the Urals that we drove through in his SUV while roaming around back in the days] last week on my way back to Sweden, I was subject to a long layover in Detroit. Luckily, the flight from Phoenix to Detroit was delayed an hour and thus I had time to relish in one of the privileges that makes life as an adult preferable to all other options: drinking beer in the airport. After one and a half Bud Light [though this beverage should not be called ‘beer’, rather ‘yellow alcohol sans calories plus bubbles’] on an empty stomach, I was getting tipsy and when tipsy I am prone to engaging in unsystematic discourse with random men. Thus what began like casual flirting with a fine-looking US Navy officer could have ended with me giving away Russian Army secrets – did I tell you I hooked up with a Russian officer in my early youth while living in Siberia? Didn’t think so – had I not been rescued in time by a pleasant looking young Canadian. The Canadian flipped the conversation around and later revealed himself not only to be a master of the fanny pack [I thought men like that only existed in songs by Weird Al Yankovic!] but also to be studying to become a Methodist pastor in the LA area as well as sharing a long layover with me in Detroit. We did not sit next to each other on the plane, yet were reunited in the baggage claim area. Together we made the long journey between terminals in Detroit and then shared an extended breakfast while sitting in a café facing windows displaying grey asphalt and whitish airplanes under a gloomy December sky. We talked about everything that matters – God, love, life – in that same order of importance. It was one of those accidental meetings with an agreeable stranger when suddenly you feel that you can share so much, even though you don’t even know each other and will probably never meet again, and those things that haven’t made sense before unexpectedly begin to fall into place only because a voice from the outside has brought them as well as you into perspective. Sometimes all you need is a bit of perspective. When we finally parted ways, paraphrasing the famous quote from “Casablanca”, I said to the kind Canadian: “We’ll always have Detroit”.

Now it has been almost ten days since then, but already when I boarded my flight to Newark did I feel that he had revealed something about myself I had failed to see before. Now you’re probably going to say that I interpret everything in my life according to the level of intimacy derivable from it – and so be it! But during our conversation I began to wonder: “Why have I never thought about dating a priest before? When I so obviously get along wonderfully with members of the clergy?” Let’s approach the pure facts, comrades: one of my closest friends, K., will become a priest in the Swedish Church next year. I appreciate her friendship greatly; not only due to her profession, of course, but it should be noted that on the basis of our shared religious devotion we are more snugly connected. I consider going to church on Sunday the most fun to be had on the weekend. I freakin’ love God and think His son Jesus is awesomeness and I would never underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit. Why did it take me so many years before I even considered dating a pastor to be an option? Especially considering that – at least according to popular opinion as expressed by readers of this blog in private letters to yours truly – I ‘ooze’ an urge to snatch a man any given day.

The main issue prior to proceeding is I don’t know where one finds eligible young ministers? Preferably such not opposed to going on a date with a cute [future] literary scholar of questionable reputation but spiritually committed, with a good heart and oversized ambition? Keep an eye open for me, will you?

Next time someone asks me why I flew into Detroit when moving to the United States of America I [will not mention A. and our ten days together in the Midwest in August 2010] but rather answer nonchalantly: “Why, I took the same route as Brodsky did when he moved to the states; Detroit was the first stop of many international intellectuals, renowned writers and recognized drunks alike”.

In other news I have a resolution: 2011 will be a Facebook free year. A couple of days ago I closed my accounts on all dating sites [when I have nothing to do I like to check what’s available on the e-meat market; if you thought reading the news is depressing you ain’t seen nothing yet is all I have to say] and decided that 2011 will be a year free from running after men on the F floor. Like I told my Canadian in Detroit – and he asked me if he could quote me literally on this for future reference – “When I think about it, I realize that I didn’t like a single thing about him. I only thought he had a very sexy beard”. The year 2011 will be the year when I fight my kryptonite: men.

Unless they’re men of the church, that is.

I thought about making 2011 the year I don’t drink alcohol, but then I realized that sobriety makes one’s social life highly limited. I thought about making 2011 the year I don’t have sex, but then I realized that I have needs. I thought about making 2011 the year I don’t smoke, but then I realized that I already quit more than a month ago. I thought about making 2011 the year I finally loose those pounds, but then I realized I’m comfortable with weighing almost 120 pounds. The year 2011 will, however, be the year when I make academic work a priority! If I give up men enough free time should be avaliable. Naturally.

Jul [Christmas]

Ingredients for en jul hemma [a Christmas at home] in 2010 (clockwise from the top): hemvändande utlandssvensk [returning expat]; snö [snow], Spock och julkvisten [Spock and the Christmas Bush]; systeryster [untranslatable nickname - also a cultural reference - for my sister]. Now I like to style all of my photos with that hipster-looks-like-it-was-back-in-the70s-or-something lense. In case you hadn't noticed, comrades. And have a good one!

det blir aldrig som man tänkt sig

It’s that time of the year again.

Tomorrow night I begin my journey to Sweden for the holidays – and a long journey it will be this time. When I lived in Russia, flying west for the breaks in the academic year took an average of two flights á two hours each plus three hours by train. Now that I live in the US of A, I’m flying in the opposite direction – east! – and this time it will take me approximately two days to cover the distance between San Francisco and Gothenburg. This is because I flew into Detroit from Europe this August, thus I have tickets back from Detroit to Amsterdam – via Newark, of course, for the hell of it – on Monday. And because there was no other flights with a price tag to my liking that would get me from San Francisco in time for my afternoon flight from Detroit, I will have to fly first to Phoenix in the evening on Sunday, and from there take an over-night flight. So tomorrow a voyage starts which will go like this: San Francisco-Phoenix-Detroit-New York-Amsterdam-Gothenburg. I’ll touch down on native soil around lunchtime on Tuesday… How does one survive more than 48 hours of traveling? I’m not entirely sure. I’m not even sure I’ve done this extended a journey ever before in my life? Despite all the times that I’ve flown between the US and Europe? Extraordinary are the ways in which the brain suppresses traumatic memories. After I turned in my last paper on “The Trout Breaks the Ice” on Friday, my ‘Critical Companion’ and I went Christmas shopping for hours and afterwards I bought myself a copy of Vogue [admit it, comrades, I earned it!]. So I am bringing that magazine. And this book that K. gave me for my birthday this summer that I didn’t have the time to even start reading until like a week ago: “What really happened on the way to Damascus?” Undoubtedly, she gave it to me as suggestive of one of our inside-jokes, yet half-way into it, I must confess I am enjoying myself greatly. So that one is also coming with me. In addition I threw in an edition of Shalamov’s prose that has his anti-novel “Vishera” in it, for that is the work of his on which I will be writing an article for the International Shalamov Conference in Russia in June 2011. Even though I have promised myself not to do any more work during the year of 2010, it wouldn’t hurt to re-read it? Just for fun? And see where I might want to take my research in this context? Play with it? For I have promised that I will not do anything serious whatsoever until the 1st of January. I need a rest. I have as a matter of fact already started my ‘vacation’ [funny thing is I don’t think I’ve ever had a REAL vacation before this in my life?!], and spent almost all of today watching “The Big Bang Theory” from season one all over again. I love that show; partly because it reminds me of my own life… Except I – and my roomies – have no Penny next door? What we do have next door is a guy from the Italian Department; of this I was unaware until I ran into him while frantically trying to get my laundry done earlier today. As it was laundry day, I had forgone to wear a bra and moreover opted – perhaps due to being a bit hung-over from the Mulled Wine Party I threw at my place the night before – for a virtually see-through white tank top. And it sort of makes me wonder if this might have been one of the reasons as to why he felt so inclined to engage in discourse with me at considerable length? It might simply have been my unwashed face, greasy hair and pungent odor that caught his attention, though. Whatever it was, I have learned a valuable lesson: don’t go outside of the apartment without first taking a look in the bathroom mirror. Even to do laundry.

So here we are, comrades, where I never thought I would be – not because it seemed impossible or unlikely or anything like that, but simply for I did not ever think of it in this way before – at the end of my first semester as a graduate student. This week I received my first grade at Berkeley [yes, I got an A], submitted my first paper as well as turned in my first take-home exam. I don’t know exactly what will happen next, but I’m sure it will figure itself out. What can I say now that I have done this, now that I’ve finished with step 1? I think that det blir aldrig som man tänkt sig [it never turns out the way one imaged it] is how I’d sum it up at this point. Before I came here, I spent very little time imagining what it would be like. However, I had some ideas; most things turned out very differently. I didn’t come here to find friends – yet I made two wonderful friends. I sort of came here thinking I would get myself a boyfriend – and instead of meeting one great guy, I met a lot… When I first set foot on campus, I considered my most treasured possession to be my higher education – it didn’t take me long until I realized that I know nothing. Here in California I am doing so many things I never got the opportunity to do while in Russia: I’m cultivating strong emotional bonds with broccoli, hummus and bagels; I’m exploring the joy of the body through running; and I’m procrastinating like never before by way of watching TV on hulu.com. And even though every day isn’t the best day of my life, every day I do wake up and know that I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.

Yes, last night I had a Mulled Wine Party at my place. I got drunk. I made a sort of a fool of myself toward the end – it was worth it. For contrary to popular belief, my life’s first literary love was not Mr. Darcy, but rather Pierre Bezukhov from “War & Peace”…

Break the Ice

Self-portrait with swans. January 2010. Brännö, Sweden.

During the past couple of days I have been breaking through the ice – symbolically, for there is no ice, no snow in northern California – together with Mikhail Kuzmin. He was a Russian homosexual poet who lived from 1872 till 1936 and wrote, among other things, a splendid narrative poem – or, as this lyrical genre is known in Russian, поэма – which is called «Форель разбивает лёд» [“The Trout Breaks the Ice”]. Reading it during this semester was for me one of this year’s most aesthetically pleasing experiences. Kuzmin’s poetry is brilliantly eloquent, though dense and highly coded at the same time – sometimes so to the point that we as readers have no idea what he is talking about (and perhaps we need not understand nor know anything) – and his imagery is one of simplicity and clarity. In the last ‘thrust’ out of the twelve ‘thrusts’ that together with two introductions and one epilogue make up the structure of “The Trout Breaks the Ice” he needs only write: «Два прибора на столе» [“Two sets of covers on the table”], and we see the image in its entirety: the lyrical hero and his brother/twin/double are finally united and will have dinner there together. There are many such pure, plain moments of poetic genius throughout the narrative poem – or, if one so prefers, this cycle – so many that they cannot be discussed at length neither here nor in the paper on the topic which I am currently finishing. When we talked about this work of art in Russian Modernism a couple of weeks back our professor was so pleased and impressed that she later assigned it for our take-home exam. This take-home exam is “to discuss its aesthetic power based on a close reading of the poem” in a 5-6 page paper. With “aesthetic power” is implied “tell me why you like it so much”, something that at first sounded like an early Christmas gift but later revealed itself as much more complicated. Obviously, few things in the life of a literary theorist are as wonderful as to be able to write about a poem, to analyze a poem one really, really likes. But it is easy to go from briefly lingering on how repetitions of the phrase «Последний стыд и полное блаженство» [“The last shame and complete bliss”] illustrates a penetration of the barriers – depicted in the poem in the image of ice, water, or a woman – which leads to a sensual unity in the ‘green land’, to an act of intercourse closely linked with the constant reappearing green eyes of the lyrical hero’s brother/twin/double – to loitering on the subject. So far I have written three pages and covered the mnemonic aspect of the poem – which is in my opinion what makes this poem so freakin’ awesome – in two of the twelve ‘thrusts’… It is becoming increasingly clear that I will have to cut some considerations in the realm of the ‘poetics of memory’ short and try to focus on keeping my argument sharp. After all, I have to have it ready by tomorrow evening so that M., ‘My Critical Companion to Grad School at Berkeley’, can read it and correct the grammar. When I left the Slavic Library to go home and eat dinner this evening I had settled on calling the trout “a reoccurring metaphor for intimacy”, something clearly unavoidable when writing about a poem written by a homosexual poet in which a fish keeps trying to break the ice. Yet the poem is not only about passionate love between two men – even though, as someone pointed out today in the Slavic Library, “when men have sex with women, they give birth to babies, but when men have sex with men, they give birth to ideas; ideas are way better than babies”, – it is also a poem that constantly remembers. My paper is basically trying to answer the question of how the poem is reminiscent, not of what [for many scholars have gone before me in the quest for such biographic context]. Here is my favorite passage (some say this is about Anna Akhmatova, others argue it is rather her ‘double’, and Anna Radlova thought it was about herself so she told Kuzmin so; as a result he dedicated the entire poem to her) from «Первый удар» [“The First Thrust”]:

«Такие женщины живут в романах,

Встречаются они и на экране...

За них свершают кражи, преступленья,

Подкарауливают их кареты

И отравляются на чердаках».

[Such women live in novels,

they are also found in movies…

For them men commit crimes,

guard their carriages,

and poison themselves in attics.]

*

There a little house would

stand on a lush, green hill,

behind magnolia trees,

within a cherry orchard –

morning would be the only time,

and summer our only season.

In sunrise we’d go for walks

in the wet grass, remembering

the cobblestone roads of Prague

and you’d recite Tsetaeva –

I’d know Blok’s “Twelve” by heart.

On such endless summer mornings

in our garden of illusions and allusions

you would love me –

and might even tell me so.

Ilona

How to preserve cultural heritage of your native country during X amount of years as a committed expat? Well, here I am being an example by baking traditional lussebullar with grad students from the Scandinavian Department on Monday. We also made pepparkakor, though sadly not pictured here.

It is a generally acknowledged truth that one may judge a place and its people best by how they react when you’re in trouble/need/afflicted by disaster. In this regard, Berkeley scores ten out of ten. On Monday morning my computer – my good old faithful Ernst, a California native and my trustworthy companion through several parts Europe, Asia and Northern America, bought in Los Angeles in July 2008 – gave up the ghost. Within him were – among all of my other documents – the twelve pages of my final paper on women and horses in Lermontov’s novel – a paper which is due on the 13th. This made me very sad, frustrated and anxious for my immediate future. Luckily, my ‘Critical Companion to Grad School at Berkeley’ [as I prefer to call my lovely friend M.] went with me to turn him into a reparation place to have him diagnosed, and thus Ernst and I were separated for one night. The following day I was told it would cost about 500$ to have him fixed, an amount for which I could acquire a new computer. It was an intense Tuesday of decision making indeed. Luckily, I ran into two fellow grad students from my floor – one from Scandinavian [with whom I baked the aforementioned lussebullar and pepparkakor on Monday evening] and one from Italian – and the former said she’d e-mail a guy she knew who might know how to save the data from my old computer and the latter offered to drive me to Best Buy as he has a car. There I purchased a new computer, and instantly felt that she was a woman and when I got home I named her Ilona. On my way home I ran into this very nice guy in my building with whom I used to sit outside on the staircase and smoke in the middle of the night for hours while I was still smoking [and suffering from insomnia] and he said he’d help me set up my computer, only he had to make a quick trip into San Francisco as he was flying back home to Pakistan this morning, but silly as I am, I told him not to worry about it and went ahead and set it up myself. Okay, so to make a long story short, my new computer was later saved by an extremely kind and helpful guy living in the apartment next to mine [we’ve been wondering about those five guys living next door for some time now: “are they cute? are they single? are they up for a good time?”] and he also managed to copy all the data from my old Ernst to my new Ilona. Yes, I think it is safe to say that I am surrounded by awesome people here in Berkeley!

My lovely friend M. [also known as my ‘Critical Companion to Grad School at Berkeley’] and I finally came up this system of code names for the men in my life – for I must confess that I only succeeded in quitting cigarettes – so that we could talk about them without anyone else finding out too much. Also it was difficult to memorize the names which didn’t really make much sense to M. as she is only personally acquainted with X amount of them. In the end, though, the code names turned out to be more confusing… Even though we are both huge fans of fragmenting the first sex [the code names were derived from their most distinctive physical features].

Everything else aside, I find myself constantly overtaken by illogical joy, senseless happiness and mad passions.

In Absence of ‘Quality Chart’

Comrades, do you remember how I told you that I and my roomies have this whiteboard in our kitchen through which we discuss life’s essentials? Above you have an example of how such a conversation might look – aided by a grad school necessity: PhD comics [here’s a link to the original chart we’re commenting on as it is unreadable in the photo]. It could also be read as an answer to the question: “What do you get if you place five young, attractive, slightly over-educated, single women in one apartment?”

Last Friday I decided to take a break from Facebook – and all that extremely intense sociability that comes with it – until 2011. Life has become increasingly calmer ever since.

This Friday I had my last class of my first semester at Berkeley [in Russian Romanticism] and a little bragging is perhaps in place as the professor in the beginning of it told us all with a big smile on his lips: “I’ve taught this class since 1995. And you guys are the best group I’ve ever had!” The interesting thing is that when I was in the Master’s program in Russia our group was constantly told the exact same thing, that we’re the kind of perfect compilation of remarkable people that only happens “once in a hundred years” [in quotation marks as it was the exact words of one of our professors]. Do you think it would be okay to use the cliché “it is not you, it’s me” in this regard? Once is a coincidence, twice is a fact – or so they say, anyway. After class yesterday the whole group went out for drinks with the professor and this was a first of such experiences for me and it turned out to be a lot of fun. Now I’m going to spend the weekend writing my final paper for this class – on a topic that is so exiting that the professors in my department can’t even mention it without laughing a little bit: women and horses in Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time”.

Maybe I’ll post a brief summary of it here on the blog next week… After having read so much about women and horses in literature in general, I feel like I can’t see a horse without thinking to myself: “Now how do we interpret this symbolically, read it culturally, analyze it textually?”

The mission of compiling a ‘Quality Chart’ apparently rests on my fragile shoulders, comrades! Well, when have I ever shunned real life research?

"Екатеринбург, я люблю тебя"

This lovely video - with all its soft, subtle sceneries from the magical mystery topos of Yekaterinburg - made me remember my youth, which was largely spent in this Ural town... And also it brought back so many memories of me & my former more handsome half M.'s love story, especially the part where the heroine and the hero are running across the street to catch the tramvai... How many times did we not walk those streets together? And I will never forget the first time he took my hand - whatever else this life will bring me further down the road, I already am blessed for I know that someone has loved [and still loves] me just the way I am. M. and I often stood where they stand at the end of the video and looked out over Yekat and it is nice to feel all of these things having a special place in my heart for all times. This - Yekaterinburg, my youth spent there, the experience of loving M. - are all parts of the past that make me into who I am in the present. Thanks to Varvara for posting it on her blog this morning!