I taxin, i trappen, i hissen, i hallen jag faller...

I couldn’t find any video for Veronica Maggio’s “Jag kommer” – the song from which I stole the exquisite title for today’s post – from her epic new album “Satan i gatan” and thus my dear comrades will have to make do with one of my favorites from her previous production. “Nöjd?” is coincidentally also the story of my life.

At 5 am this morning I suddenly woke up and found myself next to something big and warm. After a closer look the thing next to me in bed revealed itself to be a man. I thought to myself: “This is nice” and moved my body closer to his body and felt delightfully safe and secure for another minute before I unexpectedly opened my eyes wide and looked around and asked myself almost in shock: “Who is this?! And where am I?!” It took me another minute until I had retraced the previous evening backwards – I remember being carried into the bedroom at one point but I had no recollection of saying goodnight to him and subsequently making the joint decision to go to sleep – and I recalled both who he was and where we were and also how it all had begun some ten hours earlier. It began on Wednesday with him inviting me over for dinner. I was flattered and intrigued but most of all curious to see what was going to happen, especially considering that we had gone out on our first date only one day earlier – on Tuesday evening that is. I had said something like “let’s break all the rules” and he had made a comment in the style of “let’s cut the crap” and then we had beer and talked childhood trauma for a couple of hours. It was a good first date. The second date was better. It occurred to me this morning – while making the walk of shame across campus at 7.30 – that I’ve never officially made it to a third date in this country. As I was leaving his apartment this morning, he kissed me and said: “I will contact you again”, which sounded cryptic, like I was a spy or he a secret agent or both and we’d just shared in a significant, albeit secret exchange of information. Perhaps that’s what it was? As I did the walk of shame this morning, I couldn’t stop smiling – not only because I was then but a tired, silly, satisfied woman – but because I thought back at other ‘versions’ of me in other ages throughout my long history of having a passionate interest in the opposite sex and how different it always is and was to do the walk of shame… Today I had lunch with my Critical Companion – we sat outside and enjoyed the sunshine and soaked up the vitamin D – and I narrated to her last night’s escapades. Of course, I’m far too lucky in this life already for having been blessed with a friend like Critical Companion. In the narrative I presented to her, I highlighted his cooking skills, his correct-wine-to-specific-food ability and home-made-hummus capacity, his aesthetically pleasing prettiness, and so on and so forth, but what really grabbed her attention in the positive sense of the word was the fact that I had observed John Steinbeck’s East of Eden on his bedside table. “That’s my mother’s favorite book,” she said and concluded with the nod of approval: “This one is a keeper.” I remarked soberly that it is not exactly up to me whether or not I get to ‘keep’ him per say – considering my American track record it is safe to say that if I’m in charge then he’ll out of sight and I out of mind within hours – thus this means I’m ready for anything this time. I’ve lived far too long – and been around the block one too many times – to rebuild those castles in the air only to have them destroyed when dawn breaks and I, just like all those sad folks I met this morning on campus at 7.30, stretch and reach for nothing but a cup of coffee.

Whatever it was, I enjoyed it. Whatever it might be – or not be – again, I’m certain that I will come to enjoy it as well.

Tomorrow is the last day of classes of my second semester as a graduate student. Epic, anyone? Tomorrow I’m going to teach a Swedish class – and sing “Cecilia Lind” with the students here in California – as a sub for the Swedish teachers who are going on a conference this week. A future graduate student in the Scandinavian department – she’s Swedish – will help me out with the class and after that I’m going to take her to the awesome salad place on Telegraph. Originally I had a date with a fourth (!) man scheduled for this Friday evening, but I decided to cancel it and abstain from dating for an indefinite future. We have two weeks until the final grades are posted and I will be absorbed by the notorious paper-writing-mode for at least ten days after the German exam next Tuesday. Critical Companion and I have already planned a weekend full of working together. Really, I’ve been too blessed.

Whatever online dating was, it sure has furnished me with abundant material for my next article.

Där man odlar rädslan att bli glömd

Today after church I decided to celebrate Easter a little bit extra – by shopping for some summery clothes. This is new outfit #1: a cute tank top and yet another miniskirt.

New outfit #2: a dress with ‘something for the boys’ in a shade of pink that matches my ankle tattoo. Awesomesauce! [A bonus for the comrades who notice my detergent in the background.]

New outfit #3: okay, so half of it isn’t new – I got the pants in December – but the t-shirt I bought only a week ago. My roommate – who did go to Stanford for her undergrad but is now a grad student at Berkeley – says that I look like I’m at war with myself when I wear this around the house. I can’t stop laughing at myself, comrades. I love it!

...och utanför passerar alla småstäder i sömn, 

det är där man odlar rädslan att bli glömd...

 [Pernilla Andersson, Johnny Cash & Nina P]

Today before the service it occurred to me how much I love the sound of church bells. There is something serious and solemn about them; they resound with tranquility and I stand listening to them in anticipation – yet there is always this feeling of joy. When I hear church bells on Sunday morning, I smile. It is probably my favorite sound in the whole world. And I think Easter is my favorite Christian holiday. Christmas is nice, and Advent is pleasant, but there’s something about Easter that I can’t really explain even with words. It is a time of happiness, of victory, of life – of light and that’s why today I wore all bright clothes to church and really made an effort to greet the Lord risen looking my best – the result? A person in San Francisco this morning walked past me and said: “Wow, you are beautiful!” Another person in Oakland this afternoon walked next to me and said roughly the same thing. I think it must be this spectacular holiday: Easter makes me shine.

On Friday night I went out with an awfully handsome man – one half of me is afraid of interacting as a female equal in the company of such good-looking males; the other half whispers softly “you’ve earned it” in my one ear and “they want you too” in the other – and as always I discovered more new exciting things about myself in meeting him. I never thought I was the kind of woman to first tell a man “I’ve got two tattoos and one piercing”, and then when he asks “where?” answer “find them”. It was a nice time and I felt a little bit spoiled but I guess I’ll get used to that. Maybe we’ll revisit each other for a second date. Maybe not. I haven’t heard from that other guy I had drinks for the second time with a week ago now. Oh well. I think I’m slowly learning how to do this. It’s been a rocky road. And I had no idea where to start or even what to do or how to behave and now… now I’m not afraid to ask and break all the stupid rules. I won’t lay down my heart in front of just any man. Mistakes made and lessons learned, comrades – just like in the lyrics of some old country song. I think I need to wait a while and see what comes up in the meantime.

Besides, the semester’s wrapping up and I’m a very serious scholar.

...och allt som är bra med mig har jag en förmåga att glömma bort

I can’t wait to get back to the Urals and drink cherry beer again.

This is me practicing the passion on May 11^th 2009 in Yekaterinburg.

“Disturbing issues are raised in this discussion –

and they are the central issues of the novel –

but no one hears, no one learns, no one follows through

or makes connections, and nothing is resolved”

[a 20^th century American feminist critic

on a 19^th century novel by a Russian male author]

Strange things have been happening lately. The strange things began to happen when I gave up following “the rules” and decided that it is okay to be disillusioned with everything in this life and in these human relations and that one is allowed to recognize that it is not you who are at fault, but rather your perception and the approach implied in it to the things around you. Once you see that it is not the world, but the way that you see the world – you may close your eyes or open them wide [it doesn’t really matter for even in the darkness we continue to look] and face what is no longer reality but the sense your brain is making of what is around you.

Last week I revisited a novel that I wrote when I was 17-18. It was not my plan to revisit this novel right now, at this point in my existence, but a person in my Californian life found out about the content of this particular novel and asked to read it – that’s when I said to myself that I should probably clean up the formatting of the text somewhat before handing it over to someone else to read. I went through the text at about this exact time a week ago – sometimes I wonder why time flies so fast in my life and I never seem to be able to do anything that I think of at the moment also “at that same moment” but perhaps this is what it is like to be a busy graduate student with an abysmal weakness for tall bearded men who can never say no even though she really should more often than not – and deleted every instance of the word “but” [the novel is in Swedish, but in this discussion of it I will pretend it exists also in English though it does not] when placed in the mouth of the heroine/narrator. I also simplified the structure of the grammar: mostly my sentences in Swedish when I was a teenager were as long and winding as those of Tolstoy’s and for some reason I was reluctant to use periods. In a way, I “cleaned” the text – but while cleaning it, I also read it for the first time since 2005. I haven’t forgotten what the novel is about, as a matter of fact I often revisit certain scenes from it and perhaps I imagined them differently as the years progressed than what they really were in the novel itself. There are some embarrassing details in it. And some things are repeated so many times that if I had been a reader of this text I would’ve wondered why the heroine can’t trust anyone else to also comprehend as much of the world that she does. The narrative reeks with an eccentric distrust towards the implied reader; an implied reader who constantly needs to be “reminded” of the narrator’s personality, “guided” through the narrator’s history, “informed” of her intentions – as if she dare not leave the reader to make his own connections or even think for himself if only for a second. The novel – the title of which is still the brilliant “Moonlight, Hide My Shadow” – is confined, controlled, and closed to secondary interpretations. In my editing of it at the age of 25, I tried my best to remove some of this absurd confinement of narrative and the narrator’s irrational control by destroying the long sentences and deleting all those words marked by specific historical values and social judgments. For the first time in my life, it occurred to me why this novel is not publishable. It is not that it is a bad text – some parts of it are truly excellent, other parts are striking in their several layers of deep meaning, the language is highly complex for being the construct of someone as young as I was at the time, the main topic covered is eternally important, the narrator probably the only worthy “heroine of our time” ever constructed in the 21^st century and all of the above is me still being humble – but that the reader it directs itself toward is improbable. Of course, a text need to always take the reader into account, but in this case the reader is present in second person pronouns and thus a large part of the narrator’s way of conceptualizing her story.

As always, the strongest aesthetical moment in my prose also this early on in my creative writing is the dialogue: if I learned anything when I wrote this, I learned how to construct a conversation. I have been told that I’m good at representing speech before – and over and over again – but in “Moonlight, Hide My Shadow” there are spectacular scenes where I had to bite my lip because they were saturated with subtle genius… The best dialogues are between the heroine/narrator Tove and her “boyfriend” Hampus, not only because I [subconsciously?] delicately mastered the socioeconomic difference in their discourses – she being from the wealthy upper middle class and he from the poor working class – but also in how I somehow managed to stress their inability to understand each other. In Tove and Hampus I depicted a way in which a man can love a woman that I lost along the way as I grew older, matured, met more men, learned more about myself, saw that everything is not that easy. Perhaps somewhere inside there still remains with me today the idea of such a relationship… Perhaps I still believe in it, perhaps because something still rings true in the way that they relate to each other and when I wonder why Tove decides only to share everything with Hampus, and not with anyone else in her life – perhaps this could be explained by the fact that he loved her with that love in which we cannot believe once when have been exposed to too much? Is there perhaps some sort of purity in being naïve, in being inexperienced, in having learned life only within certain limitations, in never having crossed those damned borders?

For the past couple of days I’ve been imagining another story, a story which picks up several years after the novel ends. The novel ends strangely in itself and presents a solution which is not really a solution at all and in my 2011 director’s cut of it I decided to cut everything that was unambiguous and leave only what could be regarded as “vague” in its end. I’m not sure how much more sense this makes to the reader. So now I imagine another way to end it – even if it in itself is not an ending at all, but rather a way to wrap up our constant human situation as being victim of our own choices, always left wondering what might have been had we remained instead of leaving or left instead of remaining – with Tove and Hampus meeting each other again. As the first version of this novel was influenced by my own life – and, the attentive reader might argue, was my own life – so the novel “revisited” will be. The first ending is when she is 18 and he is 19 and their roads part naturally after graduation from high school. They go their separate ways, even though they could have created a joined road – but they wanted different things and after several months of trying to get pregnant without success, they both feel that their story is over. Then we revisit the couple: at the age of 28 and with a doctorate in [insert field in the humanities] Tove returns to Sweden from [insert foreign country] to begin her first position as a professor at a university. She is unmarried. One day she has some trouble with her car and so she brings it to the local shop. There she meets Hampus who is now 29 years old and has two sentences served in prison behind him. He is also unmarried. They contemplate a continuation of their relationship and for a moment it seems to them that they might be able to have everything that is considered human happiness and that they can rise above their differences and be united in a love that is higher than anything else and that perhaps everything has not been lost yet.

I don’t know what will happen to Tove and Hampus when they meet again. I wish I could create for them a happy ending; I’d like to give to them what I and the boy who was my “real life Hampus” never got. It is strange how certain scenes in your life keep turning up – I talked about “my Hampus” only a few days ago and as always the story seems to strange to be true, to have really happened to me, and yet that was me and that was us. Today I don’t know where “my Hampus” is, what he does [I don’t have Facebook anymore and even when I had Facebook I could never find him], and how he would approach me if I were to turn up at this job with a doctorate one day… There seems to be a border there which once it has been erected, it may not be torn apart as easily. We construct ourselves around differences and by help of borders and contain ourselves within contexts and when we are faced with breaking them down and undressing naked and leaving everything that defines us out of the picture – somehow we lose everything, somehow it is not possible, somehow being human is always being something defined by the lack or presence of other. And that’s why I think that once Tove meets Hampus again, she will not be able to surrender the woman she has become and he will prove incapable of stretching beyond his scope of the world, of his point of view, thus he cannot comprehend her. She wants to complicate him and he wants to simplify her.

In the end, it is always the reader who is the most frustrated.

Stockholm Syndrome at Stanford

“Team Berkeley” brings it to California Slavic Colloquium.

Look, comrades, I’m at Stanford!

Today April 16 2011 it finally happened: today I at last visited Stanford University. Although I was supposedly there primarily to ‘give a paper at a conference’, I suspect that I choose to do that secondly – I decided that I wanted to visit Stanford first. Since it is only an hour drive away, it does feel sort of silly that it has taken me almost an entire academic year until I made it there – now it does anyway. The conference was lovely. Sometimes I get this sneaky suspicion that I am privileged to live in a version of the world that is much better, a lot kinder, and way nicer than the reality in which all other people contain themselves. In my version of the world, overtly educated people with sweet smiles and an invested interest in each other meet to discuss their various exciting research projects in the nicest of forms and shapes – all the while knowing that the field in which we work is an endangered species and thus entails an almost inhumane competition for the fittest to even survive. Yet we pick our battles and in the meantime enjoy learning from each other. Today was my first conference in the USA and I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised by the qualities of several of the papers given – and not only the intellectual quality, but also their entertainment value, i.e. the way the presentations themselves were executed. Usually in Russia I was always the only one at a conference who would ‘put on a show’, as it were, and really bring something more than just words to my performance. Usually in Russia I was considered ‘comical relief’ at most conferences. Today’s conference did not need any such comical relief; several other people delivered their arguments with excellent diction and spiced their scientific findings with discursive twists. It was a pleasure to be present and I feel so blessed to be able to say that this is going to be my career. Immediately I have an urge to take part in several more conferences in this country and that’s why I’m now more excited than I was before about going to a conference in Washington DC in November. Before that I’ll go to a Russian conference – on Shalamov – and try to really bring it. It didn’t even feel weird to sign my hand-outs and my PowerPoint presentation with “UC Berkeley” after my name instead of “Ural State University”. I guess that is the harsh fate of the traveling scholar: the names of different institutions will keep appearing after your name throughout the years… I also enjoyed meeting so many new interesting people in my field that I haven’t met before and exchanged ideas and e-mails and talking about joint academic plans for the future. I’m a collaborator and a teacher at heart – not to mention an accidental master of diplomatic discourse – so in situations like these I tend to thrive. In addition to all of the above, it was simply a beautiful day spent in the company of spectacular people – incidentally, they are my friends and colleagues – at an absolutely breathtaking location.

Of course I had to get myself a t-shirt; I bought a really slutty Stanford [red with white print] t-shirt with a seriously plunging neckline. Perfect for the summer of 2011! Now all I need is some seriously tiny blue and yellow Berkeley hot pants to match it with and I’m ready to go. They did not have any “Beat Berkeley” t-shirt for my dad, so he has to settle for a Стэнфорд t-shirt – yeah, they do have them in Russian!

Färdig!

Last week I received the news that my French roommate in Omsk during the academic year of 2005/2006 has published a book about all those years he spent in Vladivostok. He took the picture above of me on February 18th in 2006. I started thinking of him and our months living next door to each other and studying together – and for some reason the best memories are the ones in which we are running along a frozen Irtysh after class, when the snow flurries everywhere and all over the two of us, as we playfully chase each other to see who gets first to the university’s main building and thus may use the internet before the other… When I was 20 in Siberia we did not have Wi-Fi in the dorm.

Today I kept thinking it is a shame that the English language lacks an equivalent to the Swedish expression “jag känner mig helt färdig”. I tried to translate it in my head as “I’m completely done [for?]”, but it doesn’t mean anything. To be ‘done’ in Swedish and to be ‘done’ in English are different things. Lately I feel ‘done’ – perhaps in both of these ways. I think I have not been getting enough sleep during the past week, and now it is beginning to show. Comrades, here I am once again stuck within the strange workings of the human mind and I’m not sure how to escape these overpowering mental spaces – or if I really want to do so? Okay, so that sentence made little to no sense and thus allow me to elaborate. I think I made it pretty clear in my last post here that I was going to ‘have drinks’ with a man on Sunday evening. I did. As a result of the completion of this event, I spent the entire day on Monday being completely baffled. Surprised. In awe, to put it simply. On Monday I thought that our little meeting had gone well – very well if I may say so myself – but I did not know how to handle the situation that was apparently at hand, for I kept wondering: now what, now what? What now? So far in this country I have only been on ‘bad dates’, and yesterday I imagined myself having finally stumbled upon a ‘good date’. He is a smart, handsome, versatile, and sweet guy, and it did seem like he enjoyed my company. Then came Tuesday, and against my will and better judgment I began to slowly mentally methodically work through all of the subtle nuances of the event in itself, and numerous instances kept appearing – still against my will and better judgment – in my memories which did NOT speak in favor of me. Or in favor of him wanting to ever see me again. The more I think about it, the more I understand how inclined I am to just the silliest of utterances. Especially in a state of intoxication. And in general I feel like it is never fair play after a man and a small blonde has consumed the same amount of alcohol – the body mass discrepancy is unfair and can only lead to the small blonde saying things she should probably not say and would probably never say sober. Or maybe she would, but that’s beside the point. It is unfair, that’s all. Now that Tuesday is wrapping up, I confess that I have no idea how ‘this awkward thing’ went at all on Sunday and that I have no clue as to what will happen next – if anything at all. In the meantime, I’m just going to go ahead and consider myself entirely totally absolutely ‘done’.

Yesterday I went to the gym with my friend M. – and she threatened to hit me with something hard on my head for how I had behaved toward this man, and lectured me for a while, saying things like “don’t you dare young lady to go liking some douchebag again and give him the milk so he won’t have to buy the cow and then come crying on my shoulder about it again because I love you to bits and you’re really way above and beyond that kind of behavior” – and I have some very pleasant news from the scales: in ten days I have lost 6 pounds.

“A lot of sweat, some tears, but mostly wine”

Here, comrades, is my latest reflection over life as a graduate student of Russian literature in an American university. In this one – published April 9^th 2011 in the Världens gång-section of Göteborgs-Posten – I try to get my life together and bring Tolstoy with me to the gym. Based – as always – on a true story! Tonight I’m going to “grab drinks” with a man. According to popular opinion in my department he will a) be boring; and b) I’ll be disappointed; and c) write all about it here on my blog; and then d) move on to the next. My colleagues advised me to skip point a & b and go straight ahead to blogging about the frustration. But my mother says “nobody on their deathbed ever said they wished they had had less sex”, so I guess you’ll just have to sit this one out, comrades.

The Anatomy of Happiness

Lunch outside today – April 6th – in our usual spot.

Comrade Awesome photographed by Critical Companion.

Since I moved to the United States of America I have – like Joseph Brodsky and [I’m certain] many other expats from the Soviet realm with him – acquired a new healthy habit: when I come home in the evening I lock my door and lead a private life. During my last four years in Russia I always shared a room with one other person and a general living space with several other people. I still live with other people, but here I do have a room of my own. The door locks from inside. When I want to, I can spend hours upon hours undisturbed. But one can bring one’s private life with one elsewhere as well, outside of the sheltered home – I enjoy being completely surrounded by privacy while out in public spaces and I confess that I do relish in the anonymity that this country can provide one with. The past couple of weeks have been shaky and emotionally stressful, as a tragic unhappiness has happened in my family. Almost immediately when I found out about it, I decided that it would not be included into the world that is my blog. Even though I’m a positive person who doesn’t mind sharing some aspects of my life with the reading [and thirsting for intellectual conversation – but you didn’t hear it from me!] public, I realize that this is a platform accessible to strangers, i.e. to people I don’t know and that these don’t necessarily always wish me the best. If my friends want to show support in this difficult time, they can do so through private correspondence. And whenever there are other persons than only me involved in some aspect of my life, I have learned the difficult lesson of thinking twice [more often than not even thrice] before writing publicly about it.

Despite all of this, I keep coming back to a feeling of happiness. Life has been hectic as of late, with lots and lots of work, and there have been a couple of frustrating disappointments – for example, last week somebody asked me out and then stood me up – but in general, everything seems to be heading in the right direction. A few days ago I got my invitation to Russia in the mail, and yesterday I finally bought tickets. I’ll arrive in Yekaterinburg on the 2nd of June and return to Stockholm on the 30th of the same month. In between that I am hoping to spend about a week in Moscow and attend the Shalamov Conference – my topic? Well, hopefully you saw this one coming, comrades: “The ‘Bad’ Bildungsroman: Varlam Shalamov’s Generic Intellection and his Anti-novel Vishera”. I have a hunch that this idea might be better than the simple fate of becoming just the title of a blog post. This week I keep running into Sartre on campus. The sun always shines when we meet. He looks goods and says he wants me and promises me he has emancipated himself from his ex and that we should hang out soon. Then we talk about intellectual stuff and I know he can’t concentrate when I’m looking like that and yet we do it and it is rather nice as a matter of fact. We’ll see.

Two days ago I finished George Orwell’s 1984 and yesterday I started reading Harry Martinsson’s Aniara. There are more than a few thoughts about the latter; perhaps I will soon have time and be able to write them down.

Maybe I will go soon and collect folklore at San Quentin. Maybe some friends of mine from Berkeley’s School of Journalism will come with me and make a documentary about it. And always there is this happiness. Despite my better judgment. Not that I have any.

Oh and before I forget: my next article in Göteborgs-Posten will be published this Saturday, the 9th of April 2011. This time I'm bringing Tolstoy to the American gym...