“Here the Homeless May Demand their Right”’

This is a scan of my latest causerie published on August 27^th 2011 in Göteborgs-Posten as Linnéa J Lundblad. Click on the picture to see it in a larger, readable format. I have made the habit this year of reviewing every article after publication – thanks to Annie back home in Gothenburg this is possible even from northern California – and until now I have never been *really* pissed at my editor. In this article, I paraphrased a famous citation by Dag Hammarskjöld [“Du återvänder aldrig; en annan man möter en annan stad”] by exchanging ‘man’ for ‘woman’, but that was not the limit of the obscurity I inflicted upon the aforism: I wrote ‘said to me a literary jack of all trades a couple of generations older.’ Only in the end of the article did I clear up the fog – or so I thought – by naming my source. My editor, however, didn’t catch the subtlety of my intertextuality but changed my paraphrase of the quote [!] so as to make a sentence that sounded like someone had *actually* said this to me personally [!!]. I am appalled by the thought that people working at one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers would fail to recognize such an obvious reference to the man who was general secretary of the UN for almost a decade as well as a member of the Swedish Academy.

In my next article – which I will write either tomorrow night or on Thursday evening – I will take another crucial figure in Swedish culture, obscure their wisdom, and once again my editor will think I just happen to run into all these cool folks on campus here at Cal. Viva la Ignorance!

Oh and I’m not entirely sure what this one is about – it seems to me it is hardly about homeless people – I’m beyond ‘topicality’ and now writing causerie for causerie’s sake.

With Censors Like These…

It is striking trend: while our private existence is intentionally flaunted on various social networks, blogging has come to suffer from deliberate self-censorship. When did we start writing capital letters for the initials of people in our lives, or come up with clever pseudonyms for the same? I often think that internet needs no censorship; we’re actively learning how to censor ourselves – sometimes stopping mid-sentence only to go back and erase what we have said or even practice retrospective deleting that which at a later point in time seemed like it didn’t need to be said or that having been said *somebody* might take offense – in this process there is the fear that uninhibited writing will go out of style entirely. What was the point with blogging to begin with? Was it not to say what we think, to express ourselves, to connect, to socialize our experience of what it means to be human? With time, we learned to display a fragmented life: certain chunks may be recorded, others we ourselves make the choice not to share. Supposedly we have freedom of speech in the western world; when you’re reading a blog, however, what remains to speak freely of is only ourselves. Yet, to be human is to be constantly immersed in a social context – we are sentenced to a life among others – by circumscribing what we say about contexts not solely involving ourselves, we have come to excell at precisely that which many dictatorships failed to perfecr before us. We cannot say what we wish to say and we refrain from saying what we actually mean; instead, blogging has become the embodiment of a constant fear of stepping on someone else’s toes. The fear of the internet is looming large over contemporary life – polemics is allowed to a certain point, but never from a personal point of view, but merely as a disinterested pastime [or professional, but that has nothing to do with the private sphere]. What we are documenting is not life as it was at this point in time, but life as we feel it should be represented in public writing. I have written previously about contemporary culture’s affectionate relationship with displays of ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’ as the standard for public writing, because if there is anything else – mainly life constitutes of the something else – blame comes into play and when there’s blame it must certainly be directed at *someone*. Unfortunately, I am no better than anyone else when it comes to this. I always make a highly conscious choice as to what to include and what to exclude from my blog; the fragmented picture I paint for my readers bear little resemblance to what my life – and, most importantly, my thoughts – look like. It is of course good that we care about each other for else we would be barbarians but aren’t we loosing a huge chunk of our reality by not depicting ALL of it? For whom are we writing, anyway? Who is our implied reader? Why do we feel a need at all to write publicly about our lives, to pick selected passages from it, shape them so as to fit neatly into a given form and then impose it onto the outside world? What is the point of a blog to begin with? Was it not to take control of the written word, to make it personal, to rid ourselves of the editor, of selected publication, and bringing the right to say what we think to each and everyone of us? Thoughts like these always arise in my mind when something of importance happens in my life. More often than not, these events involve other people. I would have wanted to be able to write my blog as a kind of diary – but this genre can’t function when the reader intended is not the same as the writer behind the words. Blogging becomes dangerous in a world where everything can and will be googled. Even now, as I’m writing this, I wonder silently to myself: “What if somebody reads this and disagrees? What if I step over the limit and say something that shouldn’t have been said? What if someone takes offense? Wouldn’t it be better at the end of the day to just write something cheerful about the day that is almost over now, to make a few happy-go-lucky generalisations and be done with it?” I don’t have the answers to these questions; I only know that they are always with me. The need to write about my life, to put into words what I’m thinking at the moment, is also always with me. I would like to have a forum where I can speak about events so as to try and make sense of them, to conceptualize previous experience and draw some conclusions. But this is not always allowed and I have also perfected the act of self-censorship throughout the years. Sometimes I want to just say “it’s only a blog!” like Bridget said “it’s only a diary!”, but just like Bridget knew it wasn’t just a diary – for it was really a novel – I know a blog is so much more than just a blog – it is a public forum, where the reader is always thought of long before she has even opened the browser and started scanning the page for what seems the most interesting. For example, at least once every day a stranger on the street gives me a compliment regarding my looks. Sometimes when I’m crossing the street in San Francisco the random person next to me will take a closer look at me and say something like “wow, you’re beautiful.” Documenting this reality on my blog is not an option – my readers will see me as a shallow person who is full of herself – yet, it is a huge part of my human experience. Always being aware of that someone is watching me, taking in the way I look, evaluating it against their standards of beauty, and then coming up with an affirmative estimation – that is something I have to live with. Every single day of my life. I do know the effect I have on men. It is a conscious choice not to let it rule my existence but to view it as something that just happens. Over and over again. But this was not exactly my point – I had another point entirely, but I can’t write about it because it doesn’t fit the reader intended. I wish I could intend another reader but the truth is that you cannot invent your own reader. You may invent your own author – I think I’ve invented a good author for this blog [not to be confused with the actual me who is similar but differs significantly in the way that I am a complete human individual who think things that aren’t always PC and sometimes think things that are of interest to nobody except myself] – but the reader always chooses this role without any influence from the author what so ever. What I feel is that our documentation of contemporary life is left incomplete because we’ve become so good at censoring ourselves [inititally I wanted to put a ‘damn’ in there but as I remembered that my invented author doesn’t swear publicly, I censored myself in advance]. What I realized as of late is that a tragedy happened and I was its witness – perhaps I even played a minor part in it but I will probably never know for sure – but I chose not to see, not to witness it, to refrain from acknowledging it going on. The signs were clear – retrospectively I can pick out certain events, even dates, when the tragedy was right next to me – but I stood on the sidelines and closed my eyes. It is the kind of tragedy worthy of an Ingmar Bergman movie; if I were ever to tell the story of it; it would probably seem as unlikely as everything else that I do not speak publicly about. What is reality, anyway? Is it not our own construct? Is not life what we make it to seem? If there was any set standard for life then we wouldn’t have to depict it, display it, represent it – over and over again. We’re always inventing ourselves. Now, we have come to invent ourselves as we want to be seen by others. Blogging has nothing to do with life ‘as it is.’ If life is anything, it is nothing like what you find in blogs. Life is messy and in this mess we touch each other, we depend on each other, we influence each other, we belong to each other – yet, none of this we can admit because everything you say can and will be googled against you.

These were the thoughts I had today and shared today.

Take Two

Yesterday we started building the sofabed and Critical Companion documented the whole process with comments like “what I enjoy most are the sound effects”. Alas! as it is being shipped in two parts [when I called IKEA with a perplexed voice they were like “didn’t you know that?”], I can’t show you the finished product in place in our livingroom yet, Mother.

This Friday evening was spent in the lovely company of Berkeley’s Folklore program during which I acquired this awesome addition to my already outspoken purse.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before – so many events from and facts in my life go ondocumented due to unplanned secrecy and/or lack of proper timing – but I’m planning on doing what is called a ‘designated emphasis’ in folklore during my time in the Ph.D-program in the Slavic department. It is basically the same as a minor for an undergraduate degree; I guess they decided to go with a different name for the graduate level in order to keep things fresh and exciting. I took the first required class out of three last semester and I’m taking the second one this semester. Somehow I and another student from my department got on the Folklore mailing list recently; thus, we were duly invited to celebrate the new academic year with a toast in champagne in the Folklore Archive on campus followed by a pleasant dinner at the house of one of the other students. It was a good time and installed the feeling in me of belonging to yet another awesome campus collective – as most comrades should know by now, I’m all about my own department but it does feel nice to have the opportunity to meddle with some other folks from time to time. I’m excited about already having met the other students in the folklore class I’m going to attend this semester; I’m almost equally excited about already having a ton of reading assigned for next week as well. One class required we read a chapter from Auerbach’s Mimesis and it was nice to pull out my Swedish translation of it from the bookshelf and have a sense of not being entirely new to just about everything here. As of yet I don’t feel exhausted or completely consumed by the imminent work load ahead – but then again, it has only been two days of instruction and I’ve only had one class so far in Old Church Slavonic and even though that one left my head spinning I’m still keeping my mood in a positive mode – because in so many ways I’m more prepared for what’s expected of me this year than I was at the same time a year ago. Now when I meet first year students I keep having these strange aha-moments; it is almost like I’m getting to know myself in the past and getting to see how much change one year here inflicted upon me.

I’m hoping that my next article appears in print tomorrow in Göterborgs-Posten [August 27^th 2011] especially since I was paid on time yesterday – that almost never happens – but then again, working with an editor like mine is an experience filled with sudden surprises. Though I think most people would agree that the suprises that aren’t sudden are like the worst because they’re not really surprises anyway. 

Happy New Academic Year!

Yesterday I decided to get ready for the academic year of 2011-2012 by cutting off another two inches. Usually my cousin does my hair, but as she’s in Sweden I had to make do with a local hairdresser. “Someone’s been playing with the curling iron,” he commented and, after I answered his question about when it was last cut, added:“your cousin must be some kind of genius because your hair is awfully difficult to cut.” I sure think so! Anyway, he kept hesitating to cut off that much and I kept arguing that ‘it will just grow out soon so make it shorter’ – well, to make a long story short I now feel ready to take this bull of higher education by the horns and get my scholarly groove on.

Vem ska trösta doktoranden?

A few days ago I was lurking around Free Speech Café and came across this. “Who hasn’t thought of this?” I wondered and walked up to have a closer look.

Upon closer examination of the flyer, however, an unpleasant surprise awaited me. “Even jail sentences are more precise than that!” I exclaimed.

Comrades, minutes ago I had one of those ‘oh-my-God-I-really-do-live-in-California’ moments – we experienced an earthquake! And, according to the comment offered by Critical Companion, it was “like a totally legit one, too” as it shook our whole building and made some of the furniture shake a little bit as well. Alas! nothing fell over and now it is over and back to blogging I go. It has come to my attention that during the first year you when you live somewhere new – it doesn’t have to be in a strange country or even among strange people – you can observe most things objectively, from an outsider’s point of view, as it were. When that first year is gone and done with, however, you inevitably gain awareness of that what was previously an existence ‘somewhere else’ has become – your life. You start thinking not in temrs of being somewhere else and noting all the funny stuff about that place, but in terms of simply living, getting from A to point B, getting through the day, and on and so forth. Today I suffered some slight doubts regarding my decision to linger on my graduate education here in Berkeley – questions like “Is this what I really want?”, “What am I doing with my life anyway?”, and “Why is this sometimes such an unsatisfying process?” kept reappearing – and realized that I must cultivate some kind of preoccupation outside the university or else I will perish like summer flowers come fall. I’m thinking of taking up swimming. Maybe even start attending some class at the gym. Today I walked past the theather department and actually pondered the possibility of attending an audition for a role in a play this upcoming fall – until reality hit me and I jumped to the conclusion that in all probability I will not have time to act if I seriously intend to do all the things I’ve promised myself I’m going to do this semester. The Russian translation of my article is almost finished – only one more day’s worth of work to put into that baby of my mine – and as I received an e-mail from the English language editor of Baltic Worlds I’m more convinced than ever before that my report from the Shalamov conference will be published in the next number. Also, the sofabed was delivered yesterday and tomorrow I might even start assembling it. Stay tuned for that and more craziness from the life of a struggling Slavicist!

P.S. extra points go to any reader who can discern the actual book that I tried to obscure in the title for today’s post.

Humbert Humbert

This is what my work space at the university looked during the entire past week. Finally, after putting in so many hours and so much effort at this very table in the Slavic library, the first draft of my article “A ‘Bad’ Bildungsroman? Varlam Shalamov’s antinovel Вишера as a Reconsideration of Generic Traditions” is finished. For my next trick I will attempt to edit it according to the suggestions of everyone who reads it before publication…

Sometimes I stop by my own blog and ask myself: “Why doesn’t this girl blog more often?” Either, she doesn’t have any life to blog about – or, she has too much of a life to find the time to write about it. During the past week, the latter has been truer than the former. On Friday evening, I left Slav lib at about half past ten only to grab some Mexican food – I was too consumed by the idea of getting the article finished to eat dinner – on my way over to S.’s place for a Russian movie and some much desired cuddling. On Saturday morning, I cleaned the apartment while Critical Companion read my article after which we discussed its contents and ways to improve it at length. Then I got a text from Contemporary Housewife saying she and her husband were looking at couches at IKEA; since Emeryville is basically around the corner from where we live, I decided to invite them over for a traditional Swedish ‘fika’ accompanied by Swedish coffee. After they had enjoyed this in combination with some Russian chocolate brought back by Critical Companion from the Motherland, they drove the two of us down to Emeryville where we taunted ridiculous American fashion for a few hours before indulging in some more serious shopping at H&M. We stopped by Sephora – the beauty of living in California does sometimes feel like an unprecedented luxury – where I received detailed consultation in regard to my colors while Critical Companion escaped the madness of a makeup store to go browse Barnes & Nobles next door. Today we were exemplary consumers. Tomorrow evening we will throw our very first dinner party: we’ve invited two fellow graduate students in my department – Mr. Johnson and Boy-Camm – and are planning to serve lasagna as well as bruchetta. Now that we have our own kitchen and a table with four chairs, the possibilities are endless!

Throughout the week, I’ve been navigating Nabokov’s Lolita and after finshing it two days ago I arrived at the conclusion that I must have read some other novel on a similar topic when I was seventeen because I failed to remember some of the plot’s most pivotal points. The problem begins and ends with one and the same thing: why is the book entitled Lolita when it is really about Humbert Humbert and should thus duly be known as Humbert Humbert? In the novel I was writing at the time when I read it for the first time – the infamous Månsken, göm min skugga – there is this one scene that kept returning to me as I was reading Nabokov’s prosaic engagement with the same issue. In this particular scene, the heroine, Tove, runs into her boyfriend Hampus’ father Henrik the day after Hampus leaves for a summer camp. Henrik invites Tove to come over and she agrees. During that sweaty summer night of intercourse between the fourteen year old girl and the fifty something man, he says to her: “If you’re Lolita, then I want to be your Humbert Humbert.” Tove answers: “You can be one of my Humberts Humberts.” And it seems to me that even if I weren’t paying attention to the twists and turns of Nabokov’s plot at the time, at least I managed to fathom the work’s core: in the life of a Lolita, there can never be simply one Humbert Humbert – yet, this is the mistake made not only by the actual Humbert Humbert in the novel [suppressing this realization is what eventually drives him mad] but by all Humberts Humberts every time, all the time. What I especially remembered when reading it this time is the episode when Humbert Humbert is walking behind Lolita and her friend while going to the movies and Lolita says to her friend: “What’s most terrifying about dying is that you’re all alone”. Humbert Humbert concludes that he ‘did not know Lolita’s mind at all.’ It seems to me that also this idea is at the core of the novel; Humbert Humbert claims to have loved Lolita and yet he never knew her – at all. For a few months now I’ve been pondering the possibility of writing a short story in which Hampus and Tove meet ten years later – in the original novel, they officially part ways after Tove’s suicide at fourteen [almost immediality after her relationship with his father took a carnal turn] when he is fifteen. In the short story, however, I intend to let the fictional fuse more tightly with the factional: their story ends when she is eighteen and he is nineteen, thus the short story would find them in their late twenties. Even though I have been thinking about this ‘coming-of-age’ sequel for a while now, until I started reading Lolita it did not even occur to me that Hampus and Tove might want to discuss – among other things – the fact that his father raped her that summer while he was away. Funny how the mind works sometimes. All I have at the moment are a few separate lines and some static scenes – nothing concrete in regards to plot, etc. Hampus will, for example, think when he sees her that it is strange how she should come into his life now, after a failed marriage and three children – and then start laughing because it was the first time he chose the wording ‘failed marriage’ for his one attempt at a marital union. Naturally Henrik is dead by the time they meet again. On his gravestone he wanted to have his initials spelled H. H. – even though his middle name was John. And the sudden memory of how Hampus once asked him if he ever loved someone and he said yes but wouldn’t be more specific than that…

Tonight I was planning on writing something more substantial than this, but in the middle of it S. came over for a few hours to entertain me and Critical Companion with hilarious videos on youtube while we fed him tea and the aforementioned chocolate from the Motherland. All in all, I think this was a Saturday well spent.

Ложу или кладу? [к вопросу о вечных русских вопросах]

When I got home from church today I found Critical Companion had made herself useful in my absence and purchased a kitchen table. Yesterday she bought fresh flowers – as seen on the table – and yesterday we also acquired the apartment’s first plant; she’s apparently running for Roommate of the Year.

Currently the table pictured above is covered with various research materials for my article on Shalamov’s Bildungsroman – scattered pages of an excellent article by Leona Toker from Poetics Today on top of Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and next to ‘the Bulgarian friend’ an open notebook containing such instances of abrupt brilliance from Critical Companion [while listening to me thinking out loud about my work] as ‘if it had been a success, wouldn’t it had failed as an antinovel?’ – because it is now Sunday evening and we’re sitting facing each other at our brand new table [already the heart of our home] and enjoying a cool breeze after a hot day coming through the open door. Today I went to church for the first time after the prolonged summer hiatus – I hadn’t attended a service in the city for exactly three months – sometimes a break is needed in order one may reexplore and reevaluate and be reassured that yes, I like this. Today convinced me that I still like church and that I would very much want to be as active in it during my second year here as I was my first – perhaps even more. I hadn’t really given church much thought since I got back – partly because I had so many other more pressing items on my plate – but the feeling was similar to coming back to the university: a lot of familiar faces and their kind smiles followed by pleasant conversation.

The risk is that we’ll get too comfortable in our cohabition and start ‘glorifying the home’. Though I think that is perfectly acceptable and quite pardonable considering that at least I have spent the first seven years of adult life living in different kinds of dormitories [aka. university housing] and haven’t really had a place to glorify before as well as never had the opportunity to create a home prior to this. So for the time being Critical Companion and I will busy ourselves with making a life and enjoying the process. Perhaps my posts from now on will mere be expressions of that notorious ‘private life’ of no interest to anybody else but those directly involved; a trivial record of inconsequential niceties via meticulous documentation  – so be it! Today we acquired a table; the upcoming week, we’re getting a sofabed delivered as well as a desk for my room. Oh and on Saturday we walked to IKEA together. It only took about thirty minutes to get from our place to Emeryville. Life is good.

Speaking of triviology [тривиалогия]: yesterday S. surprised me twice. Exhibit (a): he went with me to the graduate student party. Exhibit (b): he borrowed a book from me. Chronologically, yesterday marked our 7^th [seventh] date – I’ve never made it past the seventh date in this country so far – and as he decided to have me lend him some Shalamov, I will inevitably see him again. If only to get my book back.

Return of the Roommate

We don’t have an actual dinner table yet but I’m sure you get the general idea implied in the photograph above: today Critical Companion and I celebrated her return to Berkeley with a bottle of California zinfandel and a take-out pizza from Addie’s [which is conveniently located two blocks from our apartment and can be highly recommended].

After my return from Idaho I’ve been pretty busy working on my paper about Shalamov’s Bildungsroman and that’s about all I’ve been doing this week, i.e. sitting surrounded by books in the Slavic library trying to make sense of my notes – until today when Critical Companion finally came home and I prepared for her homecoming by cleaning the entire apartment [I don’t think it’s ever been this disinfected; supposedly this is due to the working class roots among my Scandinavian heritage acting out]. Actually, we tried first to make lasagna but our oven is not working correctly – it will be fixed soon – and so we opted to share a pizza instead. I haven’t had wine since I came back to California; the last time was the night before I flew out of Sweden when I and Mother finished an entire bag-in-box resulting in my flying across the Atlantic with a terrible hangover… Oh the memories! If one could only remember, that is. Tomorrow is the first ‘get-together’ with the other graduate students after the summer and I’m looking forward to meddling with all those familiar faces once again. It does feel like life is getting back on track after the summer – the time of the year I prefer is the academic part.

Once a Bridesmaid, Always a Bridesmaid

This past weekend, I escaped Bay Area by plane and traveled to ‘real America’.

Gulnara and her husband-to-be had rented a big beautiful house outside Sandpoint, Idaho with a magnificent view.

Три девицы – не совсем под окном но все же – занимаются макияжом... Here I’m doing Gulnara’s much celebrated make-up for the big day, together with her sister-in-law.

At breakfast on Saturday, Gulnara informed me that I am her maid of honor with the words “Who else could it be?” Here I am signing their marriage certificate in my role as witness.

The wedding ceremony was lovely.

The wedding cake was yummy.

The second day – a sunny and hot Sunday – the entire international wedding party [three Tartars, four Georgians, three Bulgarians, one Swedish maid of honor and the bestman who is a farmer from Tenneessee] spent on the beach.

We did what everyone else does when it’s hot and sunny: we went in the water…

The past weekend was a weekend of weddings. On Saturday Gulnara got married in my presence in Idaho and then on Sunday I was reached by the news that Father had tied the knot on Brännö in my absence. [On the same day? I wonder.] I found out that they were both going to wed at approximately the same time – more or less a month ago. I didn’t know until about two weeks before that I was actually going to fly out for Gulnara’s wedding – with the move consuming almost all of my free time and academic research taking up the time that isn’t supposed to be ‘free’ I wasn’t sure I could steal four days without severe consequences – whereas I did know for certain that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my father’s wedding for he explicitly told me they weren’t going to wait until I got back to Sweden. Both ceremonies were similar: according to my sister, my father also got married to his girlfriend in a civil ceremony held out on the patio of a [here: his] house. I liked the ceremony I was present at in Idaho: it was intimate and relaxed and didn’t involve any of the pathos or hassle usually connected with a church wedding. Even though I hadn’t met Gulnara’s husband until the day before their wedding, I have known her for several years – we met in February 2005 in Siberia – and what I have seen of her character so far tells me she wouldn’t marry a man unless she thought it worthwhile. On the contrary, I have both met and known my father’s wife for about as many years total and I know they love each other very much and that she ultimately makes my father a very happy man. Perhaps I do feel a sting of resentment for not being granted the opportunity to be there, but at the end of the day I know that at this particularly fragile time in my father’s life asking for permission from his haughty adult children is not a priority. But I have sworn to leave his current illness out of my blog – because it is private as in ‘does not belong in a public space’ – and therefore I do not intend to speak more of it.

Already while making final purchases at Costco – about an hour after I had landed and just got myself aquiented with the rest of the wedding party made up of an assorted group of USSR-born folks – Gulnara’s mother confronted me about the status of my personal life. Gulnara and I both agreed that this was strange behavior on her part; she had always been the one to stress ‘waiting’ and ‘taking one’s time’ for there are ‘a lot of bad men’ and about as many ‘bad marriages’ out there. I didn’t know what to say, and so I told her I was ‘currently dating someone’ referring to S. who had stayed at my new place until 2.30 the previous night. I’m not sure what we’re doing may actually be classified ‘dating’ though because that would entitle him to the prestigious position of being ‘boyfriend’ and with that established one should probably have some sort of plan. There is no plan; in between our sporadic yet congenial dates I never know if we’re ever going to see each other again. While in between flights in Seattle on Friday, I did consider the status of my personal life at length and as I counted up the realities of my relationship with S., I started to laugh. And I laughed for a long time; it occurred to me that I have never been further away from marriage than at this very point in time and space. It is perfectly clear to me that S. and I will never walk down any aisle together [other than at the grocery store looking for buckwheat] – details could be provided to strengthen my case but alas! such details are of private matter and once again ‘does not belong in a public space’ – and that I only continue cultivating relations with him because I genuinely like him and because we share the same profound love for literature. Also, he is much older than me and thus has the vast life experience I lack plus I think those silver streaks in his otherwise black hair are cute and make him look distinguished. Other than this, I have no idea as to what I’m doing with that proverbial ‘personal life’…

Seeing other people successfully finding love and effectively settling down does make me feel like I’m missing something and/or not doing something right. My mother once told me that ‘some people find that special someone and that’s great but then there are some people who just don’t and that’s fine’ and I’m beginning to lean more toward the latter group of people. Right now, my otherwise rampant imagination can’t even come up with a rough draft of what kind of man it would take for me want to wear a ring and promise to spend the rest of myself with him. Perhaps I’m sticking with the impossibility of anything serious with S. at the moment because I’m terrified to venture into that part of human existence at the moment – because I doubt my goals and aspirations and dreams are compatible with the demands a real relationship infringes upon the woman – and because I have decided that ‘having a boyfriend’ is simply not for me. Or I haven’t bounced back from taking the steep plunge and allowing myself to fall in love with the man from Vologda yet… It has after all been only a little more than a month since that crystal dream crashed into little pieces of broken glass. Perhaps all I have been doing for a year now is licking those infected wounds after what happened between me and A. a year ago when I made one of the most difficult decisions in my life so far: when I decided that the greatest lesson you’ll ever learn is not how to love and be loved in return but how to love and be loved in return and yet prioritize your own sanity over the other person’s insanity. You can’t spend your life on somebody else. You can’t fix somebody else. You are allowed to be selfish. There is nothing wrong with knowing your worth. I don’t think about A. every day, but I didn’t throw away any of the things he sent to me in the mail when I moved. I just couldn’t do it. I put all our memorabilia into a box and sealed it. I don’t know why; at the moment, I can’t see that a time will come when I’ll unseal it and take out those things, letters and photographs again.

Soon my second year as a graduate student will begin and this time I feel more prepared than ever before – this is after all my eight year in higher education and if I wasn’t ready now I don’t know when I’d ever feel ready – and like every year in early August, I’m anxious and nervous and excited about the prospects of getting back to ‘real life’ [the summer is not a good time for me, not very productive at all] and settling into a new academic schedule. In a way, I think I’m afraid of allowing myself to become entirely wrapped up my education, in my work for it does leave one isolated – though this kind of isolation can be pure bliss. I’m happy to have found an excellent path from my new apartment to campus which takes me about forty minutes – just like in Yekaterinburg! – and I’m curious to see how long it will take before I have walked off some of this American pudginess I can’t help but to suffer from. Ideally, I would like to walk off about ten pounds. I think this is more than possible to accomplish within a month. Also, I can’t wait to get back to my duties as church hostess at the Swedish church in San Francisco. I think this fall semester will be good but intense: I have planned to pass the MA exam by the end of it and because of this I have dutifully been reading up on the works of the Russian canon I lack throughout the summer. Yesterday on the plane I finished Nabokov’s Pnin and now I’m re-reading his Lolita. The last time I read it was when I was seventeen and that time it was in Swedish; now I’m reading it in the original English and almost ten years older. For all I know, this time it could be a completely new novel…

It was good to get away for the weekend and see something else for a change, to spend time with other people for a change. On Thursday evening Critical Companion returns to Berkeley and I’m stacking the fridge with all of her favorite food and already counting the various topics we must discuss once she’s here in person for the dialogue. I’ll probably not think too much about men with her around.

“Russia’s Destiny Found on a Street in Vologda”

My latest journalistic effort was published under Linnéa J Lundblad in Göteborgs-Posten on the 30^th of July 2011. For various reasons – first, my darling Annie [she’s in charge of scanning] was enjoying a week on Malta and, secondly, I spent the past weekend in Idaho where I enjoyed Gulnara’s wedding – it took over a week for it to appear here on the blog. As always, click on the picture to see a bigger, readable version of the article. As the title indicates, this time I’m taking my fateful readers with me to Vologda to meet not only the Russian north but also the gorgeous man I had the pleasure of knowing while in Vologda. I never mentioned it here on my blog at the time – after that wild weekend of sweet romance we shared in June – but he used to be a basketball player in the Russian national team. Now he’s just a very handsom six-foot-eight business man who might be coming to visit me in Berkeley one of these days if his promises via mail are any indication of certainty. My next article is scheduled for publication on August 27^th 2011 – keep your eyes open for that one, comrades!

After Move, Fresh Start in New Apartment

On Monday I moved into the new apartment.

Some very kind friends of mine helped me with the move.

At first, everything was one big mess –
I hadn’t even chilled the champagne!

Here I will live with Critical Companion. Everything in the apartment awaits her return from Russia next week – like the blue toothbrush cup in the bathroom.

Slowly things are starting to come together.

The kitchen has begun to serve its humble purpose [not pictured: wineglasses I bought at IKEA yesterday].

Some books are already up on the shelves.

The photograph of the «блатарь с Колымы» is the only non-negotiable aspect of living with me – it was a part of the exhibition at the International Shalamov Conference this summer in Moscow. Then *somebody* stole and gave it to me. Eventually it will go up on the wall, naturally, but the most important thing is that this beautiful Russian criminal from the 1940’s be visible from the front door…

It never occurred to me how HUGE a queen size bed is.
I’m thinking about renting out the northern half of it for a profit.

When I saw this reflection of myself this morning – August 3^rd 2011 – I thought of…

…this reflection of myself – April 12^th 2003 – and how much I must adore that nightgown…