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Red wine, cosmpolitans & marängsviss after tacos made the perfect traditional Swedish ‘tjejkväll’ on Saturday evening with my friends in the Scandinavian department.

“Like much of Dostoevsky’s work, [The Possessed]

consists primarly of scandalous revelations,

puntuated by outbreaks of mass violence.”

[Elif Batuman, The Possessed]

It took me two days to finish reading The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them by Elif Batuman. This morning I left it on the kitchen table before taking off to the university with the following words to Critical Companion: “Read & rejoice! A book about a comp lit slav who made it out of [grad school] alive!” (In the original note, I wrote ‘here’ and not ‘grad school’ but this would not be meaningful to most of the readers of this blog – unless it has become a secret hit among the struggling grad school community?) The book was written by a girl who completed her graduate education in comparative literature – with an emphasis on the form of the Russian novel – at Stanford, thus the work focus on, not very surprisingly, her experiences during the years when she was a graduate student studying Russian literature there. One of the younger professors in my department here at Berkeley figures prominently in the book, as she is a close friend of Elif Batuman, and when I saw her today I could not but exclaim that I had literally ‘heard’ her voice in the quoted dialouges between her and Elif in the book. (She said the writer did not ask her permission to reproduce her words before publishing; this surprised me as I would verify that everything I thought Critical Companion had said to me was in fact what she had meant to say.) At first I was so excited about the book that I told everyone in my department they must read it [to this someone commented: “I already read it and I don’t think it’s my genre: overly educated people talking about literature”], but that’s before I got to the last chapter – named also “The Possessed” – which deals more specificially with Elif Batuman’s time at Stanford and centers on relationships between the graduate studens she knew there and which are perhaps not all that interesting to someone viewing the process from the outside. Also, I think she could have left out the men in her life as they seem to add little to nothing to the overarching narrative – but maybe she inserted scenes of inter-gender relations so as not to leave the reader wondering if she’s gay. Either way, for me it was a refreshing read: especially her rendering of the absurdly funny Babel conference at Stanford and the bizarre adventures of the ‘International Tolstoy scholars’ in Russia resounded in light of my own experiences at similar conferences both at Stanford and in Russia. This summer, Girl-C [one of the ‘older’ graduate students in my department] heard me talk about my time in Russia in June this year and concluded that I could write an ‘even better’ version of The Possessed as my stories are ‘even more fascinating.’ So a few days ago I sat down to try and make some sense of my own adventures with Russian books and the people who read them – it wasn’t solely inspired by Elif Batuman or even Girl-C, but I had for sometime already been pondering the possibility of collecting stories of my time in Russia in a [somewhat] coherent collection to be called «Записки красивой женщины» [The Notes of a Beautiful Woman/En vacker kvinnas anteckningar]. I decided on this particular ‘humbling’ title because I realize that many of my experiences in Russia – as well as of life in general – have been informed by my appearance and that rather than leaving the reader wondering about the probabilities of certain events I would’ve wanted the source to be evident from the start. But I immediately stumbled on a gigantic problem for the structure of my narrative: the beginning. What everyone always wants to know is why a girl from Sweden – such ‘a wonderful and wonderfully stable country’ – packs up and leaves for Russia at the age of 19; not stopping at Saint Petersburg or even Moscow but taking it to the next level and going to live in Siberia and ending up spending several years in the Urals. The reasons for these are manifold but in the end all of my choices may be traced back to one and the same origin – an origin that cannot be vocalized yet less the rest of the narrative take on a different meaning – which makes constructing an articulate geneology problematic. I tried to circumscribe my own reasoning, my own logic, my own vivid experience in these fragile attempts at making a text out of what has been piling up in my head but ended up only with different ‘myths of creation,’ sort of like when someone is trying to make a religion out of assorted beliefs. God always has to start from somewhere – light must be separated from dark and the latter called day and the former night – for the rest of the story to mean something. During my brief time in graduate school, I have learned that we should first and foremost look for meaning and try to answer the question “What does it mean?” I have issues with ‘meaning’ because I doubt there is such a thing to begin with. I do believe that we may construct meaning, that we may derive it out of something – but to make any large claims about ‘meaning’ seems to me too close to asserting a presence of ‘truth.’ Before finding ‘meaning,’ we need to agree on a certain amount of things ‘meaningful’ in/to the human experience; thus, similar to how proving something as ‘true’ is also rendering something else as ‘false’ we must designate certain other aspects of the human experience as not meaningful. When I was trained as a philologist in Russia and also devoted a large amount of my time to close reading of literary texts, our relationship to them was different: it wasn’t a search for meaning, but rather an attempt at showing features in the text of importance. To be ‘important’ and to be ‘meaningful’ I think are different things. As a Russian philologist, you’re never asked to produce any final results; you come upon something interesting in a text, you trace it, you analyze your findings, and make a conclusion something like ‘this is important in the framework of the work as a whole or for this particular author’s way of writing or in literary history.’ As a literary scholar in the US, however, you do basically the same things except you’re expected to explain why these features are meaningful, i.e. what they mean for the work as a whole or for this particular author’s way of writing or in literary history. For me, meaning is not obvious.

Sometimes I think nothing means anything.

Other times, I think anything can mean nothing.

This makes for certain complications when you try to articulate any kind of lived experience in a form to be read by others: what did it all mean then? What does it mean now? If I disregard the beginning as irrelevant – or opt for one of the many myths I have circulated throughout the years – this leaves me with a problem of a different sort: how do I sort out what is important? I have a lot of extremely funny stories from Russia, like for example that time in 2009 when Marina [my former student and now teacher of Swedish at Ural State University] searched for the house of Kuikhelbecker in the villages outside of Kurgan – without finding it. Or when I and this other Swedish woman in 2005 went to visit a monastery outside of Omsk and ended up in a 24 hour orgy with this group of men in a village. What I remember most of that journey was how embarrassed I was to ask the bus driver to stop at a restroom on our way there. But this doesn’t mean anything in the general scope of things. Rather, readers would like to know what kind of songs were sung and how much we drank and perhaps how the child that was created during those hours of debauchery [not mine!] perished some months later in a miscarriage… The problem is that most of my stories have such a twist to them; instead of just being absurd glimpses of where being possessed by Russian literature may lead you, they also display clearly what sort of tragedy can happen in those places. I was never the detached observer during my years in Russia, and I think this makes it especially difficult to write about them. All the people I met there became my friends and I created bonds to them and I know their stories and what happened to them subsequently. I never approached Russians as ‘the Other’ mainly because something else was at stake for me there but also because this doesn’t correspond to my view of human beings. Maybe I was ‘the Other’ to them – but never for too long; we met halfway and I made sure we intersected there. Also, there is the problem of honesty – as well as probability. Here I don’t always think about this language that I speak fluently enough to consider it a second native language, partly for it is treated as a given in this profession and partly for I have here encountered other Swedish people to interact with. Now I’m revitalizing the part of me that is Swedish; in Russia, I could only speak Swedish with my students – after having taught them – whereas here I can have lunch with the graduate students in the Scandinavian department and speak Swedish everyday if I feel like it. Maybe that is also an additional difficulty in construction my own version of ‘adventures with Russian books and the people who read them,’ namely that I’m also something else – apart from being a graduate student in Russian literature at an American university. That’s why I started writing my En vacker kvinnas anteckningar in Swedish – perhaps more to challenge myself and figure out what my voice sounds like in my native language after all of these years of only using it arbitrary.

”Det finns inga problem, bara utmaningar” according to a popular Swedish expression. The Swedish word ‘utmaning’ is very close to the Russian word for ‘challenge’: вызов. It has the same root – to call – and the same prefix, ‘out of’ or ‘from’ something. I’m not a comparative linguist, however, so my fiddling with semantics ends here.

Maybe all of this is premature. After all, Elif Batuman wrote her book after graduate school. Though now is temporally and spatially after Russia, I’m not done having adventures with Russian books and the people who read them. All this said, I can highly recommend this book – it has even been translated into Swedish! Go get it and you may also rejoice in the narrative of someone who made it out of here.

“Finally fall and sunshine and swimming in a pool”

My paraphrase of the set phrase in Swedish – “sol och bad i en pool” – is rather difficult to render in English and so all I could muster was a boring direct translation of the title I chose for my latest article published in Göteborgs-Posten on September 24^th 2011 as Linnéa J Lundblad. [Click on the picture for a larger, readable version.] I began reading it but saw that my editor had opted for an inadequate Swedish translation of the concept ‘auquatics’ and that’s when I stopped. In a day and age when everything is googlable I consider it an insult to think your readership ignorant – and incapable of becoming less so through googling new information. Perhaps I’m hopelessly elitist and idealistic in my view of humanity. Perhaps I should save my more advanced discourse for other writings instead of wasting them in a forum devoted to mediocracy… Though somewhere in the depths of my brain I do believe that I’m writing *this* for someone and that *this* someone understands. That these words aren’t getting lost but that their impact may become visible further down the line…

Because I was too appalled to read through my text again I can’t tell you what it is about, comrades. Perhaps the dominance of the color blue can be an indication of topic?

the kind of woman I’d want my daughter to be

I changed the header on the blog to a more ‘season appropriate’ one [from September 2008 in Yekaterinburg, because here in California the summer is in full force] and then looked for more beautiful shots of Russian fall on my computer – that’s when I realized that fall very soon turns into winter where I used to live… thus, I have more pictures of glittering snow than of pretty colored leaves. The photograph above was taken on October 15^th 2005 in Tara, Siberia – the best day of my life. Still when it was that day, I knew it was not be unprecented in its splendor for several years to come. It was one of the days when I visisted a small provincial college some seven hours north of Omsk and the students I met there have stayed with me ever since. If I were to follow my dream to its utter-most edge, I would go teach at such a tiny university out in the middle of nowhere.

Someone googles my name every day [I know this because sometimes they click on links to my blog and then I see it in the statistics of visitors]. Sometimes I google my own name and sometimes this leads me to new – or old – information about myself. Today I googled my name in Russian and stumbled upon a recently published number of a literary journal in Yekaterinburg which features an excerpt from my novel in Russian [oh the horror! and the shame!] as well as an interview they did with me during the summer of 2009. When we did the interview, I was informed that the journal was going through some financial difficulties and that they didn’t know when the next number was going to come out – little did I know at the time that I would be reading the finished product from California in September 2011! The interview [in Russian] starts on page 12 of the online version of the latest number.

Sometimes being a graduate student is difficult as you constantly face doubts as to what it is you’re doing with your life and wonder if you should really be doing something entirely else with these years of youth at your disposal. This past week has been a challenging one in terms of the enormous stress I suffered when I was reproached for my latest [as of yet only scheduled to be published] article on Shalamov. In those moments, it is normal to feel frustrated and disappointed and like you should just go and hide under some rock for the next couple of years. It is okay to lament: “What am I doing with my life?” It is also perfectly fine to blame oneself for things not turning out the way they were ‘supposed’ to. At the end of the day – and at the end of a stressful week – it is normal to realize that one doesn’t always have great ideas and that one is allowed not to know exactly what the topic of one’s dissertation should be X years from now and that one piece of extremely harsh criticism doesn’t equal you packing your bags and leaving your chosen field of study. Naturally, I would prefer it if everything went exactly according to ‘the plan’ [though at this point is occurs to me that I’m not sure if I have a plan at all but perhaps just some miscellaneous goals and chaotic dreams] and if everyone around me loved me and always did the wave for each word I utter – but this is not a very productive approach to living. What would be the point of waking up in the morning if you already knew how the day was going to turn out? If everything was miraculously accomplished – including yourself? I’d rather take the occasional blows for not only do they make you stronger, they also constitute the contrastive background for happy times and successful achievements. Sometimes you have to loose touch with the ‘greater scheme’ of things and instead take pleasure in the nice little day to day details. Like when I went swimming with Boy-C this afternoon [it is our Friday tradition to head to Hearst Gym once work is done] and we ended up swimming next to each other in a lane all of our own, gossiping and laughing while getting a work-out. Or when Critical Companion and I watched the season premier of The Big Bang Theory tonight and laughed until our stomachs hurt while she ate icecream and I sipped a glass of red wine. When she came home from Russia this summer, she announced that she’d watched a couple of episodes on the plane and recognized herself in Sheldon. “Oh no,” was my reaction, “that makes me Leonard!” Our Penny hasn’t yet moved into our building but I guess it is just a matter of time. Another pleasant thing that happened today was that I took some time away from studying and spent it in insightful conversation with two other graduate students on my floor. That is another wonderful thing about being at a large American institution of higher education: your personal graduate student existence may be testing and trying and so difficult sometimes that you just want to go home and hide under the covers for a few hours but at least you’re not alone. At least we always have each other.

Tomorrow [September 24^th 2011] my next article – if the plans of my editor are anything one might trust – will be published in Göteborgs-Posten. That is good news but it also means that this month is nearing its end and I will have to write another text next weekend to be published in October…

Så länge jag håller i så är du hel

This is what my sister will be getting in the mail next week.

”Jag vet inte vem hon är

men det måste finnas någon där ute

som du kan vara med”

[“I don’t know who she is

but there must exist someone out there

with whom you can be”]

Melissa Horn, “Mardrömmar” 

The review of Melissa Horn’s latest album, Innan jag kände dig [Before I Knew You], in Dagens Nyheter a week ago seemed both displaced and misplaced. When the reviewer comments, “...där orden tar ut svängarna – ‘jag kan offra allt jag har för ingenting’ heter det i låten ‘Jag saknar dig mindre och mindre’ – hänger musiken sällan med,” [“…where the words are often expressive  - ‘I can sacrifice everything for I have nothing’ she sings in the song ‘I Miss You Less and Less’ – the music seldom follows”] it appeared as if the reviewer was either not familiar with Melissa Horn’s previous musical production or listening as if in anticipation of difference, searching for a break from the established genre, as it were. This weekend I read the large interview with Melissa Horn in the same paper, and certain fragments of one question and its answer struck me as highly important is this discussion of the role of lyrics in music – especially in the context of the Swedish ‘vistradition’ and its contemporary hybrids. The journalist points out, ”En annan förklaring till flytet i dina  låtar är att även språket är enkelt. Orden känns melodiska. Du använder till exempel få flerstaviga ord [“One reason to the flow in your songs is that even the language is simple. The words feel melodic. For example, you use few words with many syllables.”] Melissa answers: “Jag har inget brett språk. Jag har aldrig läst böcker, har ingen tidning hemma. Jag skulle gärna vilja ha ett bredare språk. Kanske skulle jag få det om jag läste mer?...” [”I don’t have a broad language. I’ve never read books, I don’t [subscribe to] the paper. I would very much like to have a broader language. Maybe I would get one if I read more?...”] Further, she adds to this topic: ”Och jag gillar att försöka göra något betydelsefullt av något väldigt enkelt och banalt. Jag vill försöka få fram en djupare mening med väldigt vardagliga ord.” [”And I like to try to make something meaningful of something very simple and banal. I want to try to reveal a deeper meaning with very every-day words.”]. Even though the discussion of lyrics in relation to music – the choice of some particular words over others – is valid and may be productive, I think that neither the reviewer nor the journalist doing the interview attempted to listen [read: ‘read’] Melissa Horn’s new album as an organic whole; not as a large novel constructed in the way that the narrative is coherent and divided into chapters, but rather as a creation in which the overarching narrative is never interrupted but overlaps and circles like in a poem. Their task was of course of a different kind: to frame Melissa Horn in the historical context and try to explain her immense popularity in Sweden despite not being ‘popular’ in any sense of the word. I have myself labeled her music as ‘feel-bad-music’ but this is but one aspect of her production; this aspect should not be regarded as inferior in any way as it is an expression having currency both within a given cultural and a social context as well as in its representation of a particular chronotope [I could expand on this issue and explain what I mean in detail but for today’s project this elaboration doesn’t seem fruitful]. What I was struck by in Melissa Horn’s third album was the elusive way in which it displays difference; the subtle absence in it of what was previously present in her songs. “Jag säger att jag inte har förändrats men det har jag visst,” [“I say that I haven’t changed but indeed I have,”] she puts it explicitly in one of the songs but she need not for the message is implicit in the innovative construction of the Other which spans the entire album. Whereas previously in her songs, the Other was exclusively male, exclusively older – who can forget the way she sings in the first song of her first album: “…när jag följde dig längs vägen den natten så vuxen i din hand…” [“…when I followed you along the road that night so grown-up in your hand…”] – the Other introduced in the third album lacks gender. When she sings “…så länge jag håller i så är du hel” [”...as long as I hold on then you’re whole], this line can be interpreted as stripping the Other of its previous agency, of attempting to let go – all the while realizing that when one part lets go in the social contract also what you leave will lack the previous status qou and can in the absence of a whole no longer claim to be in itself a whole. In Melissa Horn’s third album, the woman is on the verge of vaporizing the whole, of cancelling the social contract – recognizing as she (the lyrical heroine) does so that it will stretch beyond herself and touch upon what she excludes when she chooses to include something else. The last song of the album, “Det känns ännu sämre nu” [“It feels even worse now”], isn’t merely a meta-commentary on her own art containing a dash of irony – she appears to understand as well as her listeners what the main attraction of her music is; namely, the discourse of ‘everything being bad,’ or to put it more eloquently: the emotions expressed are those felt in pain, those that arise from miscommunication, for a lack of applicable caution, the sentiments of always somehow missing the mark. But I want to return to her phrase from the song “Dom som har bländats av ljuset” [“Those who have been blinded by the light”] that I quoted above; the song in itself is complex and seemingly centered around a dialogue between two lovers – presumably a man and a woman – satured by miscommunaction and failed intercourse as the interlocutors cannot agree on the topic and, ultimately, haven’t learned how to talk to each other (or they knew it at some point but communication is no longer possible for the context has changed too radically). There is, however, something else at stake behind this dialogue – this ‘something else’ permeates the organic whole of the album and ties all of its various ‘simple’ phrases of ‘every-day words’ together – this I would like to suggest is a construction of the Other as oneself, or maybe the other way around: to construct oneself as the Other. The male Other figures explicitly only in one song on the entire album [now I would call for some comparative analysis of the male Other as represented in her previous two albums which I don’t think exists but I think should be done], in all other instances ‘he’ is absent. But ‘he’ doesn’t create a vacuum – the absence is so seamlessly threaded into every narrative that it may very well be overlooked and thus ignored by most listeners – instead, when ‘he’ as the older, male, more experienced (sexually, socially, etc) disappears the Other as another version of the self can enter into its place. In several of the songs, the theme of re-writing is present and it appears to be an attempt at re-mapping and re-contextualizing the female voice in music. When Melissa Horn herself claims not to have a ‘broad language’ [though I think the question was posed from a naïve point of view] and that’s why she writes like this, it should be interpreted as staged naivity and an effort to impose simplicity upon an artistic construction that is far from it. Melissa Horn might prefer it if her listeners thinks she doesn’t control her words, that she is unaware of what she’s doing and what is at stake – but we need not take her explanation as anything else but yet another representation of the self as the Other. The re-writing of history [an attempt at her-story?] implies not only a different voice which speaks differently, but a voice that is speaking to someone else – and here the voice speaks not to the previous trope of inter-gender relationship, but to the relationship between ‘self as self’ with ‘self as the Other.’ One might have expected the title of the album to imply that Melissa Horn has ‘finally’ met a good man and ended up in a relationship and that now she will no longer have the material to write about what she used to write, i.e. love mediated by miscommunication and failed intercourse. In the title, however, the reference to a moment ‘before I knew you’ might be read as uttering the impossibly egocentric but yet valuable realization of a moment ‘before I knew me.’ I’m suggesting to view this album as an attempt at creating a new form of discourse in the tradition of Swedish music, of narratives tracing not interactions with an external Other as a vehicle for standard notions of the ‘opposite’ gender but rather exploring the space of a woman interacting with an internal Other – who is rather a vehicle for a deeper self-exploration and a reflection on what it means to be in dialogue with oneself. In this kind of interpretation, it doesn’t matter who Melissa Horn is (and the question of her personal life is left untouched as it is not meaningful to ask with whom she sleeps at night) or what she might have intended with her music (for her intentions, though of importance, must be rejected when we search for meaning) but what matters is how the organic whole is constructed. This might be my opinion. In my opinion, the failure to properly evaluate this creation both by the reviewer and the journalist was that they did not aim at a ‘reading’ of its larger narrative and did not ask what the absence might mean. What does it mean when the music doesn’t always seem to be as expressive as the lyrics? Surely not that music is secondary, but rather that also the music has a different role to play in the absence and the difference of what’s expected, anticipated, desired.

I wish I was a ‘real’ scholar of Swedish music. Often I think to myself that this is what I should be doing with my life – especially since I always want to explore questions of sexuality and gender and ask what is not here. Maybe I’m being reactionary. Maybe I’m just way too into listening to Swedish music – and if I were to attempt writing about Swedish music from abroad (for I am always ‘abroad’) it would be my Mimesis, created not only in exile but from exile; only in cultural isolation can I distinguish the forms as they are and read the content as it stands. My interest in Swedish music is a hobby, and my interpretations of this art a labor of love. I don’t think it has any other value than that it satisfies me, that in my cravings for intellectual explorations I can busy myself with it also on my way to the university while listening to my iPod. If I were more serious about it, I would write up my thoughts in Swedish and try to do something with them. I still haven’t given up the idea of writing a textbook which would teach Swedish through music. Many people would say this is a mad idea and crazy talk for I don’t know anything about neither musical genres nor musical history but I’m but a literary scholar who loves her native language – from afar.

Mastering the Art of the Dinner Party

Last night Critical Companion and I invited a fellow graduate student and her girlfriend over for a Sunday dinner during the preporations for which both she and I got to refine our mastery of the art of giving the perfect dinner party. I prepared perhaps the best lasagna I’ve made so far in this country while she was in charge of the French desert with apples soaked in whisky, sugar and cinnamon…

Also, Critical Companion was in charge of half of the starter: Fresh figs with Walnuts and Mascarpone. First, we simply drewled over the pictures of this on Dining with Dostoevsky, then decided to try it out for ourselves. The results were tasty!

I was in charge of the other half of the starter: chilled drinks made with 25% champagne and 75% cranberry juice. Plus some ice.

If our careers in graduate school fail, Critical Companion and I will put our heads together and write a book combining refined manners with good food and call it something like Mastering the Art of the Dinner Party: Simple Ways to Socialize & Eat Beautifully. Critical Companion and I may be very different people with highly distinct points of view – the other day we got into a heated argument about colonialism in the grocery store which we never ended as we ‘agreed to disagree’ – but there is one topic which we always see eye to eye on: food. We are both apposed to any kind of dieting and have been known to ridicule journals like ‘Cooking Light’ for we’d rather eat a lot of different things in various amounts throughout our lives than sacrifice a limited amount of time for a fleeting result that will be undone almost immediately by what succeeds it. Also, we take pleasure in the process of cooking together. As tomatoes are really cheap here in northern California, we have also been thinking about writing a cookbook reflecting our every-day existence called Hundred Days, Hundred Tomato-based Sauces – but the possibility that this has already been done is looming large.

On Culture

On Friday I was searching for a good picture of myself for Baltic Worlds to publish on their ‘contributors’ section and it came to my attention that I have a tendency to make silly faces on most photographs. I came across plenty of good pictures but they were all old; “I don’t look like that anymore,” I lamented to Critical Companion but she did not concur. Among them I found this – possibly my favorite – taken on the 17^th of September 2007. That, comrades, was four years ago today!

“Nature has designated no master to the human species;

only brutal vices and passions render one necessary.

The wife requires a husband…”

[J. G. Herder]

This evening I was walking home after a couple of highly productive hours at the university – few things are as pleasant as working in an empty building on a Saturday – and thought to myself that I’m pretty much a nerdy loser since I opted for conjugating the productive aorist of Old Church Slavonic and reading Herder instead of going to the party this evening. I got myself pretty bummed out thinking of this and how this past week has been my first ‘date-free’ week of many more to come and how I’ll probably never meet a man who meets my standards as I’ve decided firmly that I want a man for whom I will not have to make any excuses. As I wasn’t wearing any make-up and hadn’t done my hair and had on both my glasses and a generic black hoodie zipped all the way up beause it gets cold here when the sun goes down – for all of these reasons I didn’t understand why this man kept calling out to me: “Miss, excuse me! Excuse me, miss!” Finally I turned around: “What?” “Will you take my number?” he asked. “Why?” “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said. And in my answer comes the punchline of this anecdote: “Are you sure?” He started to laugh and said something along the lines of “You don’t know? And you just walk down the street not knowing that you’re the most beautiful woman in the world?” I shook my head. “Do me a favor,” he smiled, “have a look in the mirror when you get home.” We talked some more and when I realized that he thought he had been the first man to recognize a great beauty in this meek little geeky girl I decided to play along with it and asked a few socially awkward questions. It ended with him kissing me on the hand – exclaiming “you’re so soft!” [what is a woman supposed to answer to that? “you’re so rough?”] – and giving me his card. I don’t know what to make of this episode that took place in downtown Berkeley this evening; I suppose that it was an innovative change from the usual “hey babe like your ass in that skirt” comments I usually get.

Back to Paustovsky and Shalamov and the prospects for writing a paper in my folklore class on the issue of creating the Other and placing ‘It’ temporally and spatially in Paustovsky’s Kara-Bogaz and Shalamov’s Vishera. [A side note: nobody seems to be googling Paustovsky much these days; if they did it would probably lead them straight to my blog at this point.] I’m not sure how to pose the inquiry so as to make the research meaningful. What I have in mind is an entirely new reading of these works – I think one of the ‘new’ angles I’m suggesting is to read them as paralleled works which was not their intention and has – as far as I know – not been attempted previously [oh no, two embedded clauses within one sentence!] – a different reading which would place them as works ‘on the borders.’ But what does ‘on the borders’ mean in this context? First of all, both works occupy ‘borders’ in the careers of their authors: Kara-Bogaz was Paustovsky first literary success and Vishera was Shalamov’s last large prose work. If I were to be really a good scholar, I would focus my attention not on Kara-Bogaz but on Paustovsky’s work about the chemical plant in Berezniki, Velikan na Kame. This work, however, has never been republished since the 1930s – Paustovsky himself did not want it to ever reappear in print as he later reconsidered his evaluation of industrial progress in the Urals [namely, in the sixth volume of his autobiographical Story of a Life in the 1960s he confessed to having witnessed forced labor there, something he ‘failed to mention’ thirty years earlier]. Thus, for obvious reasons I cannot get my hands on this work nor read it, only the selected passages from it that the writer himself agreed to have republished in his collected works. But Kara-Bogaz was finished in Berezniki and in this way the link to Vishera could be strong enough for a paralleled reading to hold; both Shalamov and Paustovsky testify that this was the case. Did the two writers meet in the Urals? Shalamov’s comments on Paustovsky seem to suggest a meeting took place – but then again, Shalamov’s knowledge of the context of Russian literature is to broad for us to not exclude that he found out about this either a) later [as he surely knew well all the works which dealt with the construction of plants in the northern Urals] or b) from other people [the news of a visiting writer must have gotten around in the camp]. Borders are present also in the works themselves: they are both narratives of the First Five-Year Plan which locates themselves on the ‘outskirts’ of the new Soviet state. Perhaps more so Kara-Bogaz some might argue as it is a work with colonial overtones: the process of acquiring the unknown lands of the desert in Turkmenistan and bringing ‘civilization’ to a ‘native’ people. But the picture Vishera paints of the Urals is also one of an unknown land to be civilized, though the Other here is not a native people [though I might go as far as to suggest the farmers who initially inhabited this region to establish them as such] but rather the other prisoners who differ from the author because they are ‘real’ criminals, whereas the author’s crime is political. Maybe one day I will come to argue that Shalamov constructs his Other in the criminal convicts; he even collects ‘their’ folklore, as would any ethnographer upon encountering a foreign culture [but this might also harken back to the strategy of Russian literature’s quintessential prison narrative, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, which – as we know because my research has shown it – abunds in ‘etnographical’ construction of the Other through verbal lore] – and even though it would seem that Paustovsky’s ‘native Other’ with their nomadic traditions and old world ignorance is too different from Shalamov’s ‘criminal Other’ with traditions and ignorance of their own but I don’t think this is entirely the case. In the project of building Soviet modernity, both the ‘native Other’ and the ‘criminal Other’ were elements to be expunged: the process of ‘re-educating’ criminals in the camps was similar to the process of ‘educating’ the native peoples in the new territories. Also, for Shalamov the Urals is spatially a ‘far away’ location just like Paustovsky’s desert. But perhaps the most interesting question here is – and the reason why I started thinking about reading these works together to begin with – that both Paustovsky and Shalamov occupy places ‘on the border’ of the Russian literary canon. The canon I was educated in accordance with excluded Paustovsky and included Shalamov [but the latter as ‘the utter most limit’ of Russian literature]; this, however, as I realized after going through some textbooks of ‘Russian Soviet literature’ from the 20^th century, is a fairly new invention. Originally, Paustovsky was always included – sometimes also as an ‘utter most limit’ but more often out of what seems to have been ‘courtesy’ to his large influence within this literature – and Shalamov was always forbidden: not published, not read and of course never part of any university curricula. I think what I want to ask is what happens to the literature devoted to the project of constructing Soviet modernity if these two works are read as two ways of telling the same tale? I’m also interested in the way that Vishera – written in 1971 but never published officially until 1989 – was deemed too ‘destructive’ to this project that an ‘official’ work had to be ordered immediately from the state so that this work instead could be studied in the school of this region, i.e. in the northern Urals. «Пробуждение тайги» was a bestseller in the 1970s – by an obscure writer – but when I searched for it in the libraries of Yekaterinburg this summer it was nowhere to be found. Also this presents my research with an interesting twist: what happens to our knowledge of history when sources keep appearing and disappearing? Ultimatly, both Kara-Bugaz and Vishera pose one and the same question: what can we know about that which has been?

Perhaps they both answer the question similarly: we know the past in the traces of it. For Shalamov, the traces are in a present that is simultaneously another past [he’s the tricky one when it comes to poetics]. For Paustovsky, these traces lead to the future – he ends his work with one of the most classical formulations of Socialistic Realism: «Над Баку лежала свежая тишина ночи, а на востоке, над Кара-Бугазом, сметая звезды, стремительно расскрывала небо высокая морская голубизна, – над пустынями Хорезма подымался один из бесчисленных прекрасных дней» [“Over Baku lay the fresh silence of the night, and in the east, over Kara-Bogaz, the high sea blueness, sweeping away the stars, rapidly revealed the sky – over the deserts of Khorezm rose one of countless wonderful days.”]

Pardon my English: I’m not familiar with translations of neither Kara-Bugaz nor Vishera.

Jag kan fixa vem jag vill

“It’s funny how War & Peace is always the quintessential classic,” said Critical Companion when I brought home this piece of photographic evidence from my Bart ride into the city this evening.

«Ведь вот я теперь и не знаю, что это я пишу, никак не знаю,

ничего не знаю и не перечитываю, и слогу не выправлю,

а пишу только бы писать, только бы вам написать побольше...»

[Ф. М. Достоевский, «Бедные люди»]

“But even now I don’t know what it is I’m writing, I don’t know at all,

I don’t know anything and I’m not re-reading, and not correcting the style,

rather write only to write, only to write to you some more…”

[F. M. Dostoevsky, Poor Folk]

Today was that one glorious day of the week when I don’t have to show up at the university for classes but may remain working at home the entire day. I finished reading Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk, published in 1845 and which I have not re-read [or even thought that much about] since I read it in Swedish almost a decade ago. Currently it seems to me that I’m literally consuming the Russian classics one after one – my own take on the art of ‘brushing up’ – intitially as an effort to prepare myself for the upcoming MA exam this semester [or this academic year depending on how ready I feel in two months] but perhaps more now as a way to re-aquient myself with what I supposedly already knew but actually had a cursory knowledge of as it comes with the territory of being a ‘Slavic scholar’ and having been immersed in Russian culture for the past seven years. I thouroughly liked Dostoevsky’s debut this time around, maybe more than I liked it the first time I read it. This might have something to do with the language; this time I read it in the awesome Petrozavodsk edition of Dostoevsky’s collected works which is published using the writer’s original – and sometimes absurd and chaotic – 19^th century orthography. Here, being able to master the hard sign comes with the territory. But it is fascinating to see the way he wanted the text to ‘flow’, the way he preferred hiphens to separate between his paragraphs rather than just making a whole new line and a clean break from previous sentences. You don’t get that in modern Russian literature. So today I stayed at home; in the morning I called Mother in Gothenburg and Daddy in Stockholm and then did some laundry, took out some trash and in general enjoyed being alone in the apartment. In the evening I went into San Fransisco for Bible Study at my church which today was mostly me and the Swedish assistant drinking tea and talking about life. I feel like those moments are very precious, those kind meetings and pleasant conversations with people from a different walk of life and with a different perspective on everything in it. When I told her a story of struggle from my life as a graduate student, she giggled and I was surprised because to me this particular incident appeared so huge and traumatic and impossible to get over – but she just giggled and said: “When you get to be 52 years old, you’ll also learn to laugh at such things.” If there is one part of my life that I cannot do with out in Bay Area – despite this American life sometimes getting me so frustrated – it is the warm place of unity that I’ve found at my church here. It really feels like I’m leaving all of my graduate school worries in Berkeley behind when I cross the bridge and come into the city and meet a whole other world about which I know so little and all of my problems seem to remain on the east side of the bay. She said she sometimes wonder about me getting up so early in the morning on Sundays and making the long journey to church and if this doesn’t take too much time for me and away from studying. But church is my place of sanity, my place of simply being and spending time with people living in another environment and who have various thoughts and diverse perspectives on things that I rarely come across when I’m so often stuck in my little academic bubble. I guess I don’t talk too much about church on the blog because talking about it sort of defies the purpose of it to begin with: when I’m at church, I’m not anywhere else. Thus, when I leave church I enter into my ‘real life’ where church isn’t included [not to say that God is not always a huge part of me and the ‘real life’ I lead on a daily basis] and it feels weird to write about it. Also, I don’t want to come across as a crazy religious person – but I do love church. Sometimes I think that in today’s society we are too often contained within our own generation and that we too seldom take the opportunity to talk to those who are both older and younger than us. That’s when church comes into to play an important role – to unite generations. During my first year in the church here I met so many different fascinating people from so many countries [not only Norway and Sweden mind you comrades] and heard a lot of mesmerizing stories about ways of life and I would not trade the opportunity to be a part of it for anything. But sometimes I have to stop myself, think for a while, take a deep breath – and remember that this is my only my second year as an active member of a congregation and that I have to take it step by step and not get too carried away in my ‘official’ duties. I would love to be a member of the church board – I will be suggested as a candidate next spring – but I must be careful not to make church only an official engagement. The spiritual aspect was the reason I started going and it should not get lost in the enjoyment of the social. Faith should be a private affair first and on public display only secondly.

Now I get to jump into bed with Turgenev’s Father & Sons. I’m excited – especially as I can’t remember if I have read it before [sometimes it seems to me that I’ve read too much by now to remember all of the novels as separate units] or if I’m getting it confused with some other work by Turgenev. 

On Days When Nothing Happens

This morning I thought to myself “Nothing’s going to happen anyway today so I might as well not bring my camera.” Thus, after classes I enjoyed my very first dinner at Cheeseboard Pizza – a true Berkeley staple – together with three fellow graduate students. Sitting on the grass. Yeah, that’s right. This is Berkeley, comrades.

“But men in love with their opinions

may not only suppose what is in question,

but allege wrong matter of fact.”

[this dude]

“Jag längtar alltid härifrån men aldrig hem
skulle vilja ta det sen, vad ska det bli av mig.”

(“I always long [to go] away but never home

would like to [do] it later, what’s to become of me”)

[this chick]

Of course, it is outrageous to qoute people without using their name but calling them ‘some dude’ and ‘some chick’ instead [because I sense the madness and the loneliness of being the only one to grasp one’s own references I submit links to contemporary sources of knowledge]. It is perhaps as outrageous to take a 17^th century philosopher and place him next to a line from a 21^st century singer; yet today these two intersected – in my mind at least. As I’m still in the process of digesting Melissa Horn’s latest album I will refrain from speaking about it until I’ve come to some kind of coherent conclusion regarding what it means. There is a possibility that it might not mean anything. It might simply be a disc with Swedish ‘feel bad’ music. Today was sort of a good day involving wearing my red shorts to university for the first time since the summer break finally ended and getting my bum wet from sitting in the grass – it’s all in a day’s work, comrades. Currently I might give the appearance of being as scattered as the epigraphs chosen but this is not entirely the case. As a matter of fact I’m feeling more and more settled in the athmosphere of the second year – I’m liking my new hair more and more [and the things I can do with it!] and I’m thinking more and more about eventual topics for research. I haven’t been reading any more Paustovsky since we last spoke about him but I have thought a lot about the impossibility of representing history and the impossibility of ever knowing anything ‘for sure’ or ‘for certain’ and the need to attach one text to another in an effort to create a general image of a general idea. Also this might not mean anything. For the past couple of days I’ve been working on the Russian translation of my paper in English from the folklore class last spring – about prison folklore in one of the chapters from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead – which will be published as an article in a Russian collection of scholarly works this fall. I’ve finished the translation; now comes editing it and getting it accepted. I had decided that the moment I’m done with this article is the moment I start working on my book – the dreaded re-working of my Master’s dissertation from 2010 into an academic publication scheduled to appear in print in 2012 – and I’m sort of dreading getting drawn back into working on it for I fear it will consume both all of my free time and all of my free individual. But over the summer I arrived at the conclusion that it would be good for my CV to have a book published and that if I don’t publish it, then all of this research will just be laying around on my computer and in the hardcopy of my dissertation filed somewhere in Ural State University. I also have been coming up with some ideas for my doctoral dissertation – gasp! – all of which feel premature yet intriguing. I’m thinking hard about closing my account on Netflix as well because a) I should not be watching TV and b) that website is far too advanced when it comes to guessing my taste in entertainment and keep offering all of these awesome shows that I might totally like.

In the midst of everything else I’m becoming a hardcore Veronica Maggio fan.

Plus I just put «Еду в Магадан» as the ringtone on my phone. I’m really excited about that.

aldrig ångrade hon beslutet

Äntligen soffa! On Saturday morning the rest of the couch made it all the way here and thus our living room is finally starting to look like a room to live in. Yeah, Critical Companion allowed me to place a red rug in this common area… The red pillow is also mine; she gets to pick her own color and said it will be blue. She likes boy-colors.

Äntligen söndag! On Sunday afternoon – after putting in a few intense hours as ‘church hostess’ – a fellow Swedish Berkeley student who was so kind as to help out with church coffee suggested he & I go indulge ourselves at The Cheesecake Factory afterwards. Said and done!

It is certainly a strange phenomenon: since I started my engagement with ‘meta-blogging’ [which I would prefer to call ‘reflective blogging’] a while back and revealed to the reading world around us that the girl writing this blog is someone I have constructed – my conscientiously crafted author so to speak – who is niether the individual you find standing in line at Berkeley Bowl on Thursday afternoons with my debit card nor the person who has the right to vote in the Kingdom of Sweden in my name. This is not the strange part, however, but what happened after I blew this proverbial whistle – namely, that I’ve received a few ‘letters of apologies’ as I would perhaps choose to call them. I’m not sure I understand this. I don’t pretend to understand the logic of their reasoning. Would it have been okay to offend me on my blog and leave hurtful commentaries if ‘this’ had been all I am, who I really am? Or do certain ‘comrades’ feel they have been fooled because it appeared as if they had unlimited access to my life, to my person, to my all – and then it turned out to have been a misapprehension created through inventive discourse? I don’t know. All I do know is that I delete every comment on my blog which I feel does not contribute to a productive dialogue; if you return to find your commentary has been left intact this means I read it, thought about it, and decided ‘låt stå.’ I think this sums up my general attitude toward the public space that is the internet; I’m against too rigid a control over opinions but this does not necessarily mean I agree with everything expressed here and there – rather, more often than not I decide ‘låt stå.’ Speaking of constructing your own author – but we always construct our own authors when writing; we always choose from which voice to speak and so none of this should be surprising as it is just the way humans work, the way language functions in social contexts – a few weeks back Mother reproached me for how my articles in Göteborgs-Posten may be ‘read between the lines.’ Interesting, I thought and asked: “And what may be revealed between them?” Mother suspected I might be interpreted as ‘en sedeslös kvinna som emellanåt läser lite Dostojevskij’ [‘a debauched woman who occasionally reads some Dostoevsky’] by the varied readership of my hometown. Her suspicions delighted me as this was precisely the kind of representation I wanted to subtly sketch with cautiously chosen words through my texts as ‘California Girl’ for the greatest challenge women who want to be professional intellectuals today face is the unrecorded decree ‘surrender your sexuality all who enter here’ [Dante’s Hell got nothing on our Academia]. I don’t want to be blunt about it and it is not my intention to advocate for promiscuity [unless that’s what you’re into and that’s fine]. Like the female legend who inspired me as a sixteen year old girl to go into higher education in the first place – Legally Blonde’s Elle – I want for those of us who thought we’d never do anything else with our lives but ‘become a Victoria’s Secret model’ and never be seen as more than ‘big boobs and blonde hair’ to know that there is a huge world out there waiting to be taken and that you never need to choose between beauty and brains if you want it. Naturally, those with ‘only brains’ will call you a slut behind your back and those with ‘only beauty’ will whisper ‘geek’ when they think your iPod is turned up real loud. A very wise man once told me: “Never lower yourself to their level.” Several years before that, Mother said: “Mean people are small people inside with poor self-esteem.” You can’t fight every battle and you can’t confront every ‘small person.’ You always make a choice and sometimes you have to make the choice to stand strong and stand alone and stand apart. Every moment you get – be kind. Think of other people – and ask for a slice of cheesecake to go when you’re at The Cheesecake Factory in San Francisco for Critical Companion back home in Berkeley.

The past week has been precarious in several ways – most of them internal in every sense of the word – but today at church I decided that I will run my own race and follow my dream. For despite everything else that can and has and will be said – this was my dream.

Вопреки

This morning I smuggled the camera with me to the gym and took some pictures of ‘reality’ as a way to illustrate my next text. Consider this snapshot a sneakpeak of the highly topical subject which one might or might not be able to read between the lines of my ensuing causerie – which, according to my editor, will appear in print on Saturday 24^th of September.

“It is perhaps because he never realized what he was saying

that Heidegger was able to say what he did without really having to say it.”

[a French scholar cited in an American book on folklore]

«Багаж прожитой жизни [люди] таскают собой повсюду и тратят попусту,

рассказывая случайным попутчикам или, что гораздо хуже, не рассказывая никому».

[К. Паустовский, «Кара-Бугаз»]

“The baggage of lived life [people] haul around everywhere and waste in vain,

telling [it] to random fellow travelers or, which is even worse, not telling it to anyone.”

[K. Paustovsky, Kara Bogaz]

After such an imposing amount of ingenious epigraphs – the first obscured on purpose, just as the second has been supplemented with a translation so as to achieve the opposite effect [after all, where am I these days but alone in the desert of the canon lamenting those long lost, including but not limited to Paustovsky?] – it is with some dismay I realize I must prolong the epic framework already iniated and speak about that if there will ever come into being such a time [right back at you, Heidegger!] in which I will sense an urge to summarize not Proust [got Monty Python reference?] but my ‘baggage of lived life,’ I will not have to waste any time pondering its title for I decided some months ago that I will baptize my autobiography [memoirs anyone?] «Вопреки» in Russian, Trots in Swedish, and perhaps but not certainly Notwithstanding in English. I like how the Swedish translation of the Russian conjuction is also a noun in its own right – and probably the one word most accurately describing a certain frame of mind with which I have chosen to face ‘reality.’ I don’t know why I started with that, for really it belongs neither here nor there. Sometimes you got to take advantage of the places in between things and put in a little piece of pointless information so as to freshen your mind, focus your thoughts, and allow your ideas to wander. Beyond, beyond! For what is this blog if not a laboratory of the workings of a young mind? Not that I consider myself by any means ‘young’ as this is rather an adjective affluent in the contemporary culture when referring to folks in their mid-20s. I find myself in this group. I’m just speaking the discourse, man. I’m borrowing the language invented to frame certain topicalities so as to twist it a bit and perhaps make it work to my favor; alas! language is never utterly devoid of discourse and the more you allow yourself to master certain aspects of discursiveness [no, I’m also not sure that is a word] the further you yourself become entagled in the monster you were supposed to be not withstanding. [Oh the twist!] Or whatever else I might or might not have intended the previous sentence to mean. It is really up to you, my dear implied reader [who has knowledge of Latin and Old Church Slavonic despite growing up within the Swedish system of public education, who also used to get sloshed in Siberia, who has watched youtube incessantly on late weekend nights and perhaps own a few extra pair of high heels – all of the above I imply as existant within you, dear disguised comrade of mine, when I address you in these vague and ambigious ways], to understand me as was intended – including understanding and recognizing what was never intended at all and use this information against me. As a weapon! Pick it up! Stick in in me! Stigmatize me! Oh well, anyway. It probably means nothing at all, comrades. Today I suffered from homesickness. I wonder how long a person must live in a foreign land and still find oneself unable to rid oneself of one’s homesickness? I tell myself I do not miss Sweden; I tell myself it is Russia I miss. More correctly would be to say that I miss the idealized image of northern Europe that I carry with me in my mind; it is the absence of certain aspects of experienced life in northern Europe that I struggle with – most acutely at the moment I long for the opportunity to go for a walk. I wish Americans [in general, not in particular] were less extroverted. I wish there were more safe streets here in the East Bay where one could simply walk about one’s own business and think about things and not always have to be confronted by one’s neighbor. Most of the time I wish *men* on the streets here would stop saying ‘hey beautiful/babe/etc., how’s it going?’ to my objectified person whenever I pass them by because that is really starting to get on my nerves. What happened to mind your own business? Today I almost stopped to ask this one young gentlemen what exactly he meant with this phrase and what he thought I would do when he applied it to my person but then I continued on my way as I realized he as a person is not to blame for the cultural context in which he was forced to be born and raised. I miss the imminent arrival of fall at this season; there are no leaves that will start falling soon in northern California – everything in this land looks like in a tv-show or a B-movie that I caught a glimpse of while flipping through the channels as a young girl in Gothenburg. The eternal non-season of Californian reality prevails and in this over-populated region I find there are indeed ‘no safe places’ like I stated in a poem some five years ago but when I wrote that I meant something else and I didn’t know that one day those words would grow and become applicable also to this space and time. Why do I have to spend so much time in this country? It appears as though my way of viewing this chunk of time abroad as my personal ‘intellectual exile’ was much too fateful an expression because that is what it has grown into. It is my second year here and I’m still not at home. Exile can be good for the intellectual. Think of Auerbach and Mimesis – but am I strong enough, smart enough, crazy enough to write my own Mimesis? It would seem as if I am, as if I’m trying to make sense of what is around me by using all the words I own and then some which I don’t know at all – but what I always return to is trying to make sense of what is inside me. The exterior is sometimes very pleasing – bordering on the blissfully paradisical of pleasures unknown prior [such as the fact that the gym costs 10 bucks a semester and provides all the towels I might want and need] – but the interior remains lost and struggling and longing to go back to a country which I loved. It has been more than a year and I have not yet changed the title of this blog. It was “A Russia of My Own” [everybody knows I used Virgnia Woolf as my model there; my implied reader should’ve been way ahead of me in this regard] when I lived in Russia and when I lived in Russia it was a funny title and a challenge to the way I looked at that country. I no longer live in Russia and I very rarely look at that country these days [unless I’m there], and yet I will not let go of the title. I am still wishfully thinking I will soon return to the land where I loved, to the land where I lived in much despair and anguish but also was so happy and so consumed within my joy and turned into this person unable to conceptualize myself without it, outside of it. Yesterday I wrote a short story called “We’ll Never Be Friends” but I have chosen not to pubish it here even though that is the way I usually let my own mind now that I have finished something, produced a work of fiction; to have it read and made part of some kind of life outside the files on my computer. This time, I choose not to share. Why? Partly because it is a bit too personal – but then again, what kind of writing is not? And if read carefully, you will come to see that it is no more personal than anything else I have produced in the area of fiction. I think what made this short story a disturbing fact of my mind is the way it ends; if you thought “The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship” was reactionary you ain’t seen nothing yet. Yet it doesn’t really end in such a dramatic way as to leave the reader disgusted. I would like to disgust my reader sometimes. But this time I was perhaps disgusted with it myself for I saw that the way it turned out was like throwing a challenge in the face of how we perceive the eternal struggle of woman versus man – and not in any favorable manner. I think a lot about this struggle these days. I would have wanted to state something explicitly and yet it remained too implicit and thus what can be read into the work is too much of a field for going crazy and over the top and not paying attention to the actual words emplpoyed. I did mean it yesterday and I still mean it today. Perhaps I will always come to mean this exact thing. Maybe I’m reluctant to show the short story to the public because I fear its subject matter is not obvious enough. In the end, the woman tells the man a tragic thing concerning herself. Instead of the man being strong and supporting the woman and hugging her and telling her ‘Honey, I’m sorry,’ the man breaks into tears and the woman has to be strong and support the man and hug him and tell him those same words even though it was her tragedy to begin with. If we are to take charge of our own female narratives, another ending should have been in its place. That is obvious to all of us involved. But that’s not the way it is. Should literature reflect reality, life ‘as it is’? Or should literature be a realm of the improbable, of the ideal, of that which we would like to have come into being but at the current point in history remains impossible? Until we have a masculinity worth its name and reputation, there can be no true female narratives. Every time when I write I think about Nora and about how she walked out of the Doll house at the end of the 19^th century and every time I realize that every woman now is trying to finish the story of what happened after Nora walked out – but we keep being pulled back in, or we find ourselves in an empty place of untold stories. Whereever it was that Nora went – and by now it would seem as if she’s been everywhere – she would always have to encounter a man or the man. As of yet we have no male narrative to match the female narrative because if we did our entire world order would collapse; I think it is already collapsed but we’re trying to make it appear whole still for if the pieces don’t fit we would need to discharge of them and where would we be without a firm foundation called ‘tradition’ and ‘discourse’ to stand on? It would be a brave new world. But the world can only be brave when humanity is brave; humanity cannot consist of one brave sex and one brave sex only. What we need now is not ‘love, love, love’ but a dialogue between the sexes: a dialogue of equality and understand and compassion.

I suppose I could throw all of the above out the window and implant my female narrative into the larger narrative of collective lived human experience and see what comes out of it. Oh well what a glorious prospective but not today, comrades.