“Eat All the Cakes”

Here I am on a tram in Yekaterinburg in July 2006.

Sometimes illustrations to posts appear randomly selected – this might be the true strategy behind the selection.

Comrades, I did it – yesterday I finished a short story in which the heroine’s name is Nora and there are male characters with the name Arvid. Mission impossible has been partially completed. This short story doesn’t have a plot. It consists of random utterances and random memories from my life intertwined with random utterances and random memories from things I’ve read. To compete for the coveted prize of my undying love, I invite my comrades to approach this narrative as a rebus and try to solve the following tasks:

1. a. Desipher the present references to world literature as the author intended.

1. b. Find absent references to world literature that the author failed to incorporate.

1. c. If you know the author personally, locate references to yourself (for a bonus, combine these three points into one answer).

2. Understand what this short story is by choosing one of three options (note that this might be a trick question and that the option ‘none of the below’ should be exercised at one’s own disgression):

a. This is an effort to negotiate cultural displacement through literary reentextualization.

b. This is a hyperbolized representation of contemporary matrimonial anxiety.

c. This is a modernist approach to a condensed reenactment of Chekhov’s plays.

Eat All the Cakes

a short story by

L. J. Lundblad

November 28^th 2011

As someone smart once pointed out for us,

Chekhov’s characters act as heroes in other plays.

“I just want to eat all the cakes and have them too,” Nora recalled herself having said on one occasion to her best friend Anna. Another friend of hers – her name might have been Kitty for all we know – said you’re always doomed in a work of Russian fiction if your name is Anna. This is not a work of Russian fiction, but a story told on the border between two cultural spheres – perhaps even three if we wish to involve the level of meta – by a Swedish author whose native language is not English. But in the original this was written in English (though it might subsequently be translated and thus occupy another borderline entirely; you, dear inattentive reader, make these choices).

Nora imagined Arvid to be an orthodox priest when he walked into her life. Arvid provided opportunities for spirituality in conversations spiced with flirtatious overtones. Nora imagined she might move like air through prosaic reality, dance like Natasha and for this performance she needed the point of view of Pierre. She had fallen for Pierre on her hands and knees and rose up bruised but sparkling with pride. She regarded the bruises as medals from a battle and imagined Pierre and Natasha would have children she could name in the honor of other men she respected and looked up to but arrived at the conclusion that she only had one such man in mind. His name was inappropriate for any other purpose than to reenact in the future a scene of traumatic realization on behalf of the father when he sees the Natasha he thought he had married turned out to be in fact not from another novel but from a play.

A play on words as it were.

Once Nora had felt brief emotions for Vanya. She did not know how to frame those long lost feelings and in the end Vanya’s Anya had chosen one of the brothers Karamazov. In a similar way, Nora enjoyed momentary attraction to a man by the name of Rodya, yet once again the familiar plot of clashing ideological debates had been vaporized and replaced by a mundane settling of differences in a polite and even friendly manner. The woman Rodya eventually chose had a name Nora had not encountered before and thus failed to take the relationship seriously.

“Everything we know we’ve taken from things we’ve read,” she used to say and wondered if the red bag of someone she knew would be left glittering in the snow at some train station one winter evening as a link back from the unfortunate outcome to its inevitable source.

“It seems nobody these days confront each other with selections from the gospels,” Nora concluded upon remembering Lazarus as a piece of bread dough Anna had made. Nora then stirred her cup of tea with a plastic spoon that was soon to be disposed never to reappear in the incoherent narrative.

One time before tea time she walked down the aisle and saw him standing by the altar. She didn’t know if she was about to make a fatal mistake and felt uncomfortable with the present absence of omens. “You despot, you will tell me how to live my life and I will fight your lovable chains like a rebel or a dissident until I walk out into my own little revolution,” she whispered to herself and bit her lip because all of this might simply lead to a happy experience of matrimonial communion. Letting the bond of eternity slide slowly onto her finger could – oh the horror! – mark nothing but another social status and most likely leave its stamp on her next tax return.

No great work of art should have two characters with the same name but it happens in the life we lead just like in the novels we read.

“I already have a man called Arvid and it turns out that your name is also Arvid,” Nora mused and wanted to add but she didn’t: “I once wrote a short story in which the hero’s name was Adrian and I wish your name was Adrian now because it is similar to Arvid but different and this even though that character wasn’t someone I had wanted to marry.”

Let the shackles of domesticity embrace our wrist so that we also can forge the name of our fathers on legal documents and then escape the dream of our mothers triumphantly screaming: “If you didn’t have such big ears I wouldn’t have to do this!” The original twist had something to do with independence, freedom, and the eternal struggle for a room of our own. For the time being, however, we might imagine ourselves always recognizing the words of a writer we knew and loved as children even when they may turn out to be just the words of some stranger the child Self neither knew nor loved. And that we never stood outside this author’s door in the hallway with marble floors trembling softly in our adolescent mind: “I’m not ready for you.” Or that we find ourselves tracing our steps backwards to the fateful beginning without knowing that the road there simultaneously moves us forward. We can never tell who will be our Arvid until he doesn’t understand we all want to be Nora.

In a similar but maybe unrelated way, we never realize what we wanted to say until we’ve said something else. “This was not what I had in mind when I began,” Nora said and viewed her lived experience as failed mimesis of a reality that could for all we know not have been there to begin with.

из сделанного и прочитанного на выходных

It is not in my habit to publish photographs here with other people than myself in them but this one taken on Thanksgiving at our place is such a lovely shot that I felt I must share it with the world.

On Friday I walked to IKEA – it is strange to think of how I live within walking distance from it but so rarely have the time to go there – and was so overcome with sweet nostalgia for the old country when I saw this ‘adventsljusstake’ that I had to buy it. In Sweden such decorative lights appear in almost every window of every building after the first of advent.

To change our home with the change of seasons, I bought some red and green things. A new green pillow and a red heart-pillow for the couch and some new red things for the coffeetable made our living room ready for December and the inevitable coming of Christmas. The adorable stuffed animal is Critical Companion’s contribution to domestic decoration.

 On Friday I bought this year’s selection of Christmas cards to go out next week in the mail as well as the first devotional Bible study I’ve ever tried. I felt like I needed to get back to reading the Bible on a daily basis but have lost imagination when it comes to tackling the text on my own and thus thought a devotional guide would be a good place to start. Three days of beginning my mornings with a section from it has so far revealed to me that there is a practice of written prayer in it that I was unprepared for and so far I’ve been ignoring this and stuck to my oldfashioned verbal communication with God.

“There is a complex relation between a life and life so that how one lives in relation

to one’s own and others’ deaths turns out to be a project of how one protects not only

a form of life over disputations, criticisms, and  recognition in the fact of change –

but also how one protects the institution of life as lived in the singular.”

[Veena Das, Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary]

The four-day holiday in connection with Thanksgiving was well-earned and well-spent. On Thursday, Critical Companion and I spent the entire day cooking lots of tasty food – we went with roasted chicken instead of turkey and I even tried a slice – before opening our home to our lovely friends who came and went throughout the evening. It is my firm conviction that one is only obliged to celebrate a holiday in the manner of the natives during one’s first year in a new country and that after this one is allowed to make the holiday one’s own and decide what one wants from the established tradition as well as what one rejects. This year’s Thanksgiving was perhaps my best American holiday celebrated so far in the United States; it was cosy and comfortable and filled with glimpses of new intimacy with people I didn’t think I could share this kind of intimacy with. I think that’s when the holidays really are used to their best potential – when you explore new possibilities within old relationships and realize there was more to them than originally anticipated. I took the whole day off on Friday and didn’t do any work at all. I was a bit hungover after Thanksgiving as it involved drinking wine from four in the afternoon to well past midnight… Since I don’t drink very often these days – it is difficult to justify having as much as a bottle of wine around the house when the other person in the household never drinks – I’ve become somewhat unprepared for the outcome of alcohol in my blood. On Saturday, I woke up early and went to work straight away after cleaning the apartment. I’ve decided to keep track of how many hours of work I put in each day during the final stages of this semester in order to see how much of it gives actual results as well as to figure out at what times and in which situations I am the most productive. To spend eight hours working and/or procrastinating without being entirely productive is not as healthy as putting in three hours of isolated concentration on something that will yield intellectual fruit. Also I would like to find out exactly how many hours I work each week – and now that I know that I only worked a total of nine hours during this past weekend, I won’t feel as overcome with exhaustion over what has been done as I usually do. Or so I thought at least – because I still feel as exhausted as always on this Sunday evening… Well, I guess I’ll have to take my time with this project just like I’m taking my time with the devotional Bible study in the mornings – I will probably not get it right the first time and miracoulsly transform into a happy, satisfied and successful individual straight away. On Saturday evening, I went out for a beer with another graduate student which led to several beers – it is probably never a good idea to drink in the evenings when all you’ve had to eat was some soup for lunch and forgot to have dinner because you weren’t hungry – and thus I found myself a bit too hungover for church on Sunday morning. Either learn how to drink responsibly or don’t drink at all – that’s perhaps the lesson learned during the past couple of restful days…

Sometimes I wonder why life doesn’t come with clear directions and doesn’t offer simple solutions. Sometimes I wonder also if perhaps I myself choose to make the kind of choices which eliminate clear directions and simple solutions. I had already told myself repeated times throughout this difficult semester that life right now is complicated as it is and that therefore there is no need for me to complicate reality further. Instead of listening carefully to this voice of reason, however, I keep finding myself to have complicated an already complicated situation. I often wonder why you never know if – for example – a man you meet and like and who seems to appreciate you as well is something or nothing. I would like to be able to discern straight away if this is something – and thus it would be helpful if every new situation came with some sort of label attached to it so that you could easily classify it and file it under the right kind of designation immediately. I have come to realize that as life grows increasingly complex, so do the situations you find yourself in. Nothing is ever black and white; this I can make my peace with, but I wish there was less of the grey mist in between these clear-cut colors.

Today I bought tickets to Budapest. Now it has finally been decided – I will meet the new year of 2012 with Katya there.

“No reason to restrain oneself here either”

Here, comrades, is a scan of my latest article which I published as Linnéa J Lundblad in Göteborgs-Posten on Tuesday November 22^nd 2011. Thanks so much to my homegirl Annie for taking time out of her busy day to scan and send me it! In this text, I compare the American Fall with the Russian Spring as both are seasons overflowing with various holidays. Then I put on my bunny ears and expand on a very narrow reading of Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago – not the novel, but the character. What is most fascinating about my article this time is not any of this, however, but the fact that Critical Companion appears as a very real presence in the middle picture. There’s a lesson for everyone in this: if your roommate has a monthly column in the paper, you can never know for sure where those shots of you in the Dollar Store will end up… [To enlarge and read it: click on the picture, then click 'see original'.]

Just like last month, Mrs S is duly credited for my new byline picture.

I could voice a negative opinion about what I think about how I look in this picture, but I’m not going to because to constantly scrutinize one’s appearance isn’t healthy or even necessary.

those were the days

One day this week, Mrs S and I were eating lunch outside and talking about serious stuff when I got distracted by this hoard of undergraduates passing us by and looking like school kids. “I also looked really young as an undergrad,” said Mrs S and later sent me a photograph as proof. I responded with a flashback to my first semester of university studies – this picture was taken on some stairs in October 2004 in Saint Petersburg. Maybe I also looked really young then?

“We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label

describing what it is. It is value, rather, that

converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.”

[Karl Marx, Das Kapital]

Until this past week, I had never read Marx – and I can say that even though it is embarrassing. When I lived in Russia, some of my older professors who had lived the greater part of their lives in the Soviet Union would often assume that growing up in Socialist Sweden meant that we also read – like in Communist Russia – Das Kapital in school. Contrary to popular ignorance, the Swedish school system educates its children in market economy and not in much of anything else; Marx is not a standard element in the economic curricula at most of our schools. I remember taking a class in Yekaterinburg in Russian contemporary history; the professor teaching the course had previously been a professor of the history of the Russian communist party, and so most of our time was spent talking about the years after the revolution of 1917 and up until the next revolution of 1991 with a seemingly strange focus on Soviet movies to tell the tale of imperative events. It was in connection to this class that I watched “White Sun of the Desert” for the first time, followed by perhaps a month of information about the Soviet space program because this is the proclaimed favorite movie of Russian austronats. What can I say – the education I received in Russia was diverse and often full of surprise associations. As I had not read Marx until a few days ago, I didn’t know what Marx was all about – I only knew he had been taken on a truly bad trip sponsored by Lenin and friends throughout the 20^th century. As I was reading Marx, I remembered this one time when I was in the eighth grade – I think – and I did a presentation for my class on social knowledge [or however one would translate the multifaceted subject samhällskunskap] on the principles of economic exchange. In my presentation, I focused on the imaginary aspect of value in products and basically stated as my main thesis that value is a human construct and has little to do with anything else than social structures. [I might have been a Marxist before I knew anything about Marxism.] I remember that my teacher was upset with my presentation because I had gone beyond what the chapter in our textbook on contemporary economics said which was basically that the monetary value of a product is the effect of supply and demand on the market. He corrected my presentation and brought the class back to normality through the textbook where we continued to learn the politically correct ways of representing reality in a way so as to sustain our own economic status qou. Much of school textbooks are aimed at preparing good consumers for an adult life lived through commodities as well as informed yet obedient subjects with faith in the current democratic system – or at least that was the impression I got while I was in school – because if we had been allowed as children to question the values upon which our own society was based, this society would collapse. What seemed strange to me about all of this as a fourteen year old in school was that the world I had been brought up in operated with values that had nothing to do with demand and supply; I grew up in an upper-middle class world where the value of most of our commodities was determined by their exclusive nature or authentic quality which in themselves were solely based on social interactions. Things were expensive and deemed authentic because of their value in the eyes of others. I didn’t understand it at the time, but the reality of my Swedish upbringing was one in which dimensions of social mobility through the denied or granted access to certain commodities always was the elephant in the room. I think that my teacher in school probably knew about and had read Marx, but I also think that he knew that this kind of thinking was not included in the school program and might cause confusion among those students not prepared to step back and think about the social relations in which the modern human being always finds herself. If I had been introduced to Marx at fourteen, I would not have been as inclined to buy the same designer jeans as everyone else wore that were cool at my inner-city school mostly attented by children from my own class. Some children can see through this – and I think I did eventually and perhaps even more so when I made the bold move to relocate to a less ‘cool’ country than my own at nineteen – but whenever they do, they must face consequences: if you wear the right designer jeans, you are allowed into another circle in school, and when you are a part of that circle, you have the opportunity to be invited to parties you would not be able to go to without the possession of these jeans and you get a chance to date one of those cool guys who wouldn’t hit on you if you didn’t bear the stamp of approval from the rest of the group. This might seem like an anectodal way of explaining contemporary desire for commodities, but when I came back to school after having spent my first vacation in the US at the age of fifteen, I wore my brand new Tommy Hilfiger jeans like a badge of honor. I knew that the wardrobe I had acquired at an American outlet in Florida would mean more than just new clothes – wearing a top from Guess, I climbed another step on the social ladder. Not only was I marked as one of the few from a family with the financial resources to travel to the US at the time [now this is not as rare a phenomenon, though still a sign of the upper-middle class], I also brought with me material documentation of my exclusivity. Unfortunately, my school didn’t have as many cute boys in the ‘upper circles’ as one would have hoped and I didn’t end up dating anyone of them because I was still branded a nerd as I did complicated presentations in class using hidden Marxist thought and got straight As without putting in much effort. To be cool in school, you have to be failing in at least one subject – and physical education, as I can tell from personal experience, does not count.

But all of this really makes me think now. When you start to question the foundations upon which your life in society has been built, you begin to uncover your own unconscious motives with the realization of which you may grow increasingly uncomfortable. Everything appears to me now as a constant performance of life, rather than life itself [perhaps we might even begin to question what constitutes a life?] – we live not so much for ourselves, as for the image of ourselves in others. Appearance can get you very far in life, and if you know how to play your vanity cards right, you can go as far as you’d like. A certain look can grant you access not only to a certain job, but also a certain social position which comes with certain dimensions of power which you may or may not abuse as you see fit. I’m also remembering another assignment in the same class as mentioned above, with the same teacher and in the same time period. We were told to make a budget for a year in our imagined lives as adults; i.e. we picked the profession we saw ourselves as having, the teacher determined our salary, and we were to map out a year of income and subtract our imagined expenses from this sum. As we could pick any profession we could dream up, I said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up [at the time I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing as professor]. He thought this was a complicated choice, and thus granted me the role of the one who writes ‘book of the month’ for Bonniers, which I now think is absurd. I imagined myself having a kid at seventeen, getting married as well as getting a divorce, and living together with my daughter and my best friend at the time and her cat ten years from then. We did our calculations together and executed the assignment in a very impressive way [or at least that’s what he said]. Much can be said of this teacher, who was in charge of four subjects during my last year before graduation. He explained education in a way to me that made me never able to look at school with the same eyes again. “It is all about containment,” he said, “it is a place to keep children until they are ready to enter into society.” And since I didn’t want to be contained – or at least I couldn’t be contained after he had exposed the masterplan behind it all – school became for me what it should be for everybody: a place to learn the genres of social interractions. When I went to him to find out my final grade for these four subjects he taught in the spring when I was fifteen, I was very embarrassed because I had suddenly traveled to Greece for a week in the middle of important exams and then traveled as suddenly to Stockholm to spend some time with the adult man I met when I was in Greece. I didn’t really lead the life of the average ninth grader. I cannot forget what he told me when he revealed that he had given me an A in every subject [without any exams!]: “Because you’re too cool for this place anyway.” The adjective he used in Swedish was ‘häftig’ which doesn’t translate well into other languages. Cool is merely one dimension of this quality. One day I would like to find him – I don’t know where he is and I don’t remember his last name – and thank him for seeing through my blonde hair, mini-skirts, push-up bras and pink lipstick. He saw I had brains too before I had come to know it myself.

Writing out your own personal intellectual history holds little meaning and almost no value to anybody else, except that it might awaken in others memories of similar experiences. To be able to know anything in the present, you must map your previous knowledge and trace your own educational journey, sometimes back to steps you didn’t think were of importance. If you want to think about things, you must always first start with what you thought before – and find the meaning in old thoughts and how this meaning operates in your new thoughts. You can’t ever erase levels of lived experience – even though we might often want to – because they always factor into the present experience. Reading Marx at twenty-six led me to thinking about the ideas of value I had at fourteen and how they were contrary to what I was being taught in school. I do not want to say that I don’t believe in school, or that each country should have its own school program, but what I would like to say is that before we start thinking about education, we need to get our ideas about knowledge straight. To learn something is not the same as to know something. There is a difference between learning and mastering a discourse – because learning always means getting the genre right or else you’ll get nowhere – as well as there is a difference between learning and incorporating these learned facts into active knowledge. If all you know about democracy is that it is your right as a citizen to vote, you might never realize that what you’re participating in is a commodification of western thought. Political parties don’t advertise their ideals for nothing – and it should be clear to everyone that when the democratic process is marketed as product, that is also what it becomes.

Sometimes one thought leads to a memory which leads to another thought and at the end of the day you find your own voice has become reactionary. That’s when it is time to go to bed.

where would we be if we didn’t talk to each other

Remember my post from a while back, about how the truth of our time is written in the toilet? Well, I revisited my favorite public restroom booth – last week as well as this week – to find that the productive female dialogue continues.

It all began with the little question “Are you happy?”

Then, also other messages received a reply – or several.

Who wouldn’t?

Of course, we wouldn’t be true female representatives of this cultural, social, and economic paradigm if we didn’t talk a little about men… and the grievances they cause us.

There’s always someone out there who will support you.

And perhaps another someone is going through the same thing.

So many different voices, so many different hand-written present traces to mark the absence of the author…

But I saved the best for last! Back when I was just starting out my university journey at nineteen, this was a great concern of mine as well. Should I leave a tip, speak from experience? Or rest assured that she’ll figure it out on her own with time?

Destruction of public property or a great document of our time?

This past weekend was almost entirely devoid of events worthy to be noted. All I did was work, but I also felt that I needed to spend an entire weekend working undisturbed in order to releave some of the stress I have been experiencing the past couple of weeks due to not getting everything done that I needed to get done. Most of the weekend I was working on a re-write of my midterm paper about “The Dream of Oblomov” because the first version of it wasn’t satisfactory – perhaps because this is the first time it has happened to me during my years in higher education I took it as an especially hard blow to my ego. Now that it is done – and there is no guarantee that the new version will be an improved one as the root of the problem is my lack of academic refinement when it comes to coherent thought and articulate expression which is something you can’t fix in a day or even a month – I just want to not have to think about it ever again. I studied for another midterm in Old Church Slavonic, though rather half-heartedly. The test was today and I think I passed and perhaps even did better than on my last midterm in this subject but as graduate school now seems to me one big magical mystery tour I can’t really say anything conclusive. I prepared for my presentation tomorrow about the concept of sin in the chapter leading up to the suicide of Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which I enjoyed because I got to spend plenty of time browsing my trusted old faithful Bible in Swedish translation that my grandmother gave me for my twenthieth birthday. The reason why I picked sin – and not any other of the multitude of Christian concepts one may work with when approaching Russian literature – is because I think this is a central dimension of this particular faith. Whereas Christinaity shares many of its aspects with other religions, the way in which it situates sin as the mediator between humanity and God is quite remarkable and perhaps even original. I had fun when I did my close reading of this chapter in Dostoevsky’s novel through the lense of sin, and could revisit the philologic education I received in Russia which was by no means a secular enterprise; there my professors quoted the Bible almost every day during class and at the time I didn’t ask critical questions about it but rather accepted it as a given.

So my weekend was boring, yet productive, and didn’t involve anything fun such as going out to dinner or out to a party to get drunk. After a whole weekend of work I felt like I was in need of a weekend after my weekend, and thus could not resist the temptation to make it a half-day on campus today and go home at three to take a nap. I used to take a lot of naps in the afternoon when I lived closer to campus; now I have to cut my working days in half, take a nap, and then get back to some more work in the evenings. When you’re a graduate student you always have something to do, even when you’re supposedly having a day of rest. Even though this week will be over on Wednesday, the two days ahead of me now still seem like a massive mountain that I must somehow get through and over in order to come out alive on the other side. I have been a little bit proactive, though, in the midst of all my weekend work: I booked an appointment with a doctor to find out what’s causing my constant nausea. The appointment isn’t until the morning of November 30^th, but I still feel content that I have now at least dealt with the situation – even if it has yet to be resolved. On campus today I ran into Sartre – as always he appears when my life is at a breaking point; he is always the symbol of a borderline and thus I greet his brief presence for the insights it always provides me with – and we shared a great conversation for a while. It seems so strange to me now to think that I was once that girl he ran into during my first week on campus last year; I can’t see myself in the girl who cried the whole night through the first time I slept at his place… Any other man might have called it a day after such a scene, but not Sartre: if anyone understands me and is willing to have patience with me, it is this man. Whenever I see him, I’m always reminded of how much I’ve changed since the last time I saw him – and yet, at the same time, I remain the same. When I see him with other girls – and he is always walking next to a pretty young thing – I’m never jealouse because I know that I hold a place in his life similar to the place he has in mine. I know he thinks I can’t be surpassed by any other woman; and it is in moments like those that I realize I’m quite awesome. Also I’m awesome enough not to go home with him on a cold but sunny afternoon like today – because I have other things to do and I know he’ll always be there. When the time comes for another breaking point.

Sheldon Time

‘Sheldon Time’ is what Critical Companion and I call our Friday evenings when we stream the latest episode of Big Bang Theory [and some other sitcoms we like], drink hot cider and eat chocolate together.

On Wednesday AND Thursday I wore this adorable knitted dress that I bought – without thinking it might actually be a long sweater and of the fact that I live in California – at H&M last Sunday. The reactions I got were funny [“It’s Christmas!”] and I was flirted with by the waiter at one of my favorite cafés which was fun as well. The beauty of fall in this region is that you can match wool stockings with ballerina flats.

Also this week I am a huge supporter of public education.

This has been one long week and I was happy to decide it was over when I left campus at six in the evening today. The non-american I’m dating tried to convince me to come out partying with him and his friends this Friday night, but I really wasn’t feeling it at all but just wanted to get home and spend some quiet hours with Critical Companion on the couch. During this week I’ve been suffering from nausea – no, I’m not pregnant – which has been so intense that I haven’t been able to pack lunch in the mornings for fear of throwing up and thus I didn’t have lunch during two days out of five which lead to feeling even more nauseated in the evenings when my body realized it still needs food to keep going. Today I made myself go and buy some soup in the middle of the day, but I’m not sure I’ve cured my ailment yet. I think the nausea might be caused by stress – the semester is wrapping up and I’ve got plenty of deadlines coming up soon and another exam in Old Church Slavonic on Monday. Then there will be Thanksgiving next week and since we’re thinking of hosting it this year, there will be the added stress of cooking and having people over for an entire day on Thursday. Once again I feel like I just want to buy a ticket to anywhere in the world that’s not here and just go away for that four day holiday and catch up on everything I should presumably have spent the semester doing in solitude. But it is really hard to get a ticket during Thanksgiving – especially if you’re looking for one only a few days in advance – and I’m not sure where I would go. I’m thinking Hawaii might be nice or just somewhere with hot and sunny weather and where I can sit by the pool and sip a drink with an umbrella in it… I’m sure this dream has a lot to do with my class. I’m thinking a lot about class these days. You’re not supposed to think in terms of class in our contemporary super-equal society, but I think that we can’t grasp the human experience as a social phenomenon without considering the influence of class. Though it probably should have occurred to me sooner, I only realized a few days ago that I’ve done what is commonly called ‘a class journey’ in my own life. Class is first and foremost a question about education – or perhaps you can’t separate notions of class from levels of education – and even though I was the first one in my family to get a Master’s last year, I didn’t think too much about the alienation I was about to inflict upon myself when I went to graduate school. I’m the first in my family to attempt to receive a PhD. I don’t think I want to say that I feel detached from my native environment because of this unprecendented choice, but it comes with certain consequences. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m doing with my life and where I am in my life, and yesterday when I was walking home through San Francisco after having a lovely dinner together with the assistant in the Swedish Church it occurred to me that I made it all the way here on my very own. I got accepted to Berkeley not because I wanted to and dreamed of it, but because I worked hard for years and submitted an awesome application they could not turn down. I didn’t move to the US out of accident – also that trans-atlantic relocation took a lot of hard work and meant many sacrifices. I didn’t accidentially find myself financially independent – more or less so – and autonomous enough to make my own choices at the age of 26 because I just stumbled into opportunities. I created those opportunities myself. I didn’t just wake up one day to find myself in a great relationship with this wonderful woman at church – I worked on that one too because I felt like it was something I needed and could enjoy. When I walked through the beautiful San Francisco last night I realized that I had made this awesome life on my own and out of my very own choices. I was also the first one in my family to move abroad for such a long period of time [crazy to think this is my eighth year as an expat]. Maybe part of my struggles with adjusting to this new and exciting but also scary stage in my academic life comes from not having anyone among my relatives who have made the same journey before me can tell me what I should do when I run into trouble along the road. I think I was also afraid for a long time of giving into what I’m doing right now because with every step I proceed ahead into the future, I leave parts of the past behind.

My next article in Göteborgs-Posten got rescheduled and will appear on Tuesday the 22^nd of November. I prefer Saturday articles for my texts, but oh well.

and the award goes to…

Late last night, I received a comment on my previous post from my comrade-in-arms [in the literal sense of the word] Dining with Dostoevsky, informing me that she had given me the Liebster Blog Award. Thank you! I couldn’t have summed up my own blogging enterprise as eloquently as she did:

“And, finally, I turn to Josefina at Nothing But Perfection. Josefina is prolific and, even better, as she has said herself at times: a citizen of the world. Through her blog’s archives and her reminiscences, you can experience that strange and sometimes wonderful place that people like me and my fellow graduate students have dedicated our young lives (and maybe even our future lives) to. Her writing is both raw and passionate; in one post she will tell you about literary theory and perhaps dissect Swedish pop music; then, in the next, she will teach you how to make Swedish Mushroom Quiche.”

A part of being given this award is that you must pass it on to five other people – to other ‘small’ bloggers like yourself [with less than 200 followers] – and thus share the joy of recognition with people you like. But when I went through the many blogs that I have in my feed, it occurred to me that many of them are no longer being updated regularly and function more like slumbering archives than a dynamic space for various discourse. The active blogs that I do follow – openly in my feed or in the privacy of my own home – all have over 200 followers and are pretty established. Many of the blogs I would like to give this award to – because they were written by people I am close to in real life – I feel like I can’t because they have either been forgotten or stuck in another time. Not everyone suffers from being ‘a prolific writer’ and perhaps that’s a good thing. I will try and pick the ones I read and enjoy on a regular basis:

Even though it is now a finished project, I still want to give this award to Mrs S and her The Contemporary Housewife. If you ever wanted to know what it is like to be a Swedish woman with an impressive amount of higher education and an impeccable writing style who suddenly finds herself tending to herself and her home in San Francisco together with her husband Doctor D, this blog is for you.

Being as I am evidently always in love with Russian literature, I cannot but acknowledge my appreciation for Lizok’s Bookshelf. With the subtitle “Reading ideas from Russian classics and contemporary fiction”, this lovely blog is as informative as it is entertaining when it comes to writing about an enigmatic body of works that one may indeed spend a lifetime exploring.

I’m not sure as to how I began following English Dad in Moscow, but I suspect that it was one of the many blogs written by fellow expats in Russia that I found while I was in the same position. Narrating his experiences of being a stay at home dad, his writing is often funny and fascinating and a little bit frightening [after all, his voice is coming from within a tumultuous reality] at the same time.

For a long time, I was almost addicted to keeping up with Två träd i en bokskog, a blog in Swedish about various pieces of literature from the reader’s perspective made by two women whom I suspect to be of my very own generation. One of them is a good friend of mine in Stockholm, though she hasn’t actively posted on the blog for some months now. I hope that this blog won’t ‘die’ or stop in time, though I understand that this may very well happen when one’s real life enters into a different stage.

Last of all I want to give the award to Krug the Thinker, even though she has already been given the award [and gave it to Dining with Dostoevsky, which is how I think I got the award]. I want to think of this as ‘closing the circle’ [given the imaginative title of her blog this seems appropriate]. This writer is a former colleage of mine and thus also a comrade-in-arms, who blogs about her irrestible cute style – both when it comes to decorating her home and dressing herself.

The never ending story of Nora & Arvid

I would probably be a bit jealous if the picture above wasn’t a shot from very own my life: lunch with a bottle of wine in Berkeley marina on November 14^th 2011. These are the kinds of activities one can allow oneself to engage in when one is dating a man with a car and the professional freedom to take two hour off in the middle of the day… To the story should be added that I was still my clumsy old self and managed to spill wine on my skirt and thus caused my colleagues to think I was simply being ‘European’.

Throughout this fall, I seem to produce short story after short story that I can’t publish here on my blog because either they are in Swedish or they are in English but don’t get finished and I trail off one evening into a dead end and start a new story the next evening which trails off into another dead end. It all began with the idea to write a story in which the name of the heroine would be Nora and the name of the hero Arvid. When I told Mrs S that I was working on something that would begin with the words “Her name was Nora and his name was Arvid”, her comment was “this sentence is already a story in itself”. Though most of my comrades know by now that Nora is a reoccurring reference to my own personal reappropriation of Ibsen’s A Doll House in light of contemporary culture, some might not understand who this Arvid dude is that she’s being coupled with in my artistic imagination. Anyone who grew up in Sweden will of course remember that this is the name of the hero in Strindberg’s The Red Room. The coupling of the quintessential progressive feministic character with what has become for me the symbol of defensive masculinism is not only a clever literary strategy, but a way to make a social and political claim at the same time. I already had it ‘my way’ with Strindberg’s acclaimed novel at the age of seventeen when I introduced in my own novel Moonlight, Hide My Shadow the chapter in which my fourteen year old female protagonist spends a summer listening to a local circle of older men of letters who meet in a café called “The Grey Room”. At the time I hadn’t interacted fully with Nora yet, but somehow I already grasped – in my sagacious ignorance of youth – that the mission of the woman in these interactions is to unmask established norms and eventually walk out not only from the café but also on the men, saying “I know all of you really want to have sex with me and that’s why I am allowed to be here but guess what the choice I’m going to make isn’t going to involve any one of you but only myself and so your battle for my body has been fought in vain these past couple of months.” Perhaps not in those specific words, but that was the essence of her action.

Today I received an excellent mail from my friend Katya about freeing oneself from one’s own predicament of being connected to previous generations and their choices [something any woman in higher education can relate to] – she can write those letters to me every day if she wanted to because I love to read them as a reminder of on whose shoulders I stand myself as well – and it got me thinking about one comment she made while she was editing one of my scholarly articles a few months ago. In this specific article – which will be published soon in Russian in a Russian context – I write about the chapter “Akulina’s Husband” in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House and analyze how it uses citations from the oral tradition in The Siberian Notebook to produce a narrative structure reminding of traditional story-telling. Katya’s main reaction was that this piece of fiction is a document of male violence against women. The actual story in this story was not reflected in my oh-so-properly-scientific article – it is a story about a man who killed his wife told to another man [and written down by a third man] who concludes that “you must beat [your wife] or else nothing good can come of it”. In revisiting The Siberian Notebook now – especially revisiting Russian scholarship on it and what I myself have published about it – I have come to realize that most of our efforts as literary scholars have been directed toward writing violence, gender, difference, and inequality out of this ‘democratic document’. If you really want to approach folklore and not stop at the patriotic or nationalistic feelings of pride that it instills in you as an innocent reader – or the fact that folklore is fun and always exciting to read because it uncovers aspects of human psychology in a way few other forms of culture do – you must first locate the forces of difference that are written into these cultural forms and allow their existence. Just like you can’t shout ‘democracy!’ when you see the poor imprisoned peasant making a joke about corporal punishment in The Siberian Notebook, you can’t close your eyes to the fact that these 486 numbered entries contain representations of violence, abuse, prostitution – and that it is a document of power structures spiced with problematic issues of gender and sexuality. When you want to talk about something written in prison, it is tempting to create opposition only between the internal and the external worlds without realizing that the internal world is as fragmented and as much a product of power relations as it is occupying a position against the external world.

It seems strange to me know to think how my journey with The Siberian Notebook began in the spring of 2005 in Siberia – it was my obsession long before I knew what it was because my obsession with Dostoevsky began and ended with Notes from the Dead House and my conceptualization of this writer was always founded in the monumental importance of the town of Omsk for his life and words – and that I not only published several research papers on the topic, but I even wrote a 184 pages long dissertation on the topic without knowing what is was. Naturally, I knew many true facts about it – these things I still know: the history of its creation, the history of scholarship about it, the textological work on it, the folkloric context and content of it, the influence of it on Dostoevsky’s fictional post-Siberia works – but not until now can I bracket my own love for the material and start asking myself what this material is really about. You have to be a little bit obsessed to be a scholar. You have to love something a lot in order to build your academic career around it – if you’re into the unknown like me, you might get lucky and strike gold with a work that nobody paid much attention to before you but turns out to be of crucial importance – but to become a ‘real’ scholar, one must not get blinded by devotion to the material and always be prepared for that proverbial ‘re-reading’ which comes with time. Before I felt mainly frustration when I realized that nobody around me shared my detailed and privileged knowledge of this material and that I was often left making claims nobody could verify. When I defended my master’s dissertation, I had to circumscribe my own interpretation of its polyphony because there was a professor of folklore on my committee who denoted verbal culture from prison as ‘anti-folklore’ – end of argument before it even began – and another professor who was opposed to viewing a notebook as an artistic whole. [If there is no artistic whole there cannot be polyphony.] None of them had read The Siberian Notebook; I had memorized it pretty well by then because I had also translated it into Swedish not once but twice. But that was then – this is now; and now it feels like I’ve only began to think. To have the task ahead of you to introduce Dostoevsky’s collection of prison folklore to an American audience in front of you can be daunting – and my first reaction to this idea was “oh no not that again” – but it is a challenge that I feel more ready for now than ever before. I think sometimes that it is providence itself looking down on me now that I don’t have the time to make my master’s dissertation into a book because I am not done thinking about what it means.

It is like that with some things: you think you’ve put something in the past and said what you wanted to say and that you can now move on to other things and then you go back and realize that there was something else waiting for you there all along, something you didn’t see before because you needed to step away and get a different perspective and return with other eyes. It is with The Siberian Notebook for me as an academic as it is with Moonlight, Hide My Shadow for me as a ‘writer’. When I wrote it I was seventeen years old and the project was to ‘say everything’ and to make as many claims about everything I knew about the world at the time – limited and narrow as my knowledge was then – but now that I’ve grown older and can return to this text both as an artistic whole and as fragmented representations of lived experience, I can see how I managed to do something else while I was telling a story that I felt needed to be told: I laid the foundation for my own worldview. I articulated the tropes that I would continue to trace for years to come and was able to say more about what was to come than I thought I was saying when I began with already a clearly formulated ending. The ending of my beginning became the beginning of my journey as an intellectual; and that aspect of my youthful novel has stood the test of almost ten years. In everything I write today, I can go back to this one text and find every single trope already sketched if not in form then in content and if not in content then in form. I think it is good to have such a private piece of intellectual history – and a sort of naked document about what I thought before I had been taught to think. Though some things may stand corrected now for my own artistic conceptualization of what I would like this novel to be if it were ever to be published – and stripped off its status as private in a public context – it is important to me both as an individual with a personal story as it is for me as a woman who can’t stop writing. Not that I have ever tried not to write, but I suspect that I would not be very successful if I did. Then it was important to speak from a voice that was true for me; now it is as important to access both through the memory of its creation and through the role it played in forming me as a creative individual. I don’t think I would have become if I hadn’t realized I could write my life but not in the format of a diary – which I also did – but choose for myself a protagonist who would take a stand where I could not take a stand and be honest where I had not yet understood if I could use honesty as a measurement of truth.

Perhaps that is why I now keep trying to create my own Nora; when I was seventeen, I didn’t have many intertextual references to work with. I hadn’t yet read that much. All I had was a native language and seventeen years of experience. In the light of these restrictions, I think what I produced was a monument of what it meant to grow up a woman in Sweden in the first half of the 2000s. In that respect, I will treasure my own private intellectual history. Maybe the day will come when I look back at what I wrote now about my own writing as well as the writing of others and think to myself “wow I spent a lot of time blogging”.

The document in which I write my posts before I publish them reached 700 pages a few days ago. I refer to it as ‘graphomania’ but maybe it is more than that – and I doubt that it is a diary because the reader I have mind is not myself but every woman out there who thought she might think – maybe this is my way of making sense of things.

here we make our own excitement

Comrades, I did it! I finally got a moment alone in the public restroom at Doe Library on Thursday afternoon and was able to take a quick shot of myself in the mirror like I used to do when I had a greater concern for fashion and more time for ego-pics. It is pretty awesome to have a hairband with a bow in a color that exactly matches not only this top, but also three other tops I own.

But to get the full potential out of that day’s outfit, you have to zoom in and mirror the picture… That’s right – I do support public education!

Yesterday – Friday – was Veteran’s Day here in the USA, and as it is a public holiday we had the entire day off. I spent the first half of it together with skype: first, I talked to my lovely friend Katya in Budapest for an hour [where she’s doing a master’s program in gender studies and it makes me jealous just thinking about all the cool stuff she’s studying right now], then I called Daddy in Stockholm for about half an hour [it’s Father’s Day in Sweden tomorrow and I completely forgot about it at the time], and lastly I spent about an hour and a half conversing with Mother in Gothenburg. After having spent such a long time talking to folks in Europe, it was time for me to rest some more and be happy about not having to go to campus but staying at home reading an article for my folklore paper and thinking critically about how I will pose the question and then solve this question in a sophisticated way. My folklore professor proposed that instead of writing a research paper for his class this semester, I would attempt to make an article about Dostoevsky’s “Siberian Notebook” aimed at introducing this collection of verbal lore from prison to an American audience. If I do succeed in writing this in a satisfying way, he wants to help me publish it in the academic journal Western Folklore next year. I’m very excited about the prospect of publishing my first real academic article in an American context, and I think I have some interesting ways in which I might want to frame my research.

Not only is Dostoevsky’s “Siberian Notebook” a topic that has been studied scarcely, it is also practically absent from research on Dostoevsky done outside of Russia. This is because the content of the notebook has never been properly translated into English – a task which I don’t feel prepared for nor inclined to do. However, I can still talk about the notebook in English and when I do so I must rely solely on Russian scholarship. My professor in folklore seems to be very firm in his opinion that one must always use scholarship conducted in the language and in the country where one is doing research, so I don’t think this narrow source of references will create too much fuss. One thing that keeps coming back to me now that I’m returning to the dreaded subject of that master’s dissertation I once defended so brilliantly in Yekaterinburg on June 1^st 2010 is that the Notebook is often referred to as a “democratic document” among Russian scholars. This is a simplistic view on a complex material. There is especially one entry that I would like to highlight, and which has suffered badly from the Russian official censorship of crude language, namely the entry which suggests that “even with [the aid of] soap you’re [not?] going to fuck me in [up?] the ass”. I would really like to know what is so ‘democratic’ about this expression. What does the word ‘democratic’ mean in Russian? Clearly, it has very little or nothing at all to do with any kind of election process or with political institutions in the context quoted above. The Notebook’s “ethical perspective” is also often at the focal point of Russian scholarship about it; it is more or less taken as a given that what Dostoevsky wanted to do when he wrote down what his fellow prisoners were saying around him was to show his “civic concern” with the “subalterns” or better yet, his patriotic stance [or democratic urge?] in a time of fierceful political oppression. I’m not suggesting that this important level of passionate involvement with contemporary issues of inequality be erased from the Notebook as a whole, but if that’s the only place we’re looking then what shall we do with the humor? I haven’t yet done any formal counting or any formal analysis of humor among the entries as a whole, but it appears to me that 90% of them are humoristic at their core. There is an aspect of Dostoevsky’s personal perspective on the entries – after all, he was the man holding the pen – but taken as independent utterances, they show ways of joking about one’s own situation. The main mission of the “Siberian Notebook” is to represent humor and not to only to display poverty, homicide, and drunkenness, but ways to think about these issues and also how to relate to them when you are on the “inside” of them. I don’t think it is a “democratic document” at all – but perhaps my view of democracy is framed through my own historic and social setting – but a document of displacement. The majority of the “heroes” of these entries are convicted criminals from the lower classes who are using cultural forms to convey not only what they are experiencing but also how they are experiencing it. In my opinion, Dostoevsky created one of the earliest studiest in popular humor. When he later incorporated these cultural forms of oral tradition into his literary works, his project was not merely one of “getting the language of the people” right. He was in the process of shifting the perspective on things, of introducing different voices whose reality became mediated through their “tears through laughter” [or “laughter through tears”] approach to it.

Folklore is never innocent. At best, it is a mediated process induced with several layers of power and perhaps a document of cultural domination over illiterate objects that was collected by elite subjects with a hidden agenda. Someday I want to try and write a paper called “The Political Propp: Folklore Theory as Subversive Practice in the Soviet Union”. Maybe that’s even enough for an entire book. Last week I started reading Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago and it occurred to me that if this life becomes as long as I would want it to be then I have plenty of time to vocalize my opinions later.