Here today, gone tomorrow

Tonight I'll give my reading, and tomorrow I'll start back the way I came, by train, then plane, then back in the car from JFK. It's fun to travel, and I've enjoyed my uninterrupted nights, but I'm really looking forward to going home. Or at least arriving there -- I'm not actually looking forward to the craziness of planes and trains.

The car from the airport, though -- that will be something.

kinds of time

Three sorts of time: everyday time, the time of habits and schedules; no-time, the stopped time or timelessness of airplanes and trains; and, worst of all, the jumpy time of the transition from the habits of one place to those of another. I've only been here two weeks, but it's been long enough to establish a schedule, which has gone a long way toward making me feel at home.

Nevsky, two ways

Walking down Nevsky in one direction: There are a couple of sketchy-looking people on the corner, and another coming toward me. I cross the street, thinking: If I get mugged, it's just going to happen. There will be no police report, and it will be as if there were no crime. Isn't the state's first duty to provide for the security of its citizens? Walking down Nevsky, dreaming of fascism.

Walking down Nevsky in the other direction: I've just come from a discussion of human rights abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. For one hour, we listened to a reasoned argument, supported with ample evidence, that the abuse of prisoners in the "war on terror" was not the result of a few "bad apples" but that orders to violate nearly-universally recognized human rights protocols in the interrogation of prisoners came down from Rumsfeld and even from Bush. The evidence is in, and it's overwhelming. There's a reason Bush won't sign international treaties or participate in world courts - he's afraid of getting a one-way ticket to the Hague. My biggest question, now, is this: Why is it necessary to go 5000 miles to a former Soviet country in order to have this sort of conversation? In order to be presented with this evidence and these reasons? In order to develop this kind of reasoned, empirical skepticism?

Because at home, we're lulled by something -- ease, familiarity, the feeling way out there in the heartland that the war doesn't really concern you and me. And it occurs to me, walking the other way down Nevsky, that restarting the heart of the heartland is gonna take something that's been unimaginable til now. A draft might do it, but probably not.

Walking down Nevsky, dreaming of revolution.

We shall meet again in Petersburg (Osip Mandelstam)

Chased by these lines by the poet Osip Mandestam who wrote these lines in the labor camp where he died:

We shall meet again in Petersburg,
as though there we’d buried the sun,
and for the first time, speak the word
the sacred, the meaningless one.
In black velvet of the Soviet night,
in the velvet of earth’s emptiness,
flowers still flower everlasting, bright,
women sing, beloved eyes are blessed.



The city is arched there like a lynx,
the bridge-patrol stands its ground,
an angry motor dissects the mist
crying out with a cuckoo’s sound.
I don’t need a pass for tonight,
I have no fear of the guard:
I’ll pray in the Soviet night
for the sacred meaningless word.

[...]

trans. A. S. Kline

Dostoevsky's apartment

Found it on a long walk beyond the Fontanka, on a street that also boasted a variety of sex shops. Grit on the wind from somebody blasting away at a building five storeys up without a net. All this seemed very appropriate. Museum itself small but impressive -- even contains the manual Anna Dostoevsky used to learn stenography, so she could take Fyodor's dictation. An ambivalent journey -- without him, my imagination would be much poorer but he really was not a terribly nice person, and it was hard to be in a place celebrating The Author when I think there's much more to celebrate in The Work.

Reading List #2

Info dump. Working fast on wonky keyboard, some links missing or broken.

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth
Ed. Tobias Wolff, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
Mikhail Epstein, Cries in the New Wilderness
Mikhail Epstein, After the Future
Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit
Eva Perkarkova, Truck Stop Rainbows
Ludvik Vaculik, A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator
Arnost Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes
Alan Levy, So Many Heroes (Prague Spring)
Sam Lipsyte, Home Land
Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don
Olga Sedakova, Poems & Elegies
Marcia Aldrich, "Hair," in Girl Rearing
Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers
Adam Johnson, Emporium: Stories
Doctorow, Lives of the Poets
Richard Katrovas, Prague, USA
Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden Baden
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs
Everything by Glyn Maxwell

And, in the category of things I really should have read by now:
Pushkin, "The Bronze Horseman," and Eugene Onegin
Dostoevsky, "White Nights," Poor Folk, Crime & Punishment
Gogol, Dead Souls

Neglect

For six years I have been troubled by a dream of a large, elaborate house falling down, usually into a mosquito-infested bog. Sometimes I am on a footbridge over the bog, watching the shingles fall off. Sometimes I am inside the house, usually lost in a twisty hallway or trying to find myself in one of the broken or badly foxed mirrors in the ballroom, where the boards are popping out of the floor.

Coming to St. Petersburg is a bit like waking in that dream. Or, SP is one place where external reality matches up with a bit of my private world, as if that world had found expression here, finally -- which makes me wonder if my vocabulary at home is not limited in some profound way. As if maybe I do not yet have a sufficient vocabulary for disorder, chaos and neglect, even though I sense these things and can make pictures of them in my dreams.

It would be very American, I think, not to have this vocabulary. I wonder how many words there are in Russian for what I'm talking about.

Thinking this way, I became curious about the etymology of "neglect," and sure enough, its root (also shared with "lecture") means "to pick out, to select." It's not quite the same thing as making something public (publishing), but publishing involves selection and drawing attention to what is selected -- which seems the very opposite of neglect.

Jane at breakfast

Jane eats a bagel in Bkyln, & I get to see it, in near-real time, here in St. P!  

Excursions to Pushkin, Peterhof

I did the touristy thing this weekend, taking group tours out to the summer palaces in Pushkin (yes, they really did name a village after him) and Peterhof (which has another name in Russian that escapes me now).

In the Petersburg suburbs the spaces meant for public consumption (e.g., parks and paths) are kept up very well, while those meant for private use (e.g., apartment blocks) are in a terrible state of disrepair. Can't tell if this contrast is a holdover from the Soviet era or if things in the apartment blocks have gone to hell for post-communist reasons. SO MUCH is needed in Russia -- doors, locks, windows, flooring, grout, tiles, paint. Probably also brushes, hammers, nails. Basic, basic stuff. The good news, I suppose, is that it's a big emerging market. On the other hand, since I think the average monthly income in SP is about $300, Home Depot in St. Petersburg will probably have to wait. I did see an IKEA billboard, though.

So, after hour-long drives into the suburbs, we pull up outside the most extravagant examples of baroque architecture (baroqecture?) I have ever seen... Both palaces were destroyed by the Nazis & so have been only recently (and only partially) rebuilt, to the tune of millions and millions of rubles. They are great tourist attractions, of course, and do generate lots of revenue for further restoration, but it was hard to be in those palaces after seeing the decrepit apartment blocks on the way in. There's some new construction, new apartment blocks, going on, but it really seems like the old ones are gonna just stay there until they fall down...

Local accent?

I have been listening carefully to how Russian is spoken in St. P, and there's a lot of stuff in the language that doesn't come across in the grammar books. So I just had a conversation in Russian in which I added a small grunt to each of my assertions, and tiny, soft hisses to my requests. I was understood perfectly. As far as I can tell.

This one's for Dad

One of my comrades on this trip is the poet Matthew Sisson of American Architectural Iron, which opened its doors in 1896 and is still family-owned and going strong more than one hundred years later. Unless I'm mistaken about the manufacturing category this business falls under, it is also one of only 50 manufacturers of its kind in Massachusetts.

Raskolnikov's apartment

Yesterday I took a walk along the Griboedov canal, following the route that Raskolnikov took, in Crime and Punishment, when he went to kill the pawnbroker. Along the way, I crossed the corner where Gogol's nose intersected with Raskolnikov on his errand, and I saw an astonishing street-level carved wooden door, huge and ancient, that had been slowly beaten into the sinking foundation of the building by the periodic floods in St. Petersburg.

But the most remarkable part of the walk was this: In that neighborhood, despite the rampant crime and general lawlessness of St. Petersburg, two buildings stand wide open -- no locks on the gates or the front doors: the building that contain, or may contain, Raskolnikov's apartment, depending on whose scholarly interpretation of C&P you happen to believe.

Isn't this amazing? A fictional apartment in a wholly dreamed-up city, Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, stands, in real life, wide open to pilgrims of all sorts, any day of the year.

In the stairwells, pilgrims have left lots of graffiti, much of it speaking directly to Raskolnikov: "Crime doesn't pay," "Don't do it!" and similar sentiments. Other visitors -- who probably would not be caught dead leaving a graffito anywhere in their own neighborhoods - take the opportunity to leave some testament to their arrival: "Skateboarding is not a crime." Or: "Sono stata qui," remarks "Sylvia da Brindisi." Others, more competitive souls I guess, compete with Dostoevsky's genius by adding remarks whose sheerly arbitrary and gnomic character seem like efforts at something like literature, an effort to participate in a discourse that is "literary," whatever that means: "Shine on you crazy Napoleon."

Our tour guide does not invite us to leave a spoor, but he does not discourage us either. No one does. Instead, some people take pictures; I am distracted, then annoyed, by the whine of digital cameras, the dizzy way the flash goes off. A man appears on the landing and slips behind a door, then the bolt clangs home. We have no real business here, what we've come to transact is only imaginary, and it's still a transaction, an experience of unfair exchange: one takes a picture, or a bit of space on the wall. What, though, are we giving in return? On the way home, one of our group, an American girl, bumps into a Russian passerby and says, in English, "Excuse me." I tell her, as gently as I can, that the Russian word is izvenitye, but the effort is bootless, for the horse has already left the barn, and in the end I just feel out of place in the presence of characteristically American goodwill -- clumsy monolingual bonhomie and casually misdirected good intentions.

rule of law and the free market

St Petersburg is a great place to observe what happens to people and institutions when free-market capitalism takes hold in a country with a long tradition of skepticism (to put it mildly) toward the rule of law.

It is necessary to give the police a "gift" of $10 to register passports. Police also accept bribes from pickpockets, and are widely recognized as useless when an actual crime occurs. Last night, a student was mugged not far from the hotel, and was advised by a reliable source that calling the police was probably useless and possible worse. If a cop stops you in St P, and you're a foreigner, they may well remove all the money from your wallet.

To libertarians who think the rule of law is unjustified encroachment on their freedom: come to St. Petersburg.

To economic conservatives who think we need rely only on market forces to produce a just and secure society: come to St. Petersburg.

how the city becomes me

Rules are very important in Russian life, but the first rule of all is that one should never consistently either flout or follow them. So, for example, in the hotel where I'm staying, the rule is, you leave your key with the receptionist whenever you leave, and in return she gives you a card which you can later redeem in order to retrieve your key. However, no one checks if you've surrendered your key or not, and so it is possible to avoid doing so until, of course, you lose the key, in which case you are busted.

Thing is, if you observe the hotel's card/key system, while you'll never lose your key, you might very well lose your card, which is not a minor problem for someone with a shaky grasp of Russian and an irrational fear of being yelled at in a foreign language.

So yesterday, after class, I go to reception, open my wallet, and search for my card. No card. I rummage in my bag. Still no card. I upend my bag on the counter, ignoring receptionist's disapproving stare. No card! Oh no, I'll never get back into my room.

And what if someone has stolen my card, and redeemed it for my key, and is right now in my room salivating over how many roubles my passport will fetch in Odessa?

I put my bag together and run upstairs to the program office. "I have a problem," I announce on my way in the door. One of the program assistants comes with me downstairs -- her English is shaky but my Russian is worse -- and together we make our move on the receptionist. She explains the situation in Russian, and the receptionist says something long and complicated.

"What's your room number?" the assistant asks me.
"413," I tell her.

She translates to the receptionist, who does something on the computer and then releases another torrent of Russian.

"430, you said?"
"No," I say, "413. 4-1-3."

Again, the relay of information, the violent taps on the keyboard, the angry and peremptory restatement of failure. I am not in the system. I am asked to spell my name.

Now this presents a problem. GRECO is in the Latin alphabet. We need it in Cyrillic. I know how to write Cyrillic, but I don't know the names of all the characters. Words are so complicated!

I dig in my bag for a pen -- I'll just write it out. As I do, lo and behold, there is my key at the bottom of my bag. Which brings me to another problem -- if I pull out the key, voila, then the receptionist will know that I have not only wasted her time searching for the card, but also that I have broken the rule about leaving the hotel without depositing my key at her desk. To make things even worse, I see on my key that my room is number 414, not 413. Oh dear.

So just bite the bullet and produce the key: "Look! How silly." I offer profuse apologies. The clerk delivers the expected lecture about the rules, and the dire consequences of flouting them, but she's half-smiling, and it occurs to me that even though she's laughing at me, the fact of her merriment makes it all better -- there's a person behind the rule book and she thinks this is all just hysterical.

Not taking yourself too seriously -- this seems to be the Petersburg ethos. I can't say I mind it...

Help Send Mr. Teen to Camp!

Elin's a friend of mine, a single mom who's trying to get the $$$ she needs to send her son to camp. You can help by making a paypal donation -- she's great, so's her kid, & it's the sort of problem where a little bit of cash could make a really big difference. Besides, you'd have spent that money on something less worthy anyway, right?

freedoms

I'm taking a 3-day seminar on the new Russian constitution. Sounds pretty weird for a writer, right? But that strangeness is really just a measure of how much writers take freedom of expression for granted in the West. There's plenty of lip service paid to specific things like the general and undeniable badness of censorship and the various restrictions that intellectual property regimes place on writers (once it's sold, you don't have control over your expression any more). But the whole problem of freedom in relation to this thing called "expression" could use more elaboration.

Looking at constitutions reveals certain things about both freedom and expression, the meaning of these ideas in different national and political contexts. Where is freedom situated in a society? It makes a difference where and what one is free to express in different places. For instance, behind the Iron Curtain the private, domestic sphere was the only site for truly free sexual expression, which is one reason why there's so much sex in the intensely private worlds of Kundera, and also why this kind of sexual expression is so relentlessly theorized in those books as well -- it stands in for the writer's freedom, which has been cut off by a repressive regime.

A question: Who is more free, the dissident whose authentic, free expression might land her in jail or worse, or the writer in a free society whose audience is profoundly distracted and uninterested in hearing what free and authentic expression might sound like?

There's a relation between writing & publishing here, too -- some connection beneath the surface. I wish I had more time to articulate it. I think of Chapbooks.com, of how their model of "personal publishing" really does somehow open a space where a writer's exercise of free expression could find a non-distracted, non-alienated audience. In other words, it's even more revolutionary than I thought. Need to think more about this...

5:10 AM, white night

This morning, from my notebook: It's 5:10 am, and the light outside is high and cool, a north light with a touch of rain behind it. Pushkin: "My sadness is light."

Bravo, Mark

Bravo, Mark, for not engaging with the tempest-in-a-teacup that's brewing over at Grand Text Auto, and for telling us why a thoughtful response on one's *own* blog is better than leaving a comment that will inevitably start a flame war. Yes, comments aggregate content to one's own site, and focus the discourse on your venue but the integrity of the community has to come first, sometimes. Conventional academic discourse is tendentious enough; there's no need to replicate the worst of it in blog comments. Well done, Mark.

Untranslatable

"Each language strikes a different balance between what is communicated and what is silent. Each nation remains silent on some things in order to tell other things, because it is impossible to tell everything. That's why it is so difficult to translate: it means to say in a certain language that which this language is inclined to be quiet about." -- Ortega y Gasset

This quote served as our introduction to our seminar with Michael Epstein, "Untranslatable Russia," in which we are charged with the task of "staging a dialogue" between Anglophone (mostly American) writers and Russian culture.

First thing I have learned: Even now, in what seems like the twilight of the nation-state, it is still possible to speak sensibly about "the Russian spirit," a mode of being that is uniquely "Russian."

I Didn't Feel Like Lenin, But It Was Still Fun

So I've made it, by plane, train and automobile. Took car to JFK, planes to London and then Helsinki, and then a train to Sankt Peterburg, or just Peter, as people seem to like to say.

Rather minimal travel woes so far, thank goodness. So far I have lost my CD case (with, alas, many CDs in it) and been overcharged for one piece of my trip -- the train ticket from Helsinki to Peter cost just over 100 euros, but the travel agency I used to buy the ticket charged me quite a bit more than that. Next time, I'll know better than to use an agent. Naturally, in the Helsinki main station there was a ticket office in the train station that would have happily sold me a ticket the day before my trip, provided I visited the office during its limited opening hours (you can't just buy a ticket anytime like you can in the States). I used the travel agent because I couldn't book directly online, and the big online European rail reseller (name I forget) couldn't help me eitehr, and so I panicked. I had already bought my plane tickets and was working under that constraint -- another bad move. I should have started with the rail schedule and the hours of the booking office in Helsinki. Duh. Expensive mistake. Oh well.

Finland is achingly gorgeous. Flat pastures broken by glassy dark lakes and stands of dark, tall, very straight pines and white birches. There was a storm in Helsinki the night I arrived -- it rained for six hours straight and the sheets of rain bouncing off the metal roofs made a sort of sweet urban thunder all night long.

The train was the fabled Sibelius -- Russian-style, with cabins in first class and those little horizontal windows that you can throw yourself halfway out of, kissing someone goodbye. Romantic. Unfortunately, I was followed by a swarm of flies on the platform and so the romance of the scene was not quite so ... unalloyed. Once on the train, I took my assigned seat and the wagon then filled up with vacationing German retirees. At one point I felt a disapproving stare, but the woman perpetrating it would not speak to me and instead complained to her husband about "people taking the seats that don't belong to them." I intervened and asked if she meant, uh, me? Should have seen their faces -- I look American, but I speak something besides English! And I overhear things! Thus ensued a long discussion about the rightness of my seat, procurement and examination of documents, chitchat about the miracle of my speakign German and how *that* came about, etc. Everyone was jolly, so I sat down and we were on our way. Then the ticket-taker came by and informed me that although I was in the right seat (#33) I was in the wrong "vagn" and so I bid my German friends tschussie and went on my way. Next seat I took was also wrong. This hilarity continued, with me lugging my junk the whole time, until we got very near the border, at which point the train authorities had more important things to worry about and so I finally sat down.

Coming into Russia, I saw the pretty border town of Viborg from the window -- it's almost medieval (it dates from around 900 AD, so that's not too surprising) and looks to be very pretty at least in the historic area. The outskirts are mostly little houses and an apartment block or two, all in a rather sad state of disrepair. The feeling of neglect got worse as we approached Peter -- many tiny shacks made, it seemed to me, haphazardly out of plywood and tin, leaning in all directions, peeling, decrepit.

Reading List

If you had two weeks in St. Petersburg and very limited room in your suitcase, what would you bring to read? Here's my list:

St. Petersburg by Andrey Biely
To the Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Russia's Other Writers: Selections from Samizdat Literature (ed. Michael Scammell)

And of course the indispensible Rough Guide...

Watch this space...

Not much here yet but...soon!