A new post after fifty billion years... about time travel.

This is an essay about time travel. It was supposed to be for a prompt in an application for the January Creative Writing Arts Intensive at Harvard, and then... morphed. And got away from me in the pleasant way writing does when you are enjoying it. It is also the first non-academic piece of writing I have produced in ages, and I felt like I wanted to share it somewhere. It is certainly nonacademic. And mostly, but not entirely, nonserious. So. Here it is!


Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? Why? What was there that interested you?

Author Chuck Klosterman, in his unreasonably serious essay on the cultural history and ethics of time travel, concludes that time travel is “the desire of the depressed and the lazy” – the hypothetical refuge of those who “would rather change every element of society except themselves.”¹ The desire for time travel, according to his thesis, is a desire for escape, compounded by a desire to have every element about oneself remain unchanged in the process. Barring the distinct (and exhaustively pondered) possibility of causing a catastrophic paradox, or accidentally trapping myself in the cruel embrace of a recursive time loop, I would absolutely love to travel in time. And I don't care if this makes me seem depressed or lazy.

The essence of time travel and its many cultural incarnations is the possibility of intervention—the chance to reverse or at least redirect the flow of life's events. And despite the potential for chaos contained in any active intervention, the notion of a panacea for regret, the chance to eliminate regret before it can develop, is a deeply compelling prospect. Given a handy time machine, perhaps contained in a retrofitted Delorean, I might never have done so much inappropriate vomiting in freshman year, or had my heart broken so many times. Disguised as my younger self, I could have corrected a variety of shattering mistakes; stopped up a number of ugly confessions before they were made; plucked the first cigarette from my younger self's hand and engaged in a lengthy, eloquent, and mind-bending anti-smoking PSA. And yet – despite the various iterations of trauma and chaos that have played their role in my life, regret is not sufficient motivation for me to embark upon the risky endeavor of time travel. Ultimately, the notion of correcting past mistakes is appealing, but not sufficient; I am cocky enough to conclude that my own repository of humiliating and unfortunate moments ultimately form part of a reasonably satisfactory present whole, and that my mistakes have not been catastrophic enough to upend my life in any permanent way as of yet.

There remain, however, a number of other options with regards to time travel. In order to consider them we must depart from the Back to the Future model (which postulates that problems with one's own present are imperative enough to justify potentially screwing the universe) and variants thereupon (such as Jack Finney's fantastic 1995 novel Time and Again, which depicts a secret government project that sends agents to make small but crucial interventions in the nation's past). There remains, however, the notion of traveling forward in time – seeing the future. In this tightly focused schematic of time travel, there could only be one goal in seeing the future—seeing one's future self (and, perhaps, changing one's present life accordingly).

As an early teenager, and in my first years of high school, there is no doubt I would have jumped (or even quantum jumped) at this chance. I spent many hours engaging in elaborate dialogues with my future self, many of which were focused around the theme of my college self having become a 24 Hour Party Person, or at least much closer to conventional notions of cool. There would be boyfriends (oh there would be boyfriends), some casual use of substances, and a variety of fantastically imagined friends, who managed to combine Ivy League smarts with the crass panache of rock musicians too cool to need to know how to play (here's looking at you, Sid Vicious). But now—having attained Ivy Leaguedom, but still at a distance from cool—I feel ambivalent about the goals of fourteen-year-old Talia. The notion that I would in many ways be a disappointment to my fourteen-year-old self is dispiriting, but not crushing; while I have rarely partied for more than, say, 5 hours in a given day (leaving a massive, 19-hour lacuna in my Party Person Status), I feel that I have discovered things in the world that my fourteen-year-old self was simply too young to know about. For example, I have learned to speak Russian and spent a total of four months in the Former Soviet Union since matriculating; this was something that fourteen-year-old me, or indeed freshman-year me, could not have anticipated. And while I imagine fourteen-year-old me would not be displeased at the sight of me, say, picking sunflowers in Moldova, she would no doubt question my continuing lack of sexual prowess, and/or lack of concretely measurable worldly success (I'm fairly certain I was supposed to have published a few novels by now... sorry, younger Talia). The result: I am forced to concede that my past self's expectations are not the best guidelines for my life's appropriate course in the present; and, therefore, that imposing twenty-two-year-old Talia's life values (or confusion) on the life of, say, forty-year-old Talia might face similar limitations. That life, as checkered with regret as it is, seems to be capable of granting enriching experience (or at least providing the space for self-education).

The only remaining truly desirable form of time travel, then, is one that totally transcends my own life. Woody Allen's recent movie Midnight in Paris follows the adventures of Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who displaces himself in present geography (moving to Paris from California), only to find himself mysteriously displaced in time (back to the Lost Generation's literary Paris). Despite sharing some themes with other cultural touchstones of time travel – most notably, the recurring trope of the time-traveling automobile, although this one is a neat vintage model complete with vintage drunken passengers-- Midnight In Paris has a different take on the purposes of time travel. True to Klosterman's notion of the self-congratulatory time traveler, Gil is transported without any particular mission, and the vague sense of dissatisfaction that is his animating feature remains unchanged. He moons around the picturesque streets of '20s Paris, and is, improbably, embraced by a broad swath of Paris's intellectual elite; Stein, Dali, Picasso and the Fitzgeralds, among others, weigh in on his mediocre novel and his inchoate, seemingly irresolvable life problems. Moreover, he allows himself to be lost in the bewitching gaze of Marion Cotillard, who, like him, is romantically obsessed with a previous time. Back in the future, he finds himself a footnote in the life of a footnote (Cotillard's character is briefly one of Picasso's many concubines; she writes in her journal about a “charming American” whose only salient features seem to be his soothing voice and continual air of confusion). Time travel, in Allen's conception, is little more than an extension of geographic tourism; like many members of the modern literary upper-middle class, Gil travels to discover an enduring truth about himself, with the aid of implausibly helpful natives. (In this case, the ultimate conclusion he draws is that his wife-to-be is kind of bitchy, and that love is easier in French.) For all its lush cinematography, Midnight in Paris is little more than the thinking man's “Eat, Pray, Love,” with a host of celebrity cameos you can actually feel good about, because the relevant parties have been dead for long enough to be chic again.

Perhaps because I am lucky enough to not be a Woody Allen character – as a female, I would no doubt be either a manic pixie or a shrill blonde-- my ideal time travel into the past would not involve such ahistoric machinations. I will confess I have fallen in love with times past. In particular, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century-- roughly 1890 to 1920-- have struck me over and over again as one of the most culturally fertile periods in the world's history. The seeds of a changed human existence were sown then; the Hebrew language was revived, in a strange time paradox of its very own; Dadaism and Surrealism flourished, as did their Fascist counterpart, Futurism, in an efflorescence of bizarre manifestos; the world erupted in a meaningless war and a proletarian revolution; and above all Europe was united in a prevailing and absolute faith in the power of ideas (although that power often turned out to be almost mind-bendingly evil). And yet—were I to travel back in time and observe my favorite era, one which I have obsessively studied over much of my educational career, I would not presume to talk to Tristan Tzara in person. I would not (though I would be tempted) break up the Paul Eluard-Gala Eluard-Salvador Dali love triangle and take one for myself. I would not seduce the Hebrew poet Shaul Tschernichovsky, no matter how appealing I currently find his moustache. Instead, I would like to be a mute observer, without participating in any way.

Unmoored in time, and existing before my own birth, I would be squarely in the yawning gap in human knowledge that precedes and follows the brief tenure of our lives. True to Klosterman's indictment, I would not significantly change any element about myself—but I wouldn't seek to change the society around me, either. Instead, I would seek a kind of self-erasure: paralyzed by the idea that any action of mine would have impossible, catastrophic ramifications, I would sink into that paralysis with the easy comfort of a dreamer. I would be a tourist that takes no pictures and has no conversations. I would not try to discover any enduring truth about myself or anybody else; I would not seek out the ultimate history "scoop," kick-starting a prominent academic career. I would try very hard not to catch diptheria, but otherwise would take no precautions at all. Slipping behind the wheel of my time vehicle of choice, I would fly back, back, back to a time before any choice I have ever made or will ever make could possibly matter. I would fly back to a time when everything I have ever loved to study was in a perfect state of irresolution. It would be like the small and inconsequential act of backwards time travel that occurs each time you watch a movie again, knowing the ending, but it would be my continual, all-enveloping present. It may very well be that a life of absolute nonintervention is the perfect refuge of the truly lazy. But I, the indolent, ponderous, perpetually yearning prospective time traveler, am perfectly OK with that.

1Klosterman, Chuck. “Tomorrow Rarely Knows.” Eating the Dinosaur. 2009.

The whole earth is intoxicated into blossom.

Reblogging this passage from the Brothers Karamazov, inspired by spring:

""I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. ""

On Novels in Time

Today as I was out having a smoke on the red, rainy Mac-quad picnic table, someone looked at the copy of Infinite Jest I had in my lap. The book is a stout thousand pages, and I am a little more than halfway through; I read the first five hundred pages on winter break and am finally, finally getting back to it. Anyway, this boy asked: "Are you reading that for one of your classes or for fun? It's huge."

I have had a fair amount of experience reading through huge novels "for fun." I put 'fun' in quotes because reading a big, fat novel tends to be a commensurately big and complicated experience for me. Everything about these novels, these fat-ass, inflated, mostly nineteenth-century novels is big (except the print): big characters, big, involved storylines, big voices narrative or otherwise, big arcs. Each one of them has a different set of experiences attached. One thing that runs consistent through an array of novels as diverse as The Adventures of Augie March and Anna Karenina, though, is the length of time it takes me to read them.

I've shopped Phillip Fisher's class "The Classic Phase of the Novel" twice in my almost-three years here, each time dropping out after the first lectures, too intimidated to read a Big Fat Novel every week. I can't remember if Phillip Fisher said it or my brilliant friend Spencer Lenfield did, but something also rankles my nerves about trying to cram all that prose into my head every week. It's entirely possible that I am making a virtue out of my own vice of slow reading, but something strikes me as a little off about trying to apply the values of industry and desperate effort into the act of novel-reading. Which is not to say that I haven't had to do my fair share of reading under duress--that's definitely an integral part of my experience as a comparative literature student. But something about Big Fat Novels demands the succor of an extended period of time, at least for me. It took me eight months to read Augie March in senior year of high school; I would dip into Bellow's dense, antic, rolling prose for an hour each night, or less, with many-week intervals in which I simply went around the business of my life and came back to it when I remembered.

The result of that attachment is a kind of sentiment that links the book, somehow more intimately, with the time I read it. It's true that rapid reading, which I often engage in and allowed me to devour The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, hungrily, on buses in one weekend and practically lick my fingers, leaves a vivid and dreamlike impression. The product of years of writing falls feverishly on you, leaving a knotted jumble of images and incidents, a muzzy sense of "style" enveloping your memories of the book without individual phrases and sentences. But slow reading--lazy reading, unindustrial and casual, spread out over months--confers an unseen benefit. Reading Augie, I had the sense of a life running parallel to mine. Neatly in the confines of the book, Augie had the air of an occasional confidante, someone I checked in with once in awhile. I was desperately enraged at that book at one point: Augie spends the first three hundred pages or so in dense, urban Chicago, pinging like a stoop-ball through the city having unlikely adventures. Then midway through the book he follows a black-haired woman to, no shit, write about iguanas in Mexico. This was practically the last straw for me; I threw the book across the room and let it lie dormant for a few months. Then I came back, penitent, and sat with Augie through Mexico and the iguanas and his flight to France. At the end of the book Augie is sitting on a train. He left me then--on the train past the end of the book, perpetually in motion. The feeling I had then was a feeling of bereavement--that Augie, my antic, nomadic hero, was finally still.

The Magic Mountain, a Thomas Mann mammoth which took me a similar period of time the next year, had a different feeling almost. The book takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and chronicles in exasperating detail the experience of one Hans Castorp, in the sanatorium for seven years. Almost nothing happens. He speaks to the woman of his dreams, a fellow patient, exactly once. In untranslated French. He smokes cigarettes without relish (all the tuberculosis patients smoke, gotta love the 1800s) and has interminable conversations about ideas. I complained bitterly about this book (my family will attest to how much I complain over my books) but finished it out of some dogged sense of duty and curiosity. In the end, Hans also leaves the sanatorium. On a train. Indefinably changed. I read the book on my year in Israel, miserable over the expectation that I would learn Torah for twelve hours every day and even more miserable at my failure to live up to that. The big, humpy mountains, like dried-out breasts, lowered their slanted brows at me, and the date trees withered under the sun. The plows were grey with dust and the cowbarns were biley with shit. I liked to dip in to Hans's sanatorium, watch him eat platters of smoked meats and steal the X-rays of his beloved and babble on and on about philosophy. It was a kind of exasperating peace, a restless stillness to contend with mine. I battled that book to the quick through three consecutive copies (one fell apart and one was lost and one remains on my shelf at home, with the rest of my spiny conquests). A novel read over time creates a sense of parallel universes. Creates a distilled past that enters the bloodstream of your present, and makes your life a queer amalgam of both.

Reading, in the conventional wisdom, will shortly be or already has become a rare experience precisely because of the time it takes. In a digital era of ease and leisure so it goes, the time that a novel takes up has become demode, burdensome, impossible. I guess it's no surprise to anyone that I am a Luddite about everything and especially my books (no surprise Kindle presents please), but to me it's precisely that burden--or gift--of parallel time that give novels their value. It reminds you of the arc of your life, present as it passes, logs the growth of its characters in a way that reminds you of your own growth.

One of my favorite Big Books as a kid was "Sophie's World," a novel that was also an introduction to some of the major ideas of Western philosophy. Fittingly for a book that dealt with the quandaries of being, the novel ends with the heroine discovering she is in a book and having an attendant crisis that dissolves the narrative. Reading that growing up -- well, it freaked me out, but also made me wistful. Like a lot of articulate and highly self-centered people, I've often imagined being a character in a book, with the end of the novel being my death. But something that intrigues me about these novels is that the novel doesn't end in death; the death is implicit, in metaphor, but it isn't written out. The fact that the novels end before the life does--just as I finish a novel before I finish my own life--implies that there is living beyond what can be captured on the page, any page, even a perfect one. I cherish the illusion that Augie and Hans Castorp and Vronsky and Levin are all alive somewhere, animated by the act of my reading, like Neil Gaiman's idea that gods we believe in are physically created by that belief. Regardless, I've had the pleasure of living in their lives as well as in mine for awhile, a gift granted to me in exchange for the time I put in, the months I colored with their adventures. To me, great novels (although Fat Novels are not always great novels) retain their relevance precisely because they demand an outmoded sacrifice of time. I hope to always be ready to give that to them.

it's official

I have bought my tickets to Odessa, and there I shall be, from June 10th to August 17th. The thought is unbearably exciting, if terrifying. I will be alone in a city by the sea, one that by all accounts hit its heyday in the nineteen-twenties, but for the time being is full of beaches, nightclubs, and monuments to dead writers. I'm bursting with excitement for the hundred stairs that loom up from the sea, for the stuffy environs of the Jewish museum, for the soft lime buildings, for the black and winsome decrepitude of Babel's infamous Moldovanka neighborhood, the site of Judaism's most colorful criminals. I'm excited to see the old offices of Ha-Shiloah, the first real Hebrew periodical, if they still exist.

I'm excited -- scared, excited-- to write my first novel, which is my plan for the time. I'll be writing the story of Moyshe Berger, Hebrew poet, born, like Xena Warrior Princess, in the heat of battle -- or, at any rate, pogrom. I'll be landing in two thousand eleven and writing my ears off back into the nineteenth century, borne (as Gatsby) ceaselessly back into the past. The waves beating on the port, the bazaar you have to hide your wallet so carefully when you walk through, the mayonnaise-doused food, slippers on your feet when you're a guest, and some apartment I haven't rented yet and can scarcely imagine -- the stuff of lonely and marvelous adventure. I seem to always undertake my adventures alone in the summers--or at any rate with no one I know along. Everything feels slightly unreal, sun-crisped and very un-Cambridge, and I take all the colors back with me to be sorted through at a later date.

Ten days or so after I arrive -- as if to punctuate the foreignness of the endeavor--is the Eve of Ivan Kupala, which I've seen depicted with beauty and nostalgia in the films of Dovzhenko already.

Here's the Wikipedia description:
"Kupala Day (Feast of St. John the Baptist; Russian: Иван-Купала; Belarusian: Купалле; Ukrainian: Іван Купала; Polish: Noc Kupały or Noc Świętojańska) is celebrated in Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine currently on the night of 6/7 July in the Gregorian or New Style calendar, which is 23/24 June in the Julian or Old Style calendar still used by many Orthodox Churches. Calendar-wise, it is opposite to the winter solstice holiday Korochun. The celebration relates to the summer solstice when nights are the shortest.

...

Many of the rites related to this holiday within Slavic religious beliefs, due to the ancient Kupala rites, are connected with the role of water in fertility and ritual purification. Youths would jump over the flames of bonfires. Girls would float wreaths of flowers often lit with candles on rivers and would attempt to gain foresight into their relationship fortunes from the flow patterns of the flowers on the river. Men may attempt to capture the wreaths, in the hope of capturing the interest of the woman who floated the wreath.

There is an ancient Kupala belief, that the eve of Ivan Kupala is the only time of the year when ferns bloom. Prosperity, luck, discernment and power would befall on whoever finds a fern flower. Therefore, on that night village folks would roam through the forests in search of magical herbs and especially the elusive fern flower Chervona Ruta."

Bonfire festivals! Wreaths in the hair of Ukrainian maidens! And me, little chubby dark Jew, catapulting herself into the middle of it. I can hardly wait. Maybe a fern will flower just for me.

HOLY CRAP WHOA SCHOLAR MOMENT

so i'm up at 3am after working on my junior paper for basically two days straight, freakin out too hard to really write, reading myself into corners upon corners.

finally I am translating in lieu of getting perhaps to the meat of my paper and I come across this ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND RADICAL QUOTE by the dude I am writing about, Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, called by some the Hebrew Nietzsche, a guy who was forced to divorce his first wife at the age of nineteen for reading forbidden books,

a guy who learned german and french and hebrew et alius and produced a troubling and magnificent corpus largely untranslated into english,

and here i am just working away at him like a devil on a handsaw for my obscure reasons

and here is this marvelous countermyth against all those stagnant narratives of rabbinic judaism
this argument for strength that was to closely prefigure some of the ideals surrounding the early pioneers of Israel, obviously somewhat derived from Nietzsche whom he read a lot of but just INTERESTING AND AWESOME especially for people familiar with biblical narratives as i have been lucky or strange enough to have my head soaked in CHECK THIS OUT especially jews especially:

We had two kings. One ruled over all of Israel, and the other began his command as king of Judah: David and Saul! Saul was head and shoulders taller than the rest of the nation, a man of sentiment, great and brave of spirit. …when he fell upon his sword before the Philistines could abuse his body, then all in us was silent, astonished at his fortitude of spirit. And David, a small youth, ruddy, was not fated to be chosen as king by the people. He was taken from his flock of sheep and rolled in the filth of rebellion, until he rose to greatness; he brought down the tribe of Saul in blood, ousting one and burying another. He made promises and broke them, bloodshed was in his house, malice and separation between him and the people. … And hark to this: Saul did not sing a song to God, on the day God saved him from his enemy David; and when the spirit of God was upon him, he commanded another to take the lyre in his hands and play before him. –But David the king was the sweet singer of Israel, and the creator of prayers for innumerable generations. Who understands this contradiction—perhaps the greatest sinner is also the most prayerful. Prayer comes to man for his mistakes! He who kills the shepherd and takes the flock—it is his heart that strikes at him and he who pours out his heart.

I see before me Saul the King of Israel, sitting and leaning upon his spear, and his eyes gazing at the hills of Israel. Many great thoughts are in his heart, of his throne, of his kingdom and of the future of the nation, which differs from that which secures its path by the ways of the histories of our people, and he sees the shadow coming from a distance, the shadow of David. –What a song would have remained of his divulgence, had the king opened his mouth and given us from his soul a song of his terrible strength. And David inherits him in life, and after his death is our mouthpiece… God, what I have loved and what I have hated! The lyric of the sinner and he who causes others to sin comes to cleanse our lives. The songs of our man became our prayers. Instead of the song of expansion and conquest of life in strength, the song of outpouring and the fracture of life. We shall not sing, unless we pray; we shall not live in trumpet-blasts of strength, but in lament… … Our weeping, our entreaties, are abundant; but of the songs of expansion, that which does not come out of the suffering of life, but conquers life—we have not one of its attributes. We cannot live; but how quick and resourceful we are at blessing and cursing…

haunting.
amazing.

nabokov and me

I am an unabashed Russophile. Anyone who knows me knows it. Chances are if you see me in the street I will be wearing my roommate's frayed herringbone coat, smoking a cigarette with one side of my mouth and with the other side muttering absently in Russian--whether recently memorized vocabulary words, lines from movies, songs from Kazan' (the Russian city in which I spent last summer), or just a simple muttered "nu, chto eto takoe?!" ("What the hell is this?!)" --the latter provoked by Boston's hyperfickle weather.

As to why I love Russia so much--the language and the culture--despite the former's difficulty and the latter's abundance of problems... This is something hard to answer, like any complex love developed over a number of years. I do know why I started studying it -- the literature. Ruslit is a glorious discipline unto itself, and its wealth is surprising, given that it developed relatively late. Russian literature was largely nonexistent until the nineteenth century; something about the largely illiterate population (but then again, most world populations were illiterate relatively recently), or the way nobles were so fiercely subject to the tsar, or the relative isolation from the influences of the West until Peter the Great had its way... regardless, Ruslit's first real hero was arguably Gogol, anyway a Ukrainian, vernacular and pungent, born in 1809 and matchlessly adept at pissing off the tsar. Russian literature was an infant compared to English literature, German lit, or French lit; and yet somehow even in its infancy it came out dancing. A clumsy Cossack reel. Reeking terribly, and speaking fiercely, an extreme and volatile condition of humanity. Dostoevsky's heroes are gnomic and coarse, wheeling, blind-sided and half-drunk, into their terrible fates. When I read these guys in high school, and also especially the bitter tonic of Soviet poets, I knew I had to learn the language they could pulse and be in. So I plunged into six cases and a set of phonics I described in a freshman-year blog post as "a glorious mouthful of throat cold." I haven't looked back since.

But all this brings me back to a certain Nabokov. He's always on people's lips, especially studiers of Russian, and especially around here, where he did something private and fetishistic with collecting butterflies; a friend unsuspecting of my animosities sent me an email when the Crimson (our newspaper) was doing an article about him, asking whether, given the sympathies mentioned above, I studied Nabokov.

Well.

I hate Vladimir Nabokov. I mean, insofar as you can hate someone who is (a) dead and (b) not a known committer of heinous crimes and (c) taught at Harvard and collected butterflies.

I am a compulsive finisher of books. It is near-physically painful for me to put down a book before I've finished it, and especially given how bumbling I am with objects this has resulted in more than one tearful loss on my part. I have finished books that took me eight months to a year to finish; I have finished books that I put down for seven months for a breather in the interim; I have finished books I actively and outwardly scorned, complaining all the while. But I just couldn't finish Lolita.

I got past all the tricky bits, too--the whole car chase, the florid word games, the steamiest of the rapes. But something in me snapped when poor pregnant Lolita was taking her stand and I just couldn't go on.

I guess in my head Nabokov is always, oddly, paired with Steinbeck--someone he would have undoubtedly scorned. Nabokov was all about scorning--there's one magnificently crabby interview with him in the Paris Review which is more than worth a full read.

A choice quote is here:

NABOKOV

... Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.

...

INTERVIEWER

What have you learned from Joyce?

NABOKOV

Nothing.

etc.

Anyway, what's in common between Nabokov and Steinbeck? Arguably nothing, besides some passion for cars in an American milieu, a kind of restlessness. No doubt Nabokov would have condemned Steinbeck as a simpering American--with his cutting word, "poshlost," about which more later in a subsequent post. (The quick definition, also in that interview: " Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ") I find pairing the two, Steinbeck and Nabokov, in my head is most intriguing because of a fundamental opposition. Maybe one I invented. I read them in subsequent summers--I read East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath on my farm-summer, working out in the fields and reading into the setting sun. And I tried to stumble through Pale Fire and quit, puttered out, in my summer in Russia.

I guess what really bugs me about Nabokov--something I can't be mollified in by his stylistic pyrotechnics-- is ... well, the cumulative effect of reading too much of his work is a kind of attrition for your respect for humanity. At least mine. Nabokov is a jeerer; which is all well and good, there's a lot to jeer at in every society. But too much jeering and your face gets stuck in a grimace...Tolstoy always said that he intended Anna Karenina to be a very different book; Anna became so sympathetic a character almost of her own accord. In a piece of Nabokov's writing, everything feels very tightly controlled. And the jeer shows through everything. Tanned Lolita, the embodiment of temptation, is a cruel joke; the one book of his I've managed to finish, Laughter in the Dark, tellingly culminates in a man being blinded, then shot, by his kittenish sixteen-year-old lover. At the end of the day, the fate of the poor lecher is meant to be funny--his guts spilling on the floor, and the little lady absconding with the gun, into the sunset with the man he's been inadvertently financing her flings with. But I find it hard--maybe I take myself too seriously, am too easily offended--I find it hard to view a human being as a punch line. The joke falls flat, hollow, and makes a ghastly echo. I'm too ready to forgive the poshlost in others, recognizing it so fully in myself.

Which is where Steinbeck comes in. What made Steinbeck so powerful for me, in a very lonely summer when I tripped all over myself in a grotesque parody of manual labor and chopped rhubarb until I couldn't see straight, was the power of his forgiveness. For every crude broad character, for every archetypical exchange, there was a bracing dose of that powerful love, that redeeming love. When Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man at her breast at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, it's puzzling, jarring, even shocking--but it's not a punch line. The force of love courses through the breasts of the girl, as through human hearts suddenly reminded of their purpose.

Perhaps it's a flaw of mine that I look to literature for that kind of moral renewal. And there are a lot of writings I enjoy for their stylistic merit or pure entertainment value, outside of any spiritual resonance. But there's something about the active negation of that resonance in Nabokov--that willingness to utterly write off those who don't fit into his criteria, both in personal consideration and in his works, that makes me shudder in repulsion. Then any stylistic innovation feels like adding insult to injury; the ugliness of the statement is not made more palatable by its added fripperies, in fact the opposite. I guess I feel that literature, too, has an element of moral responsibility--one that it can evade but not utterly abdicate, or actively renege. I recognize that I might be part of a prudish minority on this, and lumped in with the poshliest of the poshlusty. But I think literature undermines its own relevance, already precarious, when it denies its own responsibilities.

Which is not to say I think that literature needs to be all sweetness and light--far from it. I will gladly climb down into the pit with Ivan Karamazov, and wallow in his importunate drunkenness. As long as I can stand with him and say to Aloshya,

"I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. "

'kafkaesque'

is one of my least favorite adjectives. I think it's almost always used wrong, and even when the situation might somehow be actually Kafkaesque (your train is stopped on the tracks for 17 hours with no explanation, and all your fellow passengers inexplicably start howling all at once) the adjective is woefully chintzy and inadequate.


That being said.

I've spent the past few days, 2-4 hours a day, verifying the titles and series numbers of identically bound volumes of Israeli statistics from the 1970s...and 80s... and 90s. A dull maroon. Full of population densities, tourist hotel statistics, and car accidents.

Somewhere Josef K.'s tormentors are present. If they had faces, it's possible they might be smiling.

To quote Alfred Austin, who is a poet I just discovered by Googling Sisyphus:

"`Why was I chosen for this hateful task,
Fantastically futile, which the Gods
Lay on their victim, for their own disport?
Rather a thousand times upon the wheel
Would I, Ixion-like, be racked, or lift
The tantalising gourd-cup to my lips."

The poem is called 'Sisyphus'... OK, fevered love for the nineteenth century aside, I'm VERY GLAD some stylistic mores have changed. Saw Robert Hass give a magnificent reading yesterday, his face all carved up with skin cancer and a giant bandage over his nose like a half-invisible man; perhaps half-invisible is what the face of a colloquial poet is supposed to be. I fell in love with his poem about Grushenka, of The Brothers Karamazov, "I am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name is Dmitri." You can hear him read it here: http://selectedpoems.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/robert-hass-i-am-your-waiter-tonight-and-my-name-is-dimitri/

Also, since we mentioned the nineteenth century, I will quote some excellent and snappy lines from Hass's poem on the subject, "The Nineteenth Century as a Song":

"
Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century

while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs."


I love me a poet that can address finger fucking with frankness.

I feel kind of shitty that I seem to be able to address nothing but literature in this blog as of yet; we'll see how things go. I am still battling Vlad Nabokov into letting me write something of a polemic against him.



Also---I've received a few complaints about the name of this blog. Notable critiques include that it is "half fart joke, half too precious," &c. I am now announcing a name this blog contest. Something that puts the "fun" in "profundity," or a soft lob at my own narcissism, or whatever it is. I am open to suggestion. (A life goal of mine is to always remain open to suggestion.)

-Talia

a translation, and some thoughts

So first off I thought I would start with a translation... I was flipping mindlessly through the Internet, and because I had a sad mood of love on I decided to google Anna Akhmatova (also to shake myself out of my Tetris fixation, another of the great Russian inventions). I also remembered, lovingly, how the Russians of my acquaintance pronounced her name: not 'Anna Akhmatova,' but "AnnachMAtova," eliding the last A in the first name, the 'Ma' sliding out eagerly... anyhow, I came across this poem-- it's hard to use any adjectives for her poetry besides 'lovely' or 'haunting', so in the interests of not disgusting my readership I will refrain from any adjective at all. But I did a translation, anyhow, because the only translation I could find online (a good one, by Jane Kenyon) only encompassed the first stanza.

Akhmatova's picture was busy staring me down from all the poetry sites, with her razor-sharp unparted bangs, a bent nose like a boxer, hooded eyes... not a beautiful woman. Also, impossible to look away from. And born in Odessa--which anyone who knows me knows is my dream city, the one I will finally get to this summer. I will probably get my just desserts and be disappointed. But right now I am happily dreaming, in Cambridge, of an Odessan exile from earth.

But I digress: back to the poem. This was a hard poem to render into English, because a language with cases like Russian can express things a lot more economically. As you might imagine, a language with no need for clunky prepositions and articles has the upper hand in terms of meter and rhyme. Like most Russian poems, the language this untitled poem uses is sparse, and rigidly metered. I tried to reproduce that effect in addition to following the rhyme scheme in this translation. Translating poems is like walking blindfolded over a tightrope with a small child balanced on your nose--it takes an impossible amount of attention sometimes. (And sometimes you produce metaphors like that in attempting to describe it.)

Akhmatova wrote the poem in 1934, in Leningrad... students of Russian literature and history (the two are more intertwined in that particular nation than any other I can think of except Israel--but more on that later) might quail at the date, knowing that it was deep in the heart of the Stalinist Terror. Akhmatova's ex-husband, father of her child, had been executed by the Soviets; her poetry was subject to an unofficial ban that made it impossible for her to publish original work; this poem was written a year after her rumored lover, Osip Mandelstam, had written the poem that would later prove to be his death sentence (the "Stalin Epigram," nearly always introduced as "the infamous Stalin Epigram," a work with more balls than anyone thought could ever be crammed into fourteen lines). As in most of her work, she's part dour mater dolorosa, part viciously literate, all far-seeing and shrewd. Rumors flew about Akhmatova, and in particular surrounded her relations with both Pasternak and Mandelstam. Part of the rationale of Soviet authorities in censoring her work seems to have been her rumored sexual promiscuity, so it's good to know that love was just as much among her habits as grieving. And yet... It's possible that my love of twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literatures have a common factor--tragedy is their natural idiom. But I digress again. The poem is shorter than its introduction, but aren't they always?



Привольем пахнет дикий мед,
Пыль - солнечным лучом,
Фиалкою - девичий рот,
А золото - ничем.
Водою пахнет резеда,
И яблоком - любовь.
Но мы узнали навсегда,
Что кровью пахнет только кровь...

И напрасно наместник Рима
Мыл руки пред всем народом,
Под зловещие крики черни;
И шотландская королева
Напрасно с узких ладоней
Стирала красные брызги
В душном мраке царского дома...

--


Wild honey smells of freedom,
The dust--—a ray of sun,
A girl’s mouth has violet’s perfume,
and gold has none.

The mignonette smells of clearest water,
And love of apple-wood.
But we’ve found out forever after
that blood smells only of blood.

In vain the alderman of Rome
washed his hands before his men,
under their black and wrathful cries;
And in vain the Scottish queen
scours her palms of scarlet drops
in the choked gloom of the kingly home...


1934
Leningrad





Next time, I promise, it will be Nabokov.
Maybe even later tonight.

an essay about ideas

So here's something I wrote this week about ideas. It's strange and trippy and started out as a letter to my friend Pete Davis, who is an idea man par excellence - check out his amazing idea/company here: http://www.commonplaceusa.com/ It's a little ironic to be blogging an essay that ultimately points out the failure of the Internet as a vehicle for ideas. But you work with the medium you can, right?

Anyway, I call this - well - a hybrid of an essay and a poem, dubiously historically rooted. Or: a natural history of ideas.

--


I’ve been imagining a kind of historiography of ideas: lucky for me, the big privilege of the poet is to walk through imaginary countries, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for. One thing that’s struck me about this fixation on ideas I have is that it all seems to start in the nineteenth century—the big era of progressives and their fervid projects, in the big stewpot of egalitarian America. I’m also kind of stuck on the nineteenth century--and I’ve had trouble moving on.


It’s 1750...the printing press has been around for a few hundred years, but has had little success among the little-educated masses of Europe. The serfs of Russia are still bound to their fields, toiling with little hope of recompense. The dream of freedom will wait for them for another century. In the Indies, in the new colonies of America, the slave-ships are still docking by the hundreds. And on the backs of these workers—in the drawing-rooms of the nobles, in the new coffee shops springing up all over Britain, in the freshly decked-out quarters of the new petit bourgeoisie, even in the dim study-houses of the Jews—the first birth pangs of the real idea are beginning. Ideas beforehand have a little bit of fragile history: the records and philosophies passed, hand-written, from elite hand to elite hand, the small illuminations of the monks through humanity’s enfeebled ages. But it’s long enough after Gutenberg now—a little light is peeping in. The small, ghostly mouth of the idea is beginning to speak. How strange an idea is: an entity with no counterpart on earth, born out of thought and borne on by thought, the unique province of mankind... pluripotent, but alone utterly powerless.

In the printing presses and the coffeehouses and the study rooms and the drawing rooms, aloof from the ignoble striations of the society that gave birth to them, ideas are beginning to hatch and pass from mouth to mouth and hand to hand... Romanticism, Impressionism, socialism (1840s), Lamarckian (1809) and Darwinian evolution (1859), the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Mill and Schopenhauer and Bakunin... the birth of innumerable imagined republics is beginning. And spreading, for the first time, out of the little drawing-rooms of the richest—into the public blood.

It’s a heady time—the birth of the idea. Writing about Nietzsche, Lechower, one of the first visionary Zionists, said—“What I can say of him—he found a bowl deep in his spirit and upturned the bowls of everyone else. And replaced it with his own, a bowl overbrimming with a new and beautiful essence.”

Whatever you say of Nietzsche—the nineteenth century is the time the bowl of human nature first began to be fully upset. The first imaginings of human potential—the notion that that potential could be limitless—were taking root in human hearts. Men began to look to their fellows and imagine themselves bound together as nations, began to thirst for lands in which to root that public body, free of the shackles of empire. Others looked at the seemingly impassable chasm between classes and began to imagine it pregnable. One man made a machine that could capture the human voice, speaking; another made a machine that could capture the clear image of a man, harnessing light into stillness, stamping curved glass with a truth hitherto unknowable. Out of the consciousness of individual men, that clamorous darkness we all possess, ink began streaming from pens and then from presses, all with the same new, imagined, unimaginable message: the world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.

Steam poured into valves and the valves formed themselves into automobiles. Man, who had yearned from the dawn of time to sprout wings, constructed them out of wood and metal and the brittle but immeasurable force of his own ingenuity. The serfs shed their broad breeches and their ties to the brown land and became the black mass of the cities, that nervy, malleable mass they call “the people.” And the ideas streamed towards them: inchoate...unreal...unstoppable. In the nineteenth century men stopped looking back to the charred gates of Eden, and looked to create a new, perfect garden: the garden of ideas—a paradise that had never been. A peaceful and ethical garden: everything in neat rows, so carefully planted and tended that nothing could ever be as it was before. And how could it be? No one had ever attempted this!

But by the twentieth century, the paradise of ideas had become a dark garden. Socialism became Communism, raised up its red flag, and felled whole regions; the air of Europe’s countries was clotted with smoke; nationalism had showed its claws, and raked the land with greed, making colonies out of all the earth. Out of the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines blared the unified assent of thousands of voices, no man distinguishable from the great roar. Little words in the mouths of scholars and students became bullets, filling bayonets; and the earth was filled with trenches, and the trenches were draped with the bodies of young men whose ideas were draining, with their life’s blood, into the razed earth. By the middle of the century the bodies could no longer be counted: lost to ash; only a few gold teeth; innumerable under unmarked earth. Or stacked: in neat little rows. With dust filling their mouths, the dead could no longer disturb the garden of ideas; their stiff fingers would never muss the shell-pocked furrows.

But by the end of the twentieth century Europe was fatigued by blood. The flag of Communism fell over Russia, and the masses pulled Stalin down by his cold stone nose. They were weary of being the masses. They were weary of waiting for bread. They were weary of mourning their brethren. The smoke of the eternal memory flame, lit in every city and village for the fallen, stung their eyes and cleared them. The masses wanted to be men again. Each from a womb. Each with a name.

The privilege of an idea: it’s born to a man. Men’s privilege: their fathers die, and they rise up in their place. As a result, the memory of mankind is short; its little sight is poor. Even if ideas had spent themselves utterly in blood, it’s possible that someday men would forget their bankruptcy. Very few ideas are immortal, although all can be; some are as short-lived as their makers, and are blind as frogs in their last days.

Another privilege of a man: when he falls to the ground, he may lift himself up to his feet. And when he puts his hand to the ground again, he scoops up a cup of earth, and he lifts it to his mouth.

A new kind of idea began to be born: instead of turning all the earth into a paradise, man began to look inward, towards himself. By the end of the twentieth century, men had begun to doubt the sweeping power of the old ideas. They fixed every idea they saw with the stamp of its maker, the date of its origin. They looked deeply at their hands: they saw a tracery of veins, each leading in to a sole, inviolable center. And they said: no two men can be connected at the heart and survive; how then can we say this of whole nations?

They did not seek, any more, to shake the earth down and rebuild it again. They wrote new ideas in the fog of their breath on their mirrors, and they kissed their own lips. From their lips emerged a new song: the song of gain. The song of gain issues from one mouth, alone; but when men sing it in their thousands, the whole earth trembles with its discordant music.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had given men the earth: had filled maps with names, had filled the names with teeming cities; had filled each man’s mind with his own importance. A pity in man: the bride of self-importance is avarice, that hungriest of sirens. The engines that had begun to work in the nineteenth century grew fatter still on the earth’s deep reserves, and the rivers grew sick and blenched and gushed filth. Slender steel trees sliced the sky of cities into ribbons. And most remarkable of all: from the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines men created thinking-machines. They could think but little. They could see nothing, unaided. Really, they were nothing but mirrors—mirrors that men might fill with pictures no one could have imagined before. With the aid of these thinking mirrors, men could stamp their names on the air, could sing the small songs of their own importance. Ideas that might have seemed immutable—earth-changing—in the nineteenth century now flashed quick as flames and were gone, sliced into ribbons by the unstoppable mirrors.

And the pictures continue to flash. And still men sign their names on the cold, cold glass.

I will tell you who I am: I am a woman in a mirror. Each day I see my own memory cut into thinner and thinner ribbons. I am weary of signing my own name on the air. Fragile collection of syllables that it is, it grows weary with use.

I will tell you what I want: I want to turn away from the mirror. I want to walk back now: I am weary of the path we’ve taken. Most of all, I am weary of looking only at myself.

I turn away from the mirror and I look out to the street: sleeping in houses are my brothers and sisters, lying awake under cold stars are my brothers and sisters, stooping in hot sun far away are my brothers and sisters. Each from a womb. Each with a name.

Brothers and sisters: I want to turn back to the birthplace of ideas. I don’t want to wind up the bloody spool of the twentieth century—even if I could. But I’m sick and tired of the song of gain: a poor song with one discordant note, with one weary refrain.

Before it’s gone, I want to lean down to the ground and pick up a handful of earth. I want to stand up on my own two feet and cup my hand to my mouth.

I look down at my two dusty hands: the pallid skin, the tracery of veins. I listen to my blood. In my blood is an old song. Many of us have forgotten it; the first singers are long dead. But it’s there, pulsing, hovering, just under the fingernails:

The world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.

hello friends.

I decided to start a new blog. I feel ambivalent about this project-- the Internet is already clotted with vanity projects, etc. etc. -- but I also have a lot of ideas and the occasional unprompted essay cluttering up my word processor, Facebook doesn't seem like the appropriate medium to convey serious thought, and, well, what's a girl of the "me" generation without her own heaping helping of vanity?

So here is a blog.

The title, in case anyone is curious, is based off an extraordinary stanza from an extraordinary poem. It's by Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-American poet and one of my personal heroes (he's partially deaf and speaks with this thrilling, super-loud Slavic slur that's to die for--cf. recordings here http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/poems/ilya_kaminsky_at_bowdoin_college_february_2_2006.shtml). The poem is called "My Father Between Yes and No," it's very long and glorious and also Googlable, and to my knowledge unfinished. Here is the stanza:

" I imagined myself a caravella
sinking towards sleep,
four-years-old on a summer night,
listening for my father's return.
He steps into the darkened room,
touches my cheek.
Father the wind. Child the boat.
Wind touches the sail!
In the morning secretly, in his ear,
I whisper the dream.
And he smiles, saying, Lada.
"Dear" and "Ship," two words in one,
dynasty of green light.
A word harbor welcomes us, saying:
in this we can hide, we can live.
Lada, my father's voice. This sea.
This sail. This tender wind. "


"A word harbor welcomes us": I've felt the longing for that word harbor since I could read, I think; call it the product of a troubled mind or an active intellect (often hard to distinguish, let's be honest), my literacy has always been hungry, restless, full of an animating desire for refuge. I hope to write a novel this summer. A lot of writers say that reading is the key to writing well, that if you read enough, the words fill you up and start tumbling out of their own accord. I think this is true to a certain extent. Really Good Writing, the kind worth the capitalization, certainly sets my nerves stinging. Sometimes, when I'm reading something transcendent, I go outside and my blood is so excited I get a kind of auditory hallucination: I imagine I can hear the hiss of plants growing, and the cars rushing by sound like the surf. I've spent a lot of hours of my little life reading, and all those words upon words are, well, present. Even emphatically. And maybe jostling out. But there's a lot of audacity in turning from the reading to the writing--in saying, I can create a word harbor for others, instead of just resting in one already made for me. It's pretty crass to assume you're worthy of an artistic destiny (or any destiny or calling at all). Desire has a lot to do with it, but I have also got to summon up the chutzpah from my tummy. Which may be overlarge, but quails easily.

So this is a space--impermanent, easy to click on, easy to overlook, and maybe just for myself--to put a hold on the frightening assumption of that destiny and get to work thinking out loud.

I hope to write posts in the next few days about:
the history of ideas since the nineteenth century;
why I hate Vladimir Nabokov;
some kind of breathless hagiography of Ilya Kaminsky and/or Isaac Babel;
a few musings on Hebrew poetry in the early twentieth century;
a confused 'how-to' for defining yourself against a canvas of generational apathy;
what I learned herding sheep for a summer;
and other things that will be determined by unpredictable measures.

It's the province of the poet--and now, the blogger--to create imaginary countries with abandon, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for, and furnish it with wonky and imperfect inventions. I intend to fill this blog with wonky inventions, and I hope to hear some of yours, too.

-Talia