The Dordogne

After a long run in the park today, I went down to 35th street to eat a korean rice-cake and dumpling soup. The waiter, who resembles my uncle and who I recognized on the street the other day dressed fashionably in black, asked, before I even sat down, if I wanted number 50. I said, no, and he asked again, and I said, no, again. As soon as I sat down, I looked in the menu and saw that number 50 was something I had never ordered before.

At the table next to me were a white man who seemed to be in his fifties and a black man who seemed to be still in graduate school enthusiastically engaged in conversation. Over the course of about half an hour, they covered topics including chartered buses (which the black man was was getting his license to drive, although he had gone to Carnegie Mellon, which the white man mentioned was "one of the best schools in the country"), the funeral of Ronald Reagan, who the white man called a pig, the cuisine in Bologna, Bill Clinton giving a talk to a group of elderly black ladies who, the white man said, he had "eating out of his hand," and traveling. The white man was explaining that his brother, who had gotten his MFA at RISD and eventually became the art director of Time magazine, where he was making lots of money, one day dropped everything and went off to Egypt, and said that Egypt was "a place that exceeded your expectations." Then he asked the black man where he had been that exceeded his expectations, and I thought, the Dordogne.

I went to the Dordogne, in France, when I was 16, as part of an art program run by Parsons that entailed two weeks in the Dordogne followed by two weeks in Paris. We were in the Dordogne primarily to see the cave paintings, which were about 15,000 to 20,000 years old. I had seen images of some of these paintings in history books in elementary school and wasn't very excited to see them in real life. They seemed like the typical scratches one would expect cave people to produce, and I wasn't sure about the purpose for young art students of seeing something so primitive. But when I saw them, I saw that they were as expressive, aesthetically interesting, and technically sophisticated as anything that had ever been produced since. It was then that I thought, despite all our scientific developments, the spirit of human beings has, since their beginning, remained the same.

Apart from the cave paintings, many other things in the Dordogne exceeded my expectations; the landscape and people were more beautiful, the bread and croissants more delicious, the people friendlier, the air softer and milder. In comparison, Paris was disappointing.

Phantastic Gogol

Last week I went to Brown, in Providence, RI, to talk to students about my experiences in the "real world" after studying Russian Language and Literature as an undergraduate. On my way to the train station, to travel back to New York, I stopped by the List Art Building where almost everyday for a semester I walked up six flights of stairs to the painting studio. The walls in the staircase were covered with images. They're different now, of course, but the smell is the same. It was a Proustian moment.

A professor who had taught me Pushkin 16 years ago gave me a hug when she saw me. After my talk, in which I had mentioned the impact on my life of the works of N.V. Gogol, the professor said, "I guess we all have our Gogolian moments," and added that she wasn't sure whether that was a good thing. Only later, walking aimlessly around campus at dusk, did I think, it's not that we have Gogolian moments, but that there is a little bit of Gogol in each of us, which is, like certain bodily odors, repulsive yet irresistible.

The newest member of the faculty is a Gogol scholar who has just had a book published on Gogol and Gombrowicz. I searched for the book on the website of an academic bookstore with the keywords "Gogol" and "Gombrowicz" and improbably found it. At the bookstore today, however, the woman at the information desk couldn't find it. I had told her I wasn't sure what the exact title was, that it was something like "Phantasmic Matter," but that it certainly had the words "Gogol" and "Gombrowicz" in it. I spelled out Gombrowicz, "G-O-M-B-R-O-W-I-C-Z." She typed something in the computer and looked at the screen, typed something again and looked again, typed again and looked again. I wondered whether I should have spelled out Gogol. I said, "I saw on your website that you have it," to which she replied, "but you don't know the title," and I said, "no, but it's something like Phantasmic Matter." She typed and looked, and typed and looked. I started to want to make a scene.

Earlier, as I was browsing, I had heard the woman tell a colleague some insolent news about the government's recent bailout plan for companies like AIG. There was something about her tone I didn't like. She seemed to want to appear smart in order to conceal deficiencies. When she finally said she couldn't find it, I said, "I found it on the website just by typing 'Gogol' and 'Gombrowicz.'" Indeed, I had said that I was sure only that those two words were in the title. She typed again and found it. Then she said, "Phantasms of Matter," emphasizing the "of," to correct me. It occurs to me only now that she might not have known how to spell "Gogol." Maybe all that time she was typing, "Gogle," "Gogel," or even "Google."

Apart from Phantasms OF Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) by Michal Oklot, I bought, Polish Memories by Witold Gombrowicz himself, My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen, 54 by Wu Ming, The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels, and Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Of these, only the Derrida and the Oklot were not discounted.

Genazino, again.

While waiting for my eye exam on 78th street, I looked at books at Barnes & Noble on 82nd. I stuck my nose in several different "recently arrived" books and became sick with the impression that everything not only sounded the same but seemed to be singing the same whining song with the piercing chorus, "yes, of course we know there's no point, but what else is there to do?" No one seemed to be presenting things anymore as unbearingly grey, flat and numb as everything actually is most of the time.

Then I remembered reading Genazino's Die Ausschweifung on the plane to New York. As I was crossing Broadway toward the bookstore, I had imagined describing Genazino to someone who had never heard of him, that is pretty much everyone I know, as being so plainly convincing that it's irresistible on the one hand and devastatingly tedious on the other. After 30 or so pages of being entrenched in his off-white, muted world, I sigh deeply, close the book with a finger keeping the page, and wonder what it's all about anyway.

Having seen nothing by Genazino in the quite vast fiction section on the second floor, riding the escalator down to the ground floor, I imagined translating him and thereby introducing him in the United States as, perhaps, the next sensation. Then I considered that there might already be American versions of Genazino, in, say, someone like Richard Ford, whose writing repulses me, maybe only because I actually know people like his characters and don't think they're worth devoting any story at all to. Maybe, I wondered, part of Genazino's appeal is that his characters are too foreign to trigger any prejudices in me. And yet, underneath the level of consciousness infected with prejudices, he describes lives that I can relate to poignantly enough to even learn from.

By the time I reached the ground floor, I decided that the project of translating even a single novel of Genazino would be beyond my competence and, therefore, an utter waste of time. With that settled, I went toward the cash register to pay for a pocket Moleskine music notebook, in which I wanted to transcribe old English songs to play on my clarinet. Standing in line, I noticed that one of the cashiers was occupied with a woman who had already completed her purchase but lingered to talk. She kept talking and talking, and I finally said under my breath, "Sie steht da und quatscht ohne Ende! Es ist ja nicht zu fassen, eh!" Of course, I noticed that I dared utter the criticism aloud only in German, a language I doubt anyone in earshot could understand, and wondered at my cowardice. Now I wonder whether German is simply the more appropriate language for that kind of criticism, directed at noone in particular and lacking any practical effect. In any case, I can't imagine saying something like that in English - "She's standing there and talking endlessly! It's unbelievable!" It sounds translated, like something from a Kundera novel. I think in English, or at least in New York, we would say, "What the fuck is she doing?"
I can imagine something like that being said in German, but only from an alcoholic impatient to pay for his beer.

Something With Happiness

On my way home from the bookstore, I saw across the street the beautiful Turkish butcher standing in the doorway to his family store, leaning against the side, wearing his thin, white, cotton "lab" coat. That image seemed to represent to me just then all of life itself, or maybe just of spring. It's about 10 degrees celsius in Berlin, warm enough to run in shorts. It almost makes me want to cry, though at the same time it's too bad, I thought approaching home, I missed the snowstorm in New York a few days ago. As always, I want everything, or maybe just both what I have and what I don't have, but not necessarily everything else.

I had gone to the bookstore to pick up the latest novel by Wilhelm Genazino I had ordered a week ago. Both last week when I ordered it and today when I picked it up, I couldn't remember the title, but knew only that it had the word "Glück" (happiness) in it, and I referred both times to the title as having "something with happiness" in it, "irgendwas mit Glück." While looking for the book on the shelf, the woman at the store today said, "Genazido," "Glück." "Genazino," I corrected her. Then she found it and read the title aloud: "Das Glück in Glücksfernen Zeiten." "Glücksfern" is the kind of word made possible only by the lego-like quality in German of constructing words by putting words together. I can't translate it. But the title means, roughly, "Happiness in Times When Happiness Is Far Away." That seems to me just now to represent all of life itself, or at least of my life right now.

Dreams of George H. W. Bush

I dreamt of George H. W. Bush again the other night. We were planning to meet for dinner, which turned out to be a coffee, although I don't remember having anything at all to drink, or to eat for that matter, in the end. Earlier that day, I met Putin. I told him what an honor it was for me to meet him and then started to try to explain why, realizing rather quickly that this was a dangerous path to travel. Putin smiled, then nicked his head a little, as if to say, "well, I don't think so," but instead he said, "You know what? I don't believe you," which prompted the security guard standing next to me put a gun to my head. Somehow I managed to convince him (Putin, not the security guard) that, despite my lack of eloquence, I was being sincere, and he spared me. At one point I tried to bribe him for my life by inviting him to join me meet Bush later. Actually, I don't think Bush would have been particularly delighted to see that I had brought Putin along, but even in my dream I figured that my life was worth a little social embarassment. Either before or after meeting Putin, I met the Russian president who happened to be Sarah Palin or someone who looked very much like her. She didn't try to kill me, but apart from that our meeting was unremarkable.

I guess Putin wasn't very interested in meeting Bush, because he didn't show up. I sat at a round table across from two old ladies and an old man who looked like members of the only Episcopalian church in a predominantly working class Midwestern town. They sat very stiffly and unsmiling. Everything was in bright starched white and pastels. The room appeared to be the convention space in a Holiday Inn. As Bush introduced the first old lady to me, she stretched out her pinky as stiff and erect as a pencil and pointed it towards me. I felt very uncomfortable not knowing whether I should grab and wag it or bring it to my lips for a kiss. The next lady did the same, and finally the man. I think I decided to wag it after all, which I realized to be a wise decision when it was the man's turn. Then I woke up.

In my first dream of George H. W. Bush, we were on our way to the wedding of Condoleezza Rice, who had been my Russian teacher at boarding school. I was in the car with George, who was driving, and younger relatives, including some small children. Suddenly I realized that I wasn't wearing any pants and told George that I had to get some. He said we had no time. I insisted that he stop the car, but he refused. With my growing realization that I couldn't appear at the wedding of the U.S. Secretary of State pantless, I started to panic, and George finally let me out. Then I found myself in a street somewhere in India where all I saw were souvenir shops. I don't remember anymore whether I had found pants, but I never made it to the wedding anyway.