Just So We All Know

Macs can get viruses. And so can people.

At least we can keep each other company.

___

Okay, that was brief, because it was blogged from McDonald's. The first McDonald's in the USSR in fact. A beacon of hipster hairdos, monster lines, pretty nasty McFlurries,* and free wi-fi.


Also, the place I met the awesome computer repair man today after he came to my house, picked up my laptop, took it home with him, recovered all my data, installed a new operating system, and then ran all my crap through anti-virus software to make sure this doesn't happen again. Guh.

Let's take a paragraph to note how strange it is that somebody will totally come to your house within 2 hours and do all this shit for you and then meet you at McDonald's the next day to give you your laptop back. Enh?

However, let's also take a paragraph to note that downloading and installing routine updates on a mac can in fact screw things up. As in, you can get a virus on a mac. Whaaa? Apparement, mes choux.

So, can I just say, and it is not just because I'm writing a paper about temporality, but 24 hours without a laptop makes things feel so weird. Like instead of opening a web browser, I have to stand up and walk over to the balcony and look out the actual window. And then I have to go over to the bed and lay face-down on it for a while. Then I can go back to the table, think of a phrase, and write something else on my sheet of paper with my pen. Time... feels... so... slow... when... it's... not... getting flushed down the crap hole of the internet. If only there was some way of learning that lesson.**

I've now spent over an hour downloading widgets and other software and trying to remember and re-categorize my bookmarks toolbar. It's like crack for the ocd and easily-distractable.

But, most of all, I am happy that I have not had to regurgitate my entire paper from memory. That would have been i-n-s-a-n-e.

Here's a poem that describes what would have been the outcome of that:

Heaven-Haven

a nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb
And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1809

Good night!

*No crumbled Heath Bars, M&Ms, Oreos, or whatever other crap I imagine goes into one of those; just chocolate, caramel, or strawberry sauce. Seriously, strawberry? Can you even imagine what that entails? I'm imagining a microwave.
**Yes, I realize how that sounds. I know.

I Don't Like You, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince

As members of a generation steeped in mass media and nurtured in graduate education, and following the general collapse of established values in the sixties and of revolutionary idealism thereafter, they thrilled to suggestions that their automatic sophistication could see through, and dissipate, the antediluvian authority of their elders. But they suffered, too, from a loss of credible traditions that had made life seem real and reality seem livable. Many works in "The Pictures Generation" exude a melancholy of clever artifice masking inexpressible emotion.

(Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker)

We may not have much to be proud of now, but at least it's not New York, ca. 1977. (Moscow, ca. 1977, incidentally, is another story.)

And Now For Something Completely Different

Pop quiz: How would you pronounce "Featherstonehaugh"?
Give up? It's not what you think.
Whaa?

New nerd crack! (Just in case old nerd crack was getting boring.)

My favorite ones are where they try to return commonly butchered names back to their original pronunciations, such as here and here. The unintended snootiness is utterly priceless.

Also, this one.

But wait! This totally contradicts their attempts at original-language authenticity. Someone should start a petition.

Only Sort of Inspiring (Or Is It?)

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

(Michel Foucault interview in Technologies of the Self)

For all of us trying to write, these words are cold comfort, no? Nonetheless, are they not also secretly exciting?


So, I've decided to stay on and try to write here while I can.

I heard a story recently by the expatriated Canadian Mavis Gallant called "When We Were Nearly Young." In it, a girl goes to Madrid thinking that "if I set myself against a background into which I could not possibly merge, that some outline would present itself." It doesn't work. (Or does it?)

I'm waiting for an outline, too. Not so much of myself, but of the way I want to write about the things that I am writing about. It's coming, slowly, and I'm scared that if I leave and go through all the steps of playing house again, I'll lose momentum and the things that are exciting now will slip my mind.


Here are some boring things that I've been doing to get excited about another Moscow year:
1) ordering books and shoes for MomGote to bring in June
2) reconstituting dried chickpeas for making hummus
3) begging you guys to visit (!)


4) reciting Saroyan: It'll hit you you in July.

Via Post

Thanks you guys for all the love and inputs. I'm still not sure what to do, but at least the sun has started shining like crazy here and I'm feeling like whatever I end up doing, interesting and unexpected things will happen. And things will be fine.

Speaking of, two packages arrived recently. One from myself and one from my hero, Dr.C.,MD, you may know her as Cookiesforbreakfast. Totally unexpected (the one from me was ordered from UDP so many eons ago, I'd just assumed it lost), and both totally extravagant and rad! So, as I've no news to report beyond the weather and my continuing indecision, I'll just adopt the brilliant MTBE-style book review format to convey the packages' contents' bounteous awesomeness (and - ahem! - get Navel Gazing off the top of the page). OK, here we go:

1) F.R.David - The "Stuff and Nonsense" Issue (Winter 2008), de Appel, Amsterdam. [This one was from C., how did she know that it was totally what I needed right now?]

first line: "Words, Don't come easy."
last line: "Is GOLDEN!"

2) Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009)

first line: "In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. Wertheim and M. Viegener, eds., Les Figues Press, 2007), Vanessa Place, Anna Moschovakis, and I were engaged in a conversation about the poetics of erasure techniques."
last line: "Use them all." [Actually, the last "line" is a page with a dot or period in the center, but that kind of felt like cheating.]

3) Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems (UDP, 2007)

first line: "a man stands"
last line: "Gailyn is doing the dishes."

4) Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, eds., 0 to 9, The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969 (UDP, 2006)

first line: "Not '0 Through 9,' we said to each other, that would subsume us into Jasper Johns; let's call it '0 To 9' instead."
last line: "The tape is still available from The Malabe Co., Inc. but the price has gone up to 14¢ a yard."

5) Aleksandr Skidan, Red Shifting, Genya Turovskaya [et al], trans. (UDP, 2008)

first line: "In speaking about 'red shifting' I would not start with the Doppler effect, because it has no room for the word 'red,' just as in subsequent definitions of this physical process, be it cosmological, mathematical, or poetic."
last line: "knives {and}"*

*Those should be triangley brackets, but those doesn't show up in web browsers...

Bonus #1: I uploaded the editorial intro from F.R.David, cause it was just so gosh-darned right about everything. (It's about how art is not about communicating things. To which I say, YES!)

Bonus #2: Here are some of the Saroyan poems:

COUPON
Coupons are the brightest yellowest
Reddest headiest delights on the face of the earth!

--

PLACID TEAS
The cream

made an "e"

in the tea.

--

SONG
My father's my father's,
My mother's my mother's,
My sister's my sister's,
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm.

--

It may
be the
coffee-
maker

Or it
may be
the ra-
diator.

--

I see
this
little

and
even
less.

--

JULY
It'll hit you you in July.