Shh!

Shhh! The blog silence won't finish just yet. I have so much to write in my working life that it's become the last things I want to do in my spare time. But I still enjoy reading blogs and should really update my blogroll one of these days.

For now, I leave you with this intriguing short film.

Lazy Christmas

[ Image from: http://www.therecipes.net/ ]

Cooking bigos, sipping wine. Lazy Christmas. I've run out of steam for this New World, my smile's unglued and I miss the gray skies of Central Europe.

I'm also out of steam for here (again, right?). But there are other plans. Watch this space if you're not out of steam yet.

In the meantime,

get lazy for another new year.

All the best!

What if a human battery takes a nap?

Remember that scene from The Matrix when they show the human batteries in the real world outside of the simulation? I hope you do. If you don't, you're probably starting college right now or are even a little younger--young enough to have perhaps been put off by the bad sequels so that you didn't want to see the first film.

The reason I'm wondering about this is because more and more often that image of human batteries imposes itself on the images I see in advertisements, in which an oddly chirpy voice says something about "new solutions" for increasing my "productivity."

The one that scares me the most is the one for an "energy drink" (ha! see that, human battery--energy!) that is meant to do something to disrupt the natural processes in your body after a meal--to produce an effect that counters the obvious need to slow down your activities as your blood circulation concentrates on digestion and nutrition, your necessary life processes, instead faking wakefulness to your synapses so that you can work, work, work. The chirpy voice tells you that you're getting rid of a bad and disruptive "feeling" rather than that your messing with cycles that you need in order to live. And then I see the drink at the campus store, right by the registers.

In the health center that my students try to avoid unless their cold symptoms begin to appear almost fatal, there are posters touting the importance of healthy sleep of at least 8 hours per night, praising power naps. But it's the elixir against the bad "feeling" that is much more approachable, its chirpy call, much louder.

Then there are those advertisements for new office-work software and the newest phones. A couple on horseback on a dreamy beach check their work email, a woman on a ski-lift follows the stock exchange. All smile, as being at work on your day off buys them a higher level in productivity heaven, a chirpy voice says something about time-saving. This morning I saw a new one: two children eating muffins, chocolate smeared around their mouths; superimposed on their faces, a graph their parent is inserting into his or her presentation. This is happiness, right? The children enjoying dessert with a parent hidden behind a laptop, since kids never do anything groundbreaking, why not just feed them, put them in a place where you can see them, and enjoy a productive day off with your software and data? Quality time and good work, right, human battery?

* * *

A student emails me asking where my office is, right before our scheduled meeting. She's right opposite the secretary's office, where there's always three people she could ask and they would be able to give her an answer. Or she could use her indeed very "smart" phone to find the office number in her email inbox or on the course website.

I get a lot of similar queries at random times of day and night. Queries about information that is usually equally accessible to me and the students. I hear that librarians sometimes get questions via text messages or chat about call numbers and full titles of books--which the student might just as well type into the library catalog instead of asking about them. So much energy wasted by imagining non-existent pitfalls, so much thinking perversely saved by instant access demanded of people you imagine as "keepers of information." And all it takes is a moment to stop, breathe--sometimes take that dreaded nap or relax into your after-meal energy slump--and ask these really very easy questions of yourself.

[End rant.]

Halleluiah

A hundred and two degrees in the New York smog. 'Halleluiah' by Leonard Cohen playing on her dime-store record player, that song Howard liked to call 'a hymn deconstructing a hymn'. Long ago Kiki had submitted to this musical part of the memory. But it was surely not true -- 'Halleluiah' had been another time, years later. But it was hard to resist the poetry of the possibility, and so she had allowed 'Halleluiah' to fall into family myth. [...] When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Halleluiah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

Reading this in bed last night, I thought first about the time a friend of mine played me Jeff Buckley, the first time I heard him and, at first, didn't like him. Then, I thought what a pity it was that this comparison can't make the younger musician feel proud, since Buckley died almost ten years before On Beauty came out. So it can only make Leonard Cohen somewhat annoyed. But he's probably too zen for that.

Looking for Things to Read that Are Not the Things I Have to Read

Yes, I have lots of reading in the months ahead, and lots of writing related to that reading. (I belong to the "Dorothy Parker school" of writing; well, to some extent -- I hate the writing part, but I'm also increasingly ambivalent about "having written." As you can imagine, I find it all a nightmare and I complain throughout the process, finding new kinds of pain every step of the way. It's an important part of my life and its, hm, meaning.)

Because I have a lot of reading to fear, I'm trying to build an imaginary buffer of non-required reading. I don't know how much of it I will actually read, but I find comfort in knowing about books that I could read without a pencil in hand. For me, this means mostly new books, from the last ten years or so. And, usually, books by women.

Now, the latter is not a requirement but rather a flexible rule that has emerged in the course of my reading life. It's not an ideological stance (I don't think), though it has probably partly grown out of my weariness with everybody reading mostly men most of the time. When you check out people's responses to yet another bookish facebook meme, you'll find that, statistically, that tends to be the case. And I do manage to worry some people with my reading preferences -- there are friends and acquaintances who imagine I'm pretending like it's the 1970s and sticking to a "niche." But, hey, if gender is so irrelevant and we're so post-feminist, why should my reading belong to a niche rather than be the result of perfectly random choices -- the very same ones that result in all male book lists, only with slightly different results.

... and I see I've drifted away from what I actually wanted to say.

During a google search for I can't recall what, I stumbled across this piece, by Rachel Cusk. I then looked up Cusk on The Guardian and now I want to find out more about her writing. Anyone?

And in the real world, I'm supposed to be revising an essay and beginning to read some of the many things in my area. Instead, I'm staring at the yet unread copy of Zadie Smith's On Beauty on the table in front of me(I must be the last person who hasn't read it).

Things Are Getting "Serious"

I often think that I'd like to post something here but then end up worrying about giving away who and where I am. While the dangers are not as great as in spy movies, it would still feel like theft--of my private, half-serious notes and conversations. The crumbling wall between the fictional selves people have been creating on the internet and their public selves, signed by the names in their documents, selves who have bosses and "professional goals," cannot mean anything good.

Sure, I don't like idiots spewing hatred on forums and in comments, but I prefer that a moderator quietly cut them out rather than tracking them down. (Though, yes, I do think they should feel responsible for what they are saying, I just don't think such feelings an be simply induced.)

So the "seriousness" I mentioned has to do with my "professional goals." The quotation marks matter. I think we all deserve spaces where we can take ourselves less seriously and the home isn't quite that space anymore, what with professional emails and chats popping up at 2 AM on Saturdays. There is no more rest, there is just procrastination. If I were to pick a word as my nemesis, "procrastination" would be it. The devourer of my private, non-serious thoughts, the ugly imp that censors my time, making every moment that is not spent working seem over-indulgent.

This year things are getting "serious" in my work life--not entirely, not earth-shatteringly, but enough for me to get worried about the boundaries between the private (and, to some extent, imaginary and not so serious) and the rest (too serious, too real). And that sucks. I like what I do, but I also have many ironic (and sometimes vitriolic) things to say about it. And yet I know that my sense of humor would most likely be taken the wrong way if someone connected the dots.

Hopeless. But, hey, at least I finally posted something ;-)

"I use my body the same way a nurse uses her hat..."

The Fount of Boredom

I'm supposedly writing a paper. But I'm really staring at the computer screen and doing random paper-related things peppered with absolutely paper-unrelated things. Because I feel like this:

Not that I feel like reading this novel right now*; I feel as awkward as its style. Ble.

*It's Henry James's The Sacred Fount, which I must read at some point because it's supposed to be as terrible as this beginning. Pot calling the kettle black, eh...

I'm Back

Don't ask me why. I just love bad writing (reading it, writing it) way too much to stop. If you like it too, please stop by with your cup of tea or coffee and let's procrastinate together.

To clarify the changes in the author blurb: same person, just obsessively changing pseudonyms and email accounts. Please stick with the newest idea.

Much love,

Kawa

The One in Which I Argue with Henry James*

From Azarian: An Episode (1864), by Harriet Prescott Spofford:

If he massacred your dolls when you were children twice (because he found her new hiding place for her toys), it looks like there's no hope for him. Sadly, the protagonist, Ruth, doesn't give up on Azarian even after his grand speech on how he imagines their marriage:

Henry James hated the novel for its 'unrealistic plot', 'unconvincing characters', and abundance of descriptive passages. Focusing on giving Prescott advice (write like French male writers!), James didn't think that the excess in the descriptions could have an ironic quality, or that boredom experienced by the protagonist was quite poignant, not to mention that the two aspects of the novel related to a distinctly different experience than that of French (or American) men.

Azarian would be À rebours à rebours if not for the fact that it was written earlier than Huysmans's novel. Art is an important theme in the novel, but not the "art for art's sake" of the decadent dandy, but the art of women painters (such as Ruth) or women of theater (such as her friend Charmian), or the work of salon hostesses such the mysterious Mme Saratov; art that does not conceal its relationship to money and does not enshroud itself in a veneer of "isolated genius."

The successful artist Ruth believes she has to get married because 'that's just what women do.' As she explains to a well-meaning friend who's trying to warn her about Azarian: "I see what you mean, yet marriage is the natural condition of maturity. Even a bad and selfish man must therefore be a better one if he has a wife If it were question with me ... of marrying such a man as those you knew, I should feel when the dazzle of his days was off how dull and dreary would they wear away. I would bide my time, I would marry him, serve him cheer him, be his slave" (199).

She's tortured by these ideas, driven mad by them to the point when she doesn't realize she's financially independent (her paintings sell extremely well) and that she was much less lonely before Azarian appeared and chased away her friend and love, the actress Charmian.

Azarian is a novel about death of boredom and the delusion of passivity. It's also a novel about women's talent being reduced to craft and fancy rather than artistry and imagination. That's what Azarian does to Ruth and James to Prescott. James accuses her of writing puppets rather than people, but are these categories necessarily mutually exclusive?

*It's easy to argue with the dead--they don't tend to talk back.

Wednesday

One of my three favorite songs about Ameeeerica. The other ones are "Pretty Good Year" (also by Tori Amos) and Hugh Laurie's moving tribute.

Finally, a Penguin's-Eye View of Antarctica on Google Maps

Take me there.

For a summer at Arctowski. I'm not joking, I'm just getting back in touch with my seven-year-old self.

Polska Ska from 1965

Alibabki, "Echo Ska"
from the album "W rytmach Jamaica ska" - Veriton, 1965

Poverty Porn

Poverty porn is, among other things, a genre of Polish literature. It's a relative of the misery memoir, but if they should meet at family reunions, it would be clear they are not on speaking terms. Because the misery memoir is premised on at least the pretense of its author going through hell, while the author of poverty porn is always looking down on hell from the distance of several storeys, typing away gleefully, while her elbows rest on the cushion of her middle-class status and her higher education.

The poverty porn writer is the smartest person you will ever know: he can break down the walls of epistemological impossibility and inhabit the bodies of the underprivileged better than they can. He will tell you all about the filth, offer graphic and heartbreaking description of incest and sex for food, he will even paint a vivid picture of the thought process of an uneducated person, linguistic lapses and childlike logic included. Thanks to his insight you will see what it's like not to have the will to live, not to have absolutely anything to look forward to, and what it's like to eat rotten leftovers straight from the dumpster.

Most importantly, perhaps, the poverty porn writer will show you what it's like to get aroused by all this. Beatings, garbage, teeth and gum problems, blisters, abuse, family dysfunction--she will show you how it can give you a hard on. It's real life, baby. The life around us that we fail to notice but which, in its rawness, has an authenticity we can only hope to emulate.

The poverty porn author not only notices but drinks from this fount of truth as fast as he can type. There's ardor in this, but also a kind of coolness that comes from calling the shots: you all are spoiled and privileged brats, you readers, but the writer is the one who can reach past his privileges into the dumpster of lifeforce, becoming the blood brother of his characters without even pricking his finger.

He knows. She knows. And you too can know some of this if you're willing to spend 30 PLN for a grain of truth that won't -- and don't even try to delude yourself -- give you any comfort. There's no hope for the sad characters of these tales. They go on to reproduce amidst the debris and then they turn into the debris and all you and the writer can do is watch and nod your heads in appreciation of this inevitability.

* * *

That's how I see this genre's modus operandi. I find it difficult to point to a specific "originary work," but the inception of poverty porn is connected to the growing wealth gap in Poland. Perhaps I should say, to the growing visibility of the wealth gap, because, obviously, there has always been a wealth gap, though before 1989 that fact was being covered up quite well by communist ideology and by the absence of celebrity journalism.

The work that stands out to me as the high point (maybe it is the "originary work," I'm not sure) of poverty porn is Dorota Masłowska's debut novel, Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną [Snow White and Russian Red] from 2002; though her column in Przekrój took the pornographic aspect to the next level. I can still recall one of her descriptions, which is in itself a condensation of what all the texts from the column were about. It's a description of Masłowska looking at an old homeless man digging in a dumpster, which takes the form of an ode to the homeless man--it's Masłowska's Petrarch pining away for the forlorn and unapproachable male and homeless Laura, who obviously only seeks some edible leftovers and maybe clothes. The description is quite openly erotic, and all of writing about poverty I have encountered after Wojna polsko-ruska shares that prurient fascination, even if it covers it up with moralizing about the duty of describing "the true Poland that goes unnoticed."

How does it go unnoticed if you all are gawking at it?

Yes, some of the poverty porn novels are pretty good. Masłowska has an ear for language, she is witty, and imaginative. Sylwia Chutnik's debut, Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet, exhibits a great sense of humor and a feminist sensibility (not to mention the author's love of Warsaw, which translates into a gripping portrait of the city). And yet--it's still poverty porn. And it is that because the vantage point of the author, regardless of assurances to the contrary, is high, high above their characters'. It's speculation about poverty, it's like trying on a coat in a second hand shop to feel it, smell it, and leave it there, walking out enriched with a whiff of a different person and of a different life.

However, in imagining a life without the perks of education and an (at least somewhat) well-to-do family, the writers are taking more away even from their subjects--the truth about their existence and about their thoughts. The writers have them pinned down like specimens in glass cases. You can't argue with me, I have whole internal monologues written down in your voice.

And nobody will argue, because how could they? Without the time, and often the ability to write books, and have those be publishable books, on top of everything. And to be able to find a publisher.

Putting all that aside--the position of the impoverished is not a position of authority, not a preferred speaking position, if it really is your lot, and not a literary mask.

So, we could ask, if "they" don't write their stories, what's the harm in someone else doing that? Well, it's not "their" stories then. It's looking down on "them," ascribing traits and thoughts to "them," and getting off on that.

* * *

There have been many similarly problematic cases in literary history: the as-told-to biographies of American Indians where biographers would intervene and have their subject oddly accuse herself of "savagery" against all logic, or The Confessions of Nat Turner, in which Thomas Gray would have you believe that Turner thought of himself as an insane monster.

Editing has its pitfalls too: Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted to take Harriet Jacobs' story and use it in her own novel, and Lydia Maria Child who did act as an editor for Jacobs, toned her story down, sentimentalized it, and gave it a preface that today we would find condescending.

But editing at least doesn't take the subject's voice away from her. And it makes the roles clear: you are the one who owns the story, and I am here to help you tell it.

My largest issue with the texts I accuse of making poverty pornographic is the authors' assumption of a position that is very distant from their actual perspective on the issues they describe and belongs to a weaker party, a party that lacks the intellectual capital to compete with them.

Of course, fiction is not bound to be autobiographical or faithful to any rules but those that it sets out for itself. But when the authors put forward arguments about society and social functions of literature, then it's clear that it's not just fiction and literariness that are at stake here.

If what you want to do is make a statement about society with your work, say who you are and where you're coming from. Say what it's like to look at and not share, what it's like not to be able to completely understand, while wanting to understand.

I'm waiting for works that instead of offering disability fantasies or fantasies about Polish-speaking Roma from Romania, speak about distance, desire, and anger of those who want to understand more. If you're really after important things that go unnoticed, you will have hit the jackpot with this, dear writer.

More Love for Poznań

Because they made another video.

The Strange Case of the Americano

[Image from the facebook fanpage of Café Kawka, Poznań]

Kawa szatan is, of course, very strong coffee, not necessarily espresso. It's the kind you have only now and then, in cases of intellectual emergency. It's best, of course, to have these emergencies in good company, either at home or in a reliable café, where you know you won't get a paper cup with a plastic lid. Kawa szatan needs a comfortable vessel in which to flaunt its aroma and taste.

Kawa szatan is best not had on an empty stomach. It's black and bitter and, thus, breaks very nicely the sweetness of sernik or szarlotka.

How to determine whether your coffee is a szatan or not?

If you're European, the question isn't very pertinent, unless you're a gastric sufferer, in which case the first sip will tell you. For Americans, regular coffee in Europe is bound to have hellish force - but it's not satan if a local person doesn't understand your surprise at its strength.

If the regular coffee is too much for you, order an Americano. It's the opposite of what you think it is: in most places I know in Europe Americano is NOT a coffee with a shot of espresso (like it is in the US), but regular coffee diluted to 'standard American coffee strength.'

I Will Be Moving Soon

It didn't work out.

Restricting access just isn't for me. And worrying about being outed by account-linking, geographic tracking, and whatever the internet coughs up next is definitely beyond me.

I've been thinking about getting out of blogging entirely, but I'm not too thrilled at the thought either.

So on to yet another change of costume: new blogging name, and email account.

If you're interested, please join me here, where I will blog about satan's coffee, Polish politics, expat quandaries, and Poznań cafés. Please drop by because I will miss you otherwise.

Poznań

In spite of all, my favorite city in the world.

Poznań Balloon Story

Sunday morning in June: I was sitting in the first floor* room of Cacao Republika with my childhood friend Iwona, when we saw this:



In the house opposite a window opened onto a room full of balloons and an elderly man trying to navigate between them. He started collecting them and put the first set outside...

... where a lady suddenly appeared to pick them up.

* * *

Part of me still lives on in Poznań, but only in the summer. As soon as the sun disappears, it hibernates.

*second floor in the US

Almost on My Way

After I clean and pack and cross an ocean.