news bit.

Talked to my sister-in-law and brother on the phone today. They live in Rome, together with my 3-year-old nephew. But this isn’t about them, it’s about a news bit.

Do you know why there was no electricity in all of Italy for an entire day recently?

Because a tree fell in Switzerland.

speech! speech!

Today, Mikhail Gorbachev received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Brown and gave a lecture titled “Democracy’s Impact on Globalization.” It was truly a privilege to listen to this intelligent, diplomatic, humble, utterly humane politician. It’s in large part thanks to his “daring… and restraint,” as Ruth put it, that I have been able to go back to Russia after emigrating; thanks to processes he helped set in motion, people are now less afraid, more politically active over there. To take a country as twisted and stifled by its own governments as the Soviet Union and turn it around, never losing sight of humanity in the process, is admirable.

He didn’t say anything new, by any vaguely politically aware person’s standards; nevertheless, it was an excellent lecture to read (and to hear) in the current political climate here in the States. He talked of real democracy, not only on a national but on an international level. He talked of the need for popular vote, pointing out that world leaders get elected by 25-30% of their populations, considering the nonvoting masses and the (fewer!) people voting for the opposition. He said that the UN needs to regain momentum and authority. He did mention Iraq, stating unequivocally that, although Americans did create the mess, it would be wrong for the world to not participate in cleaning it up, because it would only promote divisiveness. Later on, during the Q&A, he harshly criticized the U.S. for its imperialist attitude, said that imposing American will on other peoples is not acceptable and does not promote democracy, and quipped that the U.S. needs perestroika as much as Russia and Latin America do. Throughout his speech, Gorbachev repeatedly placed emphasis on peace and the betterment of the human condition (not his exact words) as the ultimate goals.

The simultaneous interpretation was atrocious. Having done it in the past, I know what it takes; and this guy was just plain unprepared. He was bad. I wonder if he’s Gorbachev’s “own” interpreter (unlikely, given the quality) or one provided by the university (which would be shameful). I hope that, if the text of the speech is posted, it is a better translation.

Although work has been proceeding apace, most of the week’s important happenings have been of a personal nature. It’s difficult to write a work-related entry when one’s emotional self is otherwise preoccupied.

Nothing drastic is happening, I just felt the need to explain the silence. Since this is supposed to be a weblog and thus Frequently Updated, and all.

I’ve been doing some more recentering, connecting and re-connecting with people via my favorite methods of interaction (one-on-one or in very small groups), searching for – and finding! – equilibrium. This semester trips on the heels of a turbulent summer, and sustainable strength is a most appealing quality-of-life enhancer. I’m pleased to say that so far my attempts at increasing daily stability (thereby enhancing productivity) have been reasonably successful. Will our heroine become a mellow-voiced, light-emanating-from-center-of-forehead, new-agey bore? Not bloody likely. But the light is becoming bright and even, indeed.

autumn’s here, and more artists are dead.

Shards.

Right around 11pm last night, a kitchen shelf decided to crash spectacularly. It was the one holding the sugar, flour and wine glasses, dividing that particular cabinet in two and overhanging the space where the plates go. Happily, I think none of the plates are broken; as for the glasses, well, the universe seems to have attended to my de-cluttering desires and left me with exactly two of them. Which is as much as I need, bar the couple of times a year when I Entertain with Wine.

Most of it amused me; cleaning up glass everywhere late at night wasn’t quite as amusing. When I say everywhere, I mean in my living room, too.

In other news, Mikhail Gorbachev is speaking at Brown next week. Tickets are distributed today and tomorrow; so I’ll be going to get one. Should be interesting.

Digitizing the Roland corpus is easier on the hands, thanks to the excellent scanner-cum-OCR-software in the Anthropology Department. They don’t mind me using it, either, as long as nobody needs it right then.

Art’s mortality.

Shelley Jackson announces Skin. Excellent idea, not to mention an excellent writer. What, you haven’t read The Melancholy of Anatomy? It’s hypnotic. She’s written and drawn a children’s book, too. Hers is some of the most interesting contemporary fiction I’ve read.

Hello, biological clock.

I thought I was too young for this. A combination of events – a fertility-in-Europe project at work and an ongoing conversation about family structure and childrearing with a friend, not to mention a couple of close friends about to get married and thinking kids – has been rekindling my thoughts of having a child. Won’t be for a while; I’m not ready yet in many respects. But I’m so curious to know what it feels like to be pregnant! It’ll be an adventure.

In other news, the book review I submitted to RCCS, apparently, doesn’t suck. This is wonderful news, as I was nervous about this one: the book’s kind of seminal, and was published a while ago. It took a lot of work to write the review; but then, I’ve no idea how long others spend on writing them, so this may be normal. I’ll let the world know when it’s published.

Digital Variants

I’ll be doing some work with Domenico Fiormonte on his (and University of Edinburgh’s) project Digital Variants, a “contemporary authors digital archive.” Living, breathing, writing writers donate various published and unpublished versions of their texts to the project. You can see the evolution of a piece from one publication to another, for example. Faculty has also made some of their relevant teaching materials available, and some student essays have been put up as an example of the usefulness of variant-based study of literature.

Happy? anniversary, darling.

Thirteen years ago today my parents and I got off the plane in JFK and immigrated into the U.S. After we and our documents were thoroughly checked, the NYANA rep took a cab with us to our hotel. “To freedom,” he said, as we were exiting the restricted area.

In other news, my wrists and forearms are hurting in a typical RSI fashion. Tendonitis, more precisely, said my doctor this morning. I’m not entirely sure what this will mean for this Web log, but “laconic” does come to mind. I’m fascinated to find out whether I can actually stand to be laconic.

Weekend misc.

My place is a disaster, as I rearrange things and put other things in their place and throw out or give away what I don’t use. When I’m done with this project (probably sometime in October), I’ll have less Stuff and it will be glorious. Meanwhile, hopefully the apt. will at least look respectable by the end of today.

Here’s an odd etymological moment. Walking away from my office the other day, shaking my head at the thought – I’m ABD; actually within reach of finishing. This doesn’t happen to people like me. – I wondered, to whom does it happen? The word that came to mind, the adjective to describe a kind of person who is not me, who belongs in my place, is solidnyi. In Russian, this denotes a person grounded, weighted down with a respectable baggage of knowledge like with sandbags, someone not bloody likely to be blown away by the slightest wind, someone… solid.

Oh. There’s a linguistic connection out of nowhere. Thank you, brain.

Yesterday was full of green and yellow and blue, all the calmer primary colors.¹ Perhaps it’s my insides’ continued refusal to concern my self with the war not mine that kept red at bay. Perhaps it’s the leisurely morning, waking up for half an hour, finally stretching into the quiet at 7; long drive to Somerville’s reward of linguiça for breakfast in a place with green and turquoise walls, in the company of two kind sporty spice, whose faces sparkle and glow even when they’re slow and sleepy. Or, then, sitting outside at JB’s, talking family trees and Ukrainian ancestry, wondering if our great-greats might have met. Or Davis Square’s warm metal benches, Russell Hoban causing heat around the eyes as novemberish London sweeps and twists me in, down to the Thames where Orpheus’ floating head sings soundlessly, signs half-undeciphered, echoed decidedly in Herman Orff’s [post]modern life, myth creeping in and out of familiar geography with words so different from Gaiman’s, floating in a – sea? no, a stream, a chattering brook of human hands and smiles and ice cream cones carrying me as white noise does, taking care not to disturb, and I share the sunny day with them but remain entranced by Hoban’s words in a way I haven’t been since Harry Mathews…

Having walked and walked and walked with John, who seems to enjoy Boston as much as his New York, having chimed the chimes in the MIT subway station, gone down to the river to see the sailboats, walked through MIT through Indian grocery with samosa snack and too-sweet lassi to Harvard Square, having chattered and laughed and taken photographs, I reluctantly take my leave of him and other MUDfriends, heading towards Davis and my car uncharacteristically early, in an attempt to feed recent homebody tendencies and the desire to have a consistent sleep schedule, because something, dollop of conversation perhaps, reminds me of early to bed, early to rise and I want my four walls, I want to avoid driving sleepy, I want to be leisurely and not tortured about the over-hour-long drive back. On the way back, remembering the three new used CDs I’ve scored for free by bringing in a large stack of mine, in goes DJ Spooky’s Optometry, and how did this escape me before? – it’s jazz! wasn’t the sticker enough of a clue, the cornered announcement of a special guest appearance by Billy Martin? I’m stuck in traffic going through Boston, but nothing matters, it’s jazzy and trancy and smoothly then hip-hoppy, and the sunset’s subtly purple – ah, there’s that red, but smoothed out, calmed, lulled by the blue in it; sky turns darker darker dark, and headlights flash back to the trance of driving cross-country, except now it’s only for an hour then I’m

home

and Afrocelts break my heart.

¹ Green’s a primary color too: in theatrical lighting, it’s green, blue and red.

Theory and history and one in the other. (Is this nesting?)

At lunch with Roberto today, I found myself formulating for the first time why I find most theory boring, if taken apart from any primary texts to which it could be applied. I don’t have a very good handle on it yet, but as a start, the sort of theory that I’m talking about is verbose and usually has schools. It frustrates me when theory is presented not as a lens, a filter, a secondary through which to view what’s Really Important (a text, a piece of music, a work of visual art), but as an end in itself. That’s what I find boring. I also noted that there’s a lot more theory flying around in the field [1] of literature than there is in, say, art or music. Those, the “applied arts,” have more history and less theory.

But historians have their own theoretical approaches to explaining the past, don’t they? So where does history end and theory begin?

[1] For the record, I do find that the academic separation among form[at]s of artistic expression is artificial and mostly nonsensical.

Busy, body.

As my compatriots stop to consider the implications of today’s horrible anniversary, I largely tune out the world until the evening in order to get through the day.

It’s been a turbulent week or so, complete with sickness, homecoming and post-BM depression. One piece of radically good news is that I have a job. Hooray, it’s an interesting and novel research fellowship! Working with Prof. David Kertzer should be fun; he seems to always have a million projects going, and I get to learn things like strategies for preparing a book for publication. Also, importantly, I do not have to worry about whence this semester’s bread originates.

I am slowly ridding my living space of distractions: they finally disconnected cable modem service today, and my file folders have been cleaned out, purged of two-thirds of all the paper in them. For the next several weeks, I’ll be digitizing the rest of my Roland materials, and the rest of the semester will see theme and imagery markup for the corpus. This allows me to ignore for the moment the frightening prospect of having to come up with an interface for the project: this is by far my weakest knowledge base. We’ll worry about this next semester: I’ve given up trying to learn anything computer-related only in theory. Learn by doing.

Unless it’s Perl, for which O’Reilly has already graciously provided exercises.

My household is slowly starting to feel like mine, again. Cooking is a sublime pleasure; I am discovering better ways to cook for one, which has always been difficult in the past. I am also eating significantly less than before I’d left for the summer: a week in the desert after two and a half months’ worth of sunny California fruits and vegetables, followed by several days’ drive, seems to have finally knocked my body out of the habit of eating when it’s not hungry. This is both pleasing and centering.

Speaking of centering, I cannot recommend The Yoga Deck highly enough, for those interested in such things.

We seem to be getting a humanities computing seminar off the ground here at Brown. Invited talks will be open to the public, I’m presuming; so stay tuned for announcements. I think the first talk is mid- or late October; when it gets confirmed, I’ll post details. The list of speakers is pretty impressive.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about ways of advertising the course I’m teaching next semester (Codex to Code: an Introduction to Humanities Computing) to the community at large. It’s a University Course, unaffiliated with any specific academic department (although co-sponsored for approval by Italian Studies and Modern Culture and Media). Nobody has to take it to fulfill a major, but then, Brown’s undergraduate careers are largely unstructured anyway. It’s never been taught before, so it seems important for the word to get out. I’ll probably send out sets of flyers to instructors teaching related courses this semester, and perhaps drop in on some class sessions taught by people I know. Posting ads in key campus locations also seems potentially useful, but I’ve no clue as to its real value. Other ideas, anyone?

Another man done gone.

Warren Zevon is gone. We’ve known for a while this was coming, a friend wrote, but still it gives pause to a sunny Monday. Besides being generally brilliant, Zevon wrote “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” which will be part of Roland^HT.

back, in color.

No matter how hard you try, it is impossible to unpack and clean and generally feel a grip on life in one day.

I AM PROVIDENCE, says H. P. Lovecraft’s gravestone. Gunther and I did find it, with a little help from our Google.

I’m cosmically exhausted, but battle with illness is proceeding better now that driving hundreds of miles is not daily reality. My mind is laced with things and people, tied tight with the largest ball of twine in the world. (Photos to phollow, when developed – ah, analog cameras!)

I’m also finding myself all too ready to revert to old, frustrating, poor time-management patterns; so about ten minutes ago Cox agreed to disconnect my ‘net service from home. This means I’ll be doing everything internet-related from the university, which should suffice. Home will be quiet, and the inside of my head will be quiet, and sanctuary is an appealing prospect. This is a long-winded PSA: in short, e-mail is no longer the most efficient way to get in touch with me (although I’ll still likely check it every day). If you don’t have my telephone number(s) and want them, uh, e-mail me.

Exhausted or not, tomorrow is a work day. I’m not ready for this.

Trippin’

Ah, Denver. I am sitting in a funky coffee shop with ‘net access. I’ve decided not to kill myself driving, so will attempt to cover less ground today and tomorrow, and sleep in real beds.

Want to call me on the road? Reception has been spotty, but then, I was in the mountains. It should be more reliable now — and in any case, if you call and leave a message, I’ll be glad to call you back. The number is eight-eighteen, nine-fifteen, V-I-K-A. Yes, I am a dork. What?! They did ask me if I wanted anything specific for the last four numbers!

so much

to say –

but will have to wait,
which is a shame
because ‘net access is free at this Delta, UT library.

I’m driving so many miles alone. Marvelously contemplative, this is the perfect setting for right after Burning Man.

I’m taking notes, and will post them (and photos) later. Soon, life will resume; but not as we know it.