fragments of memories

i was reading this piece in harper's on memory. and the list of memory fragments in the fourth paragraph made memories start to flit into my mind. driving along I-80 in iowa in 1982 and seeing the ditches alight with fireflies - the first ones i'd ever seen. we just didn't have them in south dakota. i suppose it was too dry. 

or a memory of lying on the dark blue scratchy wool carpet in our house in town, tracing the outlines of all the weird bumps that formed the pattern, thinking about how god had a big book with everything i'd ever do written down as a plan. and trying to defy it, thinking, he wrote that i'd move my arm right now, so i'm not going to. and then thinking, no, he wrote that too! 

then a memory of lying on a bridge on a hot summer night, down in the pasture by the lake we'd rented for our horses, surfaced in my mind. it was that life-changing summer where i broke up with my california boyfriend and decided to go to the university of iowa. i can hear the sounds of the crickets and cicadas and the splash of the water flowing under the bridge, the whisper of the wind gently moving the grass, the feel of the warm air on my skin. i don't recall any thoughts that were in my head, only the sounds, smells and the physicality of it.

some memories are so clear, or at least the fragments of them are. and i feel like i don't really choose them, they're just there. 

and now i'll go back and finish that harper's piece. just wanted to capture these fragments here. i'm going to see what other memories surface in the next days and try to capture them as well. then i'll see where they take me.

color pop :: a dialogue with two talented women

i mentioned some months ago, a treasure trove of hand-dyed fabrics that i got from a artistic friend who has terminal cancer. when our local creative group chose color pop as our theme, i knew i needed to make something with the fabric scraps that she gave me. i also realized that the color palette also went with the other treasure trove of samples that another friend gave me last year. it was time to start a creative dialogue with these women. as you can see, olga (the cat formerly known as paws mcgraw) was eager to help.

i got out the scraps and ironed them and just began sewing them together - doing it in a very intuitive way without thinking too much about how it would end up. just selecting colors and sizes that fit together and just sewing and holding them up and sewing some more. as you can see, the color palette is indeed bright and fits perfectly with the theme of color pop. 

once i had enough bits and pieces, i sewed them into mini quilt rectangles, wanting them to be around the same size, so they could hang in a group of three. since we are three women, three dialogues seemed right.

dialogue 1

dialogue 2

dialogue 3

then it was time to quilt. in my stash, i found a spool of rainbow-colored thread and i knew it was perfect for this color pop project. on the back side of the quilts, i used some shibori indigo cotton that i had dyed last fall. 

i had a small fight with my sewing machine, but we worked it out in the end. 

i had a lot of trimming to do, but it felt like part of the process. i quilted in a very intuitive way as well, following the lines as i saw fit in the moment. then switching. it felt like it was indeed a dialogue with the fabrics, as they whispered to me what they wanted.

dialogue 1 - finished with binding and quilting. this was the first one i made and is my favorite. probably because i'm also a firstborn. :-) this one features only fabrics from the friend who has cancer. that wasn't actually intentional, it just happened that way. the intuitive way i sewed the bits and pieces together just happened to come together like that. 

dialogue 2 - i love the block-printed pieces at the bottom and top left - they are from the friend who gave me all the samples and works from her education at what eventually became kolding design school. 

dialogue 3 - this one is another dialogue between the three of us. i hung them on these hangers with the cute colorful clothes pins just to photograph them, but decided that it was also how i wanted to display them at the exhibition. 

the night we hung the exhibition, we got these cute little coronita beers. it took hours to find the right placement for everything. i loved how my works looked together. i had also recovered the chair i've been sitting on throughout corona with some hand-woven fabric that we acquired together with one of the looms we got for the little museum where i weave. 

i bought the beautiful hot pink fleece at a wonderful leather shop in aarhus, thinking i'd make a festive color pop pillow of it. in the end, i couldn't bring myself to cut it up, so i just draped it over the recovered chair. it looked perfect with my mini quilts and the colorful knitted hugging pillows one of the other members made. now my chair is back at my desk and the hot pink fleece and the new recovered look give me a new perspective when working at home. 

dialogues 1-2-3 and my recovered chair, which i called "working from home.”

and the beautiful skirt that my friend lent to me - it's what she made with the dyed fabrics back in the 80s. and it was FABULOUS. what a privilege to wear it. i felt absolutely amazing. i positively embodied color pop. what a beautiful day that was. i'll always be grateful for the opportunity and the dialogue.

a creative treasure trove and a reminder to live life to the fullest

one of the members of our local creative group posted on our facebook page that she was giving away her batik supplies, including a number of cantings (tjantings), which i've long been looking for (they're the little "pens" with a vessel to hold the hot wax). i wrote to her and said i'd love to have them. lucky for me, i was first. she lives only about 10 minutes away, so i arranged to stop by this afternoon to pick them up. i took a bottle of wine, since she didn't want to sell the supplies.

i had met her a few years ago at one of our exhibitions, but she's not a super active member, so i didn't know her well. stepping into her home, i loved how creative it felt...the entry hallway was covered in a collage of wallpaper samples. it's always wonderful to step into a creative home. next up, was a wall of book shelves and two comfy chairs. so inviting and wonderful. she had the things all out on the table and invited me to sit down. 

like the treasure trove another friend gave me last year, she had her extensive notes from her art education, with all the exact formulas of all the colors. she had highlighted some of the most key instructions for me. and it seemed important to her that i could read and understand them. i felt, like i did last spring, so privileged to be given this treasure. i also fear that there is no longer such an education, where you really learn everything there is to learn about dyeing fabric. 

she also gave me her color samples, on which she had carefully noted her exact formulas for achieving the colors, sometimes with multiple color baths. when i look at them, what i see is a quilt. a beautiful, rich, colorful quilt. 

she looked different than when i last saw her. her hair was very short, but i hadn't realized that it was because she had been through chemotherapy. and that that was why she was giving away her batik supplies. she has an aggressive breast cancer and at her last appointment, her doctor told her to think about how she wanted to use what time she had left. what that must feel like. it takes my breath away.

it was sobering to talk to her and her husband about what it's like to have a terminal cancer diagnosis in the time of corona. and even though we only scratched the surface, all of us with tears in our eyes, it was very moving and intense and i felt privileged to be part of the moment, even as i can't even imagine how it must feel.

i can't imagine what it's like, but there, in the moment i could, for just a second, even though it isn't my story. and then i understood the feeling i got that it was so important to her to share her notes on the colors. 

we all want to leave something behind. we want to have mattered. we want to create something lasting. and i want to create something lasting from the fabric she dyed and from her supplies. so i'm going to learn how to use them, even though they require learning about caustic soda. i have her carefully-written instructions and i can ask her for help, as she only lives about 10 minutes away. 

we have to live our lives while they're here, seize the moments while we can, and not waste a single one and leave behind all the beauty we can.

i am so grateful to have her samples and her supplies and i will think of her every single moment as i use them to make something beautiful. it's the very least i can do.

can we get a do-over on 2020?

for several years, i've bought arctic paper's lovely calendar. one year, i think it was 2018, i actually wrote a little snippet of my day in it every single day of that year, keeping a kind of diary, though it was mostly lists and trips and what i did that day, not anything deep or philosophical. still, it was the record of a busy life. i did write intentions for every week on the page for the week, which felt like a meaningful practice, even if i didn't always keep them. it featured beautiful paper that explored the changing light and colors throughout the year, so it had a kind of rainbow theme to it. the words at the beginning were a beautiful musing on time. "time is months, weeks, hours, minutes and seconds. time is seasons. seasons are light. light is a guide through time." it was so fitting for a calendar.

they work with different design schools around europe and have young people design the calendars and they're always printed on arctic paper's own beautiful papers. it's a pleasure to page through them and write in them. this year's was no different. it is a moon-themed agenda entitled "the day begins at midnight" and was designed by students from école estienne's graphic design and art direction students. i assume that's somewhere in france.

it's really gorgeous and i love the words at the beginning, especially since i always consider myself a night person, not a morning one...(capital letters removed by me):

the day begins at midnight, when creativity knows no boundaries.
more than an aesthetically attractive calendar,
we wanted to design something that makes us challenge
our traditional perception of time and creativity.
by visually highlighting night-time in imagery
through its content, this agenda wants us to reconsider 
our notion of the day.

because extraordinary things happen in our minds at night.
we know our subconscious is active when we sleep.
and we know that some people need to relax simply
to get their ideas flowing. some even find that they are
more creative at night, whether asleep or awake
creativity knows no boundaries, not in place, nor in time.

but here, as we embark on the second to last month of 2020, which has already been pretty eventful, i find i must admit that i never used this calendar at all. i didn't write a single thing in it. it's still pristine and beautiful - blank and awaiting words or drawings or doodles, the recording of a life. and i didn't record a single word of this crazy, mad year. it's almost like this clean, beautiful calendar represents a pristine do-over of 2020, just waiting to happen. 2020, between the covers of this journal, is unblemished, unmarred by oafish, spray-tanned, clownish, embarrassing presidents, and deadly viruses, and killer hornets. it's full of potential trips to exotic places, new experiences and even scratched-down notes of wonderful meals made and eaten, friends seen, laughs laughed. in its very blankness, it's full of potential. potential for a do-over of this mad, terrible year. maybe that's what we most need right here and now. or maybe we just need this damn year to be over already. 

i'll order a new calendar from arctic paper when they release it in a few weeks. and let's cross our fingers that things get better in 2021.

ways of saying goodbye

i went to a funeral recently. it was someone who i had served on a board with, not a close friend, but someone i liked and enjoyed spending time with. not all that long ago, she got a cancer diagnosis and it was aggressive and swift, clearly leaving her husband of 57 years and family reeling. she was the type to be organized and plan everything, so the funeral, which she planned herself, was truly beautiful - the songs she had chosen poignant, the way her family carried her casket out to the gravesite and and how it was lowered down in the grave while patsy cline's version of just a closer walk with thee, was played on a tinny old tape player from the 80s. patsy's dulcit tones on that old player were somehow perfect and i even got tears in my eyes as we stood there on a sunny, beautiful autumn day in a picture postcard-worthy little churchyard in denmark. 

it hit me as i stood there at the funeral, tears in my eyes, that i hadn't had the same opportunity with my dad. he died so suddenly and my work life was in such turmoil at that point, that i felt i had to keep my commitment to a big event that was going to go on with or without me. and at the time, i felt strongly that it was what my dad would have wanted me to do. i still feel that. but it means that i missed his memorial service and the funereal shedding of tears that would surely have accompanied it. last may, we buried his ashes in his plot at the cemetery, but i was a beautiful, sunny day and so much time had gone by, there was less sorrow in the moment. my sister and i had had a fantastic road trip with his two best friends and his ashes a day or so before the ceremony, and so putting what remained in the ground was on some level closure without tears. plus, i had a little jar of his ashes tucked into my suitcase, so i knew it wasn't final final. maybe when i eventually sprinkle those on my garden, i will shed the tears i undoubtedly need to shed.

* * *

karl ove knausgaard on never running out of things to write about.

* * *

swedish death cleaning
"it's like marie kondo but with an added sense of the transience and futility of this mortal existence."


* * *

i'm not the only one who has noticed that we can't talk anymore.

to grieve or not to grieve, that is the question

so many thoughts swirling in my head of late, especially as i listen to podcasts, which i do constantly. i don't always know if the podcasts provoke the thoughts or reflect them. a growing suspicion that i suck at grieving has been crossing my mind of late. and then a couple of podcasts i listened to on the way home today covered the topic of grief - this week's death, sex & money and malcolm gladwell's revisionist history touched upon it as well.  i don't know if they helped me work through my own struggles or not.

it comes down to that i don't think i've properly grieved for my father. i shed tears on the plane on the way there, as he lay dying in a hospital, nearly three years ago, but i don't think i've really, truly cried about his death. and i am not sure that i know how. there are times when i miss him acutely. most often when i'm in the garden, which is also where i talk to him. he's come to my sister on two occasions, reassuring her, but i've not even heard a whisper from him. i'm not envious exactly, more puzzled. is it because i lack the ability to open that portal to him? am i less open to it? or am i at another stage of my grief than she is? have i even started it properly? can i even recognize it? these are the thoughts that have me convinced that i suck at grief.

but it's also mom's decline. alzheimer's is so cruel and strange. she's still here, but it feels like we already need to grieve her. i don't even know this strange fabulist she has become...telling lies, or perhaps fractured fairy tales, to explain the world around her in a way that makes sense to her, as her brain fills with holes and erases the old ways of making sense. i worry that my good memories of her are being similarly erased, but i'm not sure that what i feel at this stage is grief. i find it hard to even summon pity, which sounds horrible, i know and then i feel guilty for that. but it remains that it's how i feel at the moment. 

and then i can't help but wonder if i ever properly grieved for sophia. when it happened, i was so sick and we had sabin to focus on, so did i properly grieve her passing and the passing of the specialness of being a mother of twins? i don't know. it seems like maybe it got pushed under somehow and never really dealt with, though i have always been able to speak of it, so it's not like that. but is glibly being able to mention it the same as dealing with it? i suspect not.

but how are you supposed to know how to grieve? i think our culture today places so much pressure on us to get back into the saddle immediately that we maybe don't give ourselves time. maybe grief takes years. maybe it doesn't look a certain way. maybe i don't wailingly grieve my father because i think he lived a long, amazing, worthy life and died the way he would have wished, so i can have nothing but respect for him and and be grateful for the time we had and how he shaped who i am. maybe i don't wail because it was his time and i feel that in my heart and while i am sad for me and for us and for mom that he's not here, i'm not sad for him per se. or maybe i just suck at grief.

with mom, it's more complicated, due to the disease and that she's still here, strangely more physically fit than ever, even as her personality changes so radically that she seems like someone i don't know. maybe grief doesn't come because the time isn't right. maybe i will learn to grieve when it's needed, or find my own way to do so. maybe our grief is singular, individual, so unique that i don't even recognize it because it's so much a part of me.

oddly, i think i've grieved harder for lost jobs than for lost loved ones. what does that say about me or about the times in which we live? what we do is so important to identity that we feel it as a loss of self when we leave a job, whether it's by choice or not. and so a period of mourning follows.

and then i wonder if grief is really about missing who we once were? do we lose that? or do we contain it within us, so there's no sense grieving it...

as you can see, i have more questions than answers. and rather a lack of grief. or at least the ability to grieve in a definable way...

* * *

daily affirmations from lenny.

"fucking up is how you go pro." - words to live by, i tell you.

* * *

i want to be e. jean when i grow up.

contrasts

on the same day, i picked up a vintage typewriter that we bought on an auction because it reminded me of one dad had at the enterprise during my childhood and i also got a new 21.5" iMac to replace my severely aging 24" iMac from 2008. talk about a contrast in technologies. i can't believe how thin and sleek the iMac is! and fast. and quiet. it is good to upgrade, but it's also nice to do a little old school typing. i think it's a little bit of a shame that today's computers aren't going to be able to be acquired in the future as working machines that can be used in the same way as a good old fashioned typewriter.

a question of time

i measure time these lazy summer days in terms of kitten growth. little frieda has come quite a long way since she was born may 22. it makes time seem to pass very quickly when you think of it like that. but at the same time, these long, light days stretch out and it feels like there's time for everything you want to do. it's ok that it takes an hour and a half to pick strawberries, because it's ok to eat at 8 p.m. when it's so light. if it takes another hour or more to hull them and get them into the steamer, that's ok too. time feels like it's enough.

at the same time, i'm acutely aware that time is rushing forward. sabin is growing up and i don't know if i've properly enjoyed her as a non teenager. and now it's fast becoming too late for that. she'll be in the 7th grade in a few short weeks. did we do enough together? should i have kept her home, to spend time with her, instead of letting her go to a summer house with a friend this week? on the other hand, she needs that essential danish summer house experience and she's not going to get it from us.

the older i get, the more time seems to rush headlong forward. my daily photos serve as a memory for me and i am sometimes amazed when i look back and a particular photo was that long ago. often it seems like just yesterday. time gets warped somehow, bent in memory. can i really be this old? have i really lived here that long? was it really so long ago we went to morocco? or spain? or that we met? it was a lifetime ago and it feels like i only just blinked and all that time passed.

so i'm grateful for the summer slowdown of time. for it stretching out and becoming all i need right here and now. and for the golden light that stretches well into the evening. i'll take that for now and try to save it up for those long winter nights.

* * *

more on how we experience time.

* * *

i like this essay on the treyvon martin case.
it helped me understand.
and anyone who calls himself a digital humanist is cool in my book.

* * *

russian intelligence goes old school - with typewriters!

as long as someone remembers

i'm reading orhan pamuk's museum of innocence, which is one long pondering as to whether objects can house memory and feelings. in the book füsun says "when we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. instead, we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them..." my visit to the flea market on saturday rendered a new little collection of objects which feel somehow laden with more or less inaccessible memories, reminders of stories not my own. and yet, i am still drawn to these things.

this old typewriter was there the last time i went to the market, so you might say we already have a history together, or at least that we'd met before. i didn't intend to buy it, but as i was leaving, the guy said 100 kroner and so i went for it. mostly because it still had a little poem in it that must be the last thing that was typed with it.

it's a sweet little poem about a little frog by chief doctor morten scheibel from the hospital in viborg. somehow, such a remnant there in the carriage of the typewriter does give a little bit of access to the stories and the memories it silently holds.

he experimented with the lines...using no spaces initially, then reverting to normal spacing. there's even a word he struck out and changed, offering glimpses of his creative process, left behind in the typewriter. tho' there was a more fetching typewriter there at another stand (and another price), this little poem made this one more appealing.

this camera may have similar secrets to tell, as there's a film still in it and it's on photo #14. it'll need a new battery before i can find out what memories it holds within. and discovering the battery thing makes me think that the other practica i got at a flea market a month or so ago might be ok after all if i just replace the battery.

stoneware plates and bowls keep their secrets more closely guarded. the azur nissen denmark plate is crazed and has a hairline crack, belying tales of long and not always gentle use. i loved the color and the amusing chat i had with the rather crotchety woman who sold it, so already i have laid a thin layer of my own memories onto it. the little bowl is a bit more silent, speaking only through the HAK initials on the bottom, as being a descendent of a long tradition of pottery-making in denmark. i loved the soft colors and the shape and size of it.

this little flat bowl/tray is HAK as well. the simple flower motif reminds me of the flower people sabin drew when she was little, so already i begin to layer my own meaning onto the object. it makes me a little bit sad to think that it found its way to the flea market. it must have once been a present to someone, thoughtfully given and once that person was gone and the story with it, it was packed up and sent off to the flea market. objects only retain their meaning as long as someone remembers.

in the looking glass...

i wrote once about mirrors. and about the version of ourselves we might leave behind in them.  in a room of old mirrors like this one, i was struck again by that thought. there was some magic in that faded, decaying but once grand room. and somehow it felt like you could catch a glimpse of its former glory if you looked just right into the mirrors.

so i took a lot of photos of the mirrors. hoping to capture that moment. that glimpse of the gateway to memories not my own. so present in the air, yet so inaccessible. palpable yet elusive. the air was heavy with magic in that place. it felt so empty and abandoned, but full. i had the feeling we had to whisper and the feeling that there was whispering all around me...silks rustling, voices, music..there but also just out of earshot. it was there somehow, to be glimpsed in the mirrors if you caught the right angle.

so i looked for the angle. at the light. at the puddles of black where the silvery backing is falling away. and i listened. and i imagined i could glimpse all who floated past those mirrors over the decades. and it felt like touching magic.

the nature of time and place

i keep thinking about time. maybe because it feels like it's getting away from me. or going too fast. or that there's simply not enough of it. and i feel carried away on the winds of time like a fluffy feather, without any hope at all of preventing it, time is just going to take me wherever it wants.

there are certain places i've been where it felt like time slowed down and was enough. the half year i studied in russia, time elongated itself and i could fit everything in that i wanted - long rides on romantic old trains, walks and countless cups of tea with friends, spoonsful of homemade cherry jam and  deep conversations, walks in the park, walks in the snow, trips to the opera and ballet, concerts and of course studying, reading and homework. there was enough time for all of it.

my father-in-law's house (which now belongs to my sister-in-law) is the same way. time stretches out there and there's enough of it for you to read another page of that book before dinner, add one more line to your drawing, play one more hand of cards or have one more glass of wine.

i'm hoping the new house is that way too...but i guess only time will tell...

waiting

"A needle creates an intersection each time it pierces fabric," i read on the bee creative blog last evening. and it's been haunting me all day in a lightly different version which was the product of faulty memory on my part: "a needle creates an intersection in time when it pierces fabric."

i've been thinking again about memory and quilts and whether cloth can hold memories. i've got most of sabin's baby clothes washed up and sorted now. i gave two boxes of them (including some, but not all of the shoes) to the local version of the good will just before christmas. i hope someone was able to get good use of those little silver nikes in their original box. the rest of the freshly laundered little clothes are waiting and ready for me to dive in and begin cutting them up to make a memory quilt for sabin. but i fear that's going to be difficult as well. every time i even imagine cutting into those sweet little shirts and pants and dresses, my breathing gets shallow and my heart pounds.

so, while i work up my courage, i'm turning again to embroidery and applique. yesterday, i spent hours (far too many hours), perusing inspiring blogs and flickr photostreams. i am drawn again and again to jude hill's beautiful spirit cloth creations and from her, i found an inspiring window piece on emergence, some beautiful little woven pieces on wake robin, arlee barr's inspiring stitching on albedo, thoughtful stitching on mnemosyne's threads, and the aforementioned bee creative. so much goodness that i was completely overloaded with inspiration.

so i took a scrap of fleece from my latest baby quilt, cut it into a heart and began to satin stitch it to a scrap of nearly black wool with hand-dyed thread i bought here while we watched midsomer murders last evening. a whole day of soaking in inspiration and all that came out of it was a simple little plain heart. i chose the imperfectly focused shot of it above because i think it underlines nicely where i'm at with this one. and where that is is that i'm not sure where i'm at - things are a bit fuzzy. i don't know what it will become. or even if it will become.  it's sort of a waiting piece. waiting while i find courage to create what i really want to create. waiting while i find the courage to do what i really want to do.

secret 28 - my first and only visit to bulgaria

looking for adventure one weekend in the balkans, several of us decided to head to sofia, bulgaria on a bus. we went armed only with an overnight bag, ATM cards and a dog-eared copy of let's go eastern europe. we arrived at the bus station and found our way to the center of town.

it was the late 90s and it was quite evident that the fall of the berlin wall had not been kind to bulgaria. we secured a room at the misleadingly-named grand hotel (why are those hotels always far from grand--it's true in oslo too). the hotel, still being quite soviet in procedure, took our passports. i was used to that and wasn't alarmed (not until later). we stashed our backpacks and headed out to see the sights.

the streets were curiously quiet and there was a feeling of waiting or even more, of hiding in the shadows. there were few cars and buildings seemed dilapidated and uninhabited, tho' they weren't abandoned. we walked around an art museum and in every room were the ubiquitous little old ladies who sit on a chair in the corner of a museum room in any former socialist country, ready to catch you making a suspicious move towards any of the objects. we were a little shocked to see one of them openly reading a blatantly graphic porn magazine. that seemed to underline how different things were in that place.

there was an art exhibition in a corner of an enormous concrete performing arts center, clearly built in its day (which could have been 50 years before or 5, thanks to that fast-aging concrete unique to such places) according to leftover stalinist plans. the place was crumbling and there was no one around, so we actually wandered around the whole building, taking in the stage and even peeking backstage, being struck quite silent ourselves by the post-apocalyptic quality the place had. we felt all day that we were the last ones wandering a city that had been abandoned, any people we saw were at a distance and hurrying along furtively, ducking into doors and alleys, or so it felt.

near the main square, we at last stumbled upon a little street market and bought an old camera--in fact, it's the one that started our collection. (it's the folding camera in the center of the picture above.) there was also an old mausoleum which no longer showed any sign of who had once been in it and which was all draped with cheesy banners for a big one hundred and one dalmations event. i wish i'd taken pictures, but somehow i didn't. the old hammer and sickles which had adorned the sides were chipped away at and it, like everything else in the capital, had an air of abandonment about it. we photographed the little lobster we were carrying around with us everywhere on one of the chipped away soviet symbols.

after struggling to find a place to eat lunch because places seemed so hidden away and the streets were so empty, we armed ourselves with let's go and headed out in search of, of all things, a tex-mex place that was mentioned there. it said the food was pretty decent tex-mex for bulgaria and that they had live music most evenings. we thought that sounded good.

to find it, we had to go down a dark alley and into a little courtyard in between buildings. unsure of the way, but trusting implicitly those snooty harvard brats who wrote those guides, we kept going, tho' there were no signs. we entered a doorway and went down some steps and there at last was a little sign, the sounds of people clinking glasses and chatting away over the music, and the unmistakeable smells of mexican food. we had found it.

we got a table and enjoyed quite a lovely dinner. after dinner, we moved into the bar, actually passing through old west-style swinging saloon doors, where the music was playing and ordered a margarita. the owner was a friendly young mobster man who came over and chatted with us in surprisingly good english. we told him we'd found him thanks to let's go and he smiled.

finally, around midnight, in good humor, but not even close to drunk after two margaritas over the course of the evening, we headed back through the dark, empty streets to the hotel. we took a shortcut through a dark park, laughing and joking our way, to keep any spookiness at bay and we walked up the stairs at the back of the mausoleum we had seen earlier in the day. our hotel was just across the square beyond it.

as we walked up the steps, laughing about some joke or other, suddenly we were surrounded by four uniformed policemen, accusing us of disrespecting the great monument to the great leader (whose name had been rubbed off the front and replaced by the one hundred and one dalmatians banner). i don't think i immediately appreciated what was happening. they asked us in bulgarian, what we were doing there and demanded to see our ID. of course, our passports were at the nearby hotel. not speaking bulgarian and having but rudimentary macedonian (which some argue is a dialect of bulgarian), i tried to explain this and turned, indicating the hotel. they thought i was trying to get away (which i wasn't) and one of them grabbed at the small purse (coach, of course) that i had cross-ways across my body.

completely operating on instinct and not thinking at all, i pulled the purse back, and then they grabbed me and suddenly i was fighting with several bulgarian policemen while they held back my companions. on pure adrenalin, i fought back, even biting one them--i'm sure he has a perfect scar of my teeth on his hand to this day.  but then i saw a giant clump of my hair lying on the ground. seeing that made me stop.

things cooled down, one of the policemen took the angriest one aside and talked to him. the other two remained there beside me, still trying to communicate. my russian kicked in (why hadn't i tried that before?) and we managed to get through to each other. they claimed to be calling a patrol car to come and get us and take us to the station, but their radios never crackled and and it was only then that i saw their guns in their holsters and began to shake, realizing the enormity of what was happening and fearing what could happen.

my companions were with UN forces in neighboring macedonia and finally, the policemen realized that after we repeatedly pointed it out on their ID cards. but more importantly, they also realized that we had no cash on us (the angriest one seemed angriest about that). we'd used a local ATM and had only a little bit of local currency on us and about 10 deutsch marks. that wasn't enough (and i'd been way too slow to realize that was what they'd actually wanted from the beginning).

because i spoke russian, they didn't believe me that i was american, but they did finally realize the gravity of the UN identification they'd been presented. so the one i had bit (he actually turned out to be the nicest one, so i'm a little sad it was him), told me that they were going to call off the squad car they'd ordered and let us go because i could speak russian and therefore he and i could talk--giving me a conspiratorial wink and a nudge--and oh, also that UN could be "big problem."

and so we walked away back to the hotel. me shaking more and more as we got closer. i remember that i got up to the room, sank against the wall and uttered an inhuman wail that still makes me shiver, just thinking about it. we left on the first bus out the next morning.  it was all a dozen years ago, but i can tell you i can tell you that i won't be going back to bulgaria ever again anytime soon.

afterwards, i was far more haunted by what could have happened than by what actually did. four armed men. visions of a bulgarian prison. questions as to whether they even really were policemen. their radios had never crackled, so i doubted they had actually ever called any squad car. who were they? what did they really want? just money from some foreigners? the whole city was so muted and depressed and sort of holding its breath that it lent to all sorts ideas crossing my mind on sleepless nights afterwards.

my hair, of course, grew back in time and it even came in much curlier. it's still a lot curlier from that spot to this day. i also had a black eye, but when i looked at the picture of that, it still bothered me so much that i couldn't include it in this post. time does heal things, but there are some things that you never really completely get over.

did any of that edukashun stick?

i was reading an article in the IHT the other day. the article was on the golem and how the little monster figure is on the ascendence again in prague. the whole notion of the golem rang a bell deep within the recesses of my graduate school brain. the article defined it as "The Golem, according to Czech legend, was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague’s 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis." i couldn't really place the golem thing, tho' it's undoubtedly some central european lit i once read. i like the idea of a golem, actually, a kind of protective figure. i think we could all use one of those.

but it got me thinking about what other remnants of grad school are there lurking between the song lyrics that are cluttering up my thirty-twelve year-old brain.

: : lots of marxist rhetoric.

: : oddly filtered through ayn rand.

: : and even more oddly which involves the chasing of little green bits of paper and ascription of meaning thereto (or it thereof?).

: : a residual embarrassment of not getting pilnyak's naked year on the first read (and admitting as much to the professor--tho' that was as an undergrad).

: : occasional musings on how master & margarita might be a modern example of menippean satire. (thank you bakhtin.)

: : an unhealthy adoration of derrida, tho' in retrospect, i had no idea what he was talking about.

: : ditto foucault. and baudrillard.

: : an ability to turn to whatever scene you reference in my copy of dostoevsky's brothers karamazov in under ten seconds.

: : a desire to frantically and thoroughly clean when a deadline looms.

: : the time my serbo-croatian teacher said, "spanish is easy, you can learn it in a weekend."

i'm sure there's more, but half-watching a total crap movie about stewardesses starring gwenyth paltrow (which cured me of that stewardess envy thing, by the way) has so thoroughly numbed my brain that i can't come up with them now. t.v. is evil.

happy monday, everybody.

ten years ago...

i heard on the radio yesterday that it was ten years ago that the columbine tragedy (i was gonna link to it on wiki, but i can't really bring myself to do so) happened. i have a clear memory of standing in a little studio apt. on the north side of chicago, watching oprah talk about it with tears in her eyes. just as it did then, it feels remote from me now. i can't even relate. it's incomprehensible to me and so far from anything i can imagine. i feel for those people, but i cannot even wrap my head around it.

but what it does make me remember is that ten years ago, i was teaching a course in 20th century russian culture at the U of C. i made the mistake of proposing the course together with a fellow graduate student who was taking his exams that quarter. it was a mistake in the sense that taking your Ph.D. exams at the U of C brings you to the brink of a nervous breakdown. and by to the brink, i mean over the brink into a full blown nervous breakdown that you yourself don't notice, but everyone else does. so i ended up teaching alone, which was ok, it just wasn't what i expected.

since i lived in denmark, i also foolishly accepted my fellow graduate student's offer that i could live with him at his place, since it was only 3 months. but living together with someone who has had a nervous breakdown that he doesn't really notice himself is, to describe it lightly, not healthy, so i got my own temporary apartment on campus.

that turned out to be a good thing, because it was in that little bitty apartment, within a block of The Reg, that i learned to make risotto, which is a skill i still enjoy. tho' it took several tries. i had no t.v., which was also wonderful. i also ate a lot of paté on crackers. because that's what i imagined that a graduate student at the U of C should eat. i still haven't decided if that was true or not, but it was decidedly part of my own engagement in bourdieu's cultural capital (attempting to raise mine, undoubtedly).

as for The Reg, i spent so much time there in my study carrel, that i began to glow in the dark. (that's the standard U of C joke, since The Reg was built over the bit where they did the Manhattan Project.) but seriously, being left alone teaching a course (albeit undergraduate) at the U of C, is no small project. luckily, we had modeled it around matei calinescu's five faces of modernity, which meant that we covered modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch (my fave) and postmodernism (my REAL fave, at least at the time), which was an ingenious idea (even if i do say so myself). but my very, very favorite was sneaking in alcoholism, because of its importance in russian culture. vodka is a diminutive of the word for water, which illustrates its importance as a life force in russia and russian culture, because what is language if not the manifestation of culture?

it was both a great time and a stressful time, and i'm sorry that it took columbine to remind me of it, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. i'm grateful for the opportunity to say i taught at the U of C, it's not everybody who has done that. but i did. and so did obama. he's, of course, done a little better than i have, but i'm cool with that.

what are you gonna remember?

yesterday, in doing a bit of tidying up in preparation for today's arrival of the cleaner, i came across the picture above. it's husband as a boy of about 5 together with his mother (and a large radio and a very small peugeot) having lunch by the side of the road somewhere in norway. i love many things about the photo--especially that it naturally has that lomo feel to it--all i did was scan, no effects were applied whatsoever. husband is just so cute and so is that car. all husband remembers about it was that it was in norway, otherwise, it's a roadside stop for lunch like any of a hundred others he had as a child.

many years ago, during college, i attended a wedding of a work colleague. a bunch of us from the newspaper sat together and to be honest, it was a rather lame and not very happening wedding. so we decided to move on to a nearby bar. i was hemming and hawing about whether to go along or go home and one of the guys said, "come on, what are you gonna remember?" and he was right, was i going to remember going out and having fun with friends or was i going to remember going home to bed? it was just a line tossed off in a moment, but it has resonated with me ever since.

you might even say it's become a bit of a life philosophy. i have used it countless times when people were about to wander off rather than participating in some fun activity. or when they couldn't decide what they wanted to do. or when they thought about going to bed early. because aren't the things we remember things where we were active and present and participating and stayed up late? we don't remember an evening in front of the television, we remember an evening of dancing or playing cards or having a great conversation over good food. let's face it, you don't know whether you're alive or dead when you're watching t.v. (thanks barbara kingsolver).

i think of some of the times when i said "what are you gonna remember" and the things that i'm certain the people involved remember...

like the time that richard sang bohemian rhapsody in batangas while a typhoon raged just outside:

paying the singer extra to stay on (and on and on) so we could keep dancing at the sofitel in manila:

that time my very tall colleague went to hobbit house -- where all of the wait staff are little people:

the sight of this guy (actually, all 3 are guys) at the amazing show (a transvestite variety show in manila):

my sister licking spilled limoncello off the table:

those ridiculous shots where you take a picture of yourselves shaking your head and going "lalala":

apparently most of the times i said, "what are you gonna remember," we were in manila.

i'm not going to be in manila this weekend, but i hope to do something that i'll remember. what are you going to remember?