Scribblings with Green Chalk

As you know, this is a blog about celebrities. OK, it isn’t, even if Jacques Derrida and his cat were here. I don’t think I have what it takes to write about celebrities–nor have any real desire to possess those qualities.

I don’t know if it was a childhood accident I cannot remember which might have impaired my image-storing, but I’m stuck with this vague idea of the artist as a person who hangs out in decadent cafes, sneers at consumer society, and makes art (making art is this haze blurring the picture). In this idealistic image I find little place for secrets dug up in the dumpster or amateur psychoanalysis. I like pretty dresses from movie premieres, in small doses. Mystic fraternizing with famous people in their various kinds of pain or knowing what they think without knowing them are beyond me.

Lazily browsing for some information about Alanis Morissette’s new album, I mostly found pictures of her from the Today show followed by “deep and insightful” remarks about how her thighs looked in gray pants and possible causes of weight gain. I wish people were more creative in inventing problems for themselves and just let go.

It’s probably the fault of my unremembered childhood accident, but I cannot comprehend certain trends in popular culture (so that you don’t say I blame everything on growing up in communism). One of them is the glorification of packaging femininity (don’t I sound smart?): ‘lady lumps for bling,’ or something equally awkward-sounding. With this video, Morrissette becomes another exemplary artist in my gratuitous series of posts and comments about ‘the idea of the artist.’ Down on planet Earth, she makes my day.
 
 

 
 
I decided to spare the reader my ruminations on what this parody does. The music and Morissette’s interpretation of the lyrics suffice. And I just love how uncomfortable everyone looks in this video.

(Image from Temporary Residence Limited)

I saw Explosions in the Sky last night. I felt incredibly rusty before that concert, eons since I’d been to one. Karlstorbahnhof is quite small, as is the town itself, so it was already very exciting that the band decided to readjust their sense of space by coming here. In spite of the place being slightly reminiscent of a community center stage, there weren’t any glitches. It was very beautiful. Both EITS and the support act, Eluvium, fulfilled the promise of the evening for me. I had almost forgotten how emotionally engaging I’d always found live music.

Not to play amateur ethnology, but my ideas about crowd behavior and response to music got a bit challenged by what I saw last night. I hope it’s just cultural difference and not a sign that I’m losing grip of reality. But I swear, in Poland, the room would have been afloat with dancing bodies. I don’t doubt that people were enjoying themselves, yet I found their enjoyment incredibly static. I don’t know: maybe times are changing and my crazily spiritual attitude towards live music, with an immediate bodily response and occasional tears is just demodé?…

Explosions in the Sky NPR Concert

Not the gentlemen in power, not the notoriously underfunded universities, not the rise of fundamentalism, not the intolerance that it brings, not the starve-yourself-salaries and fully European prices, not the despondency of tower-block estates, not the metaphysics of hardship, not the ugliness of unlit city nooks and crannies.

But, god, do I miss the music that speaks about it. And the concerts.

Sitting in my CD player for several weeks now is Hey’s MTV Unplugged. Part of my brain lives in a time-warp, in mid-nineties’ Poland, reading Nosowska’s columns in women’s magazines while heading for another gig. A friend from Szczecin told me that after their debut, just before the band moved to Warsaw, fans would seek out the shop where Nosowska worked and ask her for advice on life and love. It was a shoe shop, or a butcher shop, or something equally evocative.

Musical biography romanticism aside, Nosowska never really accepted the guru role. Fifteen years later (between tracks one and two), she explains that she won’t try emceeing because it would be out of character for her and hence unconvincing. Yet you can’t be disappointed, it’s all there: the melancholy lyrics and the melancholy music.

I have a history of missing Hey shows: at home with a temperature, misinformed, finishing my BA thesis. That last time, when they were playing at the juwenalia, I actually heard them. I was living by the river and the water carried the sound. It was much like pressing your face to the display window of a patisserie, but still a comfort that dreary evening.

It’s my modestly arrogant observation that it’s a great loss not to know this music. I don’t quite understand ‘language barrier’ arguments since the night I caught a cold standing barefoot on a wet lawn, listening to Lithuanian folk chants, transfixed. For the unbelievers, Nosowska and Chylińska singing PJ Harvey’s “Angelene.” (A post in Polish about this video would be limited to the two names followed by ‘wow.’)
 
 

 
 
With this video I’m hoping to deal with the “my idea of the artist” theme by means of an old (I’m told, Chinese) method: an image worth a thousand words. Since the post about the artist with a feline pseudonym still attracts crowds, I hope some visitors think to look here for the dot over the i. This is what I want: brilliant voices and dark coats.

It seems like everyone is blogging about this. I found the article via Writhe Safely, which was the first blog I discovered about the problem we call psychiatry.

I wish this kind of writing had been when a close friend of mine was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That was several years ago and meant for him an instantaneous descent from respected member of the community to lunatic outcast. Ironically, we both lived right by the mental hospital: sometimes he was on the same side of the wall as me, sometimes he crossed over to the other. The awareness initiatives undertaken by the hospital — an annual “reaching out” day and exhibitions of patients’ artworks — achieved little with respect to thinning the wall. And in spite of art therapy there remained the grim reality of an underfunded institution — because in democratic Poland mental illness was still considered something of a luxury, as I infer from it being constantly shoved lower down the healthcare priority ladder.

Out of Polish cities, Kraków is said to be the most successful in terms of integration of mental patients into the community. I heard about a successful cafe in Kazimierz ran by a group of former and present mental patients. Apart from that one island of tolerance, elsewhere in the country a psychiatric diagnosis means social death.

A lighter sentence comes with admitting to depression. I remember the shame experienced by many of my college friends: they knew they were part of a wave but it was a wave of anonymous individuals. You knew that many of the people in the lecture room with you were on prozac but you had no idea who. It was already back then, however, that I decided to be candid about my issues. Saying it loud meant resisting deeply ingrained self-hatred. On the delicate balance of my issues, self-acceptance weighed more than being perfect in the eyes of others. The scales tips occasionally, yet I stick by that choice in spite of enervating responses from people who are often well-meaning even as they are unaware of the implications they make through their “good advice.” There are those who choose to believe I exaggerate the seriousness of my earlier condition, and those who approach me like a child and try to cajole me back into therapy as someone supposedly never able to fully return to society.

How romantic: to believe that madness insulates the person from real life. It is the “healthy” society that constructs the bubble, while the person in question sits inside the bubble of alienation perceiving how he or she is being treated. There is always a grain of lucidity, even in the darkest times, yet it is commonly overshadowed by society’s vision of madness and by fear.

The missing element for me is respect. I don’t know how attainable compassion is, I don’t know how possible it is not to alienate a person whose world is incomprehensible to others. But not to perceive and not to treat that person as less human would make a world of difference.

I’m not convinced about the appropriateness of the label “mad pride” and the allusion to gay pride. Unlike LGBT people, most people with mental and mood disorders suffer from a condition that sets them apart from “healthy” society in a way that is difficult to deny. Sexuality, in its identity-affirming and defining aspects, is worthy of celebration. But mental illness? Would that not lead to further fetishization? The mad genius myth has not saved anyone yet, only catalyzed pop-culture, so I don’t see how it could lead to a more realistic conception of mental illness all of a sudden. I am not up to theorizing mental illness; however, as I recall my own experience, I felt depression to be far from queerness and close to disability. I don’t want to even try to speak on behalf of other people. With regard to many mental conditions, I am absolutely ignorant. For this reason — and feel free to call me naive — what I am counting on with this New York Times article, is increased awareness about the reality of the lives of people touched by mental illness, finally a more open discussion of pharmaceutic hoaxes and manipulations, and, hopefully, a deep reconsideration of psychiatry. Above all and as always: a dialog.

I woke up today with lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sandpiper” on my mind:

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

Apart from details of anatomy and physiology, there is little difference between me and the stupid bird trying to count grains of sand. I’m caught up in paperwork, being chewed up by bureacratic jaws, and painfully distracted from my thesis by misfortunes and temptations. I’m panicking about it all taken together and everything separately.

This pancake Sunday with my mom I split my mind between cooking and studying to the extent that I now believe pancake mix lies at the heart of blogging. I need a machine producing Time and Focus. I might disappear from here for a while on a quest for such an invention.

 
 
… I would be able to finish this sentence in French. As things are, I can still read certain things and ask about the restroom. If I were her, I would be quite shameless in decorating my apartment with Elliott Erwitt’s portraits of myself. I wonder if de Beauvoir had a secret room where she retired to absorb them in narcissistic abandon.

As an existentialist, she might have discarded the temptation that I would probably act upon: to haunt him sometimes as a punishment for publishing all those photo albums about dogs after my demise.

My presentation on America Day by Day already done and delivered, I will reread The Second Sex and leave Mr. Erwitt in peace. Note to self: keep growing the hair, get an interesting necklace and shawl, and practice elegantly nonchalant occupation of uncomfortable chairs.

 
 
Nie lubię poniedziałku: początku tygodnia radosnych obowiązków, listy spraw do załatwienia, nienapisanych z braku koncentracji prac, potrzeby wyjścia z domu w stanie mniej-więcej do użytku.

Ponieważ nie zjem porannej jajecznicy z Kazimierzem Rudzkim, brakuje mi motywacji aby w za krótkiej spódnicy wymaszerować dziś rano na spotkanie ze światem. Żeby choć w planach była kawa zbożowa w barze mlecznym w towarzystwie mężczyzny w dobrze skrojonym garniturze…
 
 

[Babelfish this or ...]

Truth be told, I saw Dogville a little while before I was plagued by the eye-eating curse from outer space.

Maybe you too know what it’s like: you hear about a movie, want to see it, but before you realize it’s in and out of movie theaters. Everyone around you is talking about it, making you feel like Rip van Winkle. Apparently it was there long enough for everyone and their uncle to see it but you, the one person on the planet, missed it. That, in short, is my unhappy love affair with movie-theater going. Recent additions to the list of the unseen: Control and I’m Not There. Turn the knife and send reviews if you like.
 
 

(Image found here)

 
 
Although it would have been nice to have seen the movie when the rest of humankind saw it and participate in the discussions, watching it on a small screen had its advantages. Due to its rudimentary set design, Dogville reminded me of Teatr Telewizji, the weekly play staged for Polish public TV on Monday nights. That’s where the resemblances end. The acting was nothing like the exaggerated Wyspiański or the exaggerated Brecht of TV theater. TV theater certainly didn’t feature graphic rape scenes, settling rather for suggestive violence. I understand that theater has since gotten raunchier with plays by Sarah Kane et al. Still, I think I could have grasped the idea without seeing Stellan Skarsgard’s bare buttocks. Again.
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As in: A place one should not go to if one wishes to obtain books. No chance. The downfall of European education is imminent and the root of evil is planted in university libraries. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and the works.

When I was doing my undergrad in the land of milk and honey, I knew that the books either simply weren’t there because the money which the government could have spent on education was channeled into subsidies for farmers, or because the department head had snatched them for his private collection years ago. What puzzles me about German-speaking countries is that when the books actually are there, they tend to be inaccessible to human beings.

Most of the books you will ever need as a student in Europe fall under the category of departmental holdings. ‘Departmental holding’ in library-catalog-speak means that whatever you were looking for is out of bounds. The only person who gets to touch it is the librarian and, if the librarian is in a good mood, the tenured professor. Younger faculty probably need to go through some sort of bloody initiation rites. In short, the departmental library is the possessive librarian’s dream come true. After another hard day of guarding the fount of knowledge from the dirty paws of the unworthy masses, they can freely exclaim “mine, all mine!” and I imagine many of them do. You, as a mere mortal, are allowed to go crying to your mommy.

You might be somewhat comforted to hear that departmental holdings may be looked at briefly in reading rooms. Yet the reading room is a subject of its own.

“It is not accidental that in the torturers’ idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the ‘production room’ in the Philippines, the ‘cinema room’ in South Vietnam, and the ‘blue lit stage’ in Chile: built on these repeated acts of display and having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama,” writes Elaine Scarry. In Europe, we call it the reading room, the public space of discomfort and impossible work conditions in which the student is invited to read and write. Welcome to the reading room.

First, you are made to strip down almost your underwear, because if your sweater is judged too fluffy by the librarian, you will be accused of introducing harmful paper-destroying dampness into the open stacks area. No bags are allowed. If you say you don’t understand why, it just means you’re a thief trying to sneak out a stack of precious first editions in your tiny pocketbook. It doesn’t matter that all books have magnetic strips and that there are alarm gates at the exit. Come in (almost) naked and innocent or leave this holy place forever.

Once you’ve stuffed all your belongings into a locker two floors away (if you were smart enough to bring small change), you can make your way to the reading room. (Turning back at some point to get the library card which you left in the locker.) The library does not take any responsibility for your belongings but you’re fine with that, since you have realized by now that you mean nothing to this glorious institution. Apart from being the source of occasional entertainment for the staff: the sight of you balancing your laptop, notebook, wallet, and pens and trying not to drop any of those while you look for the library card can be mildly hilarious. Especially if you do drop them.

More or less settled in the reading room, you are made acutely aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You want at the same time to get the pencil you left in the locker, to drink, and to go to the bathroom. (Did you notice that big sign at the entrance, the one with the water bottle crossed out?) Concentration is impossible, it doesn’t matter that you are allowed to work with the desired book for maybe even a whole hour before the library closes. You can’t focus. Chances are that you will not want to add to the time you’ve already wasted there and will decide not to eat for a month so as to be able to afford a copy of the book. If you can still remember what it was.

In the rare fortunate situation, the book you need is in the main library, in the open stacks, where you can pick it up yourself and take home. Yet the open stacks area or, more accurately, Freihandbereich is not always the idyll it promises to be. With no way to reserve the volume you want from home, you have to run to the shelf (stripped, remember) and pray that no one is using the book in the building at that very moment. What if that nightmare scenario is true? What then?

Well, in that case, not even an eyelid-deforming disease will melt the icecaps on the librarian’s heart. All you can do is come back every day like a romantic idiot and check if the book is on the shelf. Of course you have all the time in the world. After all, it’s Europe and we’re all brimming with sophistication to the point where we don’t mind the blatant ludicrousness of such actions but repeat them with pleasure.

If you were wondering why I did the bulk of my library research in Florida, now you know.

Heidelberg has an astounding concentration of physicians per square kilometer, with no shortage of ophthalmologists. Most of them were on vacation yesterday.

I understand that it was a stupid choice on my part to get stye just before the long weekend, when everyone should be having fun in the sun and seeing the world without distortions. If I had had any doubts about it, the annoyed tone of the receptionist at the university clinic made it blindingly clear to me.

I used to naively believe that it was Communism that turned people in petty power positions into condescending bastards. I should thank that lady for the cultural lesson: it’s petty power that makes you a petty official.

Eventually, I found a workaholic doctor who saw me even though I came some two minutes before his lunch break. I learned that apart from the infection I have more or less perfect vision. My left eye (the good one) can fly planes and solve 3D puzzles, the right one (attacked by stye aka Gerstenkorn aka jęczmień) can fly planes too, but slower, I suppose. He prescribed me some magic ointment and told me to nap a lot, because it works most effectively during sleep.

The monster seed from space hasn’t started sprouting yet, apparently, in spite of my worst fears. However, I’m strongly motivated to nap through the next two weeks: if it doesn’t go away by itself, it will have to be cut open. I’m also contemplating wearing shades everywhere, including indoors, because I don’t deal too well with constant questions. I don’t have any wheaty* answers.

*cross-linguistic attempt at a pun: cf. Polish and German names for the inflammation

Thanks to the Original Fedora Kid, who is being lazy about starting a blog of his own.

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