Scribblings with Green Chalk

Sitting in my spam queue was a message from someone called “Jesus” — a few unintelligible links, unfortunately. Nothing Andy Warhol could telephone God about.

via Shakesville and that door behind you. I actually hope you are an imaginary friend.

The project isn’t gone, but I had a lot of doubts about posting and halted that part. I’ve thought about the pros and cons of putting up posts and questions vs. just writing the thesis on found and idiosyncratically compiled blog entries. I haven’t resolved it yet.

Meanwhile, in blogland, a post appeared mentioning Sara Baartman. I recommend Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark if you’re interested in the making (and unmaking) of the Hottentot Venus. You will want to sink under ground, reading about the brainlessness of European “science” in the 19th century. The anti-logic of racism never ceases to surprise: while “theorizing” the black female body shape as illness (steatopygia–because it sounds smart if you invent a word), Europeans found it a titillating fashion inspiration. The bustle, a scaffolding-like device inserted underneath ladies’ dresses, compensated for the flatness of the–supposedly ideal–European derriere. The pornographic interest showed by visitors to the exhibitions where Bartman was displayed (much like an inanimate object) is quite terrifying even to read about. Interestingly, the perception of how acceptable this kind of interest was did differ: a sketch reprinted in Hobson’s book shows that some of the contemporaries considered it outright morbid that “gentlemen” and “ladies” alike would scrutinize the details of someone’s anatomy under the pretence of scientific interest.

Patricia Hill Collins’ thoughts on the easiness of objectifying others (Others) shed some light on what happened then and what keeps happening to Baartman. Even today, despite of best endeavors, many academics researching Baartman end up presenting her as a non-person, Collins observes. Pretty slideshows begging for the use of pictures and pointers can turn an informed discussion of the body into a freak show in which again we watch it as a curious object, as if it didn’t belong to a human being. Read more in the sections of Black Feminist Thought devoted to Baartman and pornography.

More arguments for my developing conflict with the idea of the Muse.

Forgive me, I’ve been away with my head. Unaware of the intricacies of blog etiquette, I didn’t leave a hiatus post.

While I was gone, my absent blog persona was tagged by the lovely Wildly Parenthetical. Since we don’t have that much of a personality split, I reply–though outrageously late.

Here it comes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Having put aside the Polish edition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the German edition of Szczypiorski’s Początek (do read that novel!), I reach for the book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It’s on my bedside table most of the time and we’re outwaiting each other. I have not gotten to page 123 yet, so it’ll be a surprise:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body) or to “alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent. (Scarry 123-124)

Earlier, Scarry writes about the image of war in Homer and gets Homeric with her syntax, so I might have lost count.

This passage encapsulates what drew me to the book in the first place. Scarry’s thesis is that pain is mostly uncommunicable, transcending language. Transcending our ability to relate. What does it mean to empathize, when oftentimes we can’t even see that the person next to us is in pain? Even when we notice, we never feel their pain… Is our mental image of their pain anything close to what they could be feeling? Is pain just an “element of blank” to the one who isn’t experiencing it, like one of Dickinson’s poems tells us? And the person in pain… a body, distant in its suffering? If so, how easy is war?

My on and off reading of the book does not allow me to offer a full-blown meditation on these questions. I’ve got reader’s block. Don’t pick on me.

I tag the following charming people, who hopefully cannot empathize with me in my predicament: Denise of Wohnen in Wien, Bowleserised, Aulelia of Charcoal Ink, Anthony, and BD (do I have the right link?).

Long time, no posting. I’ve been wondering how much time it takes for a ‘blog death’ to take effect. Hopefully, more than a few weeks away from the computer. I’ve been traveling and and trying to finish up some important school work, which didn’t leave time–nor any real desire–to keep up with blogging. So I was appreciating other things. Moreover, I was cut off from the internet for much of the time. And since there was no urgent work to be done on state (OK, school) level, I had no regrets.

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I don’t know exactly how it happened that I became obsessed with pictures of trees. It was probably something about my first visit to Ithaca, how the trees looked crusted with snow, how light fell. When I came back in the summer, a friend told me about woman who went to the gorge every day to take a picture of the same tree and trace how it slowly changed with the seasons.

Pictures of trees dominate in my Florida album. It’s been a long time since I lived near a forest, let alone in one, so those mornings in Florida, when I woke up to the sound of branches moving in the breeze and twigs snapping under squirrels’ paws, were more than photo opportunities. Those sounds could only be taken in memory (you can’t record the drowsiness or the morning chill that make them what they are). And the pictures themselves are nowhere near what it really is like. That’s the point in taking them.

(more…)

Since I couldn’t help to notice that “Cat Power” is the crucial search term leading visitors here, I would like to give a helping hand to those for whom my anti-fashion post does little. Yes, Chan Marshall is an incredible, creative creature. Unfortunately, the only anecdote I can tell you is about the time I borrowed a back issue of Der Spiegel from my roommate to read an interview with her. I was supposed to give the paper back to him the next morning, but I overslept and he had to leave the house without it, while I had a lovely late breakfast with Chan Marshall auf Deutsch.

Not glamorous enough? Yeah, well… here’s a bunch of links to more Cat Power places. If you know of some other sites, please feel free to use the comments to expand my knowledge.

Cat Power on MySpace
Matador Records
Cat Power: The Greatest
Cat Power at last.fm
Cat Power’s NPR Concert (downloadable!)

Power to the cat (Olivia, the one who wakes me with her purring every morning) I hope these links saved you perhaps a few seconds of googling. Wishing you all a lot of good music, whoever you are.

… wishy-washy winter continues.

Those who claim that boredom is a disease of the lazy have been too much in love with misanthropy to notice the insidious boredom of being busy. There’s an empty spot in the midst of the bustle. Boredom’s unmade bed. Baudelaire’s messy chest of drawers. Yes, I am busy. Yes, I am reading an interesting book. It’s not helping.

In the middle of the night I go to the kitchen to heat up milk for a cup of cocoa. Not much of a comfort. Something is off. Unhinged. But it works. Strangely.

The pewter gleam of late morning only fades to early evening darkness. I feel that the weather makes me stupid. No snow, no frost to bite your fingertips, your toes. I’m as unexcited as the bored kid in the picture below. Winter wolf’s toothless. I don’t even need a gun in that basket. I’m bored. Occupied attention doesn’t help. Cocoa doesn’t help. I don’t like myself so blasé.

[Image found here.]

Reading Bowleserised’s latest post, I missed my remembered excitement about fairy-tales, Angela Carter, Neil Jordan’s movie adaptation of “The Company of Wolves,” and all those other things that seem like they happened a hundred years ago, though the dates in letters and documents say otherwise. I know I’m in a momentary funk but the moment lingers.

I feel like changing out of my pj’s into other pj’s, sleeping through the rest of the season with snacks in between. Of course, nothing of the kind is happening. I go to school every day, write my papers, do my presentations, getting busily bored. There must be some cunning plan to get out of this, like Old English riddles and charms. It’s worse than “unfruitful land.” An unfruitful brain looks nasty on a resumé. People will eat me for dull blog posts. I’ll die bored.

Help, I’m stuck in the world of vitamin D and green nail varnish.

Soon I’ll know all the lyrics from Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back. Please help me before I dig out my Portishead records and start singing along with Beth Gibbons.

With question 2, I’d like to look at Black feminist bloggers as a community sharing aims and ideas. I wrote earlier about the blog persona. This is not a “sub-section” or addendum to that post. I would like to use the ideas I outlined there to ask about the online Black feminist community and its culture.

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the myths informing the literature of the African diaspora. Can we talk about a reservoir of concepts and stories shaping and binding Black feminists’ online spaces?

Do Black feminists and womanists see themselves as tricksters, offering subversive knowledge, criticism from an epistemologically privileged (important) perspective? Is that a mission or an ethical perspective shared among them/you?

There are several academic Black feminists and womanists who do not necessarily take the tone of instruction, but inscribe the question of knowledge and the search for it very visibly into their blogging objectives. Referring to the academia is not just a statement of interests but a speaking position, it seems to me, one presupposing a principled interaction, sometimes also applying a hierarchy, though the particular rules are up to the blogger.

The Angry Black Woman does not rely so much on the teacher persona but on the strength encoded in a stereotype she uses to her advantage on the blog. She best describes it herself:

A couple of years ago during a discussion of confrontations and how people handle them, I advised a friend that he needed an Angry Black Woman to resolve his conflicts for him. After all, Angry Black Women have advantages certain others don’t.

Firstly, ABWs are angry. Anger won’t solve most of the world’s problems, but it will get people who play at being aggressive and dominant to back down quickly. Second, ABWs are black. And we know that most white people are scared of black people. Third, ABWs are women. So, if the person you’re in conflict is a man, isn’t backing down from the anger, and doesn’t flinch at going toe to toe with a black person, being a woman is really useful. He can’t hit you, you’re a woman. If he does, he’s an abuser. If he calls the police on you, they’ll exclaim “You’re frightened of a woman? Grow a set of balls and leave us alone!” Thus, Angry Black Women have the advantage in almost all conflict situations.

(Read more here.)

Mnemosyne makes use of the figure of the Greek titaness, the embodiment of memory who gave birth to the Muses (and thus comes before them), to mark her blog’s non-literary orientation and her focus on “what i and other marginalized people have to say, than how we say it.”

There are, of course, many other ways of self-representation. One of them is focusing on the content and objectives of the blog rather than self-characterization. Ann of Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters provides a mission statement on the “About” page without any self-description. Aulelia, a young African journalist in the UK, doesn’t use a mythic persona, but instead outlines her background, her beliefs, presents her artwork and photographs of herself.

The imagery and avatars that appear on the blogs are an important aspect of the personae. Photographs place the writer as a person of flesh and blood and in almost tangible surroundings (there is a suspension of disbelief, no one reacts automatically suspecting inauthenticity). Do illustrations then suggest detachment or increased distance between blogger and reader? What to make of them?

I am not going to try to bring the above observations together. I’m asking here about common threads and would like to hear some ideas on that. Feedback will be greatly appreciated.

I took a peek at Jonathan Carroll’s blog today.

Carroll is one of those authors to enjoy astounding popularity in most unlikely places. Not many of his compatriots are aware of him… but he’s a bit of a cult author in Poland. His debut novel, The Land of Laughs was the novel of the beginning of the nineties — first printed as a serial in the legendary magazine Fantastyka, then it went through several book editions, was nonchallantly mentioned on various TV shows, and read by everyone who wanted to be someone, it seemed.

I first read The Land of Laughs when I was 15. I then read almost everything he published until I got tired with the recurrent themes — collecting fountain pens, suspension between Vienna and Connecticut, talking animals, interestingly flawed women and the sensual feel of the back of their heads when caressed by the protagonist…

I find myself returning now and then to two of his novels, the debut and Bones of the Moon and to his short stories, especially the ones collected in The Panic Hand (or rather: Upiorna dłoń, because the stories might have been published in a different form in English). Bits of God captured in a woman’s casual pencil drafts, dogs that can smell evil, fashion for a dying man. Themes I like in the way I like pieces of chocolate slowly melting on the tongue. not to be dead sophisticated but tickled on my imagination gray cells.

Like one of the reviewers on Carroll’s official website, I wish he had written the children’s stories from the Land of Laughs. The language blows me away every time:

The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one’s seen.

The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs to each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day.

The voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered.

I’m touched:

In the preface to the Polish edition of A Child Across the Sky (Dziecko na niebie), Carroll writes that he feels fulfilled as a writer when he thinks that a person in Wrocław is sitting on the tram going home after work and enjoying one of his books.

On his blog, in the entry “CarrollBlog 1.6,” he quotes Magdalena Samozwaniec, a largely forgotten Polish writer. Warm laughter. Thanks.

It was Anthony who brought to my attention the tricky nature of the blogging persona. The “About” page didn’t make me fully aware of the complexity involved. True, I tried to write as little as possible and be very cryptic. It was not to be me with my dental history, family members’ pictures, and occupational info in a new medium. No overflows of spontaneous confession, because, well, that’s not me. Even when I kept a diary as a teenager, it was more about stylistic exercises and playing with voices. It was always a notebook, you couldn’t tell what I ate for breakfast nor what the weather was like. My letters, which I have been addicted to writing for years, are pretty similar but with the adrenalin generated by the presence of a reader.

For a fleeting instant I even entertained the idea of “killing the author” in a way, of writing in a sort of disembodied voice. However, the last time someone used the term to describe me, I was more than slightly hurt. Disembodied voices don’t work. In the end you want to feel that your body is there, that blood is flowing, and ideas flutter across a pleasantly imperfect brain.

Given that I knew this much, I still didn’t see filling the “About” page as the birth of a brain-child, thought-child, as Athena leaping out of Zeus’ skull. Yet now I come to think that it was no less than that. Having been addressed several times by the name I chose for the persona writing here, I see Januaries as an idea in process of becoming, a sketch to which new lines may be added as time passes. Not a split, separate identity, but definitely a specific costume in which I perform my self.

By now, we’ve come to share to some extent the dental history (vide the summer posts about how my wisdom teeth came out), but ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in this space bear the blank masks of cartoon parents, those legs standing in the door, hands touching kids’ shoulders. You can’t complain to my grandmother that you don’t like what I say. You can’t appear out of nowhere on my doorstep, you can only send me an email. These things are important to me.

So much for me. But there are multiple ways of handling your blogging persona or rejecting it (I would argue that there is always a persona, but I don’t want to climb on a hill of theory). Anthony says he finds it easier to accept personae and nicknames that real life names. I will add that photos and details concerning work and family can be challenging. How does a blog-writer who divulges such details conceive of their online performance?

People who blog so as to stay in touch with their friends from distant places I would be inclined to exempt from this suspicious questioning. Politicians and celebrities are slaves of self-creation, so they are a particular instance in the personae game. Fiction writers are insulated by the character of their work, the blog is merely a new venue. Checked off the list. What about the others?

The most intriguing case I know of identities collapsing on each other is Zoe Margolis creating the persona of Abby Lee for the purposes of Girl with a One-Track Mind and Lee becoming Margolis as the book version of the blog became famous. I don’t know how she handles it. Furthermore, I don’t know (yet?) how her story is affecting the blogosphere. Perhaps, unbeknown to me, there is a new dream of fame out there and a new wave of erotic writers waiting to be discovered, ready to sign the accounts of their sexploits with their real names. I am sure that the online surreality is fluctuating and twisting with new conceptions of the writing self.

Meanwhile, I’m here, pondering Kate Harding’s argumentation in favor of using one’s real name on the blog. I find her explanation very convincing, although it doesn’t make me want to abandon my Dürer owl.

The icon or so-called avatar is another component of the blog persona worthy of attention. Many choose iconoclasm (or laziness, or technological helplessness) and leave a blank, others carefully sort through their best pictures. It took me a while before I found a satisfying image: a symbol that I liked, by an artist I admired.*

Does compiling your blog persona have something of scrapbook magic? A little bit of what you’ve wanted to be, a little bit of insolence, a little bit of wild theorizing, grounded in who you are, perched upon certain limitations (I wonder, for instance, how many blog personae are “thinner” and “taller,” though I’m not happy with that thought).

I think the personae are performed in an area between fiction and reality. Maybe that area already has a name, only I’m not quick enough in my link-hopping. Maybe someone will tell me I’m getting it all wrong and the blog-logic operates on completely different principles. I’d be thrilled to learn.

*I admire a pretty piece of cake, hence I replaced master Dürer with cherry pie at some point and who know what else later.

This question is intentionally hideous. It says what is says and is not rhetorical. I’m asking. Seriously.

The way the Chicago murder was dismissed by certain readers (Bhutto’s couldn’t be, for obvious reasons) and the swift, though unconnected, succession of these deaths made me wonder: since it appears to be easier to discount the particulars of a woman’s death, including or especially her sex (some argue that we should focus on Bhutto as a politician “minus” the gender factor), does that mean for some people that less is lost along with a woman’s death? Is it easier to kill a woman?

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs
…

This is where the multiple Januaries come from. All the way back to the year 1501, weaving inaproppriateness, conquest, exoticism, leaves, and lizards in a January rush. I’ve always felt that January was a month running quickly downhill. My birthday is in January and each year I get the impression that the days are rolling towards it faster than I can count, which makes me feel irrationally old (but not wiser).

I got a lovely letter from Wildly Parenthetical, saying she liked the idea of multiple Januaries and I thought it’s worth elaborating on if only by means of random associations. Frankly, I didn’t think that anyone would be interested in my choice of blogging name (more on that later) and so I never bothered to explain it. It is more or less a play of associations: the month, a vague resemblance to my actual name, Elizabeth Bishop’s arrival in Brazil, this song. I’ve never had any ‘effective’ nickname, so I enjoy the impersonality of many Januaries.

It’s a good question, though, how people choose their blogging names and what to make of the choice to blog under one’s real name? Anthony says he’s more reserved towards bloggers who use their real names (Anthony, please write a post about this so I can link here), I would make an exception with fiction writers, because their kind of writing entails an additional degree of distance and play (though does it always?…).

I couldn’t find the poem online, so if you wish to read it in its entirety, I can only suggest you look for The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Bishop is my favorite poet. I admire her technical skill, her use of imagery, and the curious humor. Like in these lines from the final stanza:

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting

Hmm… There is (was?) also an LA band called The Januaries. Not that I’m surprised…

I don’t know how it works, but that’s what it says. All the pretentious language and references for nothing

I would like to know, though, how this application dealt with the entries in Polish…

At first glance this question might seem slightly awkward. But I find it crucial to ask about perpective and forms of engagement before going on to explore particular issues connected with the black feminist experience.

From its inception, black feminism was by Black women for Black women and the benefit of the Black community as a whole. The communal aspect cannot be undermined, since black feminism has been primarily concerned with praxis: no theorizing without activism.

This much is clear. Yet since its orientation is not solely towards the female individual but the community — of women and women within a larger community — what if we asked about its possible benefits for the society at large?

The black feminist standpoint is exceptional in that it grasps multiple levels of oppression: it’s articulated at the intersection of race and gender, and as such it reveals the ways in which systems of oppression and exclusion conflate. Although in everyday existence this position signifies deprivation and invisibility within dominant discourse, in the light of standpoint theory, it makes for deep insight. Coming from the very bottom of the power hierarchy, the black feminist standpoint is cognizant of the mechanisms and ideologies that more privileged standpoints would either not notice or consider neutral.

It’s knowledge.

The pursuit of knowledge is one of the great human desires.

And — I’m thinking out loud here — this kind of knowledge appears exceptional in that it provides a chance to sever the cords between knowledge and power. It’s not about inventing the wheel or, more accurately, inventing systems of control, but about understanding. Understanding has been increasingly undervalued, since it does not have momentum, does not lead to expansion. Or has understanding never really been valued?… And yet, as I stated above, people desire knowledge, if only for the sake of satisfying desire.

Since standpoints are not inherent qualities, it makes sense to believe that one can access them without being part of the original group, with additional effort, perhaps. Yet how to do that without making it seem like an attempt to steal, and change ideas?

First of all, how to listen and hear? There is no “neutral starting point” for a dialog with a position we do not know enough about. All such attempts fail and, what is worse, lead to more misunderstandings. I found two posts at Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters that clearly illustrate this. In “What Can the White Woman Say to the Black Woman?,” the writer, Ann, warns about disregarding history. Irrational fears of “reverse racism” often preclude necessary openness, without which participating in the project of black feminism is not possible. This leads to isolation and separatism. And while separatism has its advantages, it rarely leads to sharing knowledge and spreading tolerance.

As Patricia Hill Collins warns (critiquing Hazel V. Carby):

Exclusionary definitions of Black feminism which confine ‘black feminist criticism to black women critics of black women artists depicting black women’ (Carby 1987, 9) are inadequate because they are inherently separatist. Instead, the connections here aim for autonomy. (Black Feminist Thought 32-33)

Arguing for autonomy instead of isolation, Collins opens up the possibility for outsiders to be part of the discussion. The question remains: How?

Another one of Ann’s posts, “Shut the Fuck Up,” mentions attempts at placating Black women without asking about the reasons of their anger and discontent. Treating women like children is, of course, nothing new but always a suicidal shot if what one wants is insight and knowledge. The answer is, as Ann points out, to shut up. Not to step in with “but’s” and “however’s” before you’ve heard the argument and thought it over. My next question is where to go from there.

If your objective is to learn and use the knowledge in your experience and, furthermore, to engage with the perspective (which is what I personally want), how do you find your place within the larger project? Which, in the end, boils down to the question: who can become a black feminist?

Those who follow my scribblings on a more or less regular basis (thank you for that), probably noticed that I put up a new page. I want to add to the random ramblings a thread about the idea which, I hope, becomes in the end a good thesis.

From now on some of the posts will be concerned with questions about black feminism, the black feminist standpoint, and the different forms of activism (with emphasis on blogging and internet initiatives).

Please feel free to contribute to the discussion, irrespective of your sex, skin color, nationality, if you are interested in and supportive of black feminism. Misanthropic comments are not welcome.

Everyone can do it: pick a place on the map, possibly the most distant from your home, and come up with a few crazy ideas about what life there could be like. You can call this game “Inventing the Barbarians.”

What brought me to this conclusion was a post about Kyrgyzstan on one of the wordpress blogs. I sent the link to a friend who is Kyrgyz (the HCA people all know who that is:-)) and then decided to join the discussion myself, having read through all the comments.

I do believe that it was genuine curiosity that inspired the discussion. However, it was nothing more than folk anthropology and, in the end, “Inventing the Barbarians.” Folk anthropology is a temptation we all give in to, when we want to grasp the exotic and lack the information and proper tools to approach it. Yet folk theories should not be treated as anything more than what they are — rules of thumb to be kept within the intimacy of one’s mind. Folk anthropology relies on simplistic distinctions between “us” and “them,” “the civilized” and “the barbarians.” If let out into the world and popularized, it can be very harmful. That is my main reservation toward the kind of writing exemplified by Brownstein’s post. A university professor should be sensitive to how easy it is to get the hate machine going, and the comments he got unfortunately show that his thinking out loud corroborated some of his readers’ own folk theories.

One other interesting issue that the post brought to my attention is how folk anthropology uses sources of information and how it blindly trusts data. The most minuscule scrap of information gains paramount importance, is clung onto and quoted over and over again along with a set of obscure statistics. (All of a sudden, everyone’s forgotten that statistics is the most refined lie.) It becomes an issue of faith, not of interpretation. The New York Times as ultimate authority? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan; I don’t know what my Sunday breakfast would be without NYTimes. But whatever happened to critical reading? NYTimes, like any other newspaper, is tied to the demands of the market. The articles have to cater to the lay public (yet intelligent, yes) that seeks not only information but also entertainment. The writing style has to be pleasing and generalizations need to be formed so as to communicate a point within the limited space of the printed page. NYTimes is not the gospel truth, there are other sources of information out there. Go find them.

Internet and blogging give you the opportunity to talk to the people from the most exotic and distant places. Use it instead of inventing barbarians.

To us all folk anthropologists out there: go out and listen and seek. And think quietly, and think quietly again before you start thinking out loud.

jeśli się nie mylę, tak zaczynał swoje listy do przyjaciół Zbigniew Herbert. Podoba mi się, więc kradnę. Moje kochane Zwierzątka, chyba nic z tego nie wyjdzie… z mojego pisania tutaj po polsku. Myślałam na początku, że będę przeplatać, ale nigdy się na to nie składa.

Nie mówię “nigdy”, ale nie chcę obiecywać. Myślę, że ci, którzy mnie dobrze znają, rozumieją lub zrozumieją, o co mi chodzi. Moja czteroletnia wojna z polonistką w liceum sprawiła, że uciekłam od pisania po polsku. Studia w obcym języku też mnie do tego nie zbliżyły. Nie oznacza to jednak jakiejś bolesnej alienacji od języka ani kultury, mimo że chwilowo nie mieszkam w kraju. Nadal lubię polski jazz, poezję, Kazika, humor Grzegorza Halamy, filmy Barei i Poznań. Ale jeśli chodzi o pisanie, postanowiłam na razie pójść kawałek drogą Conrada. (Nie, nie zaciągnęłam się na statek i nie planuję napisać alternatywnej wersji Lorda Jima.) Zobaczymy, co z tego wyjdzie.

Proszę, piszcie, niekoniecznie na temat. Prawdę mówiąc, bardzo cieszą mnie komentarze po polsku, szczególnie gdy mają to szczególne, nieprzetłumaczalne poczucie humoru.

Życzę Wam smacznego Św. Marcina, moje Zwierzątka.