Scribblings with Green Chalk

Homesickness has caught up with me under the guise of a summer cold. It’s ridiculous: my nose a leaking faucet, I go to sleep early like a baby and the only thing that calms me is reading Herbert and Szymborska in bed. Remembering the old gods, although they’re merely pieces of names and roadside statues, is aspirin for confusion. It could be that the cold is punishment for forgetting Midsummer. In which case I should check with neo-pagan websites what I am to expect next. Perhaps finally toads and snakes falling out of my mouth with every cussword? That would be a very practical solution to my nutrition issues.

What I should have been doing on June 24:

After the dancing, I would have had to jump over that fire for a hypothetical idiot destined to marry me. Then, around midnight, I would have had to take off the lovely wildflower garland, put a candle in it, and let it float to the other shore of a lake (with the hypothetical idiot in mind). The hypothetical idiot would have had to go into the woods in search of the fern flower that blooms only on that particular night. Should my garland sink before reaching the shore and his ass be bitten off by wild pigs, there would be little hope of us finding each other and getting married. The whole ritual would have to be repeated the following year.

As a little girl, I tried not to fall asleep, lest I should dream of my future husband.

It’s quite possible that the celebration as it looked like when I was growing up was a mere aberration of our Slavic ancestors’ rites. But if you can provide the bored wooden statue of Światowid with some entartainment, why not do that? I might drop by later this summer for a picnic with the gods. (Those cycles of nature: I’m packing again to leave in mid-July.)

The small pictures are from the open air museum in Lednogóra, where we used to celebrate Slavic Midsummer back in the 1980s and early 1990s.

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.

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.

Long, long ago, before the ministry of education was taken over by lunatics who wanted to censor everything, high school kids were allowed to read some meaningful Polish prose. It is a well known fact that when you’ve got acne and a self-perpetuationg existential crisis, nothing cheers you up as much as books on the vacuity of being spiced up with more than a touch of camp. Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) blew our minds. Even putting them in one sentence makes a paragraph sizzle.

While Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke reassured us that, indeed, all people were fakes, Witkacy showed us how to put feathered hats on party with that idea. On his search for what he called “the pure form,” he shot fountains of brain-twisting puns and neologisms, knitted vulgarisms out of newspaper clips and old wives’ tales. “Eyes a divine blue like buttons on a pair of underpants,” “son-of-a-shriveling-gut”: you can’t help wishing you could cuss like that, with nonchalance and neon glare. Certainly something to twist the censor’s scissors with.

Just like his biography. Witkacy was a child prodigy who was educated by private tutors. An artist’s only son, Witkacy clung to the bohemian enfant terrible act long after he’d grown out of his shorts. In his snazzy villa in Zakopane, he wrote letters announcing to unsuspecting souls that he’d “unfriended” them. And he painted. On vodka, on absynth, on whatever drugs he could find. Knowing that creating under the influence was not a great feat in itself, he turned it into a business. He set up a portrait company with prices differing according to the degree and kind of intoxication. Since not that many were interested in boring “clean” paintings (which were also the cheapest), Witkacy experienced many trips during which he encountered happily disjointed female heads among oranges, artistic vortexes bending space, and his own grimacing face. And this he shared on canvas.

“A woman need not be beautiful,” biographers scribbled down. “She must, however, be interesting.” Troubled as he was–the painting above is the famous “Fałsz kobiety” [A Woman's Falsehood] and not to forget those ambiguous disjointed heads–his female portraits are entrancing. Burning eyes, wild hair, surprising poses, no dolls with empty faces.

It’s not that as a troubled teenager I dreamed of being one of Witkacy’s women. Glossing over the tragic ending, I wanted to be him: hanging out with my genious friend Bronisław Malinowski, making art like a demon, and then ending up in a Swedish novel.

With idiots wanting to butcher up his beautiful crazy fiction, I can only say that the sons-of-a-shriveled-gut can poke their hollow blue-as-underwear-buttons eyes out. Until things improve in Po(e)land, I unfriend the lot.

 
Berlin: I fell in love with it when I was maybe six and angry that the people were speaking a language I didn’t understand. I came back several times, always just to rush through, touristically (not in a Run, Lola, Run! fashion). Why oh why didn’t I spend more time here when I lived a mere four hours of train ride away? To be able to torture myself with the question as I was ambling down Unter den Linden as a damn tourist, probably.

The picture: My grand return to the Zoologischer Garten after many years. I got lost there with my mother when I was little. My mother wasn’t little then, but a great companion for getting lost, nonetheless.

If I were smart I’d have a bunch of them sitting in my drawer–a cunning plan of local patriotism from afar. But I hardly have any pictures of home and no postcards. Somewhere, in the neverland of postal theft, there are some postcards and fridge magnets I had sent to friends who never got them. Here’s a googled pic of what Poznań doesn’t really look like any longer.

 
I was home in March, got back. No postcards.

Walking madness has set in again, as soon as it stopped being dark and cloudy all the time. I climbed up on the Philosophenweg on my first night in Heidelberg and I went up there several times between my finals to inaugurate the spring. There’s more to it than these pictures from walks with friends (waving to Denise). And it’s all about getting off the path anyway.

(more…)

I saw a cat outside my window this morning. One of the few benefits of a basement apartment is the view of birds on the lawn, clueless rodents, and, yes, an occasional cat. More often, however, you get to see the irresolute legs of someone heading to the supermarket or rubber boots of kids running towards the nearby playground.

Meanwhile, I feel like never leaving the house, only lounging in my pj’s and watching Katharine Hepburn movies.

When I lived in Poznań, someone explained to me why the city wouldn’t close down the old zoo, even though most of the animals had already been moved to the new zoo at lake Malta. Stare zoo, situated near the city center, was acquiring a ghostly quality, partly abandoned, dilapidated.

“They can’t close it down completely. There’s an enormous rat colony living off the zoo waste. If they shut it down, all those rats would flood the city.”

For a long time afterwards, I couldn’t shake the image of rat hordes overtaking the Poznań Old Town, streaming through Św. Marcin, swallowing Zamek. It reminded me of a movie scene I’m not sure I had actually ever seen. For all I know, I could have imagined the whole thing, as I admitted in my comment on Bowleserised’s post on foxes. My sketchy description reads as follows: … a movie scene from a USSR production which, come to think of it, might never have existed, only I dreamed it and convinced myself I saw it on screen. [T]he scene is communist tower blocks reaching high, high into the sky, concrete gray in a desolate landscape and wolves, wolves everywhere, with glowing eyes. And a voice saying that they’ve taken over the city.

Exaggerated, dreamed, romanticized, maybe morbid. Still, the rats are there, unwanted but hungry. Beyond antipathy and acceptance, rats simply exist in the cities as another layer of their population make-up. Tip the balance and they crawl out of hiding.

I didn’t know about the rat quarter under the old zoo before that memorable explanation, but there were plenty of strays where I lived then. My roommates and I helped feed the cats the janitor found in the dumpster until someone complained to the administration. The janitor was forced to give up the cats and leave rat poison in the cellar. Rats again.

In Vienna, a rat spotted one night by the main university building was the only stray I saw. After a couple months it became disconcerting. No surprises, no uncontrolled life. It’s hard for me to imagine that Vienna reached some sort of a higher level of “cityhood” when it became simply uninteresting for undomesticated animals. It seems more likely that only rats survived the effective catching and killing.

Where do you find the life of a city, in what circumstances do you see its contours? When I read Reznikoff’s animal poems, I see the city as a living space in an instant unmade and made up again by the discovery of birds in naked trees, foxes on the park lawn.

So I was wondering about the request for information about fox sightings in Berlin (see link above). Is the man looking for stories that a reader of Reznikoff might appreciate? Does he want to re-imagine the city in the mode of my USSR movie fantasy? Or is he a member of some sort of vigilante fox-hunting group for which fox is the new rat? Let’s get them before they eat us?… I’m too lazy to write to him. In this case ignorance might be bliss.

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.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

My guiding thought for the new year. Or any year.

It might seem like a sign of sad disenchantment to say that people generally aren’t good and kind, but outside of Disney movies that has always been the case.

Some time before Christmas I had an interesting conversation about censorship and “smoothing out” fairy tales. All those cut tongues, cropped toes, missing fingers were taken away from us. And in exchange we got Bambi. Not even close to a real deer. Not like the ones I watched as a child run through the orchard, the ones I’d meet on a walk in the fields near our family house. Where my parents live has become suburbia: Bambi and Desperate Housewives. Neat laundry, controlled scream.

In my deep wintry sleep at my parents’ this Christmas I dreamt of toads and snakes coming out of my mouth, like in the uncensored Grimms’ tales. What doesn’t have to be kind by decree, may still discover its own kindness. Coughing roses doesn’t bring you closer to your truths, while toads and snakes make good company when what you think or say suddenly gets the stamp of vulgar and unacceptable.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, or don’t let the bastards grind you down, as the Wikipedia translation reads. The Handmaid’s Tale was published over twenty years ago. My last angry letter to a newspaper was in response to an interview with Atwood on the occasion of the anniversary. The interview is hardly worth mentioning, the interviewer wasn’t even skillful in concealing that she hadn’t read the book. She got the number of Polish editions wrong, unaware of the first one in the 1980s. The epitome of idiocy was reached with the question “What is the idea behind your writing? As most (sic!) readers, I’m interested in the thoughts underpinning the prose”… more than in the text, she should have added, because I can’t be bothered to read. Because critical insight, no, mere skepticism is too much to ask. We want Bambi, an easy conviction that if not “good” then at least everyone is “OK.” That all the ranting is useless, that apocalyptic visions belong to cold-war sci-fi, that what a woman wrote in Canada over twenty years ago has no connection to where we are heading.

I didn’t reread The Handmaid’s Tale over Christmas. As always during my visits, I tried to catch up with Polish press. The Republic of Gilead was dripping from the pages of weeklies and women’s magazines. Neo-Nazi rightwingers temporarily removed from power but lurking in the shadows. All-powerful clergymen checking the wires on their brainwashing machines, getting government funding for their latest whims. Celebrity women talking drunken nonsense about how they wish they were housewives, locked away with their kids in a space between the kitchen and the church. Single women as the new plague and a theory to put their sexuality in a box labeled “disease.” Feminist politicians laughed out of court for their lack of “dress sense.” A sex scandal victim shamed for not being pregnant with the corrupt politician who abused her but with someone else (in the zany world of prim and proper logic she probably should have been “faithful”)… and the rape jokes, the rape jokes that crop up everywhere… The Republic of Gilead adds bricks to its walls. We can’t be bothered to read, so we don’t know we’re not even original in this madness. And of course, let’s bow our heads and be nice in an eternal Christmas, let’s cough roses and say things are changing for the better.

Toads and snakes are creatures of the margins that remind us that darkness exists. There’s no place for them in the well-lit world of Bambi and newspaper rationalizations of everything. Where all the people are wonderful and our culture is our home, our religion is our law, and our thinking is anathema to the happiness that lies in complicity. I don’t believe any country and any people can be sane if they simply rename their totalitarianism. Is being ruled by a one-sex hierarchy claiming power over souls really any better than living under the boot of a foreign working-men dictatorship? This Christmas we didn’t even have snow to cover it up.

I want toads and snakes, a space for the genuine, so that smiles are not merely painted, but the tension of muscles could be felt under the fingers when you touch someone’s face. Not crowds frogmarched into churches but believers and non-believers and outright heretics safe from clergymen’s home archives’ all-seeing, all-punishing eyes. I don’t want a morality that comes from religious tribunals and our corrupt traditions but from people’s lives. In fact, I don’t want to write about how my visit to the country brought me down. I want toads and snakes, uncensored stories, uncut minds.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Don’l let the bastards in you get you.

Happy new year, everyone.

Walcząc z zatruciem kawą (niestety) i porządkując ostatnie sprawy przed świąteczną wycieczką do domu, słucham Kultu. Za moimi plecami stoi otwarta walizka, jeszcze pusta. Bez zmian: nadal nienawidzę pakowania; jutro będę spontanicznie wrzucać ubrania i prezenty. Kazik powinien napisać piosenkę o torturach pakowania. W wielu innych sprawach trafił idealnie w moje odczucia. Słucham Polski i przypomina mi się, jacy w liceum byliśmy wspaniale zblazowani, ale jak mimo wszystko pragnęliśmy zmian. Te pociągi i ponure perony… przypomina mi się noc, którą z Jakubem spędziliśmy na dworcu w Zielonej Górze; jego spontaniczny krwotok z szyi bez żadnych śladów, groźni bezdomni, jak czytaliśmy Autostopem przez galaktykę, żeby nie zasnąć. Trudno uwierzyć, że to było prawie pięć lat temu. Podejrzewam, iż jest to tak naprawdę do powtórzenia, z krwotokiem włącznie. Tylko że znaleźliśmy się w tak odległych miejscach, nie tylko geograficznie, że osób, które mogłyby to powtórzyc już nie ma.
 
 

 
 

Te pociągi! Te dworce!

You do know that feeling when you see a homeless person, a sense of shame tinged with indifference. Not that it’s most convenient to look away, or that like Ben Franklin we have absolute control over what happens to us… But how far does ranting and raving go and just how much love for the world and benevolence is there in our personal reservoir?

I remember a friend of mine who, seeing a beggar by the entrance to the Viennese Hauptuni, got into a long tirade over what this country and our demonic capitalism do to people.

I have my fears about waking sleepwalkers, so I let him dream his marxist dream. Maybe I have a heart of stone, but I didn’t see things as he saw them there and then.

It’s becoming my favorite answer that we are all to a greater or lesser extent bound within our perspective. What you are and what you have directs your perception, structures it, and writes between the lines. Embodiment is tough to oppose. You cannot, try as you might, just float out of your body and stand apart with a sense of complete insight and oneness with the world. Yet our pet theories often give us the feeling that through them we are achieving precisely that. This is my pet theory.

And this is how I make sense of that situation from several months ago. My friend, who was an American exchange student, comfortably well off, and a big fan of Marx, saw in the beggar the proof of great social injustice caused by capitalism and the US impact on world economy. While he struggled with outrage and what seemed to me like a bit of self-disgust (for being American), I was somewhere else on the whole issue. An exchange student like him, but with incomparably smaller funds, and, moreover, from a former people’s republic, I did not conceive of the old man’s desperate condition in terms of capitalist oppression. First of all, because capitalism in Austria is not an exact recreation of American models (so “this country” is not “this country” with the intonation and criticism that automatically came to his mind). And, perhaps more importantly, because the old man was not an Austrian ousted to the margins by the state economy’s cruel machine, but an emigrant, most likely from a former communist state. His mumbling didn’t sound even remotely like German. If it were possible to ask him why he came to Vienna, I imagine we’d have heard a story about how he wanted to embrace the cruel capitalist machine. Where it got him objectively and how evil the world actually is remains beyond anyone’s perspective.

If it’s the homeless who really know what homelessness is about, then there are slight chances that the others will be able to go beyond romanticizing homelessness. It’s an ironic footnote to the standpoint theory. Be it linguistic barriers, madness, or aimlessness of storytelling, whatever the reason, it’s not very likely that we’ll get a comprehensive outcast’s view of the world.

There is a beggar on Heidelberg’s Hauptstrasse that everyone recognizes. The guy usually has a peaceful albeit somewhat blank look on his face and he’s always sitting with his dog. He’s got a piece of cardboard covered in unsteady handwriting (I never read it) and he wraps his dog up in a blanket. Like many people, when I pass them I can’t help to want to stroke the dog. Thank God I never tried to.

This is what I heard today from my classmate Ricardo. As he was walking down Hauptstrasse a while ago, he saw an elderly man approach the guy and try to lift the blanket to look at the dog. The homeless guy quickly leapt to his feet and punched the elderly man, who staggered and fell down cracking his skull on the pavement. A crowd gathered around them, people yelled at the beggar. And Ricardo said that the beggar yelled back something like: “He shouldn’t have tried to touch my dog.”

Whoever knows what that meant. I’m not up to theorizing about poverty nor madness, nor up to stroking anyone’s dog after this story.

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.

I don’t think I have a temperature anymore, but I still feel weak and my nose is still like a leaking tap. Ergo, I still have a cold. However, this is what I did today: I spent an hour waiting in the wind and rain for a package from my mother. Because my mother had the romantic idea to pass the package through someone traveling to Heidelberg. So I almost froze to death waiting for it at the station and when I finally got it, I saw my tram driving off (it’s Sunday, they go every hundred years). I dragged the package home in the rain… and went to sleep without opening it.

Several hours later I opened it and found — apart from the things I asked for — a neatly tied parcel with… what should I call them?… St. Martin’s croissants(?). Rogale marcińskie, which is the Polish name of this delicacy, is probably the most wonderful thing about the region I come from. It’s St. Martin’s today, which means everyone in Poznań and its environs, is eating rogale…

(Image: mniammniam.pl)

It’s also a delicious beginning of the second year of my emigrant life, which — in spite of the scarcity of rogale — has been good for me so far. And rogale have definitely been worth the epic quest. Ask any poznaniak, they’ll tell you.

PS: It’s also Independence Day in Po(e)land. My chance to wave a flag, if I had one.

Tonight I was at the HCA to help out with our americanist contribution to the Long Night of Academia. We had lots and lots of kitsch decorations: red-white-and-blue bells, ribbons, and flags, of course, flags. And hot dogs, muffins, and marshmallows. After three hours of giving out marshmallows as prizes in the US quiz, I got more than bored with them.

It’s funny to think, though, that it takes so little to represent a place or an idea. What we had there tonight was cliché to the extreme. And it worked. On some level, those simplifications simply do their job. Without denying diversity, there is always place for the almost too straightforward in any grand thought and in any country.

On top of my favorites’ list of those straightforward elements of American life are the mailboxes (I just found a website of a firm manufacturing them in Germany, so I’m not the only fan). In Europe, they’re mostly unnoticeable. Not to mention, smaller. In the States, they’re like separate actors in the landscape. It’s endearing how out-of-place they look. If I tried to condense my memories of Ithaca into a single image, it would be that of a baffled deer nuzzling a mailbox.

But quite apart from my favorites’ list, beyond my liking and not liking, is the US flag. It’s everywhere. In Europe, you can see national flags on courthouses, city halls, or on national holidays. More and more often they’re accompanied by the flag of the EU. I personally have a problem with how the American landcape is cluttered with flagpoles. Is it due to some inexpressible yet profound need to connect with the symbol? Perhaps it’s something that I cannot grasp because, coming from Central Europe, I have an inherent fear of nationalism? Let it be a proof of my discomfort that after a few hours I just had to get rid of the picture of a flagpole I took in NYC from the blog header. Too uncanny for my taste.

On the other hand, I like it how the flag is used and abused. People tear up and stain thousands of them every day, since they’re on napkins, paper cups, T-shirts.

There’s a whole lot of them in the HCA trash tonight.

If you wanted to know about the Democrat-Republican debate in Heidelberg, you should have been there in that huge crowd. I didn’t feel like suffocating in there and the Republican was late anyway.

Bad poetry announces it’s about combat, a major battle in vaguely affiliated with hip-hop where cannons shoot out enormous words like Love, Trust, Honesty, and Innocence. The poet – or, more precisely, Poet – in a failing voice, with a dry throat, staggering from line to line, keeping in mind the unheard tune, thinking about the unmade video of him or herself reciting this, or of the blinding light, or of the crowd they are facing, a crowd lazily sipping alcoholic beverages, a crowd of fighters who had fought over the scarcity of chairs in the room – the Poet then (the hero of this lengthy sentence) solemnly declares that he or she is a Fighter.

Bad poetry has its allure. Its willingness to fight against the great roaring Something is truly endearing. All those declarations of love and manifestoes of disappointment with the world want to be revelatory. And somehow they manage to scratch out their bit of tenderness from the listeners’ drunken hearts. They are like grandmothers’ coffee tables with one leg shorter, those clumsy poems written by Fighters for Innocence, World Peace, Her Attention. You listen and clap with sympathy, like you would slide an unused dictionary under the table’s shorter leg.

What is good poetry then? Performed poetry, is must be added, none of the stuff that comes in ink on a page. Something that is shouted, whispered, half-sung on stage, that wakes you from the beer-induced nap. The Dionysian recitation that stands on its feet bravely and doesn’t remind you of flea market furniture. It might falter on paper but here it lives for the six minutes of the competition entry.

At the poetry slam I’m referring to it seemed that the better poems came from followers of Billy Collins. It’s, of course, one of those sweeping generalizations, it’s a drawer I put those poet performers into, although it’s possible that none of them had ever read Collins. Their poems were in German and one of them even dedicated his to students of German literature present in the room, so their performances may well have been a homage to a tradition I am completely unaware of (thus for a second I hang my head in shame). But the thought behind their poetry reminded me of Collins or Pope in that they aimed at lightness in their meditations without capital letters: on how one may couch attraction in commercial slogans, on the fate of mother-related cusswords in German, on the fate of rhyme, on the delays of Deutsche Bahn, and on the advantages of being a man from Eastern Europe.

Was it poetry what happened on that stage? I do not mean to dismiss performed verse by asking. My doubt relates to the magic of the moment. The poet chanting the lines, the audience responding to his or her skill… and suddenly the listener is swept under the wave of connection, not knowing whether it is expressiveness he or she is applauding, or the words. I certainly cannot recall any line in particular, any intriguing conceit or simile from any of the poems I heard that night, hence my question. If it was poetry, then its simple subjects did very well without the protection of cannons and bullets of Love and Capital Letters. If it wasn’t, it still did what poems should do.

I think that poems today ought to stick to objects. They should wrap themselves around bread knives and light bulbs, and come out from those places where only dust rules. And dust, as is widely known, is no fighter, but what each fighter eventually bites.

PS: I don’t know who won that night, I had to catch the tram back home. But if anyone knows who triumphed at the poetry slam in Heidelberg’s DAI on October 20, please let me know.

PPS: There was wine but it was ridiculously expensive.

I want to thank Asia, Anja, and Mika for making this a wonderful evening.