Re: Wonky

Together with my much better half, we're going to New York this weekend for her last state-side hurrah, before she is borne away by swans and fairies back to ye olde Albion. So, this is as good a time as any to revisit the recent Borg invasion of the Big Apple.

Deck The Halls...

...with inflatable penguins...


...and snowmen trapped in oversized, electrified beachballs...

...fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-LA! Merry Christmas, everyone.

Spread The Misery, Spread The Joy

The sun is shining, and I'm stuck in the library, so I thought I would finally share what many of you have been clamouring for for years and years, albeit, to your credit, silently: fragments from the texts I'm reading. Well, I've just finished a survey of 28 years' worth of newspaper articles on Polish poetry, so I'll give you quotes from three articles, and because I like you that much, I'll even throw in one from a book at no extra charge. here goes:

New York Times, 7-2-1985:

So many Poles spend so much of their time waiting for a ''kolporter'' that one might conclude that there is a revivalist cult of the American songwriter here. But the word that sounds like Cole Porter actually refers to something clandestine.

The Vancouver Sun, 19-12-1991:

The love scenes presented a problem for the 77 Polish translators who have so far prepared 84 titles for publication. Polish, it seems, lacks the proper language for delicately describing the kind of love Harlequin specializes in. The texts, even in the hands of the best interpreters, came back either as complete vulgarity, or else sounding like a medical consultation between doctors. Harlequin asked a number of prominent Polish poets and writers to try to inspire the translators with samples of dialogue for a love scene.

Los Angeles Times, 1-10-2006:

Engdahl, a mere schoolboy at 57 compared with some of his colleagues on the committee, enjoys a kind of notoriety in Swedish literary circles that he often refers to as hurtful. Why do they hate him so? While Ahnlund likes a good human story, Engdahl is a post-structuralist who believes in things like "textual analysis." In his speech at the presentation of the Nobel to Jelinek, he quoted Hegel (never popular at parties): "Woman is society's irony.""If literature is a force that leads to nothing," Engdahl pressed on, addressing Jelinek, "you are, in our day, one of its truest representatives." (Thunderous applause.)

And the book - Remaining Relevant After Communism, by Andrew Wachtel:

Artistic literature in the postsocialist cultural model ahs become socially unnecessary, an almost completely private affair which lacks any social importance and which is interesting only to narrow academic circles, to writers, and to rare dedicated readers who nurture their passion as other marginal groups nurture theirs: some people belong to satanic cults, some to the Society for Lovers of Bulldogs, and others, amazingly, read Serbian poetry.

Morning Glory

From Slide Show

And So It Begins

I'm happy to announce I have managed to irrevocably break one of the library computers: it started with the silly excuse for an abaccus announcing that my account has been suspended (which it hasn't) and that anyway, I'm using the wrong password (which I wasn't). It went downhill from there.

No-one seems to know what happened, or perhaps they just don't want to state the obvious: it's clear to me that this is the start of the long-foretold machine revolution, and the more tech savvy humans are trying to ingratiate themselves with our new robotic overlords by forming a cult. There is already a sort of permanent, furtive procession of IT people to cubicle 31, as they all pretend to be trying to fix the computer - even as they get on their hands and knees in front of it and mutter to themselves in Old Church BASIC. You're not fooling anyone!

In other news, my much better half is now here in DC, which means I go down the corridors skipping merrily and giggling softly like a mountain brook, as tiny blue birds braid my hair and woodland creatures gambol around, much to the annoyance of the Library Police.

Bonus picture (you'd think at least one of them would go into hiding after the election, wouldn't you):

Reverse Sisyphus Manoeuvre

Yesterday was the Kluge Prize ceremony - it's kind of like the Nobel Prize, but with less publicity. To my Polish friends - did you know Leszek Kołakowski was awarded the prize in 2003? See? And yet, it's highly prestigious, by which I mean, they give you a million dollars. Well, not you. They gave a million each to Romila Thapar and Peter Brown, both historians, both in their seventies.

We were invited to the ceremony, of course (but not the dinner - there are limits). There were velvet curtains, fanfares, a string quartet, goat cheese tartlets. and lectures from the winners. The speeches were interesting, I'm sure, but I found myself defaulting to my trapped-at-a-lecture-reading-presentation-or-any-speech-really mode, which I first came up with when I was about eight, and had to sit through never-ending sermons at church. It consists of me trying to figure out how I would go about climbing all the way up to the ceiling of the space I'm in, swinging on chandeliers and scaling columns on the way. I got halfway to the glass ceiling of the Jefferson Building's Main Hall before Romila Thapar's talk finished, but then I got to a tricky overhang which seemed impossible to negotiate safely, so I split my time between looking for an alternative route and observing Peter Brown's glasses as he talked. They were engaged in what can only be described as a reverse-Sisyphus manoeuvre, sliding down the bridge of his nose and getting tantalizingly close to the tip, only to be pushed back a the very last moment by a seemingly oblivious Brown. Hypnotizing.

Tuesday, I note here out of my sense of duty as a chronicler, was the day of my first featured spoken word performance in the US, at the TerPoets open mic night in College Park, Maryland. I had great fun, and it is always exhilarating to perform in front of a roaring crowd of what may have well been more than two dozen people. Good times.

Maybe That’s Just the Way I Read It

If you have a spare few minutes, you could do worse than spend them listening to this.

I Won't Spill Pants On Your Wine

So there - the New York trip has been and gone, and I told all the stories to so many people already I don't think I will be able to bring myself to write a full report. You want to know something about MoMA or the Upright Citizen's Brigade, or what not to do on the subway, you ask. All right?

In the meantime, I have partaken of my very first Thanksgiving dinner, which featured the companionship of 100% real Indians (from India) and a vegan turkey; made the first step towards a post-PhD world, in which dinners are free and lunches subsidised; and almost denied myself access to most of my money by misclicking a button on the bank's website (BTW, the FairFX people are awesome: they spotted my error and fixed it themselves before any real damage could be done. If you ever need a prepaid currency-exchange-oriented mock credit card, and we both know you eventually will, they're a good choice). ,

I also have a feature slot at the University of Maryland's Terpoets Open Mic on hte 9th, so if you're on the East Coast and feel a craving for poetry, come over.

Today's blog post was sponsored by colour-coordinated things that apparently fall off trees:

NYC

Some pictures: click on this one, and it'll take you to where all the others are. I will be uploading new ones for the next day or two, as and when I find the time to resize them etc.

From NYC

Harlem Globetrotters

This short note is brought to you by my sense of inadequacy: I am accompanied on this trip by semi-pro bloggers whose output I could never hope to equal even on my home turf. I'm basically typing this to stay in the game, as it were.

So: I'm in NYC, which to my city fetish is like a red rag to a bull, if the bull really likes red rags, and wants to get lost in them, and get to know their less obvious sides, and find nice things about them in spots that would normally be overlooked. A very discerning bull, in point of fact; a bull of taste.

Also, performed in the Nuyorican. The sheer awesomeness of this fact is not tempered by the cringe-inducing open-mic that followed the slam. But if anyone else rhymes sorrow and tomorrow in my presence, they better stay on their toes, I'm a mean shot with an empty glass.

Taking lots of pictures, but this computer and my camera memory card don't speak to each other, so a proper, illustrated travelogue will surface when I am reunited with my own laptop. Or, I may just upload a bunch of images.

You Will Travel and Come Into a Great Fortune

That's what my fortune cookie said.

From Slide Show

The last few days have been really weird - the borgs have arrived to pay me a visit, and being subjected to their constant stream of mockery (one likes to think it's friendly banter) here in the US has just raised the level of surrealism to a new high. We have learned many things together, such as:

• there is no time of day when CSI is not playing on one tv channel or another
• peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are good, mac&cheese - not so much
• the posh part of DC stinks to high heavens of rotting leaves, which is cool, in a schadenfreude kind of way
• taking beautiful pictures of trees in autumn will have you mercilessly derided by people you thought were friends
• etc., etc.
  

We're off to New York later today, armed with a post-it note with the address of NYC's best pizza and cheesecake spots, obtained from an insider at great peril to all parties involved.

Means & Ends

Though it's clean and crisp
I sweep all the snow away
Don't want accidents

Punchline

The London Metro paper on the day after the election:

I'm Not Sure You Know...

...but there was an election over here some days ago. By now you've read everything about it, so I figured you'd be interested in reading some more. 10 day old news. That's how relevant I am.

Everyone was expecting a massive turnout, so lots of people voted ahead of time; many others got up at four in the morning to avoid queues, and ended up queueing with the rest of those qho tried to be smarter than the others. By the time I got off work, the rush was over, and there were camera crews around town...

...reporting on crowds that weren't there:

So where were all the people, you ask? Well, loads of places - cafes, restaurant, fast food joints, etc. - offered freebies on that day to whoever asked for them. Initially, they were going to reward people with "I voted" stickers, but it turned out it would be bribing people to vote, and thus a felony. So the network reporters would have been better off checking the local Ben & Jerry's, for example:

The election itself was over quickly - by 23:00, everyone knew the results, and I got to watch university professors and their friends (yup, I was at one wild election night par-tay) get all misty eyed during Obama's acceptance speech. Then people hit the streets, and everyone rambled around with slightly confused expressions, shooting fireworks and looking like they could not quite believe what had happened.

DC Story

Things That Go Bump In The Dark

It's late. I get on the metro in Columbia Heights, having just visited a haunted house (staged yearly, I'm told, by the friends and neighbours of our local Special Assistant to the Director of the Office of Scholarly Programs, whose job this year was to grab peoples ankles as they clambered up the stairs, running from the chainsaw wielding maniac in the yard).

Back to the metro: the car is almost empty, apart from a dapper musketeer, a slutty bee (I think), some guy who clearly just was in a motorcycle crash (and still holds a piece of the bike in his hands), two Kiss members, and a zombie. Discussing, I shit you not, string theory. In pretty serious and competent tones, too; the conversation got quite intense, at one point especially when they started debating branes, which is when my smile got so broad it became apparent to everyone I was not really reading my book. Zombies arguing about different types of branes? You can't blame me for bad puns if life just throws them at me.

Here's another Halloweeny pic for all of you (snapped on my way to the laundromat):

Also: propaganda pumpkins FTW.

Basket Case

In 1992, professional basketball players were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time. The players who were part of the team the US sent to Barcelona were superstars from the golden age of the NBA – everybody’s heard of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Charles Barkley, right? I remember watching the games on the wood-panelled TV in my grandmother’s living room (“Bohdan, go play outside, the weather’s too nice to stay indoors”), and being completely, utterly, irredeemably hypnotised. Those guys were just out of this world, and they were having so much FUN. I wanted to be just like them, of course, and this new-found ambition fuelled long years filled with hard training and scotch-taping broken pairs of glasses together. I did make it on my school’s high-school team, and then I could have my own brand of fun, watching most games from the bench as I wondered why the coach hated my guts so much. But I digress. I meant to show you this:

Yes, I fulfilled my childhood dream – I went to see the Washington Wizards' first game of the season (they were once called the Washington Bullets, but as DC used to have the dubious honour for being the US murder capital for many years, they changed the name; it seems to have helped, although the new logo is enough to make you want to kill someone). The game was a bit of letdown (most of the Wizards’ best players are currently injured), but the whole shebang was just perfect – the overpriced hotdogs, the lightshow, the cheesy announcer, the cheerleaders, the burrito toss, the kiss cam… You get a lot of metaphorical bang for your quite literal buck, even if you are stuck way, way up near the ceiling because you bought the cheapest tickets on offer. Here's the kiss cam, which I think synergises very well with the Sprite ads:

There was only one worrying thing, seeing as election day is just around the corner:

Adam said it was probably fake, and they were trying to get the people to text more in order to take their money. Or phone numbers. Or both. I’d rather believe that, too.

All In A Day's Work

Here’s the thing about living in the US: you feel like you’re in a movie. I’ve seen so many films and TV shows set in the home of the brave that in my mind, Macy’s and 7/11 are not real stores, just sets in sitcoms and action films; pick-up trucks are props, not actual modes of transportation; the FBI is a fictional organisation of superheroes (or villains, it depends), not the guys who occasionally to take a different route to get to the Library. Honestly, the impression is so strong, whenever people speak, I look down, waiting for the subtitles to appear.

And so I can't shake off the vague suspicion that this whole thing is somehow less than real. It doesn’t help if the screen of your computer occasionally spontaneously displays messages like these:



Aw, c’mon. At least tell us what the substance was!

Where Have All the Heroes Gone

They looked up and yelled:
It's a bird! It's a plane! No..
Wait... Yeah, it's a plane.

Over The Anvil We Stretch

I took the metro all the way to the University of Maryland . The station is way up there on the northern end of the green line:



I made the trip to see the Junkyard Ghost Revival, the touring spoken word supergroup consisting of Anis Mojgani, Buddy Wakefield, Derrick Brown, and a fourth poet who changes every few weeks (it was Cristin O'Keefe that evening). If you don't know their stuff, google it, sit back and enjoy - those guys are the epitome of amazing. They are the bee's knees, the dog's bollocks and the cat's pajamas. Also, Buddy remembered me from Oxford, which was a nice surprise, and hanging out with Anis for the first time since Paris was awesome. Plus, the two of them made me go on stage a read a poem, so now I have officially shared a stage with people who opened for the Rolling Stones and toured with freakin' Sage Francis.

Also met a bunch of great people from the Maryland Uni's poetry circles, took part in a semi-choreographed dance routine to this song blaring from their tour van's speakers, had calzone pizza at a strip mall, and lost a game of pool against Derrick in a dive bar with a wonky jukebox. My American experience is getting more and more genuine.

Pictured - Buddy and Anis at the D.P. Dough pizza place, awaiting nourishment:

Target Market

So I went down to Pentagon City metro the other day to do some shopping, and noticed the billboards were different than at other stations. I took a closer look, and saw that while one or two were touting pension plans for federal employees - fair enough - most were ads for the acronymically named JAGM, by Boeing and Raytheon. Can someone please explain to me the logic behind a billboard campaign advertising air-to-ground missiles? Is the average commuter going to go "Gosh darn, I'm so annoyed having to remember whether my F-16 uses stingers or hellfires, I always get the wrong ones at the mall - the JAGM thing looks like it could save me some headaches?" I'm perplexed.

On a (vaguely) related note, the sequel to my all-time favourite computer game is coming out, and despite all the controversy, I can't help but feel excited - especially since I recently ofund out most of it is going to take place in a post-apocalyptic DC. So I will be able to do the tourists sights in real life, then revisit them after a nuclear explosion and a mutant invasion. And while this could seem slightly disquieting, this sign I saw at the Library's staff entrance today makes me feel nice and safe and warm:

Reassuring

Near the postboxes in the corridor that leads out of my house here, a crumpled, laminated sheet of yellowing paper is stuck to the wall.
For one reason or another, I stopped to read it today, and I would like to share it with you all:


Now if that's not reassuring, I don't know what is.

Wrap Up the Case

So the other day, the National Portrait Gallery had a free showing of the Maltese Falcon. We went to see it with A., and boy, the movie is all kinds of awesome. Look here:

What with me being in the middle of a noir phase after The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this really hit the spot. Repeatedly. With the butt of a pistol.

And while we're wrapping up, it's time to call an end to the Shuffle & Baffle thingy - 18 out of 25 is astounding, considering the fact that some of the lines I would never have guessed myself. I'm very proud of everyone (with the exception of Paul, who really should have guessed the Smashing Pumpkins song; I mean come on). Anyway, here are the solutions:

1. King Crimson, Frame by Frame
2. Erykah Badu, Cleva
3. Bjork, Joga
4. Sun Kil Moon, Glenn Tipton
5. Buddy Wakefield, My Town
6. Roots Manuva, Colossal Insight
7. Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans
8. The Decemberists, Eli the Barrow Boy
9. Aoi Teshima, Teru no Uta (Tales of Earthsea Soundtrack)
10. Noir Desir, L'enfant roi
11. Madredeus, O Mar
12. Jeff Buckley, Corpus Christi Carol
13. RHCP, Emit Remmus
14. Iva Bittova, V cerném
15. Sage Francis, Crack Pipes
16. Regina Spektor, The Consequence of Sounds
17. Smashing Pumpkins, Rocket
18. Non-prophets, New Word Order
19. Saul Williams, List of Demands
20. System of a Down, Toxicity
21. Atmosphere, Aspiring Sociopath
22. Tom Waits, Little Rain (for Clyde)
23. Sufjan Stevens, Flint (for the unemployed and the underpaid)
24. Buck 65, Heather Nights
25. Atmosphere, Guns & Cigarettes

Oh, and if you haven't had enough, Daan's just posted his version.

Shuffle & Baffle

Stole this from a friend:

• Put your music player on random.
  
• Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
  
• Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
  
• Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.
• Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

So. Here's mine:

1. Frame by frame, if by drowning, in your arms, in your arms, analysis.
2. This is how I look without make-up
3. All these accidents that happen follow the dot, coincidence makes sense only with you.
4. Cassius Clay was hated more than Sonny Liston, some like KK Downing more than Glenn Tipton
5. The first time my town saw the sky, it sucker-punched us in the throat
6. Collosal insight (collosal, man) invites the soul (inviting of the soapbox), sturdy after good food (more sturdy)
7. We didn't sleep too late, there was a fire in the yard
8. Eli the barrow boy of the old town sells coal and marigolds, and he cries out all down the day
9. Yuuyami semaru kumo no ue, itsumo ichiwa de tonde iru
10. Je ne sais qu'une chose, tu tiens ma joie ma peine entre tes mains
11. No nenhum poema, o que vos vou dizer, nem sei se vale a pena tentar-vos descrever
12. He bear her off, he bear her down, he bear her into an orchard ground
    
13. The California animal is a bear
14. Pred dvermi opráším sníh z vlasu, sníh z paží, z rukávu, sníh z ras.
15. I'd give a 21 gun shot salute with the toy rifle that you gave me, but it won't shoot
16. My rhyme ain't good just yet, my brain and tongue just met
17. Bleed in your own light, dream of your own life
18. You ain't got no style, you ain't got no style, you ain't got no style, you ain't got no style
19. I want my money back, I'm down here drowning in your fat, you got me on my knees praying for everything you lack.
20. Conversion, software version 7.0
21. 7:30 AM, alerted to life by a song on the radio
22. The Ice Man's mule is parked outside the bar where a man with missing fingers plays a strange guitar
23. It's the same outside, driving to the riverside
24. Sleepy town, Saturday, seen a man drown
25. Rappers stepping to me, they wanna get some, but most of them should go and boost their monthly income

Good luck!

Built From Nothing but High Hopes and Thin Air

I learned a few things yesterday.

1. The Eastern Market is the best place to go for second-hand bikes.



2. The National Gallery of Art is good for buying prints and posters as well as crashing parties.



3. The Sylvan Amphitheatre is right next to the Lincoln Memorial, and the Christian McBride Quartet makes for an amazing soundtrack for Kavalier & Clay (which is a great book, and you should go read it now).


4. Nick Cave is a glamorous demon on stage, and his electric mandolin player is Rasputin crossed with a crane.

You guys in Europe live in the future

Walking around in a daze today. I still have not gotten over the overwhelming feeling this whole thing is fake and/or is happening to someone else entirely. The feeling is compounded by the fact I have spent the last month or so checking out DC on google maps, and I keep wanting to zoom in on my surroundings and scroll them.

The Library is humongous and it's a freaking maze:



Seriously. I only got out today, after registering and meeting the rest of the cubicle warriors, because I thoughfully dropped breadcrumbs on my way from the entrance. Not sure I'll find my way back to my desk tomorrow; the minotaur has probably eaten them all by now.

The cubicle warriors seem cool. We crashed a formal reception at the National Gallery of Art today, and conferred on subjects such as MAs in Life Studies and mysterious shiny pseudo-Spanish foodstuffs.

Also, on my way back from the NGA, I saw these guys, enjoying a special kind of guided tour of the city:


Made my day.

Stuff packed. Tickets printed. Stomach tennis-balled.

If everything goes according to plan, in almost exactly twenty-four hours I will be five time zones away. This will then, hopefully, turn into an amazing travelogue, full of insight and witty observations on life on the other shore of the Atlantic. Or, you know. It could just go the way it usually does, with a brief flurry of activity at the start quickly degenerating into a series of short, vaguely guilt-fueled bursts of blogging interspersed with ever-longer periods of non-.

See, now you can't say I haven't warned you; basically, you've just read my EULA.

Oh, google it.

Placeholder

Aptly named, holding, as it does, what can only be called a place.