Up Up And Away

A goodbye present for all those good men and women I'm leaving behind at the Library:

Elizabeth Bishop
View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress

Moving from left to left, the light
is heavy on the Dome, and coarse.
One small lunette turns it aside
and blankly stares off to the side
like a big white old wall-eyed horse.

On the east steps the Air Force Band
in uniforms of Air Force blue
is playing hard and loud, but - queer -
the music doesn't quite come through.

It comes in snatches, dim then keen,
then mute, and yet there is no breeze.
The giant trees stand in between.
I think the trees must intervene,

catching the music in their leaves
like gold-dust, till each big leaf sags.
Unceasingly the little flags
feed their limp stripes into the air,
and the band's efforts vanish there.

Great shades, edge over,
give the music room.
The gathered brasses want to bo
boom - boom.

Oh, snap

I was trying to find out how you go about formatting in-text citations from anonymous sources using MLA (which is the style we have to use for all our academic papers at the CTCCS - and I hate it, all those full stops are not doing it for me). Exciting stuff, huh? So they explained you just include an abridged version of the title and a page number, and gave an example. Ladies and gentlemen, the example:

An anonymous Wordsworth critic once argued that his poems were too emotional ("Wordsworth Is a Loser" 100).

Oh, dude. Burn!

This Morning

Yerp Yerp

Continuing my series of blog posts I've been hoarding for when I have no time to write, please enjoy this screen cap from the Anglophone wikipedia page for Polish poetry. It has since been ammended, but I can't see why - it seemed like a masterful summary.

What Librarians Drive

I've been sitting on this post for a while, and I figured this was as a good a time as any to let you in on the secret life of librarians. I mean, I know people sometimes order books on short notice, but still...

I snapped all of these pictures on the Library of Congress staff parking lot:

But I Missed The Parade

20.01.2009, 7 am. -8 degrees Celsius, light wind. Federal Center Metro Station. I am yawning my jaw off, standing somewhere out of the way of the thousands upon thousands of confused tourists streaming out of the metro exit, hoping that the rest of the Cubicle Warriors will show up soon so we can go stand in front of a giant screen and watch Barack Obama become president. A girl wearing a hat covered in "yes we can" stickers accosts me.

Sticker Hat Girl:
"Sorry, are you travelling alone?"
Me, thinking she's a volunteer wanting to show me the way:
"No, I'm waiting for some friends. They should be here any minute, thanks."
Sticker Hat Girl:
"It's just that I have one spare ticket, and if you're by yourself, you can have it."
Me, thinking how I saw some of these tickets crop up on Craigslist for $400 a pop:
"..."
Sticker Hat Girl:
"Here, why don't you take it, and if you don't use it, give it to a deserving individual."

Sticker Hat Girl walks away, never to be seen again, leaving me with one ticket to the western blue zone, the standing area closest to the Capitol (any closer and you're a VIP, which earns you a crappy green collapsible plastic patio chair). Some of the Warriors showed up in the end, and told me not to be stupid, to go, and to show them the pictures later. And so mere 3 hours of queueing later, I was in where even Kima could not go.

Still don't know how or why I got so lucky, but there you go. V. says it's Karma for being turned away from two gates before the Saturday concert. And the pictures? Right this way, please.

From Inauguration and Swearing In Ceremony

Actually, hang on, I have two more things to add:

• the funniest part was the brilliant tactic they used to get people to leave after the end of the ceremonies: they had Elizabeth Alexander recite a poem. I never thought 2 million people could leave a place so quickly. Seriously, it worked better than a water cannon, riot police should consider nominating a Crowd Control Laureate;
  
• the saddest part was how quickly poetry can disperse a crowd, and how much bad PR it got after the event. Granted, I thought the poem was pretty bad (I mean, "Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?" Really?), but that's the most exposure to poetry these people will have for the next, well, 4 years. Couldn't they have picked someone better? Someone who could maybe read their own freakin' poem aloud? Even Jon Stewart said he's not a big poetry fan after that debacle. That's some bad stuff right there.
  

Are You Leaving?

I took well over 300 pictures at the "We Are One" concert; a considerably whittled down selection can be found here, and a general report from someone who had a press pass - here.

It was an unusual feeling, being there - it was much more a national event than a concert, and I felt a little bit like I was intruding on something that was not really meant for me. More than anything else, the whole spectacle reminded me of one line from a Henry Rollins rant, delivered roughly 5 or 6 years into Bush's rule - "Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a president whom you would treat like a rock star?" Well, Obama got bigger cheers than anybody there, bigger than Beyonce, bigger than Bono, bigger than Jamie Foxx; when the big screens showed him bobbing his head to Mary J. Blige, everyone went "awww". These people, for better or worse, really do believe that something momentous is happening, that somehow this election will make a difference. They would probably find it hard to tell you what the difference will be, but whatever - it was still good to see so much positivity in so many people. I never quite know what to make of mass celebrations like this - they do feel like manipulation, to a certain extent, like promising everything will be all right when it clearly won't. But the million of people or so gathered at the Mall clearly needed some kind of cathartic experience.

From Inauguration

Anyway, when I decided to move to another part of the Mall to look for more photo ops, a lady asked me in a concerned voice - "Are you leaving? You can't leave now, what are you gonna tell people when you're old?" She seemed really worried on my behalf. "It's all good," I said, brandishing my camera, "I'm just looking for a better angle."

They Are Many More Than One

Barack Obama is here - and so are most of the good people of this country. It's hard to even take the metro, but the locals are not complaining, primarily because they are for the most part too busy selling Obama socks and commemorative paper plates.

The inauguration is on Tuesday, but a lot of people came early, some of them because of this event right here, and I think I may make my way there, if only to see the crowds near the Lincoln Memorial replicate the scene from Forrest Gump (although it is probably too cold for anyone to jump into the pool). That's assuming I get there, though, which promises to be a challenge.

Alone in the Dark

I was going to post about the upcoming presidential inauguration today, but it'll have to wait (I may also have pictures of the thousands of portable toilets that currently form a defensive structure around the Capitol tomorrow): I have another story to tell.

Yesterday around midnight, my flat powered down: no light, no power in the sockets, no nothing - and most importantly, no heat, as my place is warmed by two electric heaters. So I called my landlord, he came down (people from to other flats had complained, too), and found it was a blown fuse, but not a standard one, so we would have to wait until morning to get a spare. Right, I thought, time to show some spirit, so I tried to pretend I was camping as I wore two sweaters to bed and wrapped myself in blankets. I'd seen worse, and it would all be fixed in the morning.

I came home an hour ago from an open mic, with a bag full of food and fond thoughts of Friday night basketball on TV. It was not to be. The flat is dark, the flat is silent. The flat, above all, is freakin' cold: it's -10 outside right now, the temperature didn't go above -4 all day, and the walls here are wafer-thin.

I've been calling Edward (the landlord - keep up) at 10 minute intervals, but he's not answering his phone, so I assume he was lost in his quest for the mystical spare fuse of make-the-cold-go-away. Dunno what I'll do - I'm kinda reluctant to call people from the Library up at 23:00 and ask whether I can sleep at their place; however, the other option is spending the night slowly but inexorably turning a deep, quiet, frozen blue, which I suppose would be fitting for political reasons, but is otherwise not that attractive.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Edit: a friend's landlady agreed to take me in for the night, and equipped me with a mattress and a comforter. Things are looking up.

Edit 2: we have power. I repeat, we have power. Proceed as normal.

Freudian Slip

Here's a quote from Vladimir Tismaneanu's article in a 1994 issue of the Village voice:

The fact that these intellectuals in the mid '90s no longer bark in their previous glory should not allow us to forget their original achievements.

Who's a good intellectual then? Yes you are! Yes you are! You have plenty of original achievements!

How Odd

I just noticed that the Golden Globes are on TV; I found myself mumbling along with Ryan Seacrest in Polish before I switched it off.

Edit: Slumdog Millionaire got Best Screenplay and Best Drama. Yay!

New York Revisited

We went to New York with my much better half, and now it’s been officially accepted by her, it’s only a question of time before we move there. Right? We met a legendary poet and activist from the Bowery Poetry Club and he took us out for delicious Cuban food, and told us about his programme for helping people with Alzheimer's syndrome with poetry; we walked around the East Village and Soho, and found a place that served burgers and cottage cheese; we visited the International Center for Photography, but the Fashion Museum was closed; we spent some time in Brooklyn but could not find Junior's, so we had our cheesecake at Grand Central; we dug tunnels through second-hand bookstores; and on the bus back to DC, we finished the first season of The Wire* as we drove through Baltimore.

While still in NYC, we bought ourselves our Christmas gift – a shiny new DSLR camera – and I mention it here because the place we bought it at deserves a description**. It’s this massive photography shop, run almost entirely by Hasidim (closed on Saturdays, of course), and functioning like a gnome workshop, or a goblin-run bank, or something equally fantastic. You choose what you want, a behatted and sidelock-sporting attendant places it in a box, which then travels down two floors via a series of conveyor belts and pulley systems to the behatted and sidelock-sporting cashier, whom you pay, whereupon the box rides over to yet another employee, behatted, as you may have guessed, and sidelock-sporting, too, who hands you your purchase. Awesome, awesome stuff.

*I'm going to go out on a limb here and state, publicly, that The Wire is awesome. It's not even jumping on a bandwagon anymore, is it? It's finding tracks left by the bandwagon in the dirt many years ago, and following them in the vain hope someone from the original caravan has survived.

**Also, to brag about it. But you knew that.

Emotional Weather Report

The wind that blew through DC yesterday was really strong. The day started out all sunny and warm, and then the sunlight became even brighter against the backdrop of dark clouds that came out of nowhere. A few minutes later, a full-on sleet storm swept through Capitol Hill. The wind blew chunks of frozen rain against windows with worrying strength. It kept blowing and blowing, though, and so the clouds eventually went by, lingering on the horizon. The sun staged another of those ridiculous pink and gold affairs that are just disarmingly beautiful, like those 80s ballads you hate to admit move you to tears when they come on the radio. The evening was much colder that the morning, but the sunset would not be as pretty without the clouds.

Happy new year, everyone.