Return of the Space Cowboy

Back home from Warsaw. Will write more after I sleep.

Litwo, ojczyzno moja

Dla tych, co nie są na twarzoksiążce - przeklejka: tym razem, nie dość, że po polsku, to trochę poważniej, niż zwykle.

WIęc tak: mam szansę pomóc organizacji, która używa poezji jako elementu terapii dla osób cierpiących na chorobę Alzheimera. Okazuje się, że często pamiętają wiersze jeszcze ze szkoły, a rozpoznanie i wspólne wyrecytowanie kilku wersów to dla nich frajda i rzadka okazja do kontaktu z innym człowiekiem. Projektem zawiaduje Gary Glazner, poeta z Nowego Jorku związany z Bowery Poetry Club; wydał m. in. antologię wierszy, które się sprawdzają w przypadku Amerykanów, a teraz chce spróbować stworzyć podobne w innych językach, między innymi po polsku, no i poprosił mnie o pomoc przy wyborze tekstów.

Pomyślałem, że w takim razie zapytam was wszystkich: pamiętacie jakieś wiersze z podstawówki albo liceum? Wiecie, jaki wiersz zna absolutnie KAŻDA osoba, która dorastała w Polsce, niezależnie od tego, czy jest polonistą, czy inżynierem?

Nie chodzi o to, że by z głowy umieć wyrecytować cały wiersz, oczywiście. Wystarczy, jeśli ktoś rozpoznaje linijkę-dwie, parę słów, które działają jak bodziec – tak, było coś takiego, pamiętam. Dla przykładu: podejrzewam, że mało kto pamięta całą „Lokomotywę” Tuwima, ale chyba wszyscy potrafią dokończyć „Stoi na stacji lokomotywa...” – tak jak wszyscy znają ciąg dalszy tytułu tej notki. Dodatkowe punkty, jeśli zapytacie też rodziców, znajomych, i wszystkich, którzy się napatoczą. Ważne, żeby nie sprawdzać w listach lektur i innych takich – zresztą komu by się chciało – tylko powiedzieć, co się pamięta. Mogą być wierszyki dla dzieci, mogą być poważne teksty. Cokolwiek, co tkwi gdzieś w głowie z takiego czy innego powodu.

Jeśli macie jakieś pomysły, stuknijcie komentarz... Wielkie dzięki!

IN ENGLISH
For the doubtlessly numerous Anglophone readers of this note, a summary: I was asked to help out with a project which helps people suffering from Alzheimer’s using poetry – it turns out that a good way to reach people with the disease is to recite poems they remember from school. They’re trying to compile an anthology of texts that would work in Polish, so I’m asking my friends to tell me what poems they remember. If YOU know any Polish poems, be sure to leave a comment below!

Right: I felt I needed to wrap up the US part of the blog somehow. First off, you'll notice the slideshow is now showing pics from Birmingham. The pictures from my US stint will stay on Picasa - over here.

Note also the "Half-baked" section: this shows my tweets (it's an RSS feed, really, so it does not always update as quickly as it should - if you wanna follow me on twitter, seek out @beveryquiet). I got a new phone, so I can tweet now. What. Shut up.

And now the gist of it: I did not really jump on the "25 things about me" meme, but I thought the format may work if you narrow it down to "25 random thoughts about my stay in DC." So here goes:

1. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is all kinds of awesome. It’s a show by a theatre group called the neo-futurists, and how it works is they give you a menu with 30 plays, then you scream out numbers, and they do the play you choose (they all last roughly a minute or two). They range from slapstick, through rants about women peeing on toilet seats (who knew), to literal music videos (think – bald guys standing on an empty stage as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” begins, doing a 180 degress turn everytime they sing “turn around”).
2. Commercials on American TV are rarely interrupted by programming; they mostly concern medical stuff and car loans, and the copies of the local ones are stored in Sèvres as the ideal example of “crazy.”
3. The Library of Congress is beautiful. It was amazing going to work there everyday. Also, from now on, every time you go to see a movie with me, prepare for much finger-pointing etc.
4. My belt buckle has the uncanny power of setting off metal detectors. Every trip to get lunch featured me doing a short mini strip-tease routine for the world-weary security people guarding the staff entrance.
5. Capoeira Angola is a whole other philosophy of movement, and I don’t think I could really learn it, not after 8 years at Beribazu. I could do the steps, most of the time, and I had fun, but they kept telling me I was too stiff and wanted too much too quickly, even if I felt if I loosened up any more and slowed down like they told me I would stop, then gently fold to the ground. It’s the mindset, I’m guessing.
6. There are two places: Washington and DC. I worked in Washington, amongst police and besuited politicians. DC started two blocks north of where I lived, and it’s a really rough place, with a lot of poverty and crime. You hear a lot of sirens in DC, and not all of them are from motorcade guards.
7. The Fellows at the Kluge Center took me off guard by being a bunch of friendly, open, funny people, where I expected a bunch of socially awkward, experienced academics turning up their noses at us junior researchers. I came to Washington fully expecting my social circle there to coalesce from capoeiristas and spoken word people. Not so.
8. New York is great. I want to live there
9. I went to more pub quizzes in DC than I thought possible within the space of a couple of months. Not a single question concerned Polish poetry, or indeed any Polish issue, which is just as well, because I was traumatised by the fear that everyone would then look at me and I would forget who got the Nobel prize for literature in 1996.
10. I still don’t understand how I got a free ticket to the inauguration.
11. People in the US do find it much easier to strike up conversations – it’s a difference I felt from the first days. I had one guy in a convertible talk to me at three separate traffic lights (I was on my bicycle), because he liked my bag and wanted to get one like it.
12. There is a wide discrepancy between what I would love to be like when I have some free time alone (go to a museum with my notebook, sit down and write poetry), and what I actually do (go home, order pizza and watch the NBA on ESPN).
13. Craigslist is a useful, fascinating, and scary realm populated with kooks and weirdos. And perverts. I wonder why it never caught on in Europe.
14. The Washington Wizards are officially one of the most boring teams in the National Basketball Association, and they have an ugly-ass picture of a bearded magician wielding an orange ball as the team symbol. They used to be called The Bullets, but they changed the franchise’s name because DC used to be the city with the highest crime rate in the US, and they felt they were sending out the wrong message. Whatever, the old logo was way cooler.
15. I can sort of appreciate the more obvious elements of an American Football game now. Still clueless when it comes to baseball, though.
16. I played a lot of Fallout 3, and it was a pretty cool experience to see a post-apocalyptic version of the place I lived in on my screen. Someone should totally make a Warsaw edition. The Palace of Culture as a supermutant stronghold? No?
17. I am really ready to finish my PhD and move on. Really.
18. My landlord was a nice guy, and a fellow procrastinator, which is cute, but not when you tell him there’s a strong smell of gas coming from the kitchen, and he says he’ll deal with it within the next month or so.
19. Money issues: all bills being the same size – confusing. Prices displayed without tax – annoying. Losing over 25% of your grant money due to the plummeting value of the British pound – scary. Getting (much) more food for your buck – good!
20. Catholics are a sect in the States; most people don’t even consider them to be Christian. Also, there is a church on every corner, and every single one is of a different denomination, some of which sound made up on the spot (“The Congregation of the Pilgrims to the Waters of Jordan and Friends of Jesus of Nazareth and All the Saints”). Being an atheist is sort of edgy and risqué, unlike in the UK, where it is the default state of being.
21. Why does no language handbook, not ONE, say that entrées are main courses in the US? Elevator-lift shmelevator-shmift, I need to eat.
22. The performance level at US poetry slams tends to be higher than in Europe. However, I have one big issue with what I’ve seen in New York and DC: it appears you are pretty much limited to talking about ethnic identity and oppression (if you belong to one), gender and oppression (if you’re a woman), and finally: religion and oppression (if you’re a believer). That’s it. Now, all of these are valid themes, but if you hear 15 poems about the same thing, all delivered (expertly) in the same, angry, shouting style, you get very tired, very quickly, because the message is so transparent that it could be summed up in three sentences, preferably chanted by a crowd at a rally. Don’t get me wrong, there is room for politics in poetry – there is room for nearly everything – but it’s art, dammit, make it beautiful, make it have more levels, make your words do something interesting, for chrissake. Now I know for a fact there poets in the US who do all this and more. I guess they are even more exceptional than I thought.
23. Everybody is from Poland. I mean, they’re not. But many, many people can trace great-grandparents to some part of Silesia or somewhere.
24. People talking in American accents sound like they’re in movies.
25. I saw so many people on single-gear and fixed-gear bikes that I really, really want one now. I’ve started eyeing K.’s old road bike as I pass by it in the mornings. It’s looking worried. I think it knows what’s coming.

There. Nice and wrapped up. Now to get on with my life.

Just So You Know

I will keep this blog alive in the post-DC era; I like it more than my old university-issue one anyway. Expect a flurry of activity here soon; this post, however, does not qualify as part of said flurry. It is a pre-flurry, if you will, an avant-flurry of sorts. An ominous flurry-prophesying sign. I just wanted to reassure the masses that visit everyday and clamour for more insightful and acerbic commentary that is my trademark that there is, indeed, hope, nay, there is more than hope, there is rock-solid certainty. I just need to shake off the last remnants of my jet-lag.

Meanwhile, here's a picture I've taken one block away from our place, that illustrates the current Birmingham weather AND, in one fell swoop, points you to my new Flickr feed, because I forgot my username for the old one and the emergency question doesn't work and I could not get it back so it will forever remain a memento of our NYC trip and nothing else. That's right, out with the old (I'm looking at you, Picasa), in with the new.