Stating The Obvious

This blog is now retired, and is unlikely to return to active service in the near future. Now, let me gently but firmly push towards more interesting corners of the internet, like here, or here. Bye!

Poetry & Parades

Things have been so busy, and I have been writing so much lately (work mostly, with some poetry thrown in), that preparing a blog entry has started to seem like an increasingly daunting prospect. I'm not giving up just yet, but I will take the easy way out right now and instead of writing up a bunch of stories, link to a bunch of pictures.

So, I performed at the Freshblood Cabaret in Leamington the other day, where Karolina snapped this awesome picture of Brighton-based poet Ashley ffrench:



On the very next day, I went to St Andrews university to feature at their third slam. (run by Harry Giles, winner of the Pencilfest we organised last year and all-round cool guy). Scotland is spectacular, and never let anyone tell you otherwise. St Andrews itself is a wonderful place, with a mere 20 000 inhabitants (7000 of whom are students), a university just a smidge less ancient than Oxbridge. It claims to be the birthplace of golf, and so throngs of American golfers dutifully performs the pilgrimage. It also boasts a beach where Chariots of Fire was filmed, and an awful lot of sky.



And finally, the St Patrick's Day parade went right past our place today, and as all manifestations of Irish cultures should, it featured a samba band, Indian drummers, and a troupe of fan-wielding Chinese dancers. We still got Irish jigging, though:

Just A Quick Plug

My capoeira group now has their own photostream on Flickr - check it out here.

18-55 AF-S DX VR

The wide angle lens came in the mail today! So, we took the camera along when we went to the post office this morning. Samples below.

Like The Thunder

Here's what I found in one of my work mailboxes:

New Orgasm Enhancerr
Click HERE

Merit hereafter by killing (this creature), even of the sun,
the moon, or the fire, that is the is almost adored. He
has learned to excel them watercresses in the street or
by stitching in diadem adorned with many gems, like the
thunder.

God I wish I could write like that.

Pierre Bourdieu on the Sociology of Translation

I'm sitting in the Wolfson Research Exchange, a part of the Library reserved for PhDs. Every place is taken, but an uncanny silence reigns over the room, as everyone pretends as hard as they can to be working on their dissertation. The fact is that we all believe that the others are well-organised, self-disciplined researchers, who are just now ticking off items off their daily, weekly and monthly to-do lists, and so we all do what researchers do best: keep up appearances.
Me, I can tell you right now that the Humanities Building I can see through the window has no less than four parabolic antennae on its roof, versus two old-school bent-wire affairs and two brave, but rather mangy-looking bushes. Also, a strech limo version of a Hummer just drove by on University road, which begs the question, who has their hen night on campus, in the middle of a sunny Wednesday. Or which Department Head decided to show that the power of positive thinking can overcome the recession.
The Humanities building has a sad little Japanese garden in its patio, and it seems the cherry tree has gotten into its mind that blossoming time will be any day now: it's covered in little pale pink buds, upon which some very happy birds are feasting as I write.
There is also, you'll be happy to know, a cloud shaped very much like a Fedora in the sky.

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.

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.