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@wordtrapper
Photo by Aya Okawa - Kaibeto, Arizona
the biggest struggle of my life is understanding how unintelligent most people are. i cannot believe it. i feel i cannot empathize with it.
“The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”
-Shulamith Firestone
i desperately need a new outlet, ourwildways has grown to be too huge, i cannot spill any of my true thoughts without people responding with venom. i am re-inhabiting the word trapper.
i don’t yet know what this will become but i suppose with time we ought to find out.
i suggest everyone keep a secret, well-hidden journal of their most intimate thoughts- to record the unspeakable, the profane, the perverse, the unpublishable utterances of the mind.
-Me
i am unfit for men.
i hold on to my freedom with too fiery a grip
i embrace my freedom too dearly
you will not ensnare me,
i depart from you and face my naked breast to the mountainside
i thrust through the river, i want water in me
in her arms i swim freely
you will not contain me,
i...
an subpar poem that just wound through me
Everything flit from us:
You danced like a wave
And fell like a storm,
Wish n’ bone
Take me in tonight
So i can make in you a home,
Soft petals roar and foam
On the ocean, on the rose,
Across the earth- I suppose,
Crescent spine, tinge back to me-
I loved you then,
I love you now-
Only with a fierier grip.
-Me (ourwildways)
show me the dim and dusty corners of your mind.
show me your shame, your sins, your desires: infatuation breeds in dirty waters.
show me what you hide from everyone else- hell, show me what you hide from your own self.
darkness, thick as tar, exhorts an irresistible pull.
a little writing exercise for my BFA short story, working through writer's block.
Back to Writing, Back to Work:
my darling unruly girl flits from beneath my pen.
her middle-aged love lowers his glasses, raises an eyebrow, and smiles.
under the moon she dances naked by a brook, spreading mud over her breast.
he sits in a leather chair far away, reading the words she wrote, pairing nouns together, stacking verbs as naked hips stack.
: infatuation breeds in dirty waters.
Me slamming my head into the wall over my short story.
Eugene Onegin (...and a little about Nabokov)
Eugene Onegin: a novel in verse, has been (i admit) bought and sent to me in a small cardboard package thanks to Mr. Nabokov. Being fascinated-borderline obsessed- with Nabokov, Pushkin was the next Russian on my reading list. There is also the fact that he is a great writer.
Eugene Onegin is a sophisticated novel of time and fleeting youth, its flooded with Lord Byron's influence and a pre-transcedental masterpiece of retreat to a simpler life. Pushkin, a precursor to Tolstoy, a classical romantic, wrote about the retreat to the country: a retreat to nature and to the older Russia. The lyrical, rhythmical descriptions of the land, the life, the seasons that change as youth fades, are overwhelming. Pushkin's verse-prose is gentle and then sharp. The first half of the novel makes no thematic promises of greatness and then the second half blows it out of the water.
Eugene Onegin is largely intertextual in its native scope: Pushkin name drops a lot of his fellow Russian writers, who the modern reader cannot be expected to know. However, the novel's intertextuality is also self-contained. Onegin's narrative is interwoven with Pushkin's; where, at times, the "I" could be either one of them speaking. The two story-lines work together in the sense that Onegin's story of failed love and lost purpose helps Pushkin address the nature of time and loss.
Eugene Onegin is slightly cynical, slightly arrogant, and he loves his freedom. He leads an aimless life in his dacha, when he meets Tatiana. At that time his friend Vladimir Lensky is enamoured with Olga. Tatiana writes Eugene a letter declaring her infatuation, and he rejects her 'elegantly'. The novel then moves away from Eugene and becomes Tatiana's story- but not before Eugene whisks away Olga at a ball and challenges Lensky to a duel, killing him.
Tatiana becomes the center point of the novel, and she transforms the most throughout the story, eventually almost trading places with Eugene. She gains the title of a Princess, and governs her fate autonomously. Perhaps what is most stunning is that the novel never ends, Pushkin simply moves us away from the final scene, which is left in eternal anticipation.
Pushkin goes farther, then comes nearer. His narrative proximity undulates throughout the story. At times he completely removes himself from his characters, speaking to us directly (Eugene fades), and then Eugene reappears. We meet Pushkin first as the novel begins with Pushkin tending on his "halfway dead" Uncle, he then begins to gradually introduce Eugene Onegin to us:
"Let me acquaint you with this fellow,
The hero of my novel, pray,
Without preamble or delay:
My friend Onegin was begotten
By the Neva, where maybe you
Originated, reader, too"
Reader! Pushkin calls you out, he names you, he recognizes those foreign future eyes of yours that will trace his words. Published in 1825 this is the first novel I have seen address the reader directly. And it is from here, I believe, that Nabokov borrowed this technique: most prominent in Lolita. The text becomes an interaction, a conversation in which Eugene Onegin is Pushkin's tongue. Pushkin seems to suggest that there is something greater here, something beyond the story, something you, as the reader, can partake in. He befriends you in a way.
The multitude of images is akin to Nabokov's prose: the country life, the Russian leaves and pines, the landscapes, the samovars, the intricate Tolstoyan life of aristocracy. All of Nabokov's Ada or Ardor echoes Pushkin's arbours and ardours:
"Let me glance back. Farewell, you arbours
Where, in the backwoods, I recall
Days filled with indolence and ardours
And dreamings of a pensive soul."
Both novels are concerned with the passing of time: youth fading and darling old Russia slipping away. Pushkin creates a mysterious, distant land where nostalgia blooms. All that is gone glimmers. And life, just as his novel, is left unfinished. Pushkin's characters live on, their story unwritten, as we leave Eugene Onegin alone to face Tatiana's husband.
"(Blest) who does not read right to the end
Life's still, as yet, unfinished novel,
But lets it go, as I do my
Onegin, and bid him goodbye."
Life is never finished, never done, until we can utter 'life' no more.
PS. Since I was disappointed with Stanely Mitchell's translation, and wished I had gotten Nabokov's translation instead, it can be found here.
he pours his love in me, fills me to the brim,
till i overflow, seeping love beneath the door,
down the stairs and out in bray.
a warm bath after a cold day; you are so good to me.
you as grass bend beneath my feet; dawn bids the night away.
sunrise jumps forth from our memory into humid...
A little thing i wrote last night
Tenth of December
The internet raves of George Saunders, and his "Tenth of December" received a lot of praise, being 'the best book you will read this year' amongst other things. Going in with these expectations- or perhaps promises- the work was not all that I expected it to be. While I can appreciate his stylistic precision and humor, the ghosts of greater ideas behind his work remain just that: ghosts.
"Tenth of December" is a short story collection of ten short stories, each set in a middle or lower class American family, each filled with ironic humor that blurs out the subtextual darkness and despair. The stories range from topics such as: class, kidnapping, suicide, rape, science fiction, struggling to make ends meet, and a man who dresses up a pole in his backyard.
I have never read Saunders and reading various other reviews, this collection seems to be very much his style. As an avid reader of classics the form of the postmodernist short stories was fresh, the language bare, and the emotions surfacing. What struck me most about all of his stories were the implications of what is being said. Saunders conveys to us much more than the characters deliver.
The collection opens with a bang. The first story is sharp as a knife. "Victory Lap" is about a young teenage girl who gets kidnapped a few days before her birthday. It is told in alternative points of view, beginning with hers and moving to the house next door where her classmate watches, debating whether or not to intervene. Saunders does an excellent job with the voice of a young girl, it is genuinely plausible. The short story is painfully realistic, painfully real, it's difficult to read at times. This story was the most powerful, and most memorable. Paced out just right, without an extra paragraph, without anything I would cut.
The namesake of the collection: "Tenth of December" is my second favorite. It's about a man who attempts to commit suicide by freezing to death naked in a park, and a boy who crosses his path, almost dying in attempts to help the man. It is a stunning piece of work, with a sharp voice of two people in different places in life, brought together in the snow, with nothing but ice between them. This is one of the stories which covers a larger existential scope, Saunders seems to be poking with a stick questions such as "what is the purpose of life?", "why live?" The darkness of early December begins to descend not only on this story, but as it is the last one, on the whole collection.
In "The Semplica Girl Diaries" a middle aged man's diary of trying to provide for his family, set in a subtly futuristic world, a story that is written almost entirely without using "is" or "I", Saunders writes: “Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.”
Saunders is one of the writers who can write about the ordinary in an extraordinary way. The majority of his stories are set in American suburbia, families of middle or lower class, ordinary houses, ordinary lives. Yet he manages something greater: without saying it, he gives us the feeling of these people, he writes in a very humane way- if that makes sense.
Regardless of what darkness the characters of these stories move through, they all hold on to a streak of light. Although permeated by an almost suffocating heaviness, the stories retain hope. In the seasonal darkness of December the snow shines white.
-Ania
Mary
Having recalled intrigues of former years,
having recalled a former love.
-Pushkin
Mary is potent nostalgia and faded love. Mary herself, after whom the novel is titled, never appears in the work. Only her name exists: uttered by Ganin, the protagonist, and Alfyorov, her husband. Mary's existence springs from Ganin's recollection, from his agonizing desire for the past. Instead of blood and bone, Mary's flesh is dusty recollection. Four days Ganin wanders through Berlin, his émigré city, and retraces his memories: his love for Mary, his love for Russia- until his past life beats more fervently than the present.
Mary is, in many ways, the skeleton, the sweet foretaste of all of his later works. Published in Russian in 1925, it is Nabokov's first novel. A short 114 pages (or so is the first edition printed) novel feels as if the young emigre writer, who at the time himself was residing in Berlin, is reaching beyond the page: grasping at greater things. The novel was translated in 1970 by Michael Glenny, 'in collaboration with the author'. There are glimpses of the well-paced Nabokovian sentences, in places the cadence of the prose flows seamlessly- other places there are stutters, and a few scenes or chapters that could be omitted. In many places the English words chosen reminded me of weaker stand-in's- the original, richer Russian I could decipher as distant cousins of my Polish.
As a feverish Nabokov admirer and reader, Mary was an absolute joy to read; an impressive glimpse into the young writer's first imaginative push. There is a lot of young Nabokov himself in the work. Ganin is a distorted picture of the young Nabokov, translating and trying to make a living in Berlin, after being exiled from Russia.The novel also concerns itself with the foaming waves of first love: rising and falling. Mary is an impetuous girl who's slightly different twin sister reappears as Annabel in Lolita, and has been briefly mentioned in Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory as a childhood heartthrob. There is also Nabokov's undying desire for the reconstruction of his perfect passé Russia: "the act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that i seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life..." he admits in Speak, Memory.
The novel begin's in a dark elevator, in which Ganin and Alfyorov are stuck together. Seemingly strangers they become introduced in the darkness. Unknown to them yet, they both have one thing in common- Mary. The novel moves through an undulating darkness. Ganin's past is veiled in wet darkness of the Russian countryside in his dacha, and it is that same night through which he wanders the streets of Berlin. Chapter 3 offers a stunning description of the strange that this world sometimes becomes. We move through darkness with Ganin, as he takes us back and forth, his past Russian life and then, gracefully, back to present Berlin. It is only at the end of the novel that the darkness lifts, the world becomes strange again but it is not under the night but under dawn. And with that comes Ganin's most important realization.
Mary is one of Nabokov's more poignant novels. Mary is memory, Mary is nostalgia: the heartbreaking knowledge that the past has forever slipped away and yet forever lives on.
--Ania
Summer Reading List
Read: Gone Girl-Gillian Flynn
Mary- Vladimir Nabokov
Tenth of December- George Saunders
The Old man and the Sea- Ernest Hemingway
Eugene Onegin- Alexander Pushkin
Reading:
The Man who Noticed Everything- Adrian Van Young
On the list:
Selected Poems- William Wordsworth
Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace
The Red Tent- Anita Diamant
Love in the Time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Collected Stories- Alexander Pushkin
Room- Emma Donoghue