Various Pieces of Information, or at least Blocks of Text, from the Pre-Baikal Region

I bought a volume of Anna Akhmatova poetry yesterday, and when I opened it up to the middle it was to the first page of Requiem, to the “in the place of a prologue,” that I’ve read so many times and that still paralyzes me, every time. I generally hate to admit to strong reactions to things that are often quoted or held up for admiration, so in the interest of breaking my snobbish affectation I am quoting it in full here:

[Akhmatova is writing about standing in line to visit her son in a Soviet prison, where he was being held mainly to induce her, Akhmatova, already a world-famous poet, to write pro-Soviet poetry]

«В страшные годы ежовщины я провела семнадцать месяцев в тюремных очередях в Ленинграде. Как-то раз кто-то «опознал» меня. Тогда стоящая за мной женщина с голубыми губами, которая, конечно, никогда в жизни не слыхала моего имени, очнулась меня на ухо (там все говорили шепотом):
- А это вы можете описать?
И я сказала:
- Могу.
Тогда что-то вроде улыбки скользнуло по тому, что некогда было ее лицом.»


I really like the font in the Akhmotova book. Russian typefaces are often very unattractive, especially the ones used by teachers in handouts, where it generally looks like it was written in capslock, even though it wasn't. I'm feeling a distinct lack of used-bookstores in my life: I don't know if they have just eluded my cursory search, or if there really aren't any. The bookstores I've been in are good for buying low-quality notebooks with pictures of American cars, and for buying law textbooks, but bad for other purposes. There's generally one shelf of «Literature of the Fatherland», always containing basically the same books. I don't know why my computer has decided that I always want to use these Russian-style quotation marks even when I'm typing in English.

Also, I have a new favorite in the let's-write-random-words-in-English-everywhere-and-therefore-be-cool phenomenon. On the bus yesterday I stood behind a boy in an orange button-down shirt on which was written, in a silver scrawl across the back, along with other things, «In the dark of the night, In a crumpled manner.»

Kyrgi armor in the 10th century was really cool, apparently.

Here is one of my favorite sentences from my Siberian History book, describing the early settlement of the northern reaches of Siberia:

«Мамоны и шерстистые носороги – основные объекты охоты древних людей – откоцевывали все дальше на север в поисках корма, а за ними были вынуждены идти на север и люди.»

First of all: wooly rhinosauroses?! Why was I not informed? And then the idea of people picking up all their possessions and treking ever northward in search of mamoths is both romantic and pathetic. These poor people, only a page earlier in the book, had come to Siberia in the first place because the ice age had milder effect there- and then they were lured to the artic circle? By animals that were about to check out, themselves, and abandon the suckered Siberian tribes to the ice entirely? Still, I would sure like to see a wooly-rhinosoaros hunt, especially as this was all still 5 thousand years removed from the use of metal in Siberia.

Abigail Wilson Mayer, there is a significant lack of blogging action coming out of Western Russia. The global balance is being thrown off. Please take action immediately, or a wooly rhinosoaros WILL be dispatched. I wonder what my Speech Practice professor thought of the fact that I listed «wooly rhinosoaroses» as one of my interests in the list we made for homework. I will be so impressed if it actually shows up as a topic of discussion.

Ok, I have to write an essay by tomorrow on the subject «To see is not to know.» I wonder what I'll say about that. Hopefully it will not be as rambling as my last essay for this class, in which we were given a wide variety of potential topics and I wrote about how I was having a really hard time choosing a topic and then about the general difficulty of choice in modern life. Still haven't gotten that one back.

Hey, Mother, what was that movie I watched with you, a long time ago, with the guy pretending to have a math degree or something, working on some engineering project I think, and the female romantic interest is surprised that he doesn't know about that law of steps, each half the size of the last? Is the woman dying of some disease? And what's that principle called? Also, whoever knows, what the name of that awesome movie with the guy driving his lawnmower across the country? And how about that one where the people get engaged with a plastic ring at the circus- I think the woman is a show rider? And recovers from some show-rider-related injury? And anyway, everyone claps when she says yes, of course- I really liked that ring, and I hope the guy never gets her a new one, like he said he would. I think I watched that one in Columbia, as well as the next one I'm thinking of, where in one of the beginning scenes the main character is a kid and riding in a sports car with his not-much-older babysitter and they're smoking, and they pass his parents' car, and the babysitter tells him just to wave. I think later this babysitter becomes a romantic interest and also has some horrible disease; why do women in movies always die lingering deaths? Sickness can't be that romantic. Maybe by «always» I mean «in the one's that I especially remember.» No women die lingering deaths in the lawnmower movie. But everyone is sort of sick and miserable- the old guy, his dying brother, the old guy's mentally-handicapped daughter whose children were taken by the state. So, this paragraph started because I wanted to write about that rule of the half steps in my essay...

Camo. It's in.

These blog postings would make a lot more sense if they were writen while I was actually paying for internet, instead of being written whenever I happen to have my computer on in my room, providing an outlet for procrastination and collecting stray thoughts like my winter clothes are currently collecting dust. They say it will be cold on Sunday.

New pictures are up, for those of you not checking daily, which hopefully means all of you. By new I mean I put them up about 3 days ago.

Update (from Cafe Fiesta):
Major happening on the marshrutka on the way here: two very sharply, fashionably dressed girls, rather sharply beautiful, got into the marshrutka and A) asked if the marshrutka was going to the central shopping center, which it was, but is totally not the name of a stop, and B) ASKED HOW MUCH THE RIDE COST. The driver looked at them with almost as much disbelief as I did, and never did answer. Woah. People who know how to use the marshrutkas worse than I do!! I assume they were displaced Muscovites. Thoughout the rest of the ride they proceeded to speculate on how the door opened and to look around them with great amuzement at the provinciality of their surroundings. I do not yet feel enough a part of the city to feel affronted at its account.

My other recent news is that I went into a store, (way more cool than any I would have entered in the Joined Together States, as they say here, but I was driven to desperate measures by my lack of warm-weather clothing) and remembered the word for «to try on clothing». I was so impressed with myself that I bought two things. Then I realized that I can't very well wear cropped pants with leather ankle-boots and had to go to a shoe store- my shoe-buying skills proved remarkably inferior to my clothes-buying skills. I now have a rather ugly pair of not-actually-for-sports sneakers, in the wrong size.