there is nothing for it. vladimir nabokov's name literally means "world-ruler of the sideways people." i realized this in a terrible burst today in class when one of his characters fell "nabok" parenthetically ( Read more... )

omlette with nutella. breakfast of, um, russian champions.

on my way home in the middle of the bright, bright night was ravished by the devouring and powerful desire to listen to the rent soundtrack. what's a girl to do.

1. time fliiiiies / and then no need to endure any more

ok kids how do you pop a russian blister

1. it's true that havin' fun's a terminal addiction / but what good is happiness if it's just a state of mind

edit
( an exercise in short-form adjectives, mangled by the machine )

headed to the russian white nights. i keep thinking it is like the british empire: the sun never sets. last night ezra & i drank iced tea with bourbon, walked to stuy, had a midnight conversation with some janitors about sex, politics, children, and judaism ( Read more... )

right in the middle of a horrifying description of the psychological torture inflicted on her husband in the labor camps, nadezhda mandelstam breaks into a discussion of mental illness, of people particularly sensitive (poets) and therefore especially susceptible, of the musical itch of a poem that does not go away... she says I noticed that in ( Read more... )

lease up in ten days. acting accordingly. i am struck by how much dust i didn't even know i had!

1. there's a life across the river / but i do not see / why i should please those who will never be pleased

brodsky is terribly hard to hold up in english. like our flag he demands never to touch the ground but like any cloth he sags and taunts you right when your hands are most full of him. (the flag metaphor is a good one: all those stars & stripes.)

( Forces are mocked in abundance. )

kharms has a little piece called Sonnet-- not a sonnet at all, only a bit of microfiction. it begins, "A peculiar thing happened to me: I suddenly forgot which comes first-- 7 or 8?" last night i dreamt it really was a sonnet; that the tension between 7 & 8 had something, somehow, to do with 14; that kharms was hopkins reincarnated; that i ( Read more... )

finished zhivago. an immoral, petty novel, i've decided. my irritation with the selfish doctor has only grown since i've closed the book. perhaps i had repressed it while waiting to see his fate. briefly wondered if pasternak loved men, as the rare moments of intimacy between men are the points of illumination throughout. wondered if he was a ( Read more... )