Cortázar avec kitten

I love Cortázar’s work. I think I love it even more than Down and Out. No, I definitely do. I love his style, I love his thought processes, I love having a chance to witness this final adventure between two incredibly interesting and passionate characters.

Last year I studied in Madrid and took a class with Angel Aragones in Surrealism. It was fantastic. He taught me (showed me) to look at the world in a new way. To notice the mundane, for instance, which in fact is usually not at all mundane, not even a little. To appreciate “el azar”, chance, serendipity. To paint without inhibitions, to write without inhibitions. I like to think all of this was somehow in me before, but Angel’s teaching made this come out of me so much… It was probably one of the most important classes regarding my development as a person.

I feel that Cortázar does something similar here. I haven’t read his other works (though I plan to now), but he shows me that it’s okay to be kooky and zany and all over the place (when really it’s not that at all)…He freely shares his innermost thoughts, his most detailed observations, his seemingly silliest and most superfluous thoughts, while most others would shut them out, bury them inside, and not waste others’ time with them.

But why not? These idiosyncrasies, these unique musings are part of what makes us human, are they not? I love that we read this book, I’m thankful that we read this book, because every time I come across something like this is reaffirms in me that it’s okay to be this way and it’s okay to share yourself this way (people will love you all the same).

I’m excited to read more of Cortázar’s work, and similar work, and work that isn’t similar at all. And even more so, I’m excited to produce my own.

the B train

Brighton Beach is a small place, but I decided to go back nonetheless. I’ve been here many times, but I have never lived here. This is because my mother comes from Moscow, and nobody from Moscow or Saint Petersburg (where my mother lived after turning thirteen) comes to Brighton Beach.

Many of the people living here come from smaller cities in Russia, or the Ukraine. Many come from Odessa, overlooking the Black Sea, drawn to the beach and water of Brighton. I ask my mother how she avoided living there, and her answer is simple – she is a Muscovite. And for any Muscovite it may be assumed that anyone not hailing from Moscow, or the former Leningrad, is, as she said with a laugh, “Provincial.” Ouch.

So, in the mid-1970’s, when New York witnessed a surge of Russian immigrants, many were drawn to Brighton for the ocean. Now, people keep on coming, but for a different kind of convenience. Coming to Brighton Beach is like entering a small Russian town – there are few traces of America, save for a Starbucks and a Palace Fried Chicken that have opened on Brighton Beach Avenue.

These two locales stand out, as almost everything else is decidedly Russian: Russian pharmacies, with Russian medicines and ointments; Russian bookstores, exclusively distributing the Cyrillic alphabet; Russian restaurants and grocery stores, filled with Russian goods, freshly shipped; Russian medical practices with Russian doctors who’ve avoided becoming taxi drivers or housekeepers in a new land; Russian policemen; Russian everything.

As such, you can live your whole life there and never speak a word of English. You can live your whole life there and almost forget what continent you’re one. You can live your whole life there and never have to assimilate to American ways of life, only watch Russian television, only read Russian newspapers, and never even learn the language of your new country. Spooky, isn’t it?

I decided to revisit this twilight zone of sorts on my own terms.

My adventure took place on April 25, 2008, the day that my grandmother died, and a day that certain believers consider holy, as it falls between the Jewish Passover and the Russian Orthodox Easter. But this is neither here nor there. Well, on second thought, I suppose it’s very relevant as these events influenced my mood and impressions on this day, and perhaps everything that happened to me upon arriving at my destination, and even after that.

I set off at around eleven in the morning. I consider wearing black but refrain. I stop at The Donut Plant on Grand Street to tell Harika the news. He’s a nice little man, a Hare Krishna, who works there, and who is very much in love with me, and quite kind; surprisingly not creepy. He gives me a strawberry juice (strawberries, cane sugar, spring water) and my favorite donut, a chocolatey heaven. He tries to comfort me with his words, which are full of hope and kindness due to his faith. I tell him of my upcoming journey and he recommends the B train.

I walk to the Grand Street station at Chrystie Street in the bright sun. I reluctantly wear sunglasses, for the first time this year, as I always fear to miss something important that I wouldn’t have without them. My skirt flows up the stairs like a magenta wave, as I hurry down them, underground. On the platform I wait and see lights coming and hope that it’s the B. In the distance I can see the orange circle. “At least give me this,” I think to myself. Then, “But no,” as I see the white letter formulating down the track. As it approaches, however, I notice the little white line that differentiates a B from a D and am quelled, for the moment. Patience, dear.

I should mention before I go on that it’s a Friday around midday, and a glorious day at that, not counting my grandmother’s death. My train car is not even half full. I seem to see a Russian face at the other end of it, and decide to check where it gets off (Sheepshead Bay, perhaps?), but soon forget, or rather, am distracted by new faces.

A little Hispanic girl stares at me for a while and then becomes engrossed in the darkness out the window, while we’re still underground. She kneels on the bench, with her back towards me, her face pressed against the glass. Once upon a time I sat like that myself.

I was hoping to be above ground by now and I ask the little girl’s father if we’ll be underground the whole time, risking being taken for an actual tourist as opposed to a pretend one. He answers kindly, “No.”

7th Avenue. Stand clear of the closing doors.

I start crying again at the thought of my grandmother. A woman gets on the train wearing a headscarf the way my grandmother used to, they way Americans tend to refer to as a “babushka” with an emphasis on the second syllable, when this word in fact means grandmother (when the emphasis is placed on the first syllable), whereas the word for a head scarf such as this is simply platok. The woman watches me watch her and cry.

Now we’re above ground, finally. I start to feel like the love child of Mahoney and Theroux, if only because I’m a woman alone on a train, thinking many thoughts. As I ride along in my blazing pink skirt and my Love Therapy t-shirt, I don’t need anybody but myself. For the moment, at least.

Suddenly, I catch a strong scent of Victoria’s Secret Love Spell fragrance. It seems to make me think a million different things, my mind involuntarily recalling everything that happened on any given moment that this aroma may have drifted past my nostrils in the past. It smells too sweet, almost trashy, and I mock myself for having my own bottle at home. At least it was a gift.

I decide that the woman in the headscarf across from me is not Russian after all, and just as I have this thought I hear the Russian tongue, down and to my left. My head whirls around. Yes.

The woman in the headscarf gets off and I step across to take her seat and get a better look at my victims, an older man and woman, most likely husband and wife. The woman has clear, blue eyes, an up-turned nose, and a frowning mouth full of golden teeth. Soviet. Something in me wants to say that feels like home, but it certainly is not.

This is what I do. It’s not that I actively seek out Russians on my daily excursions; it’s just that I can’t help but notice them. I can spot a Ruski coming at me from a block away. This lady’s got an extra-large Slavic bust, wrapped in a red coat with black fur collar. Down below are matching red pants and humble black shoes. She clutches an orange plastic bag, holding something black, which could very well be another bag.

The man whom I assume is her husband, or gentleman caller, sits beside her. He wears a baseball cap that reads

songline painting

the scene early on where chatwin is in the gallery and the american couple comes in to look at the art.  I found that this innately showed the total lack of understanding that non-aboriginals have about songlines.  This I think is reflected throughout the book. how can chatwin have understood what songlines are if he is a westerner?  what makes him so special?

i think that this ultimately goes back to the form of the novel being sort of half-hashed.  It is not a reflection of his trying to recreate a songline in a literary form, but rather a reflection of his lack of understanding about the subject that he is trying to explain.  This is furthered by the fact that he almost abandons the subject near the end of the book.

What can be a better example of a colonist trying to understand the people that his culture has supressed? 

newport rhode island is the sort of place middle classers like myself only think exist in fairytales.  It's the kind of place that makes you think... "oh my" and then "oh my really?" and not in a good way.

I had the pleasure of spending a very jane eyre-esque weekend in the vacation home of one my friends last year.  Her house has a name... The bellvue house... the street it's on is bellvue ave. the street was named after the house...

after naps with some other friends and strolls on the cliff walk and a tour of the Vanderbuilt mansion i started to feel like elizabeth bennet....

this small town in rhode island is picturesque, sunny beautiful and such... but i think that a beautiful place like this is sort of ruined by the large mansions and huge estates.  it makes a beautiful place remind you of wealth and prestige and superficial things... 

 interesting how a natural place can be turned into a centrifuge for capitalism's biggest displayers 

Andrew's mom and my mom are from Sao Miguel

Impressions of Ephemeral Interactions with Nomads and Travelers

It started with a series of disorientations: I took the E instead of A or C and I noticed my mistake after the first stop in Brooklyn; I changed trains twice after this to re-en-route myself; I walked into the Canal St. subway with sunlight at my back, and I emerged face-to-face with night; and I was the only white person for the two-avenue and three street-block walk from 125th and Frederick Douglas to 128th and Malcom X. I looked like Kincaid's intended victim, on the outside.

No one avoided my eyes, on the inside. Eddie chatted me up and warm as he signed me in and processed payment for the top bunk bed in the ten-person Naval-ship room. Just transferred here - he worked for a month at another Jazz location 33 blocks due south. In fact, "They're having a barbeque tonight. I'm going over there in a little while if you want to come." A squall of a guy wearing grey sweatpants, baggy eyes, and big light brown and frizzy bushy curly hair passed with a sauntering stagger. One hand in his hair fiddled mindlessly and he crinkled his forehead in my direction with a nod, "Hey."

Tunnel Vision

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

– A few choice, and fittingly appropo, words of wisdom from experienced traveler through the world of the psyche and subconscious, Aldous Huxley, to which I’m certain Julio Cortazar would give his nod of approval.

As a kid growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, one of the things I loved the most about going for rides in my dad’s pickup truck across the city (stereotypes, I’m ready...let’s rock and roll!) was getting to go through an awesome tunnel that cut right through the inside of a big ‘ol mound of earth. I don’t know if I can describe with any justifiable accuracy what it was exactly that I loved so much about this experience...maybe it was the multi-faceted visionary craziness of a barrage of citrus-hued florescent lights, or the “Zip! Zoom! Whoosh!” sound of all the cars flying by, the echo bouncing off the inside walls of the long hallow concrete tube. Or maybe it was just the exhilarating sensation of being in a vehicle that was moving at (what always seemed like) such a high speed along the inside of a really long, hallow, concrete tube built into the meat of a mountain.

note

My rules are even simpler than Cortázar’s were: take one hour to walk down one block. I choose a block in my own neighborhood; in fact, the one just below my street, running parallel but never touching. I’ve lived on Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenue since September, but I have never walked down the block of Sixth Street between those two avenues. Like Cortázar’s autoroute, this one block is parallel to the one I walk every day, yet although it is in my own neighborhood, to me it is still a new place, like Flaubert’s Egypt, foreign.

Like Xavier de Maistre from de Botton’s Art of Travel, I am exploring what is almost my own bedroom, my own backyard. Already I am wondering whether I will be bored, or whether I have escaped that downfall of travelers by altering my mind-set. De Botton believes that “de Maistre’s work sprang from a profound and suggestive insight: the notion that the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a traveling mind-set to our own locales” (242). My traveling mind-set here has different standards than it would on a normal trip – I anticipate something, but I have all the time I need, no tour books or historic sites or monuments to expect great things from, and no money or time or even energy at stake, and so my anticipation cannot be disappointed.

Where a Rose is a Rose is a Rose

Wherein the protagonists decide to act in a touristically revolutionary manner and get off the Staten Island Ferry… in Staten Island 

Once upon a perfect spring Friday, the temperature was a fresh 65 degrees and a slight breeze out of the northwest lazily pushed puffy cumulonimbus clouds through a bright sunny New York sky.

As the John F. Kennedy ferry boat’s foghorn blew, indicating departure from Manhattan’s Whitehall terminal, Amanda leaned over the railing and casually remarked on the appearance of our grand vessel. “Do you think they painted it this garish orange for a reason?” Holding the rose I bought for her from a vendor outside the Staten Island Ferry entrance, she looks at it, then turns and gazes out at the Statue of Liberty in the distance and the receding buildings of Lower Manhattan. “You know, my therapist and I were talking today about stopping to smell the roses. Funny, huh?”  

my mom would not believe this picture

Leaving: We Needed to Get Out and Get into the Wild

For the two of us- Jay and I- on the 1 train that morning, it was not a ride to work. Had you been on the train too, you would’ve known it right away by the size and nature of our vagabond backpacks, our hiking boots, and weatherproof jackets.[1]

As it was for me –and many New Yorkers- this trip was an experiment in Escape. The city can be very suffocating and the itch to get out can be almost unbearable at times. One may crave for home that place in the suburbs, but this spring I was (and Jay was too) craving for the wild. The concrete canyons, the limited vantage point makes one’s soul shriek for some nature. Nature for the wild where the canyons are made of stone carved by snow melt, not humans, and streams wind by way of gravity not design.

Cortez the KillerDuring World War Two, before the Nazis began exterminating Poland’s Jewish population, they forced everyone to move into urban ghettos. The largest of these concentrations was in Warsaw, where 400,000 people lived in a space the size of a few city blocks. Starvation and disease were rampant. Three-hundred thousand of those quartered in Warsaw would eventually die at the concentration camp at Treblinka.

The ghetto had been liquidated in shifts, by the thousands. A rebellion, made up of Polish resistance fighters and Jewish occupants of the ghetto eventually came together to oppose the deportations to the camps. Nazi forces invaded the ghetto on the eve of Passover in 1943. They came to crush the growing opposition, and they came for the rest of the population. The resistance lasted two weeks. They held back the Nazi forces with little more than a handful of pistols and Molotov cocktails. It couldn’t last. No foreign assistance arrived. Everybody everybody everybody was killed. Thirteen thousand went down in the fighting and the remaining fifty thousand were taken to Treblinka.

The incan cosmosHow about a taste for the absurd side of things. Autonauts of The Cosmoroute provides readers with a journey into the mind of two highly insane people, a journey into the heart of what it means to travel, en epic adventure along the highway of life, a sliver of light in the bleak and sometimes boring world of travel writing.
Autonauts was like a psychedelic experience disguised as a travel book. You feel like everything makes little sense while simultaneously making all the sense in the world. Why not make the most absurd vacation idea into an actuality. I love the experimentation, the free flow insanity of this book. I would get lost in the imagination of these two love birds at times but I couldn’t help but smile and feel sorry for their tragic and heavy relationship.
Every time I’m on the highway now I can’t help but wonder what the people at the pit stops are all about. I wanted to meet them, to share my fantasies with them, to make a rest stop my personal vacation spot on the side of the highway. I want to play with bugs in the mud, to feel like a little kid again, and to laugh at the world for its normality and boring nature.

This bench provided my security and nook for the night, didn't get much sleep done though“When I rest my feet, my mind also ceases to function”(Chatwin, Pg. 250) Every day I wake up the same person I was the night before. I have a routine, just like any other human. I get up, make a pot of coffee, occasionally smoke a cigarette, usually take a shower, and then I head off to class or work to take part in what seems like the never ending cycle of my life. But on April the 17th, 2008 I decided to wake up as a completely different being, a force of energy and life that I had been keeping bottled up inside myself in the constant quest to maintain normality. It had been planned out the night before, my friend Drew and I were to take on the roles of foreign tourists, country of origin: unknown. The goal: to explore New York City as down and out foreigners; to become tourists in our city; to shed our selves of the day-to-day worries, anxieties, and normalities that control our lives; to become one with the streets, its aboriginal beings and the life that it emanates from its cracked and immense exterior.

Gray Line: sweet, sweet 3d composite

*will add the photos I took tomorrow when I have the USB cable

New York City is the only place I want to be eight months of the year. The unfortunate fact is that, as much as I consider myself to be a resident of this city, I will have to return to Long Island in May and resort to being a commuting, though very infrequently so, member of the bridge and tunnel crowd. I will have to look at pictures to refresh my memory and satiate my eyes. New York will exist as a fantasy in my mind. All dramatizations aside, I’ll probably only be able to come in a heaping handful of times. For the summer at least, I will be an outsider. I will long for the days I can walk around the Village. However, these fantasies will exist to me like those that appear in the minds of foreigners who have only seen the exaggerated splendor of the city in the movies.

Should I have dressed like Natalie?

Several evenings ago, as I was walking to pick up some take-out from a local arepa restaurant, I overheard some young boys talking while we waited for the light to change at the intersection of Havermeyer and Broadway. “That’s where I used to live. Over there…with the Jews” said one of the boys, pointing South.

Suddenly I was reminded of the large Hasidic community, just blocks from my apartment in the trendy, hipster infested Williamsburg. The community my Brooklyn-raised grandmother remembered when she asked, “Williamsburg? Like with the Hasidic Jews?” upon finding out where I was living. I had never visited this community, but used to bike through it last semester on my way to a class I was taking that met at Brooklyn International High School in Brooklyn Heights. Though I’d never stopped to explore this neighborhood, I had always been intrigued while passing by on my way home. Maybe this intrigue was due to the fact I grew up Jewish, as did the residents in South Williamsburg. However, we couldn’t be less alike. My two hundred member Reform synagogue in the Tennessee hills, my Episcopalian father, and the fact that I’ve been consuming bread for the past week (to name a few) would certainly be a disgrace to any of the Hasids in Brooklyn or elsewhere.

Rock Star Although published seventy-five years ago, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is timeless in one indisputable way: a day in the life of a busy restaurant.

Equal parts memoir and expose, rock star chef-cum-writer-cum-travel-show-host Anthony Bourdain's 2001 bestseller Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, is a modern recognition of that. He riffs on Orwell's classic as openly as he does freely, regaling the reader with tales of ruffians, misfits, missteps and misconduct. The restaurant industry is indeed rife with what one might politely refer to as "personalities", and both Orwell and Bourdain are rather deft at accurately sketching out the elements and characters that are the cog in the restaurant's machine. Bourdain can often be a little too clearly trying to shock-and-awe the reader as he guides him through the restaurant business, and the bad-boy posturing can sometimes err on the side of cartoon-ish.

Traveling back in time was out of the question.  I wanted to see what Manhattan was like in the 20s.  Speakeasies.  Ladies of the night.  Newsies selling papes on the streets.  What a life it must have been.  Teddy agreed.  New York must have been a devilish place to visit way back then. 

But traveling backwards, now that was more practical.  Place, not time.  That was the ticket.  After realizing the difficulty in crossing streets and descending stairs with my back facing forward, we picked another approach. 

Teddy and I, we’re kind of lost souls.  We don’t fit in with the other kids.  Teddy has, recently, recaptured his identity.  Hailing from Berlin, he made the voyage back to his homeland and found the place of his birth, his true home.  He was really happy.

Been here?As a resident of lower Manhattan, you have probably never been to Washington Heights. If you do end up going, you will probably be destined for the Cloisters, or perhaps a stroll to the George Washington Bridge, or maybe even a football game at the Columbia University stadium in Inwood. You will board either the C train or the 1 train heading uptown, iPod fully charged, and watch the crowd thin out once you pass the northern end of Central Park before thinking to yourself, Wow, I didn’t know that trains went above ground in Manhattan, as you briefly cross through the station at 125th Street before dipping back into the bowels of the city. You may actually be surprised at the diversity of the crowd of people that gets off the train at 181st Street, because isn’t Washington Heights supposed to be a primarily Dominican neighborhood? But then you will realize that the tourists who are getting off of the train with you are there to see the Cloisters, or the George Washington Bridge, or perhaps are continuing on to the Columbia University football stadium, and you will continue on to the elevator that will get you out of this station. You may feel a bit claustrophobic or frightened as you board this strange contraption (but you would never let this show, because you are a New Yorker, after all, and you are used to riding elevators and crowded trains filled with strangers), and you will be relieved to be released on the upper level of the subway station, where you will find the exit and stand at the street corner of this previously uncharted territory.

the view i didn't see

nine o’clock in the morning and I’m taking an inventory check on the subway bench to distract from the pair of middle-aged sweatshirt men doing “the nod” at me and refusing to stop staring and grinning from across the track, also the one who walked past and did the up-down look and murmured, “nice, whatchu got on there.” and so this leads to the obvious question, why did I choose to wear a short lace dress and gold embroidered boots on a long train ride to a beach town, long island, montauk? the first of the WHY questions I ask myself and others ask me and I fail to answer. the best I can do is say that I always dress warm and sensible for the journeys and tend to fall asleep in my headphones, which does not lend itself to writing or observing. so I wear the dress to keep alert, but the real effect is that I feel idiotic and idiotically enraptured with my reflection across the train window and get the haughty mentality of a girl who is not taking the train to wander, but to go to her home in the hamptons and feed her purebred a nice carrot.

Our Heroine, Madame Tutli-Putli As The Old Patagonian Express comes to a close, and our guide Paul Theroux reaches his destination of Patagonia, he begins to think about the nature of his travel, and the fear and anxiety inherent to it. "There are many satisfactions in solitary travel, but there are just as many fears, " he writes on page 394. "The worst is the most constant: it is the fear of death."

New Yorkers are straphangers by nature, and we have our commuter rails and access to Amtrak. We often travel by rail alone, but this is largely routine. We can put on our iPods and pull out our books or merely get lost in our thoughts and go about our travels in a haze that's equal part hypnotic and part born of habit.

But when one travels by rail outside of this sort of routine, the isolation can be a bit more taxing. Sure, there are others around you, so you are not exactly alone. But without the crutch of routine even the most anticipated journey by an experienced traveller can present moments of anxiety - as severe as Theroux's aforementioned fear of death, or as mundane as worrying about missing your stop.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my profound gratitude to Ahmed Ifzal (or Ifzal Ahmed?), the cab driver who dropped me as close to the FDR Drive as was humanely possible, and without whom this odd little adventure might not have been possible.

PREAMBLES

1

Concerning the origins of the expedition.

Please refer to http://www.placeandliterature.com/node/6102

Room 30

Text Passage from The Hotel, Room 30

Wednesday March 4, 1981. 11:20a.m.

I go into room 30. Only one bed has been slept in, the one on the right. There is a small bag on the luggage stand. A beautifully ironed silk nightgown lies on the chair that has been pulled up near the bed: it clearly has never been worn. Everything else is still in the traveling bag. All I see there is men’s clothing: grey trousers, a grey striped shirt, a pair of socks, a toilet kit (razor, shaving cream, comb, aftershave lotion), a dog-eared photograph of a group of young people surrounding an older woman, a passport in the name of M.L., male sex, Italian nationality, born in 1946 in Rome, his place of residence, five foot seven, blue eyes. The bathroom is empty, so is the closet, but in the drawer of the night table I find: a box of Panter cigars, a fountain pen, airmail stationary, a leather box with the initials M.L. On a piece of paper is the address of a Mr. and Mrs. B. in Florence, a wallet with five identical photographs of a blond woman and a wedding photograph showing the man in the passport in a tuxedo and the blond woman in a wedding gown. There is also an old bill from the Hotel C., dated March 4,1979, in the name of Mr. and Mrs. L for the same room, number 30. Exactly two years ago, M.L. spent the night in the Hotel C. with his wife. He has come back alone. With the embroidered nightgown in his suitcase. His reservation was for last night only. He is leaving today. I’ll do the room later.

Who hasn't been on one before?

Having grown up in New York City, I have taken the subway a million and a half times before. But today, today I took a trip like none that I had ever before taken. My trip to “upstate” Manhattan, or rather 186th Street and Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, proved to be much more out of the ordinary than I had originally anticipated.

Being that it was the weekend and I had been out considerably late the evening before, my dress for the day was nothing to write home about. I had to force myself to get out of bed at a much earlier hour than I do most other weekends so my apparel was the last thing I had energy to fuss over. The obvious choice was my comfy jeans and a t-shirt, a zip up sweatshirt and a pair of broken in, well loved sneakers. What better way to take on the New York City subway system than in an easy fitting, doesn’t matter who I have to stand or sit next to outfit?