28 Sep

Also, among my current reading projects, I’ve been reading a book in Russian, the title of which I would translate as ‘The Dancer from Khiva, or Story of a Simple Soul.’ Although I’m not terribly far into it, I know I will finish it before too much longer. The vocabulary is a good level for me, possibly because the author, Bibish, is not a native speaker either. Instead, she is a Uzbek woman, born in the mid-sixties in a small rural village, surrounded by a traditional society which, despite Soviet theories of lifting the veil from the woman of the East (after all, женщина — тоже человек), didn’t particularly treat women the way sensitive Westerners are used to thinking they should be treated.

Yeah, raped twice in the first forty pages. Still, she keeps going, and she’s doing her best not to sit still and wait for the blows to fall.

I bought the book at the semi-annual Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, because it had a nice looking cover, and wasn’t obviously a translation of a trashy English detective or romance novel.

A little googling leads me to the discovery that the book was on the best seller lists in Russia when it came out in 2004, shortly after my study abroad time. There’s a sequel called Talk Show for a Simple Soul. More than that, despite speculation, it does seem to be a true story. I found an interview, and, strangely enough, Bibish’s livejournal.

I’m trying to discover if the book has been translated to English, because I feel it ought to be.

28 Sep

Here’s the plan for the coming weekend:
1. Make it a long one.
2. Friday afternoon, fly to Vegas with Alex, spend the night there.
3. Call my parents, feign intoxication, report that I’m in Vegas with Alex, we’re in line for an Elvis impersonator, oh, it’s our turn! hang up quickly, not answer calls for rest of trip.
4. Drive west, towards Grand Canyon, have adventures, see pretty rocks, eat a bacon cheeseburger.
5. On Wednesday, return to Vegas, return to Seattle, make a renewed attempt to be a good vegetarian, show off pictures of pretty rocks.

09 Sep

I’m currently reading In the Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Johanna Kavenna. So far, it has made me quite curious to visit Iceland. But that’s in a general sense. So far only one passage of the book has particularly struck me — when she begins, she goes to Norway to visit Arne Naess, who she describes as ‘the ageing conscience of an oil-rich nation,’ and ‘a philosopher of the pending eco-apocalypse,’ in his nineties when she visited, but with a life long series of outdoor interactions.

When I said to the hotel manager that I was going to visit him, he had told me that Arne used to climb up the buildings in the University of Oslo. Students would wait for him in a lecture room, and he would appear through the window. I wanted to ask this old man in the thick jumper if it was true, but something more substantial seemed to be required.

Instead she asks him about Thule, about the idea of a wild place beyond the outer limits of space. He reminisces about Norwegian nature in his childhood, the way that Norwegians have historically lived fairly solitary lives on homesteads and thus had more connections to the land than to other people, and this is being lost…

‘So have people lost this experience?’ I was asking.

Arne never answered a question directly. It made him slightly gnomic, with his head cocked to one side and a slight smile curling his lips.

‘I want to tell you about mountains,’ he said. ‘I have seen a lot of mountains. In the mountains you have a basic sense of upward, ascent. And this is positive,’ he was adding. ‘”Ascent” is a positive word. Up and up. A great increase. And so on. So you have feelings there which are satisfied without you knowing it. You see, there is the sky. The bigness of mountains, that’s one thing, and then you have the greatness. There are some mountains in western Norway which are just as great as Mount Everest. But they are not so big, but that is not the essence of mountains, it’s not the bigness, it’s the up, the getting higher, and the broadening of the outlook, seeing vast areas.’

When this wizened philosopher could still climb, he refused to reach the tops of mountains, renouncing the quest for domination over the natural world, he claimed. A sense of the smallness of the self, the vastness of nature, he seemed to be saying, was somehow revitalizing, a healthy experience to have from time to time. Arne thought that the only goal of his submission was to find unity with nature, and he started to tell a story about when he climb a series of peaks, across the Mediterranean.

‘I started getting to the summit of each mountain, but after about thirty summits, I could go just because of the beauty and the greatness. And even though the summit was only ten metres from me, I would not take those ten metres, to include that summit also in my list of summits. I would just go where it was great to go. I was getting more mature. Going for days and days and days, I more mature. What is really here? What’s the greatness, what’s the greatness? What’s the greatness of my experience in these mountains? And then of course the summits were not counted any longer, at all.’

This is so different from the way most people go about thinking of mountains, myself included. I cannot remember who said it, or even the exactness of the quote, but someone being asked why climb a mountain? and replying, simply, because it is there. But if you stop to think a moment, the rest of the mountain is there, too.