| hum de dum |
[19 Jun 2009|07:53pm] |
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off to Iceland on Sunday - a mere 2 days! I am excited to go off and acquire a whole new set of experiences in a country I've never seen, whose language I don't peak -- go stare at geothermal vents and pull rhubarb from the cold, damp earth. I'm bringing Icelandic sagas, Buddhist scriptures, "East of Eden" and a whole host more, a few sweaters, jeans and hiking boots, and a whole lot of excitement. I seem to have all these convictions - that it's good to farm, sail and travel, that I want children, that the earth is sacred and overconsumption is ugly - that have appeared out of nowhere. I know I want to spend some years after college working odd jobs on ships and farms and seeing the world. That's the plan.
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[01 Jun 2009|10:54pm] |
Dear Everyone,
I am leaving to Iceland June 22nd. I plan to bring a few pairs of jeans, sneakers, Tevas, no laptop, no phone, and a lot of books. Since I will be on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with eighteen hours of daylight and nobody I know, I will presumably have a lot of time to read. But I want these books to be special.
So recommend me some books that have changed your life. One to three, since I obviously can't bring (or read) all of them. I don't care the category or the nation of origin, poetry or play, essay, manifesto or novel. I also don't care if you think I've read it before--chances are, I haven't. Just give me something that will knock my sheep-crap-sodden socks off in the land where geyers spring and the Northern Lights shine.
Can you do it? Yes you can!
Love,
Talia
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| home from college |
[01 Jun 2009|06:34pm] |
Retrospectives are stupid, especially of monumental years.
Took a lot of classes... found a boyfriend who wears a kippah who is, like me, a datlash ("dati l'she'avar, or: formerly a religious Jew, and now not observant). Farming this summer in Iceland and rural Virginia. Reading Slavic folktales. A paucity of close friends at school, but hopefully that'll change.
Things I did this year I never thought I would do:
take a telescope safety class; do (a whole lot) of stand-up comedy; write for a television show; date a boy who wears a kippah; eat a gypsy pancake (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3463/3307476123_a79b225831.jpg?v=0)...
So much to do left!
I wish I'd partied more and had more adventures. These things can be cured-- three years of college left!
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| beautiful mountain goats lyrics. |
[19 Mar 2009|11:41pm] |
what a surprise on this blog.
thanks for reminding me of this song [Bad username: _twoheadedgirl"]
In comes you, not the same person I knew.
Looking roughly the same, but something hungry getting restless in your brain.
So there I go.
Not the same person you used to know, peaking through a fish eye lens at you.
And the cornet blows where the oleander grows.
And us too, not the same people that our old friends knew.
And so down the street you head in the high summer heat.
White long sleeve oxford pushed up to just before your elbows.
Black pumps & a medium length black skirt, eating a path through the dark, damned birth.
I hope they've got plenty of money where you're going.
And the cornet blows, where the oleander grows.
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| poetics from lately |
[05 Mar 2009|06:59pm] |
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mood |
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 cheerful |
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Could I have picked a more pretentious post title? Maybe not. Even so though, today I got out of class in Harvard's Semitic Museum and there was a streak of skywriting turning yellow against the setting sun. To my left the herbarium with five million dried plants in glass held its quiet, wreathed heavily in snow. I'm translating a sonnet cycle by Shaul Tschernikovsky, who wrote from 1890 on in difficult Hebrew, defiantly, about the Greeks. I read his translation of Goethe's "Prometheus" into Hebrew and the fifteen sonnets I am translating are about the sun. It's called "To The Sun," and the epigram is a quotation from the Talmud in Tractate Succot, saying, "And the rabbis deemed that it was all right, when no sun shone on the Holy Temple, for the people to pray facing the sun in the east" (obviously a very rough translation). In Hebrew, in Petrarchan meter, to the sun!
Here's sonnet #2 because I feel like it. My translation is terrible, the poems are much more rigidly structured and they rhyme... I want to make this into a longer project, and perhaps I can bring back the sophistication of the language, but for now I'm just focusing on conveying the images (which is hard enough in his Hebrew, let me tell you):
Like one of the golden ears in wheat-stalks heavy with grain,
that rose in full beauty and will flourish in all of its plenty,
like a single grain that hides within its breast its secrets,
a guarantee of eternal life, and a remainder of something already;
like the ear of grain stolen from the field, that suckled at the village's breast,
and wet with the juice of life, dreaming a dream of her beauty,
I also grew! and yet my soul thirsts for more.
ah, day will chase day! and will I collect this debt?
ere my dream comes! my path is hidden from my eyes.
as I turn this way and that--I turn: what is mine, who is mine?
and have I come to the border? or have I passed it already?
did my father lie to me, did he not guard what came from his mouth?
I am a bud of grain, and my father is my sun,
and he summoned for me the hot rains, and commanded the mountain mists.
Tschernikovsky love. They called him "The Greek," but he was a Russian.
All my classes are making me think a lot but not work too hard, which is, I think glorious. It leaves me time to be in love, which is a good thing to sandwich into a schedule. Love has crept up on me suddenly, not unpleasantly, as if I'd eased my body into cool water. Suddenly the whole flesh is engaged; every pore is present. It's a good thing to walk around in winter continually being surprised at your own joy.
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| two new poems |
[03 Mar 2009|08:12pm] |
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mood |
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that pretty much sum up what has been going on.
Maglite Flashlight/Anemone Enemy
When you looked into my throat with your little black flashlight—
pustules like white anemones
in a red garden—its light was strong;
and when you kissed my lips afterwards, parched with fever like two
wrecked mosses in the dull humming of cars and
the dull reoccurrence of light in the window,
you held that cylinder pointed towards the mattress like a gun
like it was worth all your money
like you couldn’t unclasp your hand around it black
and fine as it was with its unwavering light.
( what an unwavering light... )
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| Laocoon Turns Twelve |
[13 Feb 2009|11:25pm] |
"Laocoon Turns Twelve" (or "Fever Poem")
At twelve in the grip of fever
with one ear on the muttering in my bedroom
and one ear pressed on the pillow I knew
my power was as the power of a king
whose kingdom would soon be annexed
pooled entirely in my poor fate
the worried faces hung above me like cold
crescent moons in dark air ripe with sweat
they were cooing me back to life they wanted
to woo me back
i pressed my face to the pillow i breathed
hot breath into it serpent's breath
i wanted to be immersed in fire an extraordinary
thing i could sense it stirring
my limbs up they cycled
out of my power
i wanted to bloom like a ranunculus
red hot as the breath of god
they lifted me
they bore me
in the blankets they left my sweat
on my scratched hands
fire had scraped its teeth
they placed me in a bath filled with ice
and left me there a small brown figure
the grown moon erased itself
in the window o sky like a mouth
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| my favorite quote from moby-dick |
[08 Jan 2009|06:22pm] |
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs - commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster - tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand - miles of them - leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, - north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
( Once more. )
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[05 Jan 2009|08:44am] |
Dear LJ world at large,
Is anyone else interested in working on an organic farm this summer? There's this organization called WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms - www.wwoof.net) that provides info for organic farmers all over the world; you can work on these farms in whatever country, in exchange for room and board - no fee. You pay your own airfare, though.
I emailed some farmers in Iceland. I want to spend all of July there, going up to the mountains with the sheep in the first week of July and then spending the rest of the time harvesting rhubarb.
Working with my body in the sun.
BALLER.
Now I'm just seeking a companion - while a month in Iceland an hour from Reykjavik and close to the sea sounds amazing even alone, it might be a little much...
Anyone in?
-Talia
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| Love and Wild Boars |
[18 Dec 2008|12:06pm] |
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mood |
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music |
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besame...besame mucho... |
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Love and Wild Boars
I read in the newspaper that there are wild boars, a pandemic of boars from the forests of Brandenburg, in the streets of Berlin. They come out at night, snuffling in the green spaces, feeding on compost, stepping with ungraceful menace in the paths of cars; males can weigh up to two hundred pounds and thus they interrupt the flow of traffic in the guts of nocturnal Berlin. They're the only thing I can think of to compare my passions to--snorting, inconsiderate, with teeth hanging over their lips and rank odors, stout, ungainly bellies, persistent hooves. How I wish to go about my business, but I am hopelessly interrupted, like those hapless drivers hanging out of their cars at dusk, at midnight, a little haggard and all disbelieving, peering at the carnage in the teeth of the radiator grille, all that unfortunate, costly damage, snuffed life, and tangled metal…
( I'm exhausted by these little accidents. )
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| long update, adapted from a letter |
[03 Dec 2008|04:27pm] |
I've been thinking a lot about how people fall out of your life despite (maybe because of) your best efforts, and how much I hate that decline, gentle slip, disappearance, maybe more than anything. I'm writing this in the bus station in Hartford, CT, because I got stranded on the way back to Boston, and bus stations seem like excellent places to write about disappearances. They smell like pee, and everyone is in an elaborate process of pretending to already have left. On some level I feel like this vestibule, with garish lights and corporate slogans, cynicism, anger, weariness, and abundant pee, is a good metaphor for the consciousness in the absence of narrative (or some other roundabout way of phrasing the way you feel at 9pm on a Sunday with no one to talk to).
( I'm writing this like a diary entry... )
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| hell fuckin na we can. |
[05 Nov 2008|01:48am] |
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voted. rioted in the streets of harvard square, and by "rioted" i mean "yelled a lot and high-fived people in cars." am happy and disbelieving. go the soul of america! whoda thunk you could abandon yr antiquated morality?
i'm curious about the future of americana kitsch -- will it have to take on a sheen of multiculturalism in order to remain relevant? are we now utterly in the age of minority-as-majority?
i like the guy hanging out on the john harvard statue in a green spandex thong and nothing else. what did he want the headline to say? not so much "harvard celebrates obama" as "man in thong on pedestal" it seems...
history brings out the oddity in people. i do enjoy having run through the streets and stood on low structures and hollered the president's name. pretty exciting.
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| life! |
[24 Oct 2008|11:25am] |
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I don't know, man, I'm just so happy. I have a lot of work and things, and the Jewish holidays (and my spontaneous decision to keep them) didn't help much, but everything here remains incroyable. I was in a stand-up show last night and then I stayed up til three a.m. with four friends, talking about our weaknesses and strengths and singing songs on guitars and bringing up religion. I found out that one of my best friends here won the Intel international science fair twice and hadn't bothered to bring it up for the first two months. Life here is rife with mind-fucks like that. Russian continues to sound like a mouthful of glorious throat cold, with a series of strange endings; I'm writing a short story for Jamaica Kincaid to review; I've lost a whole bunch of weight, in a good way; I will spend six hours writing a paper today; at six p.m. one of my favorite comedians will meet with the stand-up comedy society; everyone is exciting here, everyone has interesting things to say, everyone is strange. All the boys hold themselves really oddly. The heat hasn't been turned on yet, and it's freezing. I'm still just surprised by joy impatient as the wind. The other day I walked a few miles down a street that has houses from the 1650s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's house, the French Consul General's house. The ground was scratchy with dead leaves as I shambled along and the berries were bright on the branches. The old shingles, crooked and shining, grapevine patterns carved into mantels, the broad wind hurtling around my head!
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[19 Oct 2008|05:08pm] |
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Yesterday I got high and thought about anthropology a lot!
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| hmm |
[17 Oct 2008|12:17pm] |
This is my second college update. I should really get around to updating this thing more frequently, with shorter posts, like Ji. Anyway, life is good. I continue my campaign of wacky pranks and Russian language learning. This weekend, for Columbus Day, I went up to Maine to my roommate's house, and jumped in the ocean in Maine in October, and took a five-mile hike to the top of a mountain and looked at the awesome array of foliage, and picked apples, and baked apple crisp... and ate delicious transgressive Maine seafood...
And then at college I:
-read Lady Chatterley's Lover
-realized I knew how to say "Your mother is like a tiger in bed" in Russian
-pulled off one of the most elaborate wacky pranks I ever attempted (more later, lest the prankee discover this blog)
-critiqued fiction with Jamaica Kincaid
-learned how to write "baller" in cuneiform
-picked up a juicer and $44 worth of fruit that Harvard bought for my friends and I, because we told them we were starting the Harvard Juicing Society
-made crepes
-successfully tried out for the Harvard College Stand Up Comedy Society (HCSUCS)'s show next week
-wrote "Tatyana's father doesn't live in New York with his family because he loves vodka and marijuana, and does not love his wife" on a Russian test (and will probably get extra credit)
So basically, college gets an A+ for fun, although I could do without the utter celibacy. Lame!
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| harvard |
[23 Sep 2008|10:22am] |
So I know I haven't written at all in the three weeks I've been here.
This is because I am Il Capitan of Lame - I know this phrase, "Il Capitan," because I have been exposed to so much diversity here and I just spontaneously become fluent in other languages that way. No but for real, there is just a lot of diversity. I've learned to say "hi, how are you" in Swahili, Macedonian, Russian (I'm taking Russian, so I guess that doesn't count), and Hindi, it's hot. Diversity, it's attractive. So are many of the international students.
Everyone here is just excessively talented; I tried out for eight plays and got one callback (status undetermined), two bands and I didn't get into either - in fact, the only successful audition I had was for Shani, the Jewish social action a capella group that sings in nursing homes. And is just as super cool as it sounds. However! One compelling reason to try out: the conductor/leader wears a beret all the time and basically just resembles Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, minus the bulky chest and shoulders, but with the ponytail. Imagine Gaston as a twenty-year-old macrobiology major/professional cantor with a beret on, and you would have the right idea. Right. Right. I myself am as fluttery and flustered as usual, this is not a surprise. My courseload is all-English, all-the-time, which is, I suppose, a good thing, although perhaps will be overwhelming ... I am taking:
-English 154: Literature and Sexuality (the reading list, which I bought most of yesterday, is all, 'Freud! Foucault!' and then it's all 'Venus in Furs! The Story of O! The Sluts! Lady Chatterley's Lover!' and so, essentially, yesterday I bought drinking chocolate, cup noodles and sexy-books; it was pretty decadent)
-A 12-person fiction writing course WITH JAMAICA KINCAID! You had to write a three-to-five-page autobiographical statement to apply and I got in as a first-semester freshman. Pretty rocktastic - and given that I want to be a writer, this achievement definitely cushioned the blow after mariachi band rejected me. !El jerkos!
-Russian A. I really enjoy this class because Russian is so trippy to speak. Everything, from 'hello' to 'here it is!' sounds like you scooped up random letters from alphabet soup and tried to pronounce them despite a severe throat cold. I love it and I love learning new alphabets (Russian practically has two alphabets - print and cursive. That shit is crazy.)
-Expository Writing 20. Required course, but we get to analyze poetry for it, which is a bright spot. Still: bleah. Too much writing, writing, writing. Of essays, essays, essays.
My roommate is excellent, her name is Ashley, we are somewhat inseparable and are taking Lit & Sex together (thus earning us the handy appellation of "sex buddies"). ( I bombard her with tales of my Jewishness... )
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| hmmm |
[01 Sep 2008|01:50am] |
I move in to Harvard on Friday.
I wish Jamaica Kincaid would post the application requirements for her fiction writing class already, so I can start neurotically fixing up some kind of fiction portfolio (JAMAICA KINCAID ZOMG).
I spent five days in California with the boy who is going to be an engineer, although it's over, and frankly I am as usual in a questioning and perfervid tizzy, as when am I not? The questions of love and physicality are too deep for me. They're stranger and older and more brutal than I could ever be. The East Bay area is beautiful, Sonoma County has these very wide and baked-up hills, these green vines, these blue skies, this bright, crisp heat, this shark-filled cold Pacific, and redwoods towering up like slim and faceless gods... I dig. I dig highly. I could see myself living around there. I like San Francisco although it's nothing close to New York for scale. I finally met ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) schiarire, and she was, as promised, quiet, but delicate and brilliant as I had expected, and she and the engineer boy showed me around the city. Excellent times. I love being with quiet, deeply intelligent, black-haired people I adore and admire.
Weird things happen on the streets of New York. I am just thinking about this for unknown reasons: my last week of work I recall seeing someone's porno collection smashed on the sidewalk near a slightly crumpled cardboard box, for all the world as if some irate girlfriend had dumped it from a third-story window. This was right next to a nice car that had a big key scratch on the side of it. I felt like I'd wandered into the set of a music video. Also that same day in Grand Central Station there was an epic showdown between an older, white, portly man and an obviously homeless African-American man begging for money in the station. I overheard some of the dialogue and it was sort of like ---
HOMELESS MAN: Go back to ya mansion!
PORTLY MAN (extremely heavy Brooklyn accent): Get outta here! Nobody wants you here!
HOMELESS MAN: I don't want you here! You here that? Go back to ya mansion!
Then another African-American man, fairly prosperous-looking, came over to break it up.
PORTLY MAN: What, ah you his friend? I'm gonna call the cops! Get outta here! Nobody wants you here!
PROSPEROUS LOOKING MAN: No, I'm not his friend, sir, can you let him alone?
PORTLY MAN: Soon as he gets outta here! I'm gonna call the cops!
It went on but I had to get home. I mean... really, New York, must there be so much human drama on your throbbing streets at all times? Every walk to and from work I passed a few people crying for no apparent reason. I cried a few times in the streets myself. And the endless propositions! NYC: constant street theater. I don't know what kind of human dramas will play out in the Harvard dorms. I'm expecting a lot. I keep expecting and expecting. We'll see what happens.
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[27 Jul 2008|12:06pm] |
It is time to make a bold statement in a bold and public venue which is nonetheless private enough ... because none of my real-life friends read it...
( not for delicate eyes, or co-religionists. )
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