Elsewheres and Elsewhens

We're in a café across from each other.

Can you see us, sitting there?

Do we want to be where we are in this political moment? Oy, please no, feh. Europe is all fists up against the you-can’t-be-serious claims of here. Go, Europe. Do we want to be anywhere, ever, when we think about suffering that doesn’t need to exist? Well, that is the question.

Feel like a bit of travel? Grab a coffee. Look out the window. Tiny green things are poking up. How do they know how to do it each year? They don’t watch the news.

How are you feeling? If you were here, I would listen. We would be together and feel less alone. I would ask you to say three things in the moment you love, and I would tell you three things in the moment I love. I will tell you them now. I love the way writing stops time. I love those cheese and onion things I made last night from a video on Instagram. I love the way the way reading old notebooks makes you feel better about your life now.

In July 2004, I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, to teach creative writing at the St. Petersburg Literary Seminars. I recorded my impressions in a notebook, and for no reason—honestly in a random move—I started reading this notebook today.

What appeals to me about the entries is the particular way we write in notebooks that is unlike any other way we write. At least this is true for me. In the notebooks, I’m confessional. I'm on a couch. I'm in the booth on the other side of the priest. I'm talking to a lover in bed, a lover who isn't for the moment judging me, so there’s a feeling of freedom that is probably mistaken but is nonetheless in the air.

Arriving in Russia, I was entering a group that was already in place and looked like a community. It raised anxiety in me about fitting in, as I think such a situation would raise in most people. I also felt pleasure in the dislocation of being a foreigner. You’re in a culture you can’t quite make out. It returns you to a state of childhood, where you don’t know how to evaluate things. There’s such a thing as good ice cream and bad ice cream, the child wonders? All ice cream tastes great.

As a foreigner, you’re not afraid of things because you don’t know the signals of danger. I find it appealing to look back as this kind of unknowing. These days, I find I’m less and less interested in the subjectivity of evaluation. It wearies me to receive it, and it wearies me to offer it.

Notes from July 2004.

I’m interested in how people get to be who they are and how they make choices about how to live. I’m fascinated. This quality comes across to people as a sort of kindness in me, I think. I also scare them with what they feel as too intense. I’m trying to resist the impulse to woo people whose aloofness makes me feel unwanted and unworthy, but I am not succeeding. It’s really so tempting to be ridiculous. I can’t mask it.

I’m attracted to the Russian language, just at the period of my life when all hope has ended of remembering any words. There’s something to be said for the dieting advantages of travel here. I have taken to eating white cheese, the consistency of pencil eraser, because it kind of fills me for a while. Also smoked meat in vacuum-sealed packages. I kind of like doing without. It makes me wonder why I ever do with. My room is brilliantly light, facing a courtyard. It's modern and clean. I have lucked out. It's like finding money on the street, except you would never find money on the streets here.

It doesn’t really get dark. The sky is still milky at 2 AM. Continual light makes people do things and want things. I can feel my eyelids closing, but I know how to fight sleep. The white nights make me feel that sleep is beside the point. I have been told that several bats fly around the courtyard. I hear them. I am going to see if I can see them. I did. Bob Olmstead said they were birds. I think they are bats. They were squeaking. I’m sure they are bats. Birds don’t squeak like that, although maybe they do.

I walked part of the way around the Griboyedov Canal with Mary, but she didn’t want to go the whole way. She had a cold and was a little tired. The canal is narrow and twisty and flows through the center of the city, starting at the Moyka River near the Field of Mars and flowing into the Fontanka River, around 6 miles and crossed with 21 bridges. We ate lunch at a sweet place near her apartment. I felt the tiniest bit better trying to communicate with my three words of Russian. I learned to read maybe four letters in the Cyrillic alphabet I didn’t know before. We went to Nabokov’s house. The ceilings and walls were paneled with inlaid wood. We went to Akhmatova’s house. I bought postcards.

Marlon Brando died today. I’m not sure of what. I met a young Russian. He wouldn’t tell me his age. He said Brando had died of an embolism and corrected himself and said an aneurysm. Could an embolism cause an aneurysm? He asked me to define the word soporific. I misheard him and thought he was saying something about Elvis. I said Elvis wasn’t soporific. He laughed when I thought he’d mentioned Elvis. No one knew the word Stakhanovite. I had to explain that Stakhanov had been a super worker under the Soviet regime and had upped the labor quotient, causing everyone to despise him. I thought you could run that risk if you appeared to offer more than other teachers.

After I left Russia, I traveled to Germany, and on a train from Frankfurt to Berlin, I met a woman Gesche, a doctor, who was 36. We enjoyed talking to each other for several hours, and by the time we arrived in Berlin, it felt like we had become friends. She gave me a very rewarding sense of how my openness and curiosity could be the opposite of scary. I loved her then, and I love her now.

It’s mild and the air is soft. Geshe met me for breakfast today, and we sat at this café and talked. She had been awake since 6 PM the night before, up all night on her feet on duty until nine this morning, working in the intensive care neonatal unit. The babies are kept alive on tubes and other technologies after 25 weeks. She showed me how much they weighed, as if holding a pound of butter, 25 grams. Everything in their bodies needs to be assisted. Their brain cells don’t know how to regulate swallowing or breathing. She had to take blood from veins too tiny to see with the naked eye. I asked how it felt to do the work, and she said she liked it. It made her feel skillful. She was wearing a blue T-shirt and a long sweater over skinny black pants, a gold necklace, eye makeup, dark fuzzy brows, dimples in her cheeks. She has a ready, beautiful smile, delight in being with me, alive and awake. Next, was going to the dentist.

On the train, I’d told her how much I admired what she did. She had started as a neurosurgeon and had switched to pediatric oncology. She’d found neurosurgery too dominated by men and had seldom gotten to know her patients. She asked about my work. It was hard to explain what I did in terms that served people. I described the final scene in Stardust Memories, where the Woody Allen character is wringing his hands in a sense of futility about life and what we owe each other during our brief turn in existence. A space ship descends, and aliens approach him. He asks them what he should do, since they are obviously a more evolved species. One of the aliens says, “You’re a comedian. If you want to do a service to humanity, tell funnier jokes.” Gesche got it. I knew we were made for each other.

Aliens know things.

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Babes (2024)

Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau

Ilana Glazer stars with Michelle Buteau. Glazer cowrote the script and Pamela Adlon directs. I loved it. We watched it last night. Richard said it's another movie glorifying babies and giving birth. He was thinking about movies like Night Bitch, which does do that under the bait-and-switch of being about female power something or other.

Babes is about female friendship and the way it is all the rows of marble columns that hold up our lives. Glazer is doing an older version of her character in Broad City, and Buteau has the role played by Abbi Jacobson. They are lifelong best friends. They are each other's person. When women show what their lives are really like, it's always a version of Girls or Broad City or Adlon’s brilliant series Better Things, involving food, beds, and shared bathtubs. The tension in any romance is can it continue and who wants to break it up.

The repulsive myth marketed by Freud and fed to women is that women grow out of that phase of life and become real adults who focus their attention on men and the children they produce with men. Every woman who bought that bullshit lives in a bubble of sadness and longing for a home she was forced to leave. Glazer and Buteau don't leave that home. They are that home.

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