A Handsome And Shapely Woman

I want to learn trapeze.  (I want to learn how to write a sentence about a trapeze:  I want to learn to trapeze?  I want to learn the trapeze?  I want to learn how to use a trapeze?  Look this up, somebody else?)  But I'll be sure to use a network.

The Post About Olavi Virta

I just finished reading Anne Applebaum's Between East and West, which is an account of a trip she took through Eastern Europe, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, in the late 1980s.  Travelogues appeal to me, although maybe less acutely than they do to Marisa, who could tell you about some great ones.  Mostly I was looking for an informally-written book about Eastern Europe that avoids getting bogged down in either historically-justified horror and despair or an unrelenting rush of quirkiness.  This one seemed to settle on mild bewilderment and disgust, which seems like a well-tempered combination of the two but wasn't especially compelling to read.  I tend to be easily charmed by an author with an elaborately constructed personal mythology, which was not this book's shortcoming.  Anyway, this post is about Olavi Virta.

Look at this man.  Look into his eyes.

This is the real king of the Finnish tango, according to a website called "Virtual Finland."  (So far, all of my experiences of Finland have been virtual.  A friend of mine who visited told me that everyone seemed to have their own lake.  I would probably love actual Finland, because I love fish, being in saunas, and being near, but never in, Russia.)  This is Olavi Virta.

He was arrested for whatever a DUI is called in Finland in 1962 (rattijuopumus, according to Wikipedia), and alcohol played a major part in his overall undoing, which I think is what this drawing is trying to convey:

Actually, this seems to be roughly the life-narrative of most of the stars of the Finnish tango I have read about so far.

The head of the gramophone library of the Finnish Broadcasting Company quotes Dr. Pirjo Kukkonen as saying that "tango lyrics reflect 'the personality, mentality, and identity of the Finnish people in the same way as folk poetry does.'"  Looking at tango as a genre makes me more frustrated than usual with the currency the idea of premature nostalgia seems to have at the moment, but maybe now it's happening at a volume and rate that makes it seem more obvious and worthy of analysis.  Can't we use the word 'melancholy' in more self-diagnoses?

Olavi Virta says, whatever you want.

Believe it.

Tango lyrics deal with roughly the same set of themes across all sorts of cultural and genre boundaries:  longing (longing for home, longing for a woman, longing for woman-as-metaphor for everything else), sadness, nature, one's mother.  The same is true, I guess, for folk poetry, but in that case often the particulars of the situation (the specific details of the setting, the characters, the plot, if we're talking about epic or narrative poetry) take over from the overall feeling.  In this respect tango is more efficient; it is all feeling, and if all this feeling is expressed in your own language then it is difficult to deny its power, even when held at a distance.


One phenomena I hope to discover in the course of my life is tangos written by unusually articulate fourteen-year-old girls.  I think they would (will) be magnificent.  When I know wealthy people I will do my best to convince them to create a scholarship for promising twelve-year-olds to manufacture it for me, if necessary.
 

Two Fact-Clusters to Haunt You Over Sunday Brunch (Invite Me)

1.  "Foible" is a word so heavy with the suggestion of being of Yiddish origin, and yet it is not.*

(It is from Latin-via-French (originally from the word for "to weep") and is related to "feeble" in an interesting way I will now relate.  It was used around the 17th c. to refer to the top third of a fencing blade, which is the weak part, and extended metaphorically around the second half of that same century to describe a personal weakness.  Its meaning has softened slightly since then, depending on where you draw the line between a weakness and a personality trait.  The same cannot be said for "feeble," which is still a mean thing to say about someone.)

My mother did warn me in stern tones today over Saturday brunch (let's make it a marathon, yes?) about trusting the Internet too much, so I am also accepting donations of the OED, or very smart people who fit on a bookshelf.


2.  And, here's a tune from the original king of the Finnish tango, Olavi Virta, about whom more later (hereafter to be abbreviated AWML).  Its title translates into English, I'm told, as "Why I Am Sad."

*"Foible" in Yiddish is "di shvakhkeyt."

Beauty Pageants of History

A man asked me to explain this picture:

In any way I saw fit.  So I will.

This was taken during the May 1989 All-Union Beauty Contest, put on by the All-Union Directory for the Organization of Mass Spectacles, an "all-male perestroika-inspired cooperative" that was actually privately owned, commonly known as "Venets," or Crown.  35 finalists were given three weeks of intensive training to make them ready for presentation as potentially the most beautiful (unmarried, childless) women of the Soviet Union.  The final event of the contest was originally to be held on International Women's Day, March 8, but there were problems.

There had been earlier beauty pageants in the USSR, beginning with one in Vilnius in March of the previous year, and the existence of uncategorized beautiful women preceded all of these.  None of them seem particularly Soviet in intention, and Lenin's averted gaze seems to suggest he knows it too.  The New York Times, among others, noted that the bathing suits worn by some of the contestants were remarkably revealing.  The women pictured in the set of black-and-white photographs that has made its way around the Internet are beautiful, without necessarily being comprehensively presentable, against the grain of so many a pageant participant.

The pictures are also beautiful, I think, perhaps to the point of being a little misleading; a search for the same event on Russian news websites brings up photos of the same in the garish color that seems to be very much of its time, that is, shortly before my birth.

Even now, or now-ish, though, the idea of a beauty pageant in Russia seems to inevitably inspire skepticism, across venues, in a way that seems incongruous to me with the myth/sporadic truth of the beautiful Russian lady.  She is made beautiful by not being in Russia, I guess, where she can only be ridiculous.

Along marginally similar lines, since the unpleasantness twenty or so years ago, you find Lenin in the strangest places.

Lenin in the ice.

I'm not sure he was ever beautiful, but as a subject of kitschy sculpture he seems accustomed to being ridiculous.

My favorite beauty pageant of history, or 20th-century East European history, though, is the one in Firemen's Ball.  This is how it's done, as I shall explain another post in the near future.



I'll leave you with this, a passably relevant link between U2's decadent, melancholic Euro-irony phase of the early nineties and its compulsive world-half-awareness/neo-Christian phase of the later, for some reason:

Victory Interlude

Today I achieved one of my minor goals for the year/the rest of my life, which was to learn how to peel a clementine with one hand (specifically my right hand, which is neither my dominant hand nor my primary driving hand, because I worry about scurvy on the road) while leaving the peel intact.

Feverish and/or Problematic

A week back I started reading Borges, which is a thing I have never really done, except when I read "The Quixote of Pierre Menard" between seven and twelve times for an Aesthetics class.  (On the last day of class, we discussed how ugly the statue outside the window was, and had always been, with the full force of our collective correctness.)

Why did I do this?  Because I love Argentina.  No, this is not true.  I know almost nothing about Argentina, and also I have never seen "Evita."  Because I dance tango without knowing very much about Argentina, without having feelings about it.

Explaining tango to people who do not dance tango, and so probably do not think about tango, is a risky endeavor.  Case in point:  since I started dancing tango I have received as gifts three "tango shawls" from friends and relatives.  I had no idea that such a thing exists, or is even possible, and even now, as the owner of three tango shawls (one fuzzy white, which can be converted into a cowl by opening it at either end and has for some reason a thick line of fringe on the inside, one a thin strip of pink, purple and green knitted frills, and one in what I imagine is a classic red), I could not give you an account of their definitive characteristics.  After a lot of talking and Google Image-searching, though, I determined that what is roughly supposed to happen is that I am supposed to lean back over my partner's right arm and let my body form an appealing arc, as the fringe of my shawl and, optionally, the last half-inch of my hair trails on the slightly dingy black-and-white tiles of the dance floor, before snapping back and continuing on to form new and different appealing arcs.

Sometimes the attempt proceeds along more comprehensible lines.  A man with a gorgeous and well-maintained bookshelf recommended to me that I read Borges' essay on the history of the tango, which seemed extremely reasonable.  My understanding of the man (Borges, with the many bookshelves, not the man, with his one or two) remained somewhat unearthly, which is more a result of my prodigious non-knowledge than any quality of his.  I know he was a librarian in Argentina's national library, I know he was into Old English.  I know sometimes I would sit on the floor in the Undergraduate Library and read his advice to young poets, and it would give me great feelings.  I know he was blind.  I know he is dead.  But without excessive knowledge I was also able to understand him as someone who was probably able to explain something about Argentina to me.  Most of what I know about Argentina I have learned through the tango, and what this has left me with besides a diminished certainty in my ability to move my own body is for the most part a collection of unfamiliar words, and a little bit more about music. 

So I'm not really sure what I was expecting.  I think I expected him to be something more like Nabokov, sort of playing with national and linguistic allegiance through recourse to pure proficiency, a little more sublime in the case of Borges, and personal ambiguity--Nabokov's insane accent to Borges' vague evocation of Tiresias.  What I actually found when I started reading from parts of "On Argentina," which understandably is a collection of his writings having to do with Argentina, was something I was more familiar with than I had expected.  This was not fiction and it had nothing to do with endless libraries and books that sort of write themselves.  This was nonfiction, written by a man with a sense of himself, and a sense of the place he lived and cared for, and felt that his primary responsibility as a writer was to present this place to the world beyond its borders.  The pieces were all short, and all clustered around the same set of goals; he was trying to define the Argentine national character.  At one point he defines the Argentine national character as caring not at all about national characters, or existence as a nation at all, but instead being defined completely by personal relationships.  Two separate times he proves this with the example of a crime show where a police agent befriends a criminal in order to turn him into the police, which would be reacted to with rage by his typical Argentinian.

I'm not sure if any of this indicates a contradiction, but I feel like it does.  Or maybe I'm just impressed by someone who can believe so deeply and comprehensively in both universal and particular truths, and believes that they can strengthen each other.  I was expecting something as unearthly as the stories themselves, instead I found a man engaged in the same problems of every person who attempted to live the 20th century, slaving away at the same categories that are beginning to seem insane to me.