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.

Three Times the Charming

I still don't believe there has ever been a better title for a blog than this.

THANK YOU, LIFE

DOG PARK BENEFITS ENTIRE COMMUNITY

Many Dogs I Hope Someday To Meet

Once abandoned, now loved, these mutts for the Mutt March, June 6, when I will be in Pittsburgh.

Marisa and I had lunch at Janet's today, but this is not true. We had breakfast at Janet's, or brunch at Janet's, but I said 'lunch' because Janet's is actually called 'Janet's Lunch.' Also, I am reluctant to call meals that occur before noon 'brunch,' because brunch seems like the kind of thing that happens when you wake up after noon and thus have to give up on all other meal titles because old people are already mad at you for sleeping while the sun is up. A lot of old people are mad at you.

And we saw the above, advertised on a poster, along with ESL lessons, custom dressmaking, and something else that may have involved boats. So I thought maybe there could also be a parade for people who had been jilted, but then had found love, along the same lines. Marisa didn't bother to criticize this. They could also have a mascot named Eddie.

But Eddie, this Eddie, he is the face of the Grosse Pointes. Because they are a dog town, or five dog towns making their increasingly meandering way along the coast of Lake St. Clair, which is probably a dog lake. (Once the Grosse Pointe News gets its archive business in order, I will provide you with a super-apt link to a letter to the editor from a doctor residing within our fair borders who claims that dogs are inherently superior to cats, because while a cat will simply eat you if you accidentally die in your house without feeding it to a degree adequate to the situation, a dog, realizing that its dead owner possesses some relationship to its live owner, will guard your body until other, live humans inevitably arrive. I can't remember whether or not she proposed restrictions on cat ownership, but I'm pretty sure she did, since this letter was in response to some article detailing legislation against public airing of dogs. I know she didn't comment on how a dog would treat a guest if one happened to die in your house and you didn't notice, but I wish she had. This is one reason why Grosse Pointe is a dog town, and so charming in its pointless hostility.)*

And really, me owning a dog exists in another universe, equally remote from the one where I could have written that kind of letter.* Dogs are adorable. I love to say hello to them. One of the most charming qualities of dogs in general is their readiness to say hello, while a cat must be manipulated for years for this to occur.* I may well own a dog someday if I have children who want one and I don't bother to fight them on it, because really, why? I'm sure children are so hard to deal with I wouldn't even notice, or something. And then, in this universe, I will be old, and not only will I have made a coherent series of life decisions and reached a hair-state that works well for me and does not necessitate constantly tricking myself into thinking I am working toward another, more exalted hair-state, I will also probably be the kind of person who gets up really early to accomplish things, and so I can have the special parent-bond with the dog whereby I feed the dog and walk it at times when other people don't want to be awake or don't want to walk a dog, because I assume I will have shiftless and lazy children, which is fine by me. So there's that. But I also assume my children will be unreservedly affectionate toward animals, so they can handle that part, while I am a sleeplessly vigilant mother, which is what I fear must happen. I fear.

And then, because originally when I was thinking about this I was walking on the Diag trying to remember to go do the thing I was going to do, which I forgot to do, which was pick up the newly most trustworthy translation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich* from the UGLi, and I saw a woman sitting on the ground with her legs stretched out in front of her, holding a camera, looking very serious. And I saw three young girls in baggy jean shorts and running shoes standing in front of her, on the rise of grass in front of the flagpole, right hands on their chests, singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' in high and tuneful voices. Their mother made them start again, just as they made her start again with the camera. Neither group was satisfied. Here's another universe I can't really understand, although when I think about it, I would totally have done this as a child, because I liked doing things and having people know about them.* Then their father, maybe, walked up with a plastic bag full of food, and I could see inside there were four packages of everything inside. It could have also just been a man with a bag of well-organized food, yes.

Then I got closer to the UGLi and I saw a family, a mother father and daughter, all holding hands. Actually I heard them first, talking about how a couple they all knew acted awkward when they were together in public, and at the time I was thinking about how I could finally think about every portion of my life I remotely cared about in some sort of objective way since I don't even care to think of this month as anything but formless. I was kind of dismayed at them, being happy, recognizing the unhappiness of others, or wrongly identifying something different, and maybe better or just more private, as unhappiness. Here's a universe I really could never understand.

Anyway, I'm moving to Pittsburgh on Friday, which is terrifying because my duffel of choice is walled up in the attic, which is a phrase I am tired of using more than once in a conversation. My house has seven finches in it, and I was supposed to find places for five of them to live that are not this house, but so far I have not. As my mother has told probably every person she has talked to today excluding the waitress at the restaurant we went to this evening, I finally registered for my summer class today. I also learned how to say 'lightbulb' and 'sailboat,' and at one point this afternoon I could also say, "What sort of house is this?" in a convincingly colloquial manner. I'm going to forget everything I own.












*This will come up all the time in the conversation I plan on one day having with Jeffrey Eugenides.

*As you will soon see, charming reader, this universe is separated from the one I currently work through chiefly by time. Soon, I will had gone crazy.

*It's like when you walk into a room of people and begin frantically deducing what their specific requirements with regards to facial expression, habitual level of anxiety, academic, athletic, professional, artistic achievements or lack of any of the above, comfort with eye contact, propensity to tangential speech, amount of attention paid to clothing and personal grooming, and attitude toward the room that you are both occupying itself might be for a person they would be willing to put forth effort toward communicating with, and then you realize that they're down with whatever, and you just can't handle it. That's what it's like with dogs, and sometimes toddlers.

*Time, guys.

*Though I know it is at least correct-ish, I wish I could just write Ilich because it's awkward to decide what to do with the 'y' and I have a time enough as it is trying to figure out what to say when I'm saying something that people know I know about, and really when saying anything at all, so I wish that the transliteration community could just do this thing for me.

*I keep trying to figure out what it is I dislike about the internet while running into things I like, more and more, because I love having every bit of information ever available to me, minus a lot. It's like that the only mercy available to all humans is our inability to hold every aspect of our lives in mind at once, maybe, but then half broken-down. That's probably something like what it is. I know there is no leader- asterisk for this one, but it's like the hidden track on a CD at the end of the secretly long last track for people who refuse to stop listening, or forget, or figure it out.