Compression —that’s the first word that comes to mind when I think of this collection of poems —her first english translation— by Vera Pavlova. Compression. She packs so much emotional powder, so much passion in just a couple of lines. Two lines, that’s all she seems to need to bring her emotions, and yours, to the surface. After reading them, you can no longer take refuge in innocence; you are exposed.
I broke your heart
Now barefoot I tread
on shards.
She writes with directness, without veils, exposing herself and her loves and her fears and her desires and her pains, hiding nothing. There is a lot of sex, a lot of unresolved childhood anguish, a lot of longing, a lot of questions about love and life, and of course a lot of (to my eyes exaggerated) russian passion. And, ultimately, life seen as a simple thing:
A tentative bio:
caught fireflies,
read till dawn,
fell in love with weirdos,
cried buckets of tears
for reasons unknown,
birthed two daughters
by seven men
Photo of the author by Aleksandr Dolgin
A happy moment in the car. Soon we’ll be replacing the car-seat with a booster!
We spent this weekend in Cambridge… and we fell in love with the place. There are museums, Harvard, MIT, startups, the Media Lab, ideas, music, people from all over the place and from all different classes, noise, life. Intelligence is what you breathe —so different from the city across the river, focused on “prestige” and “aristocracy”, tamed by Miltown.
And so are thinking about moving there. For a year, for an experience. To live closer to Harvard and MIT and the photography center and the music and the diversity and the T and all the great things that happen in a city so rich and cultural and diverse and with so much energies.
It shouldn’t be too hard for me —in fact, I’d be “closer” to Philadelphia now, and also more in touch with the world of technology. (A different story for Ani). The hardest part would be to leave our house, and my soccer friends.
“So amazed I was by them that I couldn’t trust my memory when they weren’t there” — Open City, by Teju Cole —I’m really liking the writing.
I miss #Argentina (Taken with instagram)
#happiness (his and mine) #amherstmasschsets #goberry (Taken with Instagram at GoBerry)
The family #photographer (Taken with Instagram at Rao’s Cafe)
“
Memories are most powerfully triggered by sensory stimuli: lipstick traces on a shirt collar, a cardboard box of sticky Polaroids, grains of sand in the bottom of a suitcase, the smell of dubbin, liniment and dried mud on old football boots, the sound of a dusty grandfather clock, the feel of moss and lichen on granite boulder … Or most famously, the taste of a soggy madeleine in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Without that sensory richness, for Facebook Timeline the key trigger is photography, and increasingly video.
” —Dan Hill on his SuperNormal Domus column about the Facebook Timeline.
I have the same feeling when I revisit my Tumblr entries of the past : old photos of Teo with a balloon, a video of traffic around Madrid, the large font of quotes —they all trigger rich memories of where I was, physically and metaphorically speaking, at the time of the writing.
#amherst is green upon our return. #spring is in the air (Taken with instagram)
