ritual of the habitual

dazed and confused.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:39:00 +0000

имам нужда да пиша, да нижа думи, да си подредя главата и граматиката. имам нужда сама да си говоря. да вървя по нишки и да вярвам, че водят нанякъде, да ги сплитам

so many things depend on confidence alone. i don't understand, but whenever the cox shouts get the confidence back in this boat, sit up, heads up, we suddenly know how to row. 'head up' gives you a direction and that's all. then rhythm to follow.

i'm a bit shaken today like i've stepped off a mood-swing rollercoaster over 12 hours. ( i rarely have those, mostly due to coffee over-dose but they are memorable confidence-destroying moments). all the problems of the world seem to be fuss and nonsense, all dissertation / future related.
sitting on the train yesterday i could see it comming together, chapter by chapter through undergrad dissertation to mphil, to phd, to where i really want to stand. and i could see the thread run off the sheets under my fingers as i was underlining.
then some talk with catalin about the phd reality, and i don't know i can't answer any of my questions, i can't tell why it was so important yesterday. still haven't written the presentation.

note to self - losing balance again, get back to the rhythm.

the words i read

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:21:00 +0000

(that make me want to go walk of the library
then i read some newspapers that make me turn back
up the stairs of academic ivory towers
then i spend some time posting this from the towered University Library)

"Without this power to proceed minus the cleanest bill of health, we are caught between two problems: one the one hand, theories, however subtly argued, that support the idea that upward class monility - mimicry and masquerade - is unmediated resistance; on the other, a failure to "recognize ... the passing of an era when the West, and particularly the Americans, were willing to tolerate the rhetoric of the third world." The task of the teacher of literary reading is placed in the aporia of an uncoercive rearrangement of the will as student and teacher shuttle between freedom-from and freedom-to; not in congratulating the will to U.S. class-power as unmediated resistance"

but also a good one:
"I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules." (xiii)

from Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

и цитат на деня от одеве: "Политико-ченжеджийски скандал разтърсва за пореден път държавата. .... Скандалът продължава."
Капитал за Бойко Борисов

mornings

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:51:00 +0000

oh my god autumn is such a beauitiful explosion.
and every year i forget

but this year I'm reminded of it more than the usual, watching the sunrise pierce thgough mist and coloured leaves every other morning on the river while tapping the water in the rhythm of an eight boat.
I should kick myself out of bed on a non-rowing morning and go out with a camera before the explosions are over.

old friends get in touch, sending mute emails with a photo attached to say that time's passing over there too, and although we both write little, we see much beauty and click the shutter and think of one another.

these photographs are from Sofia by Nadezhda Chapaeva, published by Capital.bg
look them up on their blog for nicer viewing properties.

what it looks like where i am

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:23:00 +0000

trough peter eriksen's lense:

Dushanbe pics old & new

itemised recent life

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:17:00 +0000

clockwise ...

- Mountaineering cum historical overview guidebook to Tajikistan

- Postcard, bought from the Penjikent museum although if you ask me, it belongs with the artefacts. I'd roughly date it to the Soviet period, judging by the Marx and Lenin portraits on a cake-like building, mirrored in a fountain. Typical soviet aesthetic for public space and choice of subject

- Development book recommended by Adam. One word - Brilliant! More words to come.

- Slightly absurd book on Sacred Places in Tajikistan ... my internship at the Anthropology centre here consists of editing it. I might forget English by the time I get to the end... Interesting none the less.

hights, lows, hellenistic hag

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:11:00 +0000

moral dilemmas for which i have no answers and however much i study facts or rhethoric techniques to convince myself, i won't know. for some reason they all make me feel uncomfortable with my consciousness and undermine the confidence i've been trying to build to manage exams and larger tests of time.

or maybe just low points of my day to be written on some piece of blogging to be burnt and buried in the interblag so i can sleep, get up, row and revise like normal people do...

8am - i had to book a flight with ryanair to sardinia.i need to get there for excavations, but there's nothing i have that i can compromise - time, comfort, effort - in favour of the ethical reasons against flying, except the impossible price of the ferryboat. yet, consciousness on the back-burner, i sat down to book 'cheap' flights. and honestly, they get dirtier and dirtier every time i look. the environmental damage comes first; the unneccessary consumerism ranks second; then the intrusive adds and attitude; and with every next webpage, a new kind of made-up cost added to a 'free' flight - insurance, obligatory check-in, obligatory card-handling fee, luggage, etc.

my new theory to play with is that low-cost companies molest their custommers by hidden fees, and intrusive disciplining physical discomfort, telling them where to be, when to do things etc exercises of authority. and this is all a strategy to take people's mind off guilty thoughts about carbon footprints. once you're having a shitty time and have been deceived anyway, you don't want to self-flagellate your consciousness further and enjoy your holliday.
sado-masochisstic behaviour (discomfort for self, bad for the planet) might help people get over their problematic relationship with the environment. that's how i felt on the last long flight i took anyway - 10 hours stuck next to the toilet, with a stinky fat guy next to me undermined good intentions for carbon offsetting because 'i'd suffered enough'.
or maybe they are careless bastards heading on cheap holliday.

2pm - then i met with someone who i recently learnt has published a beautiful book with funding from the getty museum, which is deeply involved in illicit antiquities (but has great outreach). this is someone whom i hold in truly high esteem, whose writings are an inspiration, and whose lectures are a privilege to attend, who has taught me more about art, antiquity, argumentation and cambridge, than any other supervisor, ... so it came as a bit of a shock and caught in the cross-fire between my two teachers (Miss Ethical black and white Heritage Management and Mr Reach Out to the Public is more important than ethical but dust-filled museums), i still don't know what to think.
anyway, he in turn found out what my exam essays would be like...
great way to motivate the last week of hard work - mutual disappointment.

4 pm talking to amiya because i'm upset and concerned, it turns out it's common advise for cambridge exam tactics - 'to do a high-mark argument, write like anything you are not': like a private-schooled english boy who can provoke by instinct, name-drop authors to parade his knowledge, and stick to disciplined timing. i'm sure where i stand on this, but i'm not sure what to do. last year i thought i would try to fit the mould to see if i can, take the best skills from it and move on. but i'm not so sure if those skills are worth it any more or it'll be time to move on to somewhere else (less mouldy) after this degree.

6pm - little 70-year old lady with blue veins under loose satine skin in grads. came up to me. she'd let a bra strap fall off her shoulder and spilt her tea with unrest, because i was bear-footed in a coffeeshop. then gave a long expose on how dangerous i was, compromising the hygene of the institution, swine flu, equatorial bugs, countryside and all. it was so tragicomical and pathetic i could not respond with anything but think 'ok whatever, if you'll fuck off and leave me worry about gender and fetishism'. i would not disagree with anything a crazy little old lady says, but it's disturbing to listen out of pity for someone who expects respect, to treat them as a story, a cultural product that needs to be tolerated or a black-white picture that only accepts respect and affection.

reminding of my great grand mother as real as she was, and aristotle's observation that we enjoy grotesque because we recognise it's art. we take distance from the hellenistic 'old hag' because she is a statue and we focus on the artist's skill rather than the degradation of the subject.
sometimes i write here to take distance from what is happening, lock it in some nice alliterations, metaphors and that kind of safe-keeping devices. then it's a bit more tolerable and thinkable through. it's text, not weight on my chest.

but it's also disturbing to treat anyone (me, the old hag, my unremembered great grandmother) as a story, a cultural product that needs to be tolerated or a black-white picture that only accepts respect and affection.

hopefully one day i'll be buried and will grow into a tree. people would keep correcting my branches, trimming me, and so on to keep me alive and keep stretching higher.

that song. again.
(god took the stars and he tossed 'em
can't tell the birds from the blossoms
you'll never be free of me
he'll make a tree from me

lay your head where my heart used to be,
hold the earth above me
lay down in the green grass
remember when you loved me)

good-drinking cup tea break

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sun, 17 May 2009 10:12:00 +0000

* ok, the last words of the last post (and i) deserve the prosaic break because i learnt something quite fascinating (for someone who made up their mind about doing archaeology following the steps of Schliemann, with 'The Deam of Troy' in my backback, inherited from their mother):

In one of the shaft-graves at Mycenae, in 1876 Schliemann found what he believed was

... a cup,

a magnificent work Nestor had brought from home,

studded with gold. There were four handles on it,

around each one a pair of golden doves was feeding.

Below were two supports. When that cup was full,

another man could hardly lift it from the table,

but, old as he was, Nestor picked it up with ease. (Iliad 11.632ff, transl. J.Johnson)

... he was wrong, the cup was made several centuries before any Trojan war and any Nestor.
But in 1954, at Pithekoussai, one of the oldest colonies near Naples, excavations unearthed a clay cup, which spoke for itself (in a hexametric inscription, one of the earliest snippets of Greek we have!):
I am Nestor’s good-drinking cup.
Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway
the desire of beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize.
The clay-cup came from a child's grave, I think as a symbolic solution to completing his early-ended life cycle to the point where he would have been as old as myth or Nestor.

Other entertaining associations include Romanian death-weddings, the purposes of Platonic myths, structuralism / cognitive theory applied to Geometric vase painting, and so on, ... I'd better get on with visions and revisions.

bonfire to summon summer.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sun, 17 May 2009 09:31:00 +0000

(i know it's summer even though it's gloomy grey and seeping rain and the tall towers of colleges are closed to prevent anyone climbing above the clouds or committing suicide during exam term)
because my jumper smelled of smoke one morning
and nettle burns weave healing stings around my knuckles
because a spiderweb was stretching fresh across the path and sealed my lips as i was running
because we warmed the river's waters with our naked swimming bodies
and as i pull my ore through water, there is a rhythm - 8 rocking over, 8 flicking wrists, 6am starts - that i did not know before.
and then i go to learn my Homer hexametres between cups of tea and cups of Nestor and Mycenae.*

if i had twitter

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:06:00 +0000

i'd say my brain is asleep after an all-nighter; but i am on a sugar high after eating too many grapes (criminally imported out of season); my eyes are reading; by bike is cycling; i'm going to listen to a four hour seminar on levi strauss; and i think i'll deconstruct all my binary oppositions by the end; but then there will be a surprise czech film.

this morning dr miracle (who is not fictional) said post-structuralist phases are something like a mid-life crises. at least for hodder. ho. ho.

will write about it later.

solid forged 4" archaeologist trowel

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:17:00 +0000

Long time no blogging. Skipping through my vacation, moving houses and a statistics project, term's begun again. Sap's rising, Cambridge is a pleasure to run through, breathing in its green and fragrant days, cool at the margins, warm in the middle, like fresh-baked gateaux molleux with ice-cream.

These weeks my dear fellow archaeologists and I have been weathering in the Fens, getting sun-burnt, wind-swept, sand-blown, mud-stuck, until at the end of the day we turn dark silty gray to reddish brown, like the soil we come from and go back to. Every next morning.
The protagonist of our excavation is an ancient river, whose skeleton lies tucked, folded under layers, in the buried soil, under an unremarkable field. We haven't found much, except for all the harvested flint, documenting where a hand struck a stone, and some badly made pot. The flat easily hides that this landscape was flooded regularly from palaeo-times until some 80 years ago. That most people who walked it were cold and their feet were wet when they went to sleep wrapped in wool, soaked with the smell of their sheep and the river. That the liminality of the environment was tangible as the sea came forwards up to the Fens, expulsing men and beasts towards the high ground. That in Roman and medieval times they had had enough with this liminality and cut a straight ditch, like we dig our trenches. That they enjoyed the sun as much as we do probably.
We have found out a lot. That we cannot walk the straight lines we aspire to. That a cut is a separate event within a feature with many fills, and they all have numbers with different kinds of brackets, documenting both the chronology of the dig and the chronology of the feature, and the 2- and 3-D arrangement of the site. That the record of an excavation can be more destructive to the salvaged information than millenia of erosion and worm-action. That interpretation begins at the end of the trowel before you decide to scrape further and break the boundary in order to learn about a new feature, while destroying it.

Then, as we embody the site, via mattocking calluses, burnt skin, iron-pan-stained trouser knees, it comes to the end of a day with watermelon, beer and sound sleep.
And I remember why I want to be this.

Well, ideally, I wouldn't be doing that much river and that minimalist Mesolithic folk, instead of some painted tombs with pretty pots for wine and a good fake Greek story.

за лифта и езерата.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:32:00 +0000

(in brief, they have built a cable car to the Rila lakes, breaking environmental and safety laws, trespassing on state property. this path was my rite of passage to mountaineering and leads to a sacred landscape for followers of the white brotherhood. i expect the mountain will punish those who disrespect her. avalanches and sliding stones are common enough to snap the cables and claim the lives of ignorant innocents. but that's how karma works.)

явно безочието е стигнало до там да избоде очите на планината. засега няколко статии и информацийки.

за да остане природа в българия
дневник
моите планини

за да остане природа казват, че:
- проектът не е преминал процедурите за одобрение от държавата и може да е опасен
- лифтът не е минал оценка за въздействието му върху околната среда
- нито технически преглед
- изходната станция стои върху свлачище
- територията, която обхваща е част от национален парк Рила, т.е. държавна собственост и трябва да бъде отдадена чрез концесия, но към момента не е

Кметът на Сапарева баня инж. Сашо Иванов казва:
"Изграждането на лифта до Седемте рилски езера ще гарантира запазването на екологичното равновесие в природен парк Рила"
"Потокът към Седемте рилски езера е голям и хората се качват с различни видове автомобили - така замърсяват значително околната среда, отколкото една седалко-въжена линия, която ще даде възможност на много хора да видят едно от най-красивите кътчета на нашата страна"

сещам се за френските алпи, които са доста тежко екипирани с лифтове.
сещам се за първия ми път сериозно на планина със скаутите и две кифли, късен ноември по козята пътечка до езерата. кифлите се качиха на камиончето с хижаря, а аз бавих момчетиите пешком. спомням си, че ясен ни изгуби в гората преди билото по тъмно. че исках да се сгуша в един корен и да спя, без да ми пука за студа, снега и зверчетата, а като капнахме в хижата бях малка, уморена и щастлива. иво направи най-воднистата супа на света, от която си вадих шпека, а по канал едно даваха фаренхайт 451.
тая пътека ми взе душата и планината още я държи, а някой ще се качва до светата светих на дъновистите и ще приближава най-високата хижа на балканите - Вазов - седнал и увиснал. ... но нали знаем за да си припомним къде ни е мястото стига само едно свлачище. то всичко се връща.

wtf is wrong with the homophobic parliament...

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:16:00 +0000

edit: fuck this. there are worse things.

sap rising to the new 5th floor.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:45:00 +0000

somewhere else a Parisian spring is happening
it sent me signs: in the way the dust particles dance in the sun, in the kinds of flowers pushing in the neatly cut grass (i do not know their names in english), in the letters from my parents, with neat sketches of a new flat attached, with old-fashioned placards and a big balcony with views to discover. i imagine circulating around the pen-drawn lines, on my way to the cupboard with the chocolates or the tea-box.

i might sometimes
prefer writing mes essais in the english rain
and dreaming about sun-pressed past of turkey, greece and rome
through post-colonial lenses / winows obscured by condensation and raindrops.

the rain curtain, doubling the library windows makes britain more of an island.
water from all sides, taking boats of thoughts to all sides.
by now my essay is as watered down and cold as morning tea by noon.

да (не) ти се случи нещо, което 45 години след това няма да можеш да разказваш

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:06:00 +0000

развълнуваща и тъжна статия, свързана с конкурса за истории за лични социализми, проведен от интститута за изследване на близкото минало.
искам стаж там. искам да чета и да разказвам. искам да си ровя нахалния студентски вирнат и още пъпчив нос из страниците на партиздат и на тетрадките с тънко и дебело писане. искам от вторични суровини да вадя думи и смисли и яркост в черно белите безименни снимки от албумите на баба и дядо. искам дядо да можеше да ги прочете и да ми разкаже.

"дневниците на Мария от Варна – „вуйчо Бечо се самоуби, бесило черно...Свако Марко се самоуби...пил сода каустик пред вратата на Борисовата градина...господи, станаха много самоубийствата в нашия род...”

"Има едно особено чувство, в гърлото, физическо усещане, че четеш история, която никога не ти е била преподавана, разказана."

1989 краят на историята -> мълчание, игнориране, не отваряне на информация

"тетрадката за приходи и разходи от 1989-а година на семейството на Григор от Пазарджик. Забележителен документ, в който всеки ден от годината е измерен в покупки. Така например първи януари 1989-а година е равен на „ хляб – половин Добруджа, захар 2 кг по 1.50 лв, тахан халва с какао 1 кутия 0.580 кг, на децата за нова година по 5 лева, новогодишни картички и пощенски, общо 54.70 лв”, а 10 ноември, петък, е обикновен ден, в който има „поръчка в стола на здравните работници, хляб – 2броя, отиване и връщане от Лесичево, вестници”, общо 3.30 лв.."

"Няма нито един разказ на човек от висшите етажи на комунистическата номенклатура или на тайните служби."

"Забелязвам, докато чета, два основни типа стратегии, през които се гледа и описва миналото – първата е желанието то да бъде представено като положителен опит, като добро и да бъде противопоставено на днешното, на времето след промените. [...]
Има и друга стратегия – да разказваш за миналото като „лошото”, от което следва днешното още по-лошо.
Има много меланхолия и много тъга. Има ясното осъзнаване, че миналото продължава да е разделено между тези две стратегии и че близо18 години след края на комунизма, ние, които наследяваме историите и на жертвите,и на победителите, не можем да ги синтезираме, да родим една друга, обща история."

"...проумявам „непосилната лекота” на такава съдба – да ти се случи нещо, което след това повече от 45 години няма да можеш да разказваш."

roofs of sofia & streets of paris.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:25:00 +0000

1.
photos by bistra boshnakova
of places loved by me too.

nostalgia comes as synaesthesia. i could smell the ink of the pages of my preferred magazine where these were published. in my mind's eye i also hold the touch of sofiiski smog and rain against my skin.

in the front plane you see the university of sofia. rumour has it that one of the domes hosts a full standing mamooth skeleton. the second done is the archaeology department library. and the third dome is the indoors climbing wall where i go bright and early to strain arms and legs, and listen to climbery tales. there's a little window you can climb out of and walk on the roofs, but now it's blocked by iron bars.

i started exploring roofs in the middle of a serious english exam for a serious certificate. it was held in the building of виас (the architecture institute). marina and i wondered around in the break, we found ourselves on the easily accessable roof with a gorgeous view over sofia. then the security guards made us come down and finish our exams. marina now studies architecture and i know nothing else of her.
the picture above is hilton, i think. hotels are useful because they're generally too polite to stop people from roaming aimlessly on their top-floors looking out of windows, unlike educational institutions.

the last picture is the structural opposite of the view you get if you lean unsafely out of the window of our living room. my street looks the same mosaic of sun-kissed bare bricks and yellows, alternating with greys. looking south, you can see the snowy top of vitosha mountain. looking north you should theoretically spot the fumes comming out of tall chimneys in the area of zaharna fabrika ('sugar factory') near the central station.

streets of paris, populated by
the 2-D souls created by ernest pignon-ernest

i think i fell in love with the streets of paris a. because it's easy and b. because i didn't have any friends for a long time there, so i befriended my camera, my map, the musea and the pavements and went on long long walks. i think many other people do the same and leave their signatures here and there on the walls, so i collected them with my camera, and watched them change, like a letter addressed in the writing.

they say telephone boots are disappearing with the advent of the mobile phone, so they will survive only in photos and archaeologist's books.

and defenestrated - a cool street photography / city art blog i found randomly.

още чернилка и мастило.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:17:00 +0000

(more bad news from the bulgarian media, related to green activism this time.)

Уволнен е Тома Белев, директор на парк "Витоша" - един от малкото директори на паркове, на страната на природозащитниците. Моите приятели се боят, че ще последват уволнения на ключови хора в управата на Странджа и Врачански Балкан.

....и това ако не е чистка!

Много силно се надявам протестът утре да бъде успешен, да се вдигне шум, гръм и трясък, та задаващата се чистка да бъде прекратена преди да се банализира и заобяснява с "кризата".

Болно ми е, че ме няма да участвам по смислен начин. И още повече ще съжалявам някой ден когато се прибера за постоянно и знам, че не съм направила каквото е било нужно на времето.
Понякога някои избори особено горчиви. Понякога това се проявява след като ги преглътнеш и остава.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WORNG WITH YOU?!

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:28:00 +0000

it's far too shameful and enfuriating to translate. fortunately i don't have the nerves nor the time to try at the moment. but in a nutshell, Capital (a leading newspaper) made a survey which concluded that bulgaria is overpopulated with fucked up people. in figures,

half the population would never participate in a legitimate demonstration, a protest, or even sign a petition, even if a cause affects them directly.
87% of the people think that when there's a shortage of employment opportunities, men should have priority over women
nearly half of the people can not 'forgive' attraction to one's own sex.

at first glance this makes me never want to set foot in my dear motherland again. on the other hand it motivates me to work hard and go back with a fighting spirit to fix this bloody wrong world in which nearly 60% of the people feel 'happy'...

----
прочетено при петя и в капитал

Половината от сънародниците ни никога не биха участвали в законна демонстрация, още по-малко в окупация на сгради и фабрики, неофициални стачки, бойкоти и дори не биха подписали петиция в подкрепа на косвена или пряко засягаща ги кауза
87% от запитаните са на мнение, че когато не достигат работни места, мъжете трябва да имат предимство пред жените.
Идеята за сама жена, решила да роди без намерения за обвързване, звучи зле според всеки трети.
Обществото е почти категорично - за да се реализира, жената трябва да стане майка.
Почти половината от българите категорично не могат да простят влечението към собствения пол.

и най-страшното е, че мога да повярвам. срам и яд.

давайте да го мислим и да го поправяме тоя сбъркан свят, който явно не иска да има нищо общо с разни шумни протестиращи идеалисти, бисексуални, невярващи в брака и - опази боже! - дето са се родили жени и искат работа.

повръща ми се.

distractions.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:01:00 +0000

i've spent much of this week in the university library, the haddon and the new hall library. the labyrinths of the UL are good for taking walks to the 6th floor, around the map room and back to the reading room. the haddon is near to the river. but for the rest of my breaks i wander around the web - a few nice places:

zana briski might be comming to do a SocDocSoc event. talk about exciting!

the social production of indifference by herzfeld. looks like an amazing read. first because he articulates the reasons for my disdain for bureaucracy with nuanced insight. second because his approach makes public policy a part of the phenomena like mythology, ideology and religion, suitable for symbolic and interpretative analysis. and third, because he reaffirms by trust in social anthropology as the best tool for understanding of human beings and the worlds they create.

chekhov's three sisters. i'll try to read through a bilingual version before seeing the play, designed by georgia next week. there's not a great chance of getting to the end, but worth the practice. my brain works differently when i don't switch languages for a long time, like now because i'm overwhelmed with reading, writing and thinking archaeological jargon in english.

solidarity forever has been stuck in my head for a few days and at least now i've got the lyrics right.

some delicious eat to live recipes to keep my ocd and blood sugar up.

xkcd again and again. because i'm doing a statistics module which follows the same logic as the second strip, projecting numeric patterns on the social relationships of people in the past.
and because i often worry about closing brackets with emoticons (it's a really good way to convey that a smile only refers to an interjection :), geeky though it is.

out of touch

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:46:00 +0000

recently i've been so bad at communicating [deleted rant rant excuses excuses why i'm an ungrateful egoist, but it runs in the family.] i've gone beyond the line where excuses make any sense

but on an unrelated communication note, this is what a bulgarian post office can look like. to specify, this is the customs post office where you (go and queue and queue and wait and haggle until you) get your recommended packages like from amazon. long live online shopping.

another curious observation: english institutions weirdly ask you to post passports as if they were just pieces of paper. i've been slightly worried and excited to see what happens to the documents i sent to the home office in the uk. not in terms of their reply but in terms of will i ever see my national id card again? and if i don't who will find it and pull it through a criminal novel scenario? how many hands will it change? how does an understanding of the 'cultural biographies' of objects (my id card) contribute to an understanding of agency and / or identity in the past / accross societies? time to stay with just that one last question.

sweet short dreams.

inclement weather

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:46:00 +0000

Last night the winds colliding just under Adam's window, at the corner of King's Parade and Benet Street were blowing so hard the snowflakes lost their sense of gravity and all snowflake decorum. They floated in spirals and whirlpools so it all looked like a particle simulator. They crashed against the glasses of many rooms which were lit in the middle of the night whose inhabitants had left their coffee go cold at the desk by an unfinished paper and had stuck their pale faces and ther camera lenses to the window to marvel at the event.

We ran outside to make snow angels, snow fight and run around the forbidden grass. There were already about 50 people and as we left more came to keep up the enthousiasm. True, this would be a complete non-event in Bulgaria as Fiona pointed out, but here even her northern blood caught some of the fascination. It's such a fairy-tale site - the multicentennary colleges' stones covered with a layer of icing.

This morning snow was a different affair.

"The A2/A4 heritage lecture today at 12 noon has been cancelled due to the inclement weather and will be re-scheduled at a later date."
Natasha hopes you all see this message in time and apologises for the inconvenience.

The fairy-tale sight completely paralysed the town. People precariously step along the pavements, as if they're made of glass. The bus was driving slower than my bike.

In the rush hour before 9, the whole traffic was in slow motion. The bike-shop was full of fresh accidents.

As pathetic and funny as this is to me, it means people do not know how to move through snow. We are losing a kind of kinesthetic knowledge and the ability to take care of ourselves in changing conditions. We are becomming prisonners of our comfort zones and fears, living in symbiotic dependency with our overheated houses, shells of plastic and asbestos that will not last functional for long but will remain a fossil for our civilisation.

This goes for snow but also for unmeasured political correctness, fire hazards and all the bloody infuriating handicapping fears of this risk-obsessed society. Disciplining fears spread along a capiliary network of peer pressure and mould every individual to conform to the group's unreasonable amplified anxieties. OK, rant over.

40 years ago children skated to school along a frozen river Cam. What would it be like in 40 years when snow is even more rare than now? We will have aged more than we should, because we suffocate our planet and our sense of wonder.

weekend plans: OCCUPATION.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:22:00 +0000

after watching the disasterous war in the previous weeks and tonight - the heart-breaking 'palestine is still an issue' film
over a hundred of us, students and others, are peacefully occupied the law faculty,
organising events, discussing and formulating our demands to push cambridge university to take action about the situation in palestine.

http://cambridgegazasolidarity.blogspot.com/

this is what i'm doing all 48 hours of this weekend. and longer if need be

my fingers tremple
(more than the usual)
with excitement

COME. this is a real chance to make a real change. now.

mid-week midnight guests

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:14:00 +0000

despite the many bitter words about gaza
we've finished a final pot of tea with alana,
and so all kinds of nostalgic euphoric inspired feelings

about driving over cracked-up cuban roads, six of us packed in the tiny car we came to call loretta,

the heat, the beach, the map that always stretched longer hours than we predicted,
(from the sierra maestra guerilla quarters in the jungle, through celia sanchez' tidy bright house, to the guantanamo hotel,)

the all-cool-night philosophising with eddie, rhum and black-tobacco filterless cigarettes
have come back

to put me to sleep a bit too restless for the early morning to come. we'll go for coffee in the indigo cafe which apparently is her favourite place in town.
i told her you lived there.

i still can feel strongly but can't yet write
about those 5 weeks.

xxx

the importance of being earnest.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:11:00 +0000

Oh, the joy of being a language geek because how otherwise would you know that your teacher is wrong?

I had a lecture on heritage this morning, which made the point that ancient artefacts like sculptures only started gaining value from their authenticity with the notion of the Winkelmian original. I.e. that people should stop buying objets d'art to restore them but to preserve them as they are. No holes of the marble filled in with wax. Sin cera, in Latin. Which is a very interesting idea of sincerity - fragile beauty with cracks, missing limbs, weathered facial features and all.

But the OED etymology of 'sincere' says:
[ad. L. sincr-us clean, pure, sound, etc. Cf. F. sincère (1549), Sp., Pg., and It. sincero. ... There is no probability in the old explanation from sine cr ‘without wax’.]

so score for the dead languages. at least this once.
i feel it's a bit more important than it needs to be because last week i saw Hamlet which razed my linguistic confidence to the ground. and i count on words for many things, among which staying sane and making a living.

it's in the writing.

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:04:00 +0000

here's a post scrambled off napkins, the flowery notebook Sevda made me, thoughts hanging in mid-air since i voiced them to Dagna and fell asleep. it'll take a while to write, but i won't draft it, so watch this space.

this year has not been going well thus far, but i'll recapitulate the few good things from this vacation to give it a fresh new start.

1. Wisława Szymborska

- http://www.pp.org.pl/wojtek/?id=30765
- http://www.links2love.com/love-poetm-wislawa-szymborska-nothing.htm
- http://rapidshare.com/files/52266950/nothing_twice.rar

2, 3, &c. in the writing
Orpheus.
Rhodope winter.
Caving in Izvornata.
Odessa.
Oksana.
Seryozha.
Lena.
My Russian vocabulary.
Trains.
Warszawa.
The NY Book review.
Waking up early.

nevermind bad dreams, work and hermes urgencies. I'll find myself a diary notebook and vsyo budet horosho.

one step backwards

noreply@blogger.com (вещица) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:29:00 +0000

Dear Dear People,

As those of you whom I see more often may have noticed, I'm getting worse and worse at keeping in touch and I have been solidifying the bad habit of writing in the lost hours between stations. Better than nothing I hope, and I stop winging right Here.
This time I have a bit of time to walk through our beautiful snowy 'Capital on the Sea' and force myself awake in an internet cafe. This vacation started at the Central station in Sofia and finished there, with the last train for the week, the half-to-midnight to Varna. My whole regret for the unworn new skates, the unseen friends, unfinished work, unread books, cups of tea left cold, all my insecurities about the new year and pessimistic thoughts of the day melted as soon as I climbed into bed on a Schlafwagen, between the fresh institutional sheets, stamped БДЖ. The sounds of trains and distance passing by are exciting not only for me, the lady on the other bed keeps turning in her sleep. When we got to the station she quickly went to work and I slowly gazed at the snow over the town that I associate with student summer camps and made my way to the bus station for Odessa. Yesterday it was Sofia through Odessos to Odessa today, then Warsaw, and Cambridge on the 13th. One step eastwards, two steps westwards. Today I'm as excited as I was depressed yesterday. It was difficult to leave this time, and every time I am more tired but then the roadmap aligns its pattern with the lines of my veins and it's ok again.
On that note I am sorry for not calling, not sending postcards, not comming to the cinema and not finishing the cups of tea with you. I have not been feeling myself lately, I have been spending incredible amounts of time with family and travelling to wherever because I thought I was needed by the former and I thought I needed the latter. I have also been thinking of ghosts of old loves confusing me as if I (of flesh and blood) don't confuse myself enough and chimeras of unachieved peaks to which I need to prove myself, passing shadows of feelings, making planning and hoping - but that's that time of the year.
I wish you a happy Christmas, hope you have parted with the dieing sun in peace and greeted the birth of the new one with hope. Something tells me 2009 will be tough for everyone (not because of that financial crisis business), but don't be afraid to have a wonderful challenging and fruitful year!
Now I'll call my granny to say goodbye and get on that bus.

love

за да няма обидени от чуждоземната реч - пояснявам - шибаното интернет кафе има само фонетична, която ми кълчи пръстите и шл.окавица, която ми боде очите. и няма ер малък. сори.