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Women Who Blog (DollyMix Interview)


As a matter of fact, I’m not in London any longer, I’m back to my rainy Manchester, travelling to Warrington each day for work. There will be a few more chapters in ‘Visiting London’ series, but I wanted to mention that just as I returned from London last week, Linda Jones was in touch asking if I was available for an interview by email for a feature Women Who Blog. I must admit, as I am still new to blogging, such requests continue to take me by surprise, but these surprises are rather pleasant ones. So, I had my first email interview, which is now published at DollyMix.tv.

As I was wondering what questions Linda would send to me, I also pondered on how I feel being interviewed. I suppose doing an email interview is different from going on air. Linda won’t let me lie on this, my responses to her questions amounted to 4 pages. I cannot thank her enough for editing it down, which probably wasn’t the easiest thing to do, after all. But I think it would be even less easy, had we been talking live. It is a reversal of roles for me because it has always been me who was doing the interview until November last year when Richard Fair invited me on his Blogspot feature. So far it has always been a lovely and comfortable experience.

Linda Jones, a journalist who I know through her blogs and the comments we exchanged, is regularly writing for Freelancewritingtips.com, is the news editor for Passionate Media. And she has got a wonderful blog, You’ve Got Your Hands Full. The blog has started, in her own words, “as a resource all about twins, triplets and more.” Now Linda is also adding “more general posts – relating to the experience of parents no matter how many children they have!” However, Linda’s blog is not just about parenting or children. There are absolutely wonderful posts about a woman’s life in general, and what I especially appreciate is Linda’s great sense of humour.

Many thanks to Linda and to DollyMix!

Visiting London-6 (London Book Fair)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I visited several presentations while at the Book Fair. There were actually four of these:

Marketing Your Bookshop (16th April)
The Internet as a Marketing Tool (17th April)
Copyright in Context: From Da Vinci to Blogging (17th April)
Globalisation, Translation, and English: a Discussion of Best Practices (17th April)

The Internet as a Marketing Tool was intended to look at how publishers and publishing houses could use the WWW space to promote books and authors, which all boiled down to a few examples of creating more or less fictional websites to bring the books out to the audience. The use of YouTube was also discussed briefly, but I picked upon the point made by one of the panellists. Some authors, he said, were writing great stuff but had little interesting to say, when meeting with their readers online or in person. Apart from the question if a writer should be a good speaker (I think so), this point is important when we think of ghost-writing.

Copyright in Context: From Da Vinci to Blogging had a misleading title, to begin with. Or perhaps, such title reflects the reality in which we now live. When I read “Da Vinci”, I first and foremost think of Leonardo. In the case with this seminar, “Da Vinci” was an abbreviation of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. I allow for a possibility that this was an error that ended up on the website and in the booklet. But it is nonetheless a peculiar error. The talk centred first on discussing various legal suits that concerned plagiarism, which nowadays comes in two forms: borrowing an idea and borrowing facts. As far as blogging goes, the main topic here wasn’t so much the protection of copyright on the web (which would involve the discussion of Creative Commons licence), but rather about ethical issues. What to do if you’re being abused through your blog? Or what if somebody accidentally or purposely abuses you?

(This presentation only touched upon the issue of ethical blogging, but this issue has recently been highlighted in these two posts on BBC Manchester Blog. First, Kate Feld looked at Manchester bloggers’ reaction to the suggestion to develop a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. And then Robin Hamman turned a critical eye on whether or not it is appropriate to use blogs when some of them are supposed to remain private or semi-private. The question rose following the use of blogs to report on Virginia Tech tragedy, and I would expect it to generate a discussion. As far as BBC Manchester Blog goes, it is an open community, so follow through to Robin’s post to read and to share your thoughts on this.)

Links:

Robin Hamman, When Is a Blog in Public Meant to Remain Private?

Visiting London-5 (London Book Fair)

Three years ago, during my first visit to London, I was researching in the day and writing at night. This April I went there for the annual London Book Fair. I will not write about it more than you could already have found at the LBF official website.
My main impressions are:

  • meeting with my old University friend (yes, this world is really small!);
  • buying an English translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America (I’ll be writing about this later);
  • attending three very interesting presentations;
  • spending about half an hour with a very interesting multilingual lady, who recently wrote a book about a cultured cat.

I’ll leave the third one out till later. Meeting my old friend was one of the biggest surprises in my entire life. I wrote somewhere on the blog about the new website that aims at bringing together current and former students from all Russian high education institutions. So this girl has finally registered there in early April, we exchanged a couple of messages, and then we found out that both of us were going to London for the Book Fair. Naturally, we decided to meet, which occurred in the form of stumbling into each other in the foyer. Soon after we sat outside chatting about each other and our unimates.

Strange things come out in these conversations. We had a girl in our year, who was a dedicated student of German medieval monasticism. Although a devoted Russian Orthodox, she was once very seriously discussing with another girl, whether they should attend the Christmas service at a Catholic or a Protestant church in Moscow on December 25th. Ultimately, she went to study in Germany for a year, where she’d met her present husband, a Muslim, for whom – reportedly – she’d converted into Islam. On one of the photographs we saw she was wearing a burqa.

Buying an English translation of Mayakovsky’s digest of visiting America was another huge surprise. When I saw the book on the stand, it didn’t even occur to me that I may not be able to buy it. So I just asked how much it cost. I bagged it with no problem whatsoever. Yet believe it or not I still haven’t read D. H. Lawrence, so when I saw several of his books on Wordsworth Classics stand, I asked if I could purchase Sons and Lovers. Turned out, they weren’t actually allowed to sell books. This was confirmed at another stand where I saw a book on successful blogging.

And the lady I spoke to is Brigitte Downey – a multilingual, cultured, well-travelled, exuberant person who spent years making documentaries and loving opera, and who had some wonderful recollections of Russia and Russian ballet. Half an hour that we spent chatting after I shared with Brigitte my knowledge of search marketing by explaining the difference between organic and sponsored results is the time to remember. And Chapter One of Diaries of a Cultured Cat is generally reminiscent of my experience of Moscow and Manchester that I have mentioned in chapters 1 and 4 of Visiting London.

In Egypt, as we know, cats were worshipped. And in 1932 T. S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats that was adapted for the stage by Andrew Lloyd Webber. You can browse the chapters from Old Possum’s Book here, but this is an extract most relevant to us:

You’ve read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
to understand their character.
You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whome we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse –
But all may be described in verse.

Brigitte Downey is describing this in prose, but even after one chapter I feel her knowledge and style will make this book an insightful reading.

Links:

Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America
Brigitte Downey, Diaries of a Cultured Cat
T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
London Book Fair
Wordsworth Classics
Brigitte Downey’s website

Visiting London-4

During my first ever visit to England I didn’t even go to London, to the great subsequent surprise of my Russian friends. It must indeed be surprising, but in truth it simply manifests this unconscious arrogance of capital citizens for whom no life exists outside the central city of a country. I also noted that some Mancunians were not particularly eager to go “down south”. I suppose with some of them it was the arrogance of somebody who lives well outside the country’s central city and thus wants to downplay the capital’s importance. So I joked: ‘when you’ve got Pall Mall and Albert Sq in your own city, what’s the point of visiting them elsewhere?’

In spring 2004 I went to London to research in the British Library and the National Archives. Since September 2003 I’d been living in Manchester, and by April 2004 the differences in lifestyles and perceptions (that would inevitably come to surface eventually) began to take the best out of me. Most frustratingly, I felt like I couldn’t write. It wasn’t quite true. I’ve always been writing wherever I had an idea or a line to build upon. During the day, this could happen at the lecture, on the bus, on the tube, in the cafe, in the park. At night I usually worked in the kitchen.

What happened when I arrived to England is hard to boil down in one or two sentences, however long. After all these years I realise that the main difference wasn’t so much between England and Russia, but between the “contexts” in which I lived here and there. The context in which I lived for the first seven months since my arrival to England was stiffening for me as a writer.

The context into which I migrated for two weeks in April 2004 was liberating. In every sense of the word (except strictly geographical), it was my homecoming. I no longer felt unfitting or dreamy. I understood that I was losing time and strength trying to adopt values and habits I didn’t want to have, or trying to persuade others to make changes.

Understanding this didn’t make my life easier, but the burden of feeling oneself strangely different was left behind for good. Spending a fortnight in London made me crave for space, motion and freedom in Manchester, which I was able to find.

I lived in LSE’s Carr-Saunders Hall, in a small room on the 4th floor. I took a bus to the British Library, or a tube to Kew. In the weekends I did a lot of walking. On my first Sunday in London I took a wrong turn from Fitzroy St and ended up in Soho instead of the British Museum. During Easter, I walked in the early morning from my hotel through Holborn to the Tower.

And at night I wrote. In those two weeks I perhaps wrote more than in the previous seven months. One of the poems has already appeared in Notebooks; because there is no actual rhyme, it was easy to translate. The very first one I wrote in London is called ‘Looking for You’. Despite the title and content, it is not actually dedicated to anybody, even obliquely. I interpret it as a poem about the search for somebody who shares your views, ideas; somebody inspiring; yet somebody who is very difficult to recognise.

Я ищу тебя в городе этом,
Не надеясь когда-то найти.
Ты, как Муза, бросаешь Поэта,
И расходятся наши пути.

Я ищу тебя в книгах старинных,
Где виньетка – разгадка судьбы.
В переулках, на улицах длинных
Чутко слушаю чьи-то шаги.

Я ищу… я ищу тебя всюду,
Даже там, где не стоит искать,
Но я верю, я верю и буду,
Не надеясь, но все-таки ждать,

Чтобы в день, когда ты будешь рядом,
Не заметив, пройти. И тогда
Снова ждать и искать тебя взглядом…
Я искать тебя буду всегда.

04-05 апреля 2004 г.

© Julia Shuvalova, 2004

(I am looking for you in this town
With no hope to ever find you.
Like a Muse, you abandon the Poet,
And our roads part.

I am looking for you in the old books,
Where a vignette unveils the fate.
In the lanes and in the long streets
I am heeding somebody’s pace.

I am looking… I look everywhere,
In the places you’re never to be.
A believer, I’m waiting forever,
Without hope, to find you here,

So that once when you’re only near,
I would then pass you by. And again
I’ll start looking for you everywhere…
I will always be looking for you
© Julia Shuvalova, 4-5 April 2004).

[The English text is an almost verbatim translation; however, the second and third stanzas give a very good idea of the poem’s original foot and rhythm].

Visiting London-3

Football Matters

I’ve been told recently that to be an Italian and not to like football is almost a crime. You’re being watched with suspicion. The person who enlightened me on this is, obviously, himself Italian, and he doesn’t like football, so I have no reason not to believe him. As for me, I haven’t really been interested in football until 2002, when first there was the World Cup and then Locomotive Moscow had won the Russian Premier League. The second fact was of more importance for Locomotive’s supporters (my grandmother and my parents in my case); the first had had a universal impact. For the rest of the summer season teenage boys and middle-aged men had been playing football. I remembered about this now because I’m writing this post in my hotel lounge, and the TV on the wall is showing highlights of the match between Chelsea and Blackburn. The highlights have just ended, with the reporter going totally ecstatic at every goal opportunity. Other highlights are still going on. It’s fun to listen to such enthusiastic commentary. And it’s fun when the match is actually engaging. But when watching the match is the same as watching the paint dry, then football indeed becomes one of the silliest, most miserable games out there.

Be Nice to Your Waiter

It may sound commonsensical. Or, on the contrary, absolutely unacceptable. But a visit to a pub in Central London has just proved that, although the waiter is there to take your orders, he is not be ordered around. This waiter was working on his own when I walked into a pleasantly decorated dining room and asked for a table for myself. He offered me a seat and a menu. I made the order. Soon after two women came in. I think I know the language they’ve been speaking between themselves. One of them said to the waiter: ‘There are two of us, can you find us a table?’

The waiter apologised and said that he couldn’t currently accept anybody, since he was working on his own. Undeterred, the woman pointed to the table at the window and said: ‘Well, we’ll take that table’. Again, he explained he wouldn’t be able to serve them. Women went and sat at the table. The waiter was now really displeased. He was now speaking loudly so that everyone could hear: ‘I’m sorry, ladies, but I will not be able to serve you’. The ladies eventually had to leave. There is no doubt all of them understood each other perfectly well.

Soon after, other people began to come in, and the waiter did not refuse them, although he did ask for extra help. And he turned out to be a really nice guy to those who showed some respect to the fact that his job is not the easiest one. Someone may think the waiter went too far with those women. For my part, I think he simply had dignity to demand respect to his pub and to himself.

Time Goes, People Change

Many black cab drivers in Manchester are not British. Not that I mind, and one of them was very kind to drive me from Manchester to Liverpool in just half an hour. But what is good about London cab drivers is that most of them are Londoners, have been living in the capital all their lives, and can therefore tell something interesting about the changes that have occurred in the city over the years.

I have done lots of walking today, and by the time I finished my lovely evening meal I was too tired to take the tube and to do more walking up and down stairs and in the street. So I took this black cab. The driver was really nice, and has always been living in North and North-Eastern London. Now in his fifties, he’d certainly seen a lot of London. He claimed he could tell the person from New York easily by their arrogant manner and hasty finger-clicking. So he seemed fit for the question I asked him.

‘How have people in London changed, would you say?’

‘That’s a good question’, he replied. ‘You know, I think people have become less polite. You used to be proud that you were British and that you were so well-known for your good manners. But these days people just don’t care’.

Regrettably, I feel this decline in manners is happening on the universal, rather than strictly British, scale. I must admit that when I was a student in Moscow, I would sometimes get so tired at the end of the long day at the lectures and in the libraries that all I ‘d arrive to my station. So I didn’t give a seat to quite a few people on such occasions, I suppose, but I will use my studies as an excuse because on other occasions I was one of the first to offer a seat to a disabled or a senior.

These days I’m being told that things have changed there. One of my old university friends had had a motorbike accident several years ago and now walks on crutches. When she visited Moscow last year, she was very rarely given a seat on the public transport. When I told this to my taxi driver, he said that if it was your “lucky” day then a situation like this could occur to you in London. I remembered a couple of similar occasions in Manchester. Then I remembered the tube this morning, when people were rushing into the carriage and not paying attention to those who wanted to alight. And we all know that the same kind of scene now and again happens at the bus stop.

It is the decline in manners, but, to my mind, it is caused by the growing decline in people’s ability to empathise. I know I use this word a lot, but it is really very important to put oneself in another person’s shoes at least once every so often, if one cannot organise themselves to do it regularly. To let another person off the train will be much easier if you imagine yourself being the person who tries to alight. To give up a seat on the bus to a disabled person will be easy if we allow for a thought that years down the line we or our friends or relatives may be in this person’s place.

This is all commonsensical; and, like all commonsensical things, it is just being forgotten.

Visiting London-2

As for where I’m writing this – I’m sitting in this souvenir shop in Southampton Row, just across the corner from Russell Square and the British Museum. I discovered it back in 2004, but I think it wasn’t in spring, but in autumn. 1 hour costs £1, which is much cheaper than to use a laptop in my hotel.

My hotel… My room reminds me of the one depicted by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. This is where Raskolnikov lived in St Petersburg:

His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room.

OK, my room is actually in the basement. I didn’t ask for it to be there, in case you’re wondering. I go there by lift. When I was leaving this morning, I tried to find a staircase to go upstairs, but all I saw were the rooms, with their doors open ajar, and the personnel already starting their daily cleaning routine. But it IS like a cupboard. It is by far the smallest room I’ve ever stayed in. Thankfully, it’s en suite. Also, the canteen where I’ve got to have breakfast between 7.30 and 9am is just a couple of steps away from my room, which again is hugely convenient. But I’ve also got the neighbours who slam the door every time they go in or out of the room.

I could be winging here about such experiences, but hey, what would I write about then? Besides, having neighbours, as I have already written previously, is very important.

My visit to London so far has been a check on my patience in relations with public transport. Yesterday, when I arrived at Euston, everybody was leaving, and the shops in the station were closing rather quickly. The voice in the loudspeaker, which is impossible to hear in the big crowd anyway, was saying something about alerts and the necessity to leave the station. Apart from those indiscernible words, the virtually first thing I heard upon arriving to London was “Yes, this is Tony Blair’s Britain”, coming from an Englishman.

And today there was a security alert whereby the trains on Piccadilly line towards Cockforsters were delayed. Those who have been waiting for the train to arrive were so keen to get in that they ignored those who were keen to get out. The station worker shouted in the loudspeaker: ‘Let other passengers off the train first, it may then be easier to get on’. The lady who stood beside me giggled: ‘You know, we’re actually supposed to be the nation of queues’. I giggled back: ‘Yes, foreign tourists have spoiled you’.

I said that in full consciousness, for the described scene has reminded me of many similar occasions that I’ve seen and experienced on the Moscow underground. I must say, though: nothing can substitute the experience of being lifted up by people around you and brought into the carriage. Nothing can substitute the sensation of floating in the space when your feet are actually dangling in the air a few inches above the floor during the rush hour. It is a powerful experience – to stare directly into someone’s sweaty face or tortoise skin on the neck with no possibility to turn away because there is nowhere to turn. So, I do recommend to go through it at least once, unless you live in Moscow or London or any other big city and such experience is hence a part of your daily routine.

As a matter of fact, I always let other passengers off first.

Visiting London -1

Since I’ve arrived in England, I almost never failed to visit London in spring. I visited the capital in early April in 2004, then in late March in 2005, I skipped 2006 for personal reasons, but now it’s April 2007, and I’m in London again. There must be, I feel, some kind of force in the working that brings me to London every year in spring.

Invariably, as well, every time I visit it, I experience a powerful feeling of being liberated. I know you’re already thinking that I feel being liberated from Manchester, but it’s not true. I still like Manchester a lot, not least because, as I said many times, I don’t suffer from hay fever in the North West. I don’t exactly suffer from it in London, but I do have to take medication.

This feeling of freedom comes simply from the fact that London possesses much more space than Manchester. It is the fact, and there is little sense to try and pretend that the vastness and grandeur of London can be substituted for something else. It can’t, and it will never be. London is not a desert, it’s the same kind of city of steel, and concrete, and brick, like Manchester, and indeed, like many other modern cities. It is its space that people like me love and miss. More than that, it is the space in the city centre that I personally miss a lot.

With me, it all comes from personal experience, of course. In Moscow, I used to lose myself in those endless serpentine boulevards, just strolling down old slopy streets with buildings of different periods and colours, or walking across bridges, stumbling accidentally into previously unnoticed little architectural gems, or revisiting the places that I have long discovered and fallen in love with. Moscow, in a way, is like Venice in Henry James’s Italian Hours that I am currently reading. So much has become known about it since the uplift of the Iron Curtain, so many people have visited it and are planning to visit in future, that it is hardly possible to say something totally new.

Same goes for London. But the fact that all hidden gems of this city have already been discovered and categorised doesn’t diminish the allure of the place. I most certainly don’t feel intimidated by it. The reason why I like going there and why now I am writing about it is the same that made James write about Venice, as he explains in this short introduction to the chapter on his reflections on this city.

It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure
there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything
to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of
times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to
visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find
a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and
you will find three or four high-coloured "views" of it. There
is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one
has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of
photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as
about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as
familiar as the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to
speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-
lover Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said
about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty. It
would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to
say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having
no information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten
the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I
hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love
with his theme.

Henry James, Italian Hours (a full text at Project Gutenberg).

Unless you have already read it, this book by the late Prof Roy Porter is a great introduction to the history of London’s growth. I bought London: A Social History back in 2002, at Waterstones in either Bolton or Blackpool, and it was one of the most interesting semi-academic readings I’ve ever come across. The rich vocabulary of a Londoner who also happened to be a seasoned and versatile academic made up for a vivid and engaging reconstruction of London’s history from the times immemorial to the present day. It doesn’t contain many illustrations, and those that were included in the book are black-and-white. But I shall once more underline his style and language; together, they provide you with all colours and detail you need to paint a picture of London’s history.

Kurt Vonnegut

It was the year 2000 when I said to one person: ‘Do you realise that all years will now start with “2”? All people who’d gone before this year have got both years starting with “1” in their obituary. Those who’ll be going after 2000 will have the year of death starting with “2”‘.

Back then we went off the subject very quickly. Today I vividly remembered this conversation upon opening Yahoo.com in the web browser and stumbling into ‘Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007’.

The news broke across the world, including Russia, where Vonnegut is admired by many. However, the reason why his exit is one of the main news topics is not simply because he was one of the greatest contemporary authors. Let’s be honest with ourselves: a lot of people never read his works. There must be another reason, therefore.

A lot of Vonnegut’s books are fiction. There are no sirens of Titan, no Billy Pilgrim, very little at all – at the first glance – to connect his texts to the “real life”. One may say it’s normal. Today there are readers and critics who believe it is not necessary to actually experience hardships in order to describe them. For this reason, perhaps, some of today’s narratives are very much like reverberations of a second-rate Victorian novel: rather sentimental and lovely, but hardly thought-provoking.

Thankfully, the works of Vonnegut were not “lovely”. Instead, they made a reader think, providing the reader was eager to use their brain to this end. “Thinking” is often being scorned as a superficial activity, but to think is to reflect and also to dream. Every thought follows a path, and every thinker is a traveller who sooner or later realises that their destination is humanism. Neither politics, nor religion, but the progress and the future of mankind.

Deep down every humanist knows that they are nothing but dreamers, and that their many dreams are never to come true, at least not in their lifetime. Still, they dream and put their thoughts to paper, canvas or film because one thing they know for sure: someone somewhere will respond to their dreams by sharing them and passing them on to other dreamers.

The progress of the Man is something that bothers every one, including those who declare to have no interest in philosophy. What is often forgotten, is that the only way to make the world better is to better oneself, to be true to one’s human nature. And this requires not just a titanic intellectual effort, but above all – empathy.

Many of Vonnegut’s novels could be labelled as science fiction. The first one I read back in 2000 was Cat’s Cradle, a story of a scientific experiment with drastic consequences. Soon after I read The Sirens of Titan, another sci-fi story. A lot of his novels involved scientific experiments, migrations in time, or space journeys. His warning against the hyper-devotion to science and technology is unambiguous. At the same time, as “scientific” was becoming increasinly associated with “virtual” and “unknown”, the outworldly wanderings of Vonnegut’s characters became the manifestations of the postmodern era. The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’ he’d used in Slaughterhouse Five stands close to the technique of collage, favoured by many art movements of the 20th c., including surrealism. The effect of such technique was in replicating the state of mind of a modern man. Fragmented memories, thoughts, emotions, reactions have reflected either a fear of, or indifference to, changes. Used in a sci-fi narrative, such technique conveyed the inadequacy and the irresponsiveness to the motion of live, which, like history (in the words of Paul Virilio), progresses at the speed of the weapon systems.

One of my first posts on this blog was about Slaughterhouse Five. Indeed, this novel has changed completely the way I envisaged the writing about war. It draws on Vonnegut’s personal experience of the World War II, and one can obviously ask, what is there to add to the significance of this novel, apart from its already established literary and historical importance?

The fact is, with all technological changes currently happening on a nearly daily basis, Tralfamadorian dogma has become a reality. It has already been known that the present lasts no longer than a few seconds. To say that we always live in the future is as valid as to say that we always live in the past. Life is increasingly virtual, and so is – apparently – death. The question is, then, what do we make of all this? Are we afraid of, or indifferent to, this rapid progress? And what do we make of the future now that we are so painfully aware that it is already in the past?

Vonnegut knew that the answer was not about who controls who: whether we control technology, or whether technology controls us. The answer was in the destination, and the destination was the progress of the man. If technology served to expand our horizons whereby we may become better people, then it was for the good. If it served to improve our weapons and to help us wage wars quicker than the previous generations could, then something must have been wrong.

Daring as he was, Vonnegut was telling true stories, disguising them as fiction. Yet his main message was about the importance of empathy, about the use of one’s intellectual effort to understand and to serve another human being. In The Sirens of Titan he paraphrased a well-known Latin sentence: ‘an intellectual mountain has produced a philosophical mouse‘ [I must admit this is not a quote – it is a “retranslation” of Vonnegut’s phrase in Russian]. Knowledge is dust, unless it is being used. And in the same novel, at the very end of it, there was another phrase, which the female protagonist pronounces before passing away. ‘You know‘, she says’, ‘it is so good when they use you‘.

I never read The Sirens of Titan in English, but it is obvious that Vonnegut was not speaking of a person being used selfishly by others. The idea was about being useful to people, and it is as humanist and idealistic a thought as it can be.

I know I could write more or less, and I am aware that many great authors will leave us sooner or later, some of whom have impacted me both as a writer and a person. Kurt Vonnegut’s impact was one of the most profound, and this entire blog is in a sense the proof. There was so much knowledge and craving to learn more, yet I couldn’t keep acquiring knowledge just for myself – I wanted to share it as soon as possible. I wanted my knowledge to be useful. I am thankful to Kurt Vonnegut for sharing his ideas with me. My only regret is that I have only now written this post.

The Return of Surrealism (Early Morning at the Bus Stop. Landscape with the Bin and the Umbrella)

This is the scene I saw at my bus stop recently.


………………………………………Early Morning at the Bus Stop. Landscape with the Bin and the Umbrella.
It instantly reminded me of Lotreamon’s quote that had exerted a rather profound influence on the minds of surrealists:

Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie (Beautiful, like the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table).

There is no dissection table here, and the sewing machine’s place is taken by a bin. But these subtle changes do not make this scene any less surreal, do they?

Mancunian Bloggers Meet…

… at The Hare and Hounds today at 3pm. No doubt I’ll write about it, but at the moment you can read about the meeting here and here. The exterior of the pub can be seen on the left (many thanks to qualitybob!). For me, it’s the most convenient venue I’ll be going to since I graduated from school in 1997. My school was in five minutes walk away from my house. The Hare and Hounds is exactly opposite Shudehill bus and tram stop, exactly where my number 8 stops. Absolutely fabulous!

On the sad side, in Moscow today my former classmates are meeting to celebrate the tenth anniversary of graduation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go to the reunion, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the fifteenth anniversary!

Update:

Wonderful weather in Manchester! Many people went into town dressed as if it was the middle of last year’s summer – sweaty hot and burning. Not me, though. It’s still April, and I don’t think it’s so hot yet.

We suspect therefore that it was the weather that did not permit some people to turn up at The Hare and Hounds at 3pm. Richard Fair said in advance that he wouldn’t be going, so he’s forgiven (he and Robin will have to organise another meeting at the BBC Bar to rectify this 😉 ). Craig McGinty was there, as well as James from YerMam and guys from Indie Credential. I know I’m missing out on a couple of people, so please mention yourself in the comments! Especially the person who’s fascinated by Bulgakov’s Cat Begemot from ‘Master and Margarita’.

We had a nice time, and people were still staying in the pub when I left. The pub seems to be quite old, with lots of period paintings and photographs on the walls. Its karaoke is very popular, with people taking the centre stage to sing anything from Neil Diamond, The Monkees, and Van Morrison. As I was leaving, I witnessed a man in a yellow duckling suit (so I think), with a glass of beer in hand; the suit was unzipped on the back. I suspect he was dropping in after a hard day’s entertaining children or giving out leaflets.

I must admit at one point I got distracted by the TV that was showing Deal or No Deal. The lady did amazingly well, knocking out all little sums and eventually leaving with £50,000. We sarcastically whispered that this sum would still be taxed, but… it’s still £50,000 after all.

Amidst all the pleasure and excitement there is only one minus – I have to wash my hair. The entire room where I sit at the moment is already filled with the stale odour of cigarettes.

On the left is the frontal view of our venue. It is really the best-located venue I’ve ever been to. Immediately as I took this picture I got on the bus that was already at the stop and soon I was on my way home.

See you all again next time!

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