so i got up early and headed into the library...but the book I needed was checked out, all 5 copies. who would have thought the works of julia kristeva would be so popular?
so i went up to finsbury park and met justin. we went to a vegetarian restaurant that does great breakfasts. we went there once before in august went i came over to england from paris for a scholarship interview (for a scholarship i didnt get) it is a nice place, especially when it is sunny. 

friday night

went to a totally dodgy pub-lots of guys with tatoos. we ended up drinking our share as well...as you can probably gather from the fotos. the guy in blue is James, a nothern irish fellow who just got back from.....sudan. he doesnt have a suntan, but then he is irish.

the white countess

Today was my last day of work…. for awhile at least. The English schools have their Easter break, and as a result, so do I. I am not complaining, I badly need the time to catch up my academic work…although the way things are going, it looks like it is going to be a lively break, unlike the serious study-exclusively period I had planned. Not that I am complaining about that either! The last day of the term went well, the Italian students at the school where I work put on an Italian party, with pizza, lasagne, and all the rest. Naturally, being a poor student myself, I took the opportunity to stuff my face, while some of my colleagues looked on in horror. I also managed to consume a box of maltese chocolates, brought to me, along with a lovely box, by my colleague and fellow blogger, Marcus. I had never had this sort of chocolates before I came to England this year, but they are disturbingly addictive.
My temporarily last day of work also happened to conveniently coincide with pay day. As I don’t have much cash this year, I don’t go out and splurge normally on this day, but it had been a long month and I had done overtime at another school….and I couldn’t bring myself to go straight home and hit the books, so I decided to go to the cinema.
I had seen an early review for the White Countess in the guardian a while back, and the film looked intriguing, so I decided to check it out. The film starred Ralph Fiennes, whom I quite liked in the Constant Gardener, and Natasha Richardson, whom I also quite like…in addition to her mother Vanessa Redgrave who must be in her eighties by now. The film was the 47th and last of the Merchant Ivory films, and as it turns out, the last, since Ismail Merchant died last year. To add to all this, the script was written by the author Kazuo Ishiguro and set in Shanghai, one of those places I haven’t been to, but dream of visiting. So it definitely appeared to be a film I couldn’t miss.
I read Ishiguro’s Quand nous étions orphelins (or so the book was called in French, I presume the English is…. When We Were Orphans?). it is also set in Shanghai and contains a lot of the same motifs: displaced Europeans, an ambiguous Japanese figure who befriends the white protagonist, a lost little girl seeking a father figure. The setting and mood of the book appealed to be quite a bit… and yet when I finished reading it, I was left with a sense of disappointment. Something had been missing, but I couldn’t put my figure on it. Maybe it was because I read it in French and it was written in English? I still don’t know. I haven’t forgot the book, and its mood still attracts me…. but. Oddly, the film stuck me the same way, perhaps I just don’t like Ishiguro’s handling of these certain themes… but no I don’t think that is it.
I absolutely loved the photography in the film- the images were really beautiful. The bar in which much of the film takes place is great; I would love to find such a place myself. The clothes, the sets, the street scenes, the interiors, all that was amazing. The film was worth paying for just as a visual experience. As in the book, the mood of the film was really haunting, lost and tragic and bittersweet. Natasha Richardson plays an impoverished Russian countess working in a bar in late 1930s Shanghai. There were many such types (some of my friends grandparents ended up in China after the revolution) and their story is worth telling. Most works on Russian émigrés are set in Paris or Nice, overlooking the fact that place like China and Belgrade were also major destinations of white emigration. Although, as a picky historian, I had a few doubts about the plot: the daughter in the film is about 7 or 8, and her father is alleged to have died leaving Russia. This isn’t possible, the Russian aristocrats got out generally in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, and certainly by the early 1920s, so if the film was set in 1937, as I can only assume from the Japanese onslaught at the end, then the Russian family must have already been in exile for close to 17 years, maybe even 20, so the presence of such a young child is a bit confusing. But this is me being anal. In general, the film was beautiful and evocative of a lost world I am sad I never got to see.
Yet, again I had the feeling that something was missing. Fiennes was totally believable in his role as a blind man, and Richardson’s acting was good too, but the film was slow moving and the plot at times seemed predictably trite. Most of all, I was a bit puzzled by the fake Russian accents all the supposed Russian characters used. It was especially funny since in the film both Vanessa Rengrave and Natasha Richardson speak in French. Richardson’s French is really good, but her mother’s was English school girl like, which sounded funny coming out of the mouth of a supposed Russian princess! The Russian accents were pretty well done, but it took me time to get used to them…. Pity those scenes couldn’t have just been done in Russian. But it wasn’t this that was missing in the film, because what that was I still cant put my finger on.
So instead, on my way home, I popped into my favourite, ultra-cheap book shop and got a 2 pound copy of Ishiguro’s Artist of the Floating World, in English, to see if I can get to the bottom of this feeling of emptiness. Full report to follow!

paul's place

so i share a building with paul, pictured here. at night we are the only two people in the building, since the ground floor contains offices, a conference room and a library, the next floors are taken up by another library...and we live in the attic-like top. actually, our space is great. we have keys to all the rooms below, so we can go wandering about the books in the middle of the night if we want to. our living area is also pretty spacious by english standards, we each have a study room for our (numerous) books, a bedroom, and then we share a kitchen and a bathroom.
my study room is always a disaster sight as i am not a terribly organised person...i can be when i want to, or if i have to, but normally i just cant be bothered. in any case, i know perfectly well exactly where everything is located, therefore i see no reason to change my system. Paul on the other hand is the most anal retentively organsied person i have ever encountered.
evey book in his possession has its own precise place on the shelf. if you dare move one thing, he notices it within seconds of walking into the room. he especially gets annoyed if you turn a book upside down, or even worse, put it on its side. this is just unforgivable in his world. added to the organised collection of books are his collector's items. by this i mean an odd assortment of military relics. he has got a few helmets, one or two swords, a bunch of german medals, and some paintings depicting battle scenes on the wall. his room is like a shine to his research interests (in case you hadnt guessed, he is a phd student in the history of the military and espionage.) he has even gone so far as to make his study room the only cat free zone in the entire building, which i find highly discriminatory. but of course, that only serves to make his room that much more enticing!
so last night he was in a chatty mood and got out his stash of whisky, which he claims he keeps exclusively for medicinal purposes....as you do....so we sat there amongst the carefully dusted and alfabetised books and drank copious amounts of extremely strong stuff. it was the kind of whisky that tastes like rakija. like you can feel it scorching your insides as it goes down. vodka doesnt do that, it is harsh in the mouth but goes down much more smoothly. and of course, english people have this wierd tradition of drinking WITHOUT food, which i still cant get used to...
after the liver abuse, i ran stumbled back over to my side of the building and decided i had to finish a text i have been reading about postmodernism. i actually did manage to sit up for a few hours and finished the whole book. i am convinced that the whisky is to be thanked for giving me the energy to go on....not that i plan to make a habit out of it!

the pub, again

met igor yesterday evening for a round of pubbing. it will be the last for a while. igor is flying to belgrade on saturday to meet up with ira, and then he is off to moscow. he will be back in mid april, but i will be in paris, so it is unlikely i will see him for a month. i will miss our pub crawls! fortunately, we will soon both be back in moscow, so thinks can continue in a much more hardcore fashion on the other end of the continent soon enough. and ira will be there too, so the fun only gets bigger and bigger!
now i have to go locate a fax machine...maysamba needs to get and english visa, and i need to invite her!

a note about the trains

I have spent a considerable portion of this past year on trains. Actually, I have spent a considerable portion of my life on trains. I have had an obsession since childhood with these sorts of transitory spaces, where everyone is milling about, wasting money, waiting to get somewhere else. Thus I do no think it odd if I spend a few moments avoiding the paper I am supposed to be writing in order to pay homage to Britain’s horrid trains. Ok, they are not as bad as everyone in France (and probably elsewhere) thinks. It seems some networks are better than others. The last time I went to Scotland, the train was 3hours late returning, and I didn’t get home until 2 am or something like that. When I went to a conference in Nottingham, it took me several hours to get there and back. I was travelling from Cambridge and it apparently never dawned on the rail planners in this country to build normal tracks running cross-country, so I ended up on a two wagon contraption that stopped at everyplace between the two destinations. I would have been better off going back to London and heading north from there. But the commuter trains within the southern parts of England are not too awful. I have only been seriously delayed once this year, when someone decided to commit suicide on the tracks, an event for which the train company can hardly be held responsible.


If you travel in daytime, the trains are comfortable enough. In the morning they are hell: you have to pay double the price to travel before 9:30, and you never get a seat anyway, since there are so many commuters that if you get on at any station other than the first, you just have no hope of getting a space. So you have to sit on the floor with the masses. The first time I saw that, I was really shocked. In Russia, it would be unimaginable to see businessmen in expensive suits sitting on the floor of a train, dinking their coffee and reading their newspapers. But here it is an everyday occurrence; there is really no alternative if you don’t live exactly in the centre of London. There is a brief period in the early evening when it is equally as crowded, but not so badly and not for so long. It seems everyone in England goes to work at the same time, but they return at a wide variety of hours. The only train I really hate is the last one of the evening. It is horrid. They always use a really old and rotten train for this hour, which I guess based on the calculation that most of the passengers will be too drunk to notice the uncomfortable seats and peeling walls. The type of passengers depends on the day, but a high number are teenage and intoxicated. Sometimes there are no toilets, and even when there are, it is best to avoid them, as they resemble those in Moscow’s infamous Hungry Duck, circa 1997. Vomit on the floor, piss and shit all over the place…. you get the picture. So when I get stuck on that train, I just try to relax and listen to my music. The worst is that the last train of the night takes forever, since it stops at every little station along the way, not getting to my station until 2 am, which is not fun. If the weather in this country were better, I would never take that train; it would be more fun just to walk around until the morning ones started running at 4:30am. But as it has been cold and pissing rain for the past several months, sitting on a warm train with drunks with drunks in the middle of the night still seems preferable to wandering around on the streets for an extra 3 hours.
A final word: most of the train stations in England are lucky enough to have a Marks&Sparks inside them. This is a really major benefit. I finish work everyday at 3:30 and go running out of the building, across the street, to the station. I then have just less than 5 minutes to choose and pay for my dinner before boarding the 3:45 that takes me to my faculty. Most of the times, I choose something from M&S. I used to go for the baguette sandwiches at Upper Crust, but those get boring really quickly. At M&S they have a much wider variety of food- there are salads and pasta, all ready to go, which makes eating on the train almost bearable. So my daily commute would be a lot less pleasant without M&S.

outrage

I went last night to a dinner party given by a visiting fellow at Robinson College in Cambridge. As usual at such affairs, I was the youngest person by about half a century, a role I am getting used to in this country, where I am constantly running into my parents’ friends…or friends of their friends…. The dinner was ok except for some retired Canadian professor who seemed to think that everything in academia today was going to the dogs, Cambridge wasn’t the place it used to be, standards were falling, young people were barely literate and so on. This really annoyed me. No doubt for centuries there have been retired professors saying such things, and yet the world stumbles on and people manage to write new books, make inventions, find cures to diseases and solutions to problems…. which would suggest that things are not actually falling apart as completely as such people seem to think. I told the professor that I think my generation has never been better prepared for serious research and I feel lucky to be where I am at this moment in time. She disagreed. Oh well. Of course I realise that things aren’t perfect, universities are under funded and there is much to be improved, but I don’t see the situation as entirely hopeless, far from it. I have opportunities that previous generations, especially previous generations of women couldn’t have dreamed of, and I wouldn’t turn back the clocks for anything…. But this was not actually the source of my great outrage. This of course involves a cat.
I met everyone in the porter’s lodge of Robinson College. As I was approaching the lodge, I saw a very nice, polite, well-groomed cat sitting patiently outside the porter’s door. It was drizzling and there was much shelter from the rain in that area, so of course I opened the door and let the cat enter in front of me. The porter then went berserk and ordered the cat out. But why, I protested, the creature was so polite and well behaved, and besides it was dreary and miserable outside. How could any porter refuse entrance under such circumstances? The porter looked at me with a sneer and informed me that the cat was from Selwyn College, and therefore completely unwelcome at Robinson. I was furious. Cats are not the same as stupid beer swigging undergrads who cant keep their jaws shut. Cats are superior beings who should be allowed complete freedom to move unhindered wherever they please, and they should be offered food and shelter whenever they so desire. A cat cannot BELONG to Selwyn or any other college, because cats do not belong to anyone other than their own furry selves. They cannot and should not be confined by useless and artificial borders that reflect divisions only relevant in the obsessive human mind. To deny a visiting cat from Selwyn the right to enter Robinson is an insult to felines everywhere, and I think such provincial tendencies should be resisted with the full strength of the international feline community!
Cats of the world unite!

after the museum we made a tour of cool-shops-selling-things-we-cant-afford just beyond cambridge circuc. we went to fopp and magma and some book shops. and we lamented being poor students. such is life. but if i ever get a job that pays an ok salary, i am going to fill it with great books!

after our non-event shopping expedition, we went up to angel to see a film.

justin has introduced me to the idea of eating popcorn in a strange mixed way. he orders sweet oon the bottom and salty on the top. the first time he suggested this, it sounded odd, but the logic is sound. your tongue gets tired of the salt at some point, and then you get to the sweet part and it seems like a nice change all of a sudden. who would have thought?

so we saw transamerica, a road trip movie with a transexual and his/her son s/he didnt know s/he had. typically american, but it was ok i guess.

then the train home....

tate modern

justin said these figures look like southern americans notions of canada. i guess it could also be west europeans vision of Russia. to me they looked like the piles created by the government snow removers (ie babushki) during the winter. when spring comes (ie in april) the snow melts of the streets and pavements, but it stays in these huge piles for what seems like forever. so that you can even have a warm day where people are wearing short sleeves and passing these huge pils on the streets.
i really like the tate modern. i also appreciate that it is FREE, something i really like about british museums.
we spent probably an hour in the Tate's book shop. it has a great collection of literary and art critisism. they were having a buy one get one free special on "introducing books" unable to resis i got four, with the money that i dont have. but i find the books really helpful in explaining things like semiotics that i am not terribly knowledgable about. so there is my reading for the weekend....
oh, and of course, when we came out of the musuem, it was pouring rain. so much for the nice sunny day away from the library! the rain continued for the whole rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

after the market, we walked to the Tate modern. i love this museum... and it is FREE! one of the major benefits of English museums....so we walked among these....blocks? 

the market has food from everywhere. I tried a massive samosa from the Indian stand, and then some spinach and goat cheese concoction from the italian area. the market has all kinds of bread, cheeses, desserts, spices and so on. not all parts are for those with sensitive stomachs, like the area where they sell whole, unskinned dead bunnies.... 

i like my saturdays; i always end up doing something fun. this saturday started (as usual) in the library, but it was bright and sunny outside, and i couldnt spend the whole day there. so i ,et Justin at King's X and we went down to the Bourough Market.  

the state of things

and so it seems the winter term has come to an end...i am so out of things that i didnt even notice this until yesterday when i saw a sign informing me that the library would be closed for the next 4 saturdays....then i put things together in my head and realised that this probably indicated the end of the second term...not that it makes much difference for me, since my work continues regardless. i still have a lot i have to get done before i leave, but time is rather quickly evaporating. i still have two big things to write and tons of material to go through....agh! last night i was at the faculty for a few hours, but then i realised that i hadnt really planned in head head exactly what materials i needed to get, which made my investigations a bit disorganised and counter productive. so i will have to repeat much of the process today, grr.

my neighbour dan...we were drinking sunday night....and last night the party continued when he decided to make a party in his flat...he is probably the most amazing cook i have ever met. he used to work professionally as a cook, until he got distracted by an MA....

the fun never stops

here is the pub where i was with dan...the days wizz by, i seem to have the idea that if i party i wont notice the weeks that still have to pass before i can leave this place......alcohol helpts pass the time...but so much writing still to do...

in the evening i met up with ian to go to a concert. we heard requiem by gabriel fauré. the performance of it was really excellent. the last part in particular is really beautiful, especially heard with in the building the concert was held in. flash wasnt aloud, so the picture is a little dark, but then it was actually pretty dark inside, which sort of added to the atmosphere.

after the concert we headed (where else?) to a pub.

my liver is in danger, definately time for a break

jeans, sweat shirts and mobiles: the cambridge pub crowd

after we had walked around enough to get sufficiently cold, we went to one of my favourite cambridge pubs and decided to drink. there were tons of jean clad cambridge university students around, includding the girls field hockey team. the were chugging beer in english style quantities (and without food) and we were sipping away at wine and whisky. yura announced he felt old all of a sudden, in his dress shirt, trousers and jacket.  

me, experimenting with the features on my latest camera in one of the collages.