These are too good, I won't spoil them with my comments. Not in this entry anyway.

BORDER. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch." (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).

COMIC. By providing us with the lovely illusion of human greatness, the tragic brings us consolation. The comic is crueler: it brutally reveals the meaningless of everything. I suppose all things human have their comic aspect, which in certain cases is recognized, acknowledged, utilized, and in others is veiled. The real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic. History has always been considered an exclusively serious territory. But there is the undiscovered comic side to history. Just as there is the (hard-to-take) comic side to sexuality.

DEFINITION. ... A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions.

FLOW. ... I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods.

LAUGHTER. ... In the nineteenth century, Gogol is a melancholy humorist: "The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes," said he.

LYRICISM (and revolution). "Poetry is intoxication, and man drinks in order to merge more easily with the world. Revolution has no desire to be examined or analyzed; it only desires that the people merge with it. For that reason, revolutions are lyrical and in need of lyricism" (Life is everywhere).

OBCSENITY. We can use obscene word in a foreign language, but they are not heard as such. An obscenity pronounced with an accent becomes comical. The difficulty of being obscene with a foreign woman. Obscenity: the root that attaches us most deeply to our homeland.

I was in Portland, a young girl walked by (in my first editing I wanted to remove "young", because what other kinds of girls are there, old? But for some reasons I felt that "young" has to stay. Maybe because the girl was devastatingly young :) and I caught a string of her perfume. I was amazed how many strong emotions it aroused in me, I would say "unearthed". It reminded me my teenage years, when I and Mom visited the local theater -- that was almost the only case I used perfume. All that anticipation, surrounding our expeditions like clouds, something was going to happen, and definitely it was not just a performance. Something bigger.

Back to the Portland's scene. I was amuzed how many mixed and strong emotions one scent can provoke, without any words being said. And if this wouldn't be enough, I had a second surge of phantom memories. Something elusive sneaked into my teenage era recollections to make them American recollections, which is, obviously, pure nonsense. I guess from now on I am doomed to have not normal, sane memories, but a mixture of true memories and fantasies, which happen not only without my invitation, but even without my permission.

Why I am writing all this, yesterday I overheard a conversation in Russian. It was a trivial conversation, nothing important, but it caused the same effect on me, the same mixture of strong emotions and vague recollections that perfume caused.

When I came across Exploding Dog site, I wasn't too impressed. The drawings looked primitive, if not to say sloppy. After browsing mindlessly through archives, I became comfortable with the style and noticed that these simple pictures express notions sophisticated enough to resist my attempts to define them. So the Exploding Dog was added to my collection of minimalist games.

What "visual vocabulary" has to do with it? Vocabularies provide us with finite set of words to choose from, and the very idea of "style" presupposes that not everything will do, and certain states are preferred, thus reducing our expressive means down to a lexicon. As am becoming increasingly frustrated with trying to express myself verbally -- and I mean written communications only; attempts to express myself orally I abandoned long ago due to utter lack of success -- I entertain myself with the idea of visual vocabularies, for they provide seemingly infinite, albeit limited, set of lines and colors and etc.; and infinity always hosts some hidden places for hope.

I picked up Marie Kazalia's Erratic Sleep in a Cold Hotel in a bookstore because there was something strangely familiar in its black and white cover. From the introduction I learnt that the author spent a few years teaching English abroad, then returned to San Franciso, where she lived in a run-down residential hotel, which, if to judge by the picture on the cover, resembles the one my friend and me used to live in, the place where I still feel more like "home" than in any other place on the Earth, a perfect place for all illegal activities from cooking in your room to writing poetry. Our hotel is located in Chinatown, her in a much worse part of the city -- Tenderloin, and most of her poems are just as gross as Tenderloin itself. Here is one that is quotable -- I found only one poem in the whole book that I am not scared to quote.

all my life I've felt alien
so naturally
traveling to strange places
makes me feel good --
normal
living a different life-style
every year
easier to run & roam
not get burdened
with the facts of one place
street names the cost of things
his/her ethnicity
where to get socially acceptable unfairness
a huge relief to be on the other side of the world
all those heavy fucking burdensome troubles
here so far away
from there no more meaning
just disappear
for a while
though always return
to exotic third world countries
roamed for years
got nowhere in particular
except in my head
came nack to where I began
can't hide the pain
have the pain to face
figure out
what to do with the pain

I read an article about "cutting" in some local paper today (unfortunately its name escaped my memory), and it was stunning. According to the auithors, about 15% of adolescents are involved in "cutting" -- making deep cuts on their body with kitchen knifes or razors, so that they start blooding. Amazingly, in this way some people find relief from their emotional pain. This kind of self-injury was long known for mental health professionals, but last years it becomes more frequent, for not to say popular (try to google "cutting" and the first return will talk about precisely this problem.)

Among other motivation for self-injury, the article lists desire to get attention, escape a sense of emptiness, and a way of "waking up" from a sense of numbness after a traumatic experience, unability to express strong emotions (anger, hurt, frustration, etc.)

It's hard to believe some people can feel emotional pai so strog, that pressing a knife deep into their body would feel as a relief, but apparently this is what happens. Another example of how difficult it can be to understand another, because normally our feeling of compassion is based on some similar, or otherwise shared experience. If there is nothing to share, in a non-standard situation our compassion can give way to anger, revulsion and other less than useful reactions. It's a plane of mine to collect ways in which people can feel compassion and react more intelligently to someone they don't understand.