I shouldn’t have waited so long to go. Yoga is yoga; even though I couldn’t understand everything, I was still able to take class, and it was lovely. In fact, I enjoyed feeling that I was communicating on another level than that of language. There were lots of interesting modifications using a folding chair, including a folding-chair-supported backbend.

The view of the Pałac Kultury i Nauki, coming out of the studio after "joga."

Afterwards, had a self-satisfied sandwich and scoped out the neighborhood where I’ve suggested that Z. and P. stay when they come to visit. On the way, saw these pathetically abandoned teddy bears in the window of a pay-by-the-weight thrift store.

Weep for what little things could make them glad.

After that moment of existentialism, I boarded the oncoming #4 tram, to head back north to Praga…

The #4 train in Plac Konstytucji.

and got off again soon after, at Królewska, to walk in Saxon Gardens. People of all ages and dogs of all sorts enjoying the profusion of fallen leaves.

autumn autumn autumn autumn autumn

Returned, once back in the neighborhood, to the little stalls that still constitute the local market even when the full flea market isn’t in effect. Buying vegetables in yoga-induced haze. Pretty colors! Why is this cake in the bakery named “Zebra?” No, that was real…it’s a black-and-white cake…but it’s the sort of thing you only notice when your brain’s been flooded with too many endorphins.

Brokul: 3,50 PLN (“Brokul kontra kalafior“..!)
Pieprze i jabłka: 2,40 PLN

Afterwards, I made a Quizlet word set for my Polish vocab quiz tomorrow. It took me sixteen rounds to get all of them. Spelling kills me with Polish words–I’ll know the first letters, even what it sounds like, but be unable to put everything in the right order. I really like Quizlet’s features, though, and I’m hoping this will help me be more productive with vocabulary in the future.

My digital camera is dying; it takes two new batteries and then says “Please change batteries” three shots later. Considering this is the same digital camera I took to Germany in 2003, it’s done pretty well…I have eked a few last images out of it, as you see, including some fall leaves, but I think I will either have to revert to textual habits or else, you know, get a new one.

No, I did not see any theater today. I like to observe Mondays off even when not required to, I’m starting to realize. But I did confirm some arrangements for tickets next weekend, when I will be seeing six performances of three plays over five days. Because it’s Poland.

Farmer’s/flea market this morning in Warsaw–getting colder, but people still out and about. Most of the yellow leaves are now on the ground rather than on the trees, but they’re not gone from the picture altogether yet.

It's never too cold for the flea market! It's Poland!

Two apples: 0,8 PLN
Paper towels: 3,20 PLN
Batteries: 4 PLN

Today, working on articles, studying for a Polish test this week, and seeing an exhibit at the Center for Contemporary Art in Ujazdowski Castle with a friend. I am also going to investigate a yoga studio near the Centrum metro station later this afternoon/evening.

In my free time, I will mourn the passing of the Funny Girl revival. Sign of the times, sign of the times, sign of the times. Investors pulling out of theatrical productions, even one as well-publicized and anticipated as this one.

Here are a few Polish expressions of the day, from the always useful online dictionary run at U. Pitt:

młodzież bananowa–“the coddled youth.” The first word means “youth,” and the second one is the adjective form of “banana.”

mocna głowna — strong head for drink.

“But bad movies—I think I’ve got a word for the kind of sadness I’m talking about. Schoenfraun. The sadness of when you’re watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. Schoenfraun. Schoenfraun. It just sounds right. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.”

“..it may seem disingenuous—but the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.”

“A lot of people who write about art don’t understand the importance of failure, the importance of process. Woody Allen can’t leap from Annie Hall to Manhattan. He has to make Interiors in between to get to Manhattan. You’ve got to let him do that.”

– Stephen Soderberg, interviewed (self-indulgently but valuable-ly) in The Believer.

Just saw his “Contagion” today, at Zlote Tarasy, as a reward after a day of writing with a fellow Fulbrighter. The film was excellent. I would recommend it to anyone–with the caveat that you might want to close your eyes when they begin this one particular autopsy–but otherwise, I think it’s a really sensitive, delicate film about a really hard-to-be-sensitive-delicate-about topic. Everyone should see it. Especially the people who like science.

PS. Shout-out to the Polish airplane pilot who safely landed the screwed-up Boeing earlier this week. All systems go at Warsaw again–my roommate just got in from a trip, with no problems. Other travelers earlier this week were delayed.

It’s a good day to be in Poland. I did not go to the Conrad festival–traveled out from the Lublin-Łódź-Wrocławaganza of last week, plus I had the opportunity to observe some rehearsals here in town. However, I have had an excellent 24 hours. Right here in Warsaw. It is nice to stay in town for the weekend for a change.

Yesterday (11/4/11):

12:00-4:30: A long lunch and discussion with friends at the Cafe Kulturalna within the PKN, including one Varsovian who I haven’t seen enough of, and one Krakowian who I haven’t seen since orientation. We discuss our future theatre plans: the Teatr Na Woli play Nasza Klasa, based on Jan Gross’s divisive book Neighbors. We also began some nebulous plans for a Poland theatrical event; a community-based event, a story circle from which nothing more might ever come–an exploration of diversity in Poland, cast in the broadest possible light. I solicit their assistance, as historians of Jews in WW2 and postwar Poland, in conceiving and executing the project. They were off, after our conversation, via bus, to a weekend festival/gathering of secular Jewish cultural exchange, in the Warsaw suburbs. We say our adieux outside the PKN, and vow that when the weather turns, we will make snowmen here.

7-9 PM: I was able to observe rehearsals for the choir at the Praga Cathedral. I got to stand in the back, behind the altos and adjacent to my friend, the tenor, as they rehearsed the Mozart Requiem. This was a wonderful experience, and I can see that watching some Polish choirs / choral rehearsals / choral conducting would be a very good thing for my project. Hearing them sing is inspiring; I go home and write until I fall asleep.

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From the continuation of our ongoing “What Would Julian Barnes Do” series, some quotes from his Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER
You already were a very good essayist and journalist before you started to write fiction. Why did you choose fiction?

BARNES
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading.

That’s right, Julian Barnes! You tell ’em!

INTERVIEWER
…don’t people always like to try something new?

BARNES
It doesn’t work quite like that. I don’t feel constrained by what I have written in the past. I don’t feel, to put it crudely, that because I’ve written Flaubert’s Parrot I have to write “Tolstoy’s Gerbil.” I’m not shut in a box of my own devising. When I wrote The Porcupine I deliberately used a traditional narrative because I felt that any sort of tricksiness would distract from the story I was trying to tell. A novel only really begins for a writer when he finds the form to match the story. Of course you could play around and say, I wonder what new forms I can find for a novel, but that’s an empty question until that proper idea comes along, and those crossing wires of form and content spark. For instance, Talking It Over was distantly based on a story that I’d been told five or six years previously. But it was no more than an anecdote, a possibility, an idea for an idea, until I apprehended the intimate form necessary for this intimate story.

I like the idea of form and content like crossing wires.

Both quotes from “The Art of Fiction No. 165: Julian Barnes,” from the Paris Review.

I just got a confusing phone call from the Wroclaw DHL office, telling me that I had valued a recent package too highly, and that they had to put a lower value on it in order to send it. I agreed to everything, being in no condition to disagree. “Whatever you say, Poland” is the only possible response to all these situations.

Anyway. Still going through all the pictures from the last trip. I took these photos on Halloween.

The Rynek on a quiet empty morning. It's about 8:45 AM, nothing is open, and I'm pacing back and forth in front of the Empik bookstore.

That fountain, along with “In front of the Pizza Hut” or “In front of the McDonalds,” is one of the three reliable meeting places for groups of lost Americans in the Wro. Rynek. Everywhere else is really confusing.

The two little houses at the front are the oldest in the Rynek.

I really like how much more enormous the tower behind is…

"Pod Gryfami"--Under the Gryphons.

A less modest house in the Rynek; one of my favorites.

GRYPHONS!!!

It is lovely to have a few days in Warsaw. As you can see from this photograph, through the kitchen window of the Praga apartment, two of the three trees I see every day have lost all their leaves.

Trees from kitchen window, with dying herbs in foreground.

I was a bit exhausted yesterday from the recent round of traveling, but maybe that is to be expected. If I have class Tuesdays and Thursdays, and spend every Friday through Monday traveling all over the country, well then, Wednesday has to be the day off. It feels self-indulgent, but there has to be at least one day a week off.

I finished reading David Lodge’s biographical novel Author, Author, about Henry James, today. My parents sent it to me a few weeks ago but I have only finished it now. It was lovely–especially poignant for someone like me who is also embroiled in theatrics. I can’t help but feeling that James’s condescension towards theater is a large part of why he never had any real success in the form. At the same time, I feel sorry for his sufferings at its hands.

Here are a few quotes:

“He [James] had endeared himself to them [the actors] by providing refreshments. Shocked to discover that they were expected to rehearse from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon without sustenance, and feeling not a little peckish himself on these occasions, he arranged for Mrs Smith to prepare daily a hamper of sandwiches and other cold victuals which her husband delivered to the theatre at noon, and from which Henry invited the actors to help themselves when they were ‘off’. Miss Robins remarked that it was the first time in her experience that a playwright had thought of feeding his company.” (p. 134)

A hamper! A hamper! So British right now! Also, did anyone else hear that line as “first time…that a playwright had thought of EATING his company? Just me?

“Just before he [James] was finally, finally finished with The American [the theatrical adaptation of the novel of the same name] he heard again from Daly, who wanted more cuts and revisions of Mrs Jasper and asked if he could supply an amusing piece of verse in rhyming couplets for Ada Rehan to recite at the end of the play, a la Restoration comedy. Henry, who had not written a line of verse since youth, was dismayed by this suggestion, but, perceiving in these demands that the New York production must be imminent, gamely composed a pretty, genial, graceful speech in rhythmical prose for the purpose…” (p. 165)

I’d like to see that “rhythmical prose” speech. The idea of Henry James writing any kind of verse is horrifying.

“Decorum in the ordinary as well as the literary sense of the term required that the fictitious author [Dencombe, in a James story called “The Middle Years”] should be denied this happy consummation. Dencombe must die at the end of the story, in his middle years, his life’s work incomplete. Imagining himself in this plight Henry summoned up a deathbed speech of such poignancy and eloquence that it brought tears to his own eyes as he penned it: ‘ “A second chance–that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ‘” (p. 168)

But in spite of all temptations…
to-wards happier con-su-mmay-tions…
he remains an ENGLISHMAN…

(those James “madness of art” lines are the epigraph for the entire Lodge novel)

and the last one, a real punch in the stomach:

“…it was just as well that she should be under no illusions as to his real feelings. About some things they communicated more honestly through their fictions than in their conversations.” (p. 169)

Oh, snap! All quotes from Author, Author, by David Lodge (2004).

In other theatre-variety news, I’m very, very happy that Cherrie Moraga’s Kickstarter for “New Fire” has come through. I’m also very happy that M. Hilyard, P. Ward and D. Sanders are previewing tonight in J. Wright’s HAVE YOU SEEN ALICE? at NOTE. I hope they have a brilliant run.

Some important things are happening in the great state of California.

First, please consider supporting playwright, activist, and writer Cherríe Moraga’s Kickstarter for her new play, “New Fire: To Put Things Right Again,” if you can. They’ve raised $26,100 of their $26,500 goal, with only 36 hours to go.

Production still for NEW FIRE from Brava! For Women in the Arts.

I try not to ask for $ on behalf of theatrical productions often, because if I did I would be doing it every day, but this is a really extraordinary project. If I had found out about it earlier, I would have been hyping it earlier–but we’re down to the wire now, and they really need that extra $400 or they won’t make the full goal. You know how KS is–all or nothing.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419411661/new-fire-to-put-things-right-again/widget/card.html

I was lucky enough to study playwriting with Moraga in college, which was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. She taught me so much. I’ve donated myself and I’ve asked friends to donate on Facebook. I know these are tough times for everyone in the US, but we need art, even in tough times–and this is important art. Here’s something she wrote about the production’s development project, from the KS page:

“…collaborators held ceremonial meetings with immigrant and indigenous communities from the barrios of Chicago to the agricultural fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley in order to establish a solid community base for their explorations as theater artists.”

Here’s Moraga speaking at a UCB commencement in 2009:

Please become one of this production’s backers if you can.

In other theatre news, some of my favorite actors in the world–the remarkable Michelle Hilyard, Phil Ward, Darrett Sanders, and other NOTE veterans–are uniting in a show opening this weekend at NOTE in Los Angeles–Have You Seen Alice. Here’s the playwright:

“There is humor and hope in my play, but this time I did not allow myself a fairy tale ending. Instead I wanted to honor the fears and frailties that humans sometimes contain, to accept and acknowledge our self-imposed prisons and our inability to take the steps we long to take.”

– playwright Jacqueline Wright on her writing process, in LA STAGE TIMES for her new play, HAVE YOU SEEN ALICE?, opening at Theatre of NOTE this weekend. Free preview Thursday. Tickets here.

I’m proud of the theatre being created by artists in California, and I wish I could do more to support both of these productions. They have my thoughts and my hopes–for the fundraising, for the opening.

Stardate: November 1, 2011. One last blurry nighttime shot of the Facade of Contemplation in Wrocław to speed us on our way…and back on the train again, back to Warsaw. (I took this picture on the evening of Oct. 29.)

I like to stand in front of this Facade, in the Rynek, and think, whenever I’ve seen a theatrical performance that confused me. I spend a lot of time in front of it.

The first of November? Really? I’ve been in Poland for three months and ten days. I arrived early—my Fulbright window only officially started on September 15—but I got here July 20th to take some workshops with a theater in Wroclaw. They’ve been busy months. I have another 6.5 months left on the Fulbright. (Through June 15.)

Today is a Polish national holiday, All Saints’ Day, and so for the first Tuesday in many Tuesdays I won’t have language class right after I get off the train. I’ve been traveling over so many weekends that it feels like I’ve gotten into a rhythm of train-to-language class.

I’m writing this on a familiar train now, the one from Wrocław to Warsaw, and we’re speeding past the countryside. I’ll post this later, when I get into town.

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(I successfully located the Wrocław DHL office and sent off the papers I’d been working on–so I have some time to get back to pictures from last week.)
Stardate: last czwartek, 27 października. Befuddled Expat’s Log. Upon returning from Lublin (small town) I really enjoyed seeing Warsaw (larger town) as a comparatively busy, bustling place. Like stepping from a dim room into a bright one. Look at all these people heading down to the Centrum metro station! So many people! Maybe not that many compared to New York, but more than anywhere in Lublin…

The apparition of these faces in the crowd...

I used the opportunity to take some pictures of the massive Dworzec Centralna, or Warsaw central train station, and the surrounding open squares. This area is right next to the Kinoteka, to the PKN, the Złote Tarasy mall, etc, and it has a wide-open feeling that reminds me of Berlin Alexanderplatz.

I’m in a cafe right now in Wro. and the uploader’s slow, so I’ll put those images up later…

It’s a nice place to return to, the PKN/Kinoteka/Centrum metro area, every time I come back to Warsaw.