oh canada.

i am headed to the northlands again, to attend various festivities (canada day celebrations in ottawa, the jazz festival in montreal) with my lovely siblings. 'tis the month of travel, it seems.

incidentally, canada approved same-sex marriage today.

jolted into the witching hour.

i may have discovered the least pleasant way to wake up at two o'clock in the morning.

that would be a very drunken fellow standing on the fire escape, pounding on the window three feet from your head and screaming.

back from abroad, and excitement just keeps on accumulating . . .

what? darkness?

returned.

counting.

- seven bug bits on one arm alone (24? on body total).
- 20-something rembrandts at the hermitage.
- 7,000 square meters of mosiac at the church of the savior on the blood.

pacing:

- raskolnikov's route, complete with graffiti scrawling words like everyone has the right to kill one person.

baltika.

is a great beer brew.

monastery yesterday:

- monks singing in the chapel.
- some little purchases.
- click click click on the camera.
- the graves of dostoyevsky, rimsky-korsakov, tchaikovsky, among others.
- a cat, of course.
- joy.

gypsy kebob with beef, a pork, the hen.

other russian-english menu translation jewels:

- a difficult childhood.
- language with mushroom sandwich.

jealous yet?:

- amber room at the pushkin summer palace.
- t. h. and s. a. reading at nabakov's house (butterflies!).
- jars and jars and jars of eerie oddities at the kustkammer's chamber of curiosities.

some of those aforementioned curiosities, from their descriptive placards:

- preparation of child's head with artificial eyes.
- injected preparations of sense organs.
- preparations of skin (without injection).
- preparations of bones (without injection).
- children's legs.
- children's arms.
- two-headed child (embalmed preparation).
- teeth extracted by peter I.
- skeleton of a two-headed calf.
- newborn kitten with double body.
- unicorn horn.
- child with harelip and anomalous number of digets.
- kid with double snout.

["Come, look, appraise, and believe your own eyes only." Frederik Ruysch]

ravel-ing.

holy shit continued:

- absinthe at an authentic russian bar.
- ravel's daphis et chloe and a poulenc piano concerto (imogen cooper, soloist) at the st. petersburg philharmonic.
- arkadii dragomoschenko (russian poet, friend of lyn heijinian) and the borey gallery.

holy shit.

- a 1.00 am boatride through the canals of st. petersburg (this probably deserves several more awed expletives).
- mushroom soup with sour cream.
- churches.

someodd hours later.

arrived. in the process:

- left late from new york.
- played 25 games of tic-tac-toe and drew lots of planes with a five year-old.
- hit turbulence.
- arrived late in london.
- missed connecting flight.
- got on a flight to st. petersburg with a small unkown russian airline.
- boarded airplane. leaned on seat in front. its back completely fell in.
- ate some bad airplane food. again.
- arrived in st. petersburg.
- unsurprisingly, bags did not arrive.

bags are apparently coming tonight. apart from that, everything is rainy and amazing. lots of pastel palaces.

night, white.

travel preparations.

- countdown to commencing the trek to russia: seventeen hours.
- probability of sleep in that time: unlikely.
- found (rejoice!): lost favorite sock.

culled for you.

- "Yet it is the poet's business to give us the feeling of an intimate union between the word and the mind." (Paul Valery, Poetry & Abstract Thought)
- "Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human. Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked a dozen reams of nonsense, even ten dozen reams of it, and that's an honourable thing in its own way; well, but we can't even talk nonsense with our own brains!" (Razumikhin in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment)
- my daily bus

tumbleweed on a ridge.

- outside: thundery, summery, headache-inducing.
- donated to the drain: another favorite earring.
- pennsylvania this weekend: nostalgia, two mentor-ladies, green.
- family: scattered about the globe.
- countdown to my own globe-trotting: four days.
- poem-ing: "elegaic."
- favorite quote from the quest for new sleeping arrangements: "my mother died 8 months ago. but not in the apartment!"

boing.

amusing myself:

- i love my wikipedia. and its deformed offspring.
- up up up,
- up up up.

camouflaged.

- johnsonberg-style: my bedroom, by a substantial layer of brick-dust blown in through the window by construction on a nearby building.
- aromatically: my skirt, by a crapload of pickle juice that i just spilled onto it.
- ironic-or-earnest?-style: a garbage truck on 91st street, by six stuff animals tied to its front grill (one gorilla, two bears, and i didn't catch the rest).