Hey, an election is coming up!

The Duma elections are coming up on Sunday, and you could tell we hit the homestretch when the rhetoric got noticeably more, er, colorful over the past week or so. The government has put up posters on many of the city's billions of billboards and placards and subway posters reminding people to vote. They feature average, working Russians -- apparently that middle class I keep hearing about -- urging them to use the voice that the state has granted them. They're upstanding citizens like doctors and teachers and young families, and they have a voice in their future! (Unfortunately we didn't snap any pictures of my two favorites, the personable cab driver and the passionate mathematics teacher, but you get the drift). Posters I didn't see include the miserable pensioner or the unemployed alcoholic, so I guess no future for them! (Losers).








We've also seen a very great many ads from United Russia, the ruling party that is going to win a crushing majority on Sunday. You may notice their posters are the same color scheme, which is a happy coincidence. Here are some of the few that don't mention President Putin, who leads their electoral list...





Now, I would love to include some posters of the opposition parties as well, but amazingly, although I pass hundreds of placards each day -- which are changed every two or three days -- I didn't see a single one from any of the other 10 parties that are on the ballot. Silly opposition candidates! don't they see this can be a good way to let the public know they exist? I mean they're always whining about how state controlled media never covers them. If I were a cynic I'd say that their western NGO money-men are too cheap to spring for a modern election campaign!

Thanksgiving abroad

My first Thanksgiving abroad. It’s always been one of my favorite holidays, partly because of the sense of travel and going home it always brings to mind. It reminds me of bracing for another trip to 30th Street Station or Penn Station, and the feeling of getting a chance to take a few days to catch your breath and reflect on the new year (whatever the calendar says, I think they always start for us in the fall). I remember going back my first year away from home, standing on the Peter Pan bus all the way from Utica to Albany because it was packed with kids like me heading east. And I remember that year I spent the holiday alone in Washington because I couldn’t get away, and feeling very tremendously lonely and glad that I knew that feeling at least once, and wanted to leave it at just once. And of course, last year, when I was still on paternity leave, and when Olga and I and Mom put together a rather comprehensive little dinner for ourselves between looking after our three-week old. That was the first turkey we made, which I always imagined was a major life milestone.

So since in Moscow, Thanksgiving is just another Thursday, I had a full day of work, But we’re planning on putting something together on Friday, a little late. We’ve had some help from parents-in-law with the shopping – a turkey breast, some klyukva (which I suspect are Russian cranberries) and the ingredients for a reverse engineered version of Bell’s Seasoning (the trick is you can only find sage at the pharmacy, where it is sold as herbal medicine).

Alas, the football I’ll have seen around the holiday is likely to be England crapping itself against Croatia on Wednesday (by the way, between that and the announcement earlier in the day that the government had lost millions of people’s personal financial information, it really wasn’t a good day over there). I still have plenty happy memories of the World Series to be thankful for, and we signed Mike Lowell!

Norman Mailer

It is very easy to make fun of Norman Mailer, and I think he was aware of that, and that’s what made him great. His death this weekend is sad enough – he never got that Nobel prize – and as mundane as it sounds, an era passes and I’m sad about what’s left.

I always took Mailer with a grain of salt, but he was such a figure that I realized I’d been thinking about him on two discreet occasions in just the past few days. First, I was wondering about what he thought about how rubbish the Village Voice has become. He was one of the founders in 1955, and I’ve always wondered if he ever bothered to check in with it in recent years. I’ve taken the paper’s collapse personally – in high school I would pay $2 for the thing at Lizotte’s newsstand in Northampton, and in college I had a subscription outright (this was before the Internet, and it feels like ages ago). I would read the things cover to cover, feeling my world open up as I read about the huge horizons of the big city, about bands and musicians and artists I hadn’t heard about yet. Within a few years though, it had collapsed into a dogmatic chaotic mush so predictable and bland that it wasn’t even worth its new cover price (free). Then a few years ago, those New Times twits bought it out, and brought their manner of sun-belt “alternative” writing to the grandfather of it all. Out went the stable of legendary – if somewhat lazy – writers, and in came a handful of underpaid kids. It is a shame, because I have always loved the idea of the alternative press, and I guess the future will be on the Internet somehow, sometime. And maybe it would take people like Mailer to ever get it working.

On a more broad level, I was thinking, as I often do, about how contemporary fiction and why I don’t give a damn about it. My latest round of thinking about it started when Nathan Englander’s much awaited second novel came out earlier this year, and as I read about it and heard the interviews, I became aware of an overwhelming feeling that there is nothing less I’d like to do than actually read the thing. I realized I read a lot of book reviews, and usually feel exactly the same way. There is nothing to get excited about, and Mailer was nothing if not exciting.

There is so much to like about his work. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead in college in giant hundred page chunks at a time. It was paced so well, and even though it was written just after the war ended and lay in plain sight for decades, it still shook and challenged everything I thought I knew about the war. I also greatly admire the manner in which he later turned to nonfiction. He was candid about how when he was young being a novelist was the most heroic thing you could do, but that in the 1960s nonfiction more and more took its place, and he brought something to that revolution. And later went back to fiction because it was important enough. He always had a way, even at his most obnoxious, to make you think. I saw him speak at Penn, and unfortunately all I can remember is that he spent a lot of time comprehensively attacking fluorescent lighting -- I agree with him, and to this day I think about that talk every time I’m in a quiet public room and hear that damn buzzing. I remember staying at a bed and breakfast in Maine with a ton of books on the shelves, including a host of Mailer’s works. I started flipping through a first edition of The Prisoner of Sex. I thought that I could detect in it the physical effect of writing on a typewriter. Something I can’t put my finger on about the fast pace of the writing, as fast as thought, mixed with a jangly and illusory confidence that comes from not thinking enough as the words hit the paper, and not thinking you have to rewrite as carefully as they should. There are a lot of things not to like about the man and his work. The egomania, the self-indulgent prose, the idea of the arts as a competitive sport, the attitudes toward women, the glorification of violence... But he was a man who was always looking for a fight or an argument, and always seemed willing to go out for a drink afterward. This honesty, friendliness, openness and risk-taking, are the best attributes of America. And it is something we are losing very fast.

But plague... what about plague?

I admit that I waited too long to go get tested. I mean, I didn’t think there were any problems, but people kept telling me I had to go. I had all the usual excuses: the clinic was on the other side of town, I felt fine, and these tests are stupid anyway. But I finally just couldn’t put it off any longer. You choose to live your life a certain way, and you try not to think about the consequences. But you can’t outrun them forever. Last week I went to the clinic, and on Friday I picked up the results. I don’t have leprosy. Nor do I have syphilis, chlamydia, TB, HIV, high blood pressure, or a narcological dependency. I have an official certificate stamped and notarize in accordance with the most recent round of laws and decrees covering foreigners here. The $60 raft of tests were for work, and I put it off longer than I should have. I admit I’m not at my best around health care professionals to begin with, but the idea of going to a Russian clinic terrified me. My daughter has a giant welt on her arm from an improperly administered TB shot as a testament to the overall competence of Russian medicine. I learned from my co-workers where to find the cleanest and most relatively efficient authorized clinic. It is near Semyenovksy Metro station, and incidentally at the heart of the shoe shopping district, with the “Paris Commune” shoe factory nearby. Anyway… to my very real surprise looking back, I can’t complain too much about the clinic or the process. You get a little sheet, and then you go on a scavenger hunt. One stop they take your blood, another they inspect you for lesions, then you go out to a little shed in the yard for a chest x-ray, and someone else takes your blood pressure. Most interesting was the visit to the narcologist, a very friendly and chatty fellow who makes you roll up your sleeves and checks that your eyes aren’t too glassy while asking about your drinking habits. Like so many things here, the experience was at the same time fascinating, frightening, annoying, and absurd. Most of the conditions they checked for are much more likely to be picked up here rather than brought here.

Orange October?

It’s a long holiday weekend here in Russia. Nov. 4 marks the third “National Unity Day,” when Russians celebrate the overthrow of the “Polish Yoke” in 1612 in a ‘spontaneous’ uprising of the leaderless Russian people against foreign aggression. The holiday was conjured up a few years ago to replace the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, celebrated on Nov. 7. The theme of foreign interference has been a dramatic subtext of late. On Sunday, we watched on the TV-Tsentr channel Postscript with Alexei Pushkov, which featured two rather incredible segments. First was a report about the Katyn Forest massacre, the 1940 Soviet slaughter of up to 26,000 Polish officers being held prisoner. Because of where and when this happened, there was much finger-pointing and plausible deniability about whether it was more a Nazi or a Soviet atrocity, but the matter was cleared up to the satisfaction of most serious researchers by the late 1980s. The incident is the subject of a new movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, and the Postscript team went to report about “the ends that don’t quite meet.” So we were treated to interviews with several Russian chauvinist “historians” who were filmed walking around the Katyn site and offering their theories, much of which I gathered revolved around how the Red Army was too incompetent and inefficient at the time to kill that many people in so short a time. Postscript wasn’t done yet. There followed an article about the Bolshevik Revolution which really earned some innovation points. It focused on the fact that Imperial Germany had funded and enabled Lenin’s transportation from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917. Nothing new about this, but Postscript pondered whether this proves the revolution was, in fact, “Orange.” In today’s Russia, the word “Orange” is practically a swear word. It refers to the December 2004 pro-democracy protests against rigged Ukrainian elections. But in Russia’s warped worldview, it refers solely to when western NGOs agitate where they don’t belong and convince dupes to take to the streets to foment trouble on behalf of NATO, the EU, the US, or whoever. The idea strikes paranoid terror throughout Russia’s ruling class. The report speculates whether the Bolsheviks were an “Orange virus,” but they are too clever for themselves. In Russia’s media it is no longer kosher to be ashamed of the Soviet past, so they had to leave the implications of the question hanging. They limply concluded that all revolutions are unfortunate whenever the powers that be overlook the people’s will.

As the old song goes, good times never felt so good

I still can’t believe the Monday we just had. On Saturday night we set our clocks back here, a week ahead of the States, and when I realized that meant Game 4 of the Series would start at 3 a.m. instead of the usual 4 a.m., I decided it would be best to just stay up for awhile. So I moved the laptop to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and watched Goodfellas dubbed in Russian on NTV while reading everything I could find on the Interwebs about the Series. Game 4 began, and what can I say? Worth every sleep-deprived minute. My mom, who was visiting for the week, managed to get up for the last two innings. And once Papelbon nailed the final out, I opened a bottle of Guinness we’ve had lying around for awhile to celebrate. It was a great postseason with the perfect ending. I think I’m kind of going to miss these ridiculous middle of the night wake-up times, when I’m alone in the sleeping apartment with just my laptop and my sunflower seeds. And it is such a good time to be a Red Sox fan, which you realize when you think about fans of the other teams. In watching the games, I came to feel a little bad for Cleveland’s fans. They had a very good team, and since they haven’t won the pennant since 1948, they are approaching operatic degrees of sports fan suffering. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot to say about Rockies fans. The team only started in 1993. History counts, and a tough, heart-breaking, through, beating like this is the kind of thing that lets you build one. It is the circle of baseball life, and I have to think that somewhere in Colorado is a kid that will remember Tulowitzki-Holliday-Helton-Atkins the same way I remember Boggs-Barrett-Buckner-Rice. Once the game was over, and I’d watched most of the online postgame show, I collapsed into bed. The sun was already up (I think, it had been an impossibly dreary and grey October here), and it wasn’t long before my little girl woke up and started cooing – shaking her head mischievously at her mom and I when we asked her if she was indeed the birthday girl that day. Little scamp. Olga graciously let me sleep a few more hours before I woke and celebrated my little one’s first birthday, which included visits from friends and family and all the usual trappings. All day I kept thinking about what a freakishly good day it was. I had a lot of time to think about the world in which she was born, getting to see the Red Sox win a Series in her first year of life. I’m happy for her, and happy that I will have to explain to her how nerve-wracking it was in 1986, 1995, 1999, 2003, and how wonderful 2004 was. Much has been made about how allegedly Red Sox fans wallowed in their misery all those championship-less years, but every real fan I know was simply eager to see our team win at last – like any other fans of any other teams – with the sole added baggage of wanted to put an end to the “Curse of the Bambino” industry once and for all. We certainly didn’t build our identity on it, as much as sports columnists wanted to think we did. In 2004 we were happy to have won, after a very long wait, and to have put all that nonsense behind us. But 2007 is pretty darn fantastic itself. I keep asking whether 2004 or 2007 was better, and I just can’t figure it out – each is a thing unto itself. Of all the things I read about this team, what I liked the most was Charlie Pierce’s essay in Slate after the ALCS. It was about Manny Ramirez, and he took the contrarian stance of unabashedly praising the “Manny being Manny” phenomenon. When the Sox were down against the Indians, Manny famously said something to the effect that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and there was always next year. The sports media flipped out, but most Sox fans knew precisely what he was talking about.

“It was impossible to watch the Red Sox over these last three games and not see Ramirez’s words in vivid action. Boston did not play an inning of baseball in which the team was not cool, and loose, and utterly in command of the circumstances. [...] This was a team that realized that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and therefore, losing was nothing of which to be afraid. Manny saw that first and brought the rest of them along.”

Throughout his time in Boston, Manny has been subject to ritualized bouts of heavy criticism, which manages to take his impressive numbers for granted and ignores completely just what he brings to the team. I remember thinking about it back in 2004, when Manny went out of his way to be demonstrably nice and friendly with tightly-wound reliever Byung-Hyun Kim – he didn’t need to do it, it wasn’t popular to do, and it didn’t work out so well, but it was the simple, decent thing to do. This kind of easy-goingness is probably also a critical part of what makes him one of the best hitters in history too. So all the clichés, about taking it one game, one inning, one at bat, one pitch at a time, turn out to be true. So to rephrase Billy Bragg, “I don’t want to change the world/ I’m not looking for a new New England/ I’m just looking forward to another season.” Now, if we can just re-sign Mike Lowell and steer well clear of a certain Scott Boras client, it should be a magnificent offseason as well….