(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

In about a week I am going to take my annual Christmas Amtrak to Chicago. I am not rich enough to drop the money for a sleeper compartment, so I get the regular seats, which are pretty comparable to a plane price. When my friends point out that for the same amoung of money I could be in Chicago in under two hours, I explain that I prefer 18 hours of low-grade discomfort to 5400 or so seconds of aboslute certainty that I am about to die a horrible death right now. Anyway, I am quite fond of trains. The train trips of my childhood were one of the best things about the Soviet system. All long-distance trains, rather than the local elektrichki (trains run on...electricity) were split up into compartments with four bunk-bed style shelves for sleeping. When I was little I always wanted to sleep on the top bunk, because it seemed adult. Ad hoc comaraderie was the norm, and upon getting into a coupee, everyone acquainted, unpacked food that immediately became communal (cold chicken, boiled eggs, tomatoes, sandwiches with bologna, washed fruit in plastic bags, little packets of salt, sunflower seeds), out it on the little table by the window and started playing chess or cards. Someone in the wagon would have a guitar and would play and sing at night. The conductor periodically would walk through and bring tea in silver teacup holders with squares of rafinated sugar. The windows opened, up and down, and you could catch the night breeze, or buy sticky ice cream from vendors at rural train stations, or equally sticky baklava or rahat-lukum or churchella (nuts strung together in grape coating) as the train progressed further South (every summer I went with my parents either to the Black Sea, when I was very young, or, for the next eight years, to the Baltic Sea, and in my mind, the unsterilized sound of the bouncing old non-gliding train is like a baseline to the progression of the sky getting more blue, the sun removing people's shirts, (like in the old fable about the posturing between sun and wind, the moral of which is a more sophisticated version of catching more flies with honey), and cypress trees disappearing past the window on the Crimea-bound route, or, alternately, crawling past pine tree forests filled with blueberries and smelling like amber, gradually and all the way into the cool subdued North of Latvia and Lithuania) . On the hour-long stops, the adults smoked outside, and the kids played together and got berated for having dirty hands because there was no real way to wash your hands on the train, just disinfectant napkins in another plastic bag, next to the washed fruit. At night, the rhythm of the train wheels put me to sleep.
Obviously, sterile American Amtraks are nothing of the sort, but I still have this atavistic, childhood love for trains, even though the comfort of Amtrak is like aspertine. But here and there familiar fragments flicker. Random conversations; I am completely opposed to those on airplanes, but will talk to people on trains. Nesting for the journey--I bring my travel blanket, my pillow, a stack of magazines and a book, and I like falling asleep as dusk becomes night and whatever is going on outside, and past the window, becomes unintelligible. My dad will meet me at the train station downtown, and we'll whiz down the Kennedy expressway to the flatland of subdivisions, where, in one white duplex, identical to the 70 or 80 around it, my mom will be cooking, in an apron over dressy clothes until the moment I walk through the door.

Comments

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

it really was great. what were you doing in warsaw? and which merenguey things do you mean? zefir?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, those "washed sheets" on the train could be a real liability.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

or pastila?

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

No train service to here.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ohh, i'd hate to drink on the train. it would make me want to pee all the time...

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

Damn girl, that was downright Nabokovian. Made me long for Mother Russia, which is really so much bullshit cuz what do I know from Mother Russia besides a few years of college language study and some tenuous family ties to the Ukraine? Still, it misted my poor hungover eyes.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

aw. hey, i'd rather be nabokovian than, pretty much, anything else.

amis's two cents

[(Anonymous)]

martin amis was on t.v. recently and was asked his opinion about who were the great writers of his time. he chose nabokov and saul bellow, and preferred, on re-reading, bellow (in particular, he cited "the adventures of augie march" and "herzog"). he said that reading nabokov made him want to be able to write like nabokov, but that reading bellow just made him think that writing like bellow would be impossible.

-mjm

[totalvirility.livejournal.com]

Speaking of random conversations on trains, I once was randomly propositioned in a train smoking lounge by a man with a cowboy hat and a t-shirt reading "Proud to be a Redneck".

The Soviet communalism sounds a little nicer.