Gained in Translation

I should probably writing about the debates or fact that I am leaving the country in, like, 36 hours but fuck that shit, it's stressing me out. You know what I am going to write about? The Wizard of Oz. You probably know that after writing his metaphor-for-American-politics-circa-the-Great-Depression book, Frank Baum wrote a bunch of sequels. What you may not know is the fact that after a man named Alexander Volkov translated the original Wizard of Oz into Russian, he continued, in a glorious and classic Soviet disregard for international copyright laws, to write his own sequels. Not translate the later sequels. But, like, write his own. He wrote like five of them: Urfin Juice (or Jews?) and his Wooden Soldiers (which I thought was a sequel for a long time, b/c Urfin Juice sounds English), The Seven Underground Kings, The Fiery God of the Marrans, The Yellow Fog (where an epidemic strikes Oz and it's Dorothy and Toto to the rescue, young-pioneer-style), The Mystery of the Deserted Castle (at some point, possibly in this book, Dorothy is replaced by her niece? And her niece's little dog named Arto). Anyway, it's a completely alternative trajectory of the Oz narrative. And then another Russian dude wrote two sequels to the Soviet bootleg sequels.

Whenever I try to explain this to my American friends I am reminded of the following experience: my sophomore year at Oberlin I had a misguided impulse to summarize Mimsy Were The Borogroves, a short sci-fi story by Henry Kuttner...wait, let me explain. The premise of the story is that the Jabberwocky is a space-time equation that can be solved by children who are conditioned into thinking within a radically different logical system by educational toys from another dimension that they find. The adults socialized into "standard" logic cannot learn the other system. The children keep bringing weird crap home, like branches and vaseline and stones, and arranging them in weird ways, and when the parents (and later a psychologist) ask them about it they can only refer to the poem; the parents think it's odd but harmless, but in the end the children solve the equation and vanish into thin air. The second narrative within the story is about Alice and Lewis Carroll; in the story she also finds the educational toys, but she is too old to find a way to cross over to the other world, but she gleans enough to relate the Jabberwocky to Lewis Carroll, who thinks she is making up cute nonsensical rhymes and writes down all of her stories. Anyway, so I told the plot of this story to a friend who was tripping on acid. After which he stared at me in horror and said "that's not how Alice in Wonderland goes at all!"

Anyway, I should go to bed, because tomorrow is going to be a very long day.

I'd like to give a shout-out to boss #1 for giving me her beachtech box, to the awesome boys at Democracy Now! for fixing it, to boss #2 for giving me a tax-exemption letter for my camera-related purchases and a boo on B&H for being closed, which means I have to go on a wild microphone chase tomorrow morning.

I know I am procrastinating, but this is related to packing, really!

Obviously, my digital camera is coming with.
The question is, which other cameras from my eclectic dilletante camera collection should I take? I can't take all of them b/c well, I'm still trying to pack light.

a. The manual Vivitar with a nice lens
b. The SX-70 Polaroid (I'd have to bring film with me and it's expensive, but so pretty)
c. The Color Splash Lomo that my dad just got for me in Prague (haven't tried it out yet, looks like it will be really cool but has an unwieldy attachment at the side where the color filters rotate)
d. The Holga (same film situation as SX-70, pretty and you can do double exposures)
e. Standard nice but not super-expensive automatic camera that will be the most easily replaceable if it's lost/stolen/I drop it into a waterfall (yes, I did that once).
f. Something else I have not thought of that I should go and buy immediately.