Dreaming in Russian

Last night I had a dream entirely in Russian.

I am a dreamer. I mean that in the most literal sense. I have dreams every night. Vivid dreams, and more often than not, adventure dreams. I’m usually trying to accomplish some task, find some thing, help some one, achieve some goal. I often remember my dreams in great detail for the first five minutes after I wake, and then, as the sleep rubs away from my eyes, I am left only with the major points of the dream and the overall tone.

This dream involved living in a floating village which was part of a chain of villages within a complex system of fjords. I had to sail a sailboat somewhere and it was a boat that was too big for one person to sail. I remember narrowly dodging submerged boulders which were demarcated by tattered traffic cones.

The dream, like most dreams, was unimportant. The fact that the entire dream took place in Russian is what really amazes me.

I was a Comparative Literature and Russian double major in college. I went to university in Moscow for a semester and spent the following semester traveling solo through urban parts of Siberia with long visits to St. Petersburg and Moscow.

I have not spoken Russian in five years. Beloit College has a great Russian program, and compared to the other students, I was a hack. I lacked confidence and drive. But I still loved the language. I loved the structure of it, I loved the way the language was built of small blocks that allowed you to take words for complex abstract ideas and break them down in to concrete images. I loved the sound of the language, and more than anything, I loved the literature it produced. I think about returning to Russian at least once a week. But where is the time?

Even now, I sometimes flirt with the idea of becoming a Russian translator. One of the professors in my MFA, Zack Rogow, translates French poetry and when I asked him how he got into it, he said that he just started translating poems that he was curious about.

Once again, proof that all it takes to begin doing something that you want to do, is to just do it.

There are so many paths to follow.

Ladies?

I don't read many female writers. I discovered this when I sat down with my new mentor to talk about what books I'll read for the next year.* He asked me what I liked to read. The only woman on that list was Willa Cather.

I got a little upset about this. With further thought I dredged up Flannery O'Conner, Annie Proulx, Carson McCullers, and Jane Austin. Which all together, is a pretty miserable list when you consider how many books I read in a year. And out of those women, how many are still alive and producing material? One.

So I started asking other writers in our program to see if they could suggest anything. From those suggestions I decided on Toni Morrison's Beloved, Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assasin.

Does this mean something? It feels like it might, although I've got no clue what that is.

I like books with adventure, strong plots, clever language, and beauty. I know for a fact that women must write books like this, but why is it so hard for me to think of them? Why is it that the writers who pop into my head are Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Herman Melville?


* The way that UAA's MFA program is structured, each student is paired with one mentor for each of the three years of the program. The student and that mentor decide on a reading list of three books per month and the student sends the mentor between 25-35 pages of creative writing once a month as well as critical responses to the books read. The pairing of the mentors and mentees occurs in the midst of our two week residency. The day when the pairings are released is like a combination of:

1. Christmas morning.
2. The first day of school.
3. A blind date.

This year I'm paired with David Stevenson, the director of the program.

Blue Fox Literary Society

Nearly every night this last week has ended at the Blue Fox. I realized last night that I have not successfully gone to sleep before 1am for eight nights in a row.

When it's hot, it's hot.

The Blue Fox is everything I ever want from a hangout bar: it's dim, full of low tables with swivel captains' chairs; it's quiet, but still has a jukebox; you can purchase a wide variety of fried foods; it's within walking distance of the dorms; and their logo is a sexy fox, sitting with her bushy tail wrapped around, winking in a knowing way. When I told my Aunt Mimi where we were spending our nights, she was surprised.

"About twenty years ago people were getting stabbed there all the time," she said.

I'll admit that her comment did make my late night walks back to the dorms a bit spookier.

The last two nights they've had karaoke there. One man came for both nights. The first night he sat in one of the low captains' chairs and last night he sat on a low stool at the bar. Both nights he sang karaoke. The Blue Fox runs their karaoke on multiple screens around the bar, so people who are singing can sing from just about anywhere. Often this means that you can't see who the performer is, and if you really want to know, you have to get up and search. The man who sang both nights was the performer that most people searched for. He never stood up to sing, instead he stayed in his seat (clearly chosen for its good view of the screen), leaned back, and sang. Sometimes he closed his eyes. He was a big guy with a big head of gray hair. He had an all-right voice with a deep Sinatra edge. He chose songs like Van Morrison's Into the Mystic and the Rolling Stones' Wild Horses, good classics, songs he clearly knew inside and out. He looked like a man with an average story, except for this. This was what he did. He sang karaoke at the Blue Fox Cocktail Lounge in Midtown Anchorage Alaska.