“I do not complain about anything and i almost like it here, although i have never been here before and know nothing about this place.” - Andrei Monastyrski
Immigrants Get It. Or I get Immigrants
… Why do I write about summer all year round? Because I was born in the summer. Because Leningrad’s sub-Artic White Nights madness was the first form of madness I had ever encountered. Because as a typically asthmatic Russian boy, summertime was the only time I was allowed to romp through the fields and streams of nearby Latvia as a fully fledged alive person. Because my first crushes were formed in the summer, those tawny peach-fuzz-coated legs, those utilitarian, slightly masculine T-shirts on a new teenage frame. Because of rooftops. Because I climbed some kind of Fifth Avenue chimney - fear of heights and my own hairy legs, be damned - just to save face before some pretty high-school girls. Because when I walk down a summery Brooklyn street everyone is visible and highly human, and in Manhattan they are slower than usual, those stressed-out faces crowned with milky gelato smiles. Because of upstate, that great Subaru exodus up the Hudson, the threat of apple orchards and migrating burrito trucks, the Bard-ness of it all.
But there is the other summer. The summer that bites back. Or pecks back…
Summer is a Latvian chicken. We make foolish choices. We think we’re young again. We run with outstretched arms toward an object of love and it pecks us and pecks us until we’re standing there snot-nosed and teary in the middle of Astor Place and the sun sets fire to our Penguin shirts and all that is left to do is go to our air-conditioned homes and ponder the cruelty of our finest season. Autumn, on the other hand, is just fine.
— GARY SHTEYNGART (New York Magazine, June 27 - July 4, 2011)
Living in Other People’s Apartments, Sleeping in Other People’s Beds
… Summer 2010
“Time passed. The seasons came and went. Like passengers in the metro they blended together. In the spring we looked for mushrooms; in the fall we found them. In summer we took warm showers at each other’s small apartments; and in the dead of winter we swam outdoors in what was then the pool that used to be a cathedral, and which is now the cathedral that used to be a pool.
Happily, we bought bread in stores named “Bread.”
We played cards without a full deck.
We tossed kopecks into canals and made naive wishes for the future: the redhead for harmony between black and white Americans; I for democracy in Russia; Tanya for a blue passport.”
— Twelve Stories of Russia: A Novel, I Guess by A.J. Perry (Book 4, Section 3)
Winter 2005 in St. Petersburg, RU a friend of mine lent me this book. I read it during a feverish, cold, and miserable winter. I gave it back to her in the spring. August 2010 I spend a lot of time showering, sleeping, and eating in friend’s apartments in NYC and I think about this passage in particular. 8/31/10 the book comes in the mail, a birthday present to myself… with it’s own inscription (To Maura, Love Maureen, December 2004).
oh, universe
