Feb 292012
Feb 252012
When we are home, we don’t need to talk about it. To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you; it is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual location. The object of [nostalgic] longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia. When we start speaking of [...] Continue reading >
Feb 232012
Anna Porter’s "The Ghosts of Europe" explores the state of affairs in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, 20 years after the end of state socialism. In each country she discovers that the historical triumphs and, more frequently, traumas remain far from being settled history. Two decades of free speech and free market may actually have intensified the debates among competing versions of history. To paraphrase Jan Gross, whom Porter quotes, "In order to reclaim its past, [insert Central European country's name here] will have to tell its past anew." [...] Continue reading >
Feb 212012
The upcoming early parliamentary election in Slovakia reminded me of a different sort of neither-here-nor-there handicap new immigrants experience: I call it the civic limbo. Until mid-2000′s you had to be present on the territory of Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to vote.* If you had moved to the United States, you were unable to vote in your old country’s elections and, as a non-citizen, not yet allowed to vote in your new one’s. You were left out of the democratic process anywhere. True enough, to the extent [...] Continue reading >
Feb 192012
If I want to show what a man who comes from the East of Europe is like, what can I do but tell about myself?” —Czeszław Miłosz in "Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition"
Feb 172012
Visiting and then writing about the U.S. has a solid tradition among the French, but it’s safe to say the late Jean Beaudrillard‘s 1986 work"America" hasn’t made the list of books covering their country that Americans would showcase. Even the most cynical among my new compatriots would hesitate to call their country "a giant hologram", a "blank solitude," or a "narcissistic refraction." Abstract hyperbole defines Beaudrillard’s "America". On the ground, it is the desert that defines Beaudrillard’s America. He can’t get enough of it because "you are delivered from all depth [...] Continue reading >
Feb 152012
Last year’s final issue of The Economist featured an article exploring euphemisms—expressions that substitute neutral, ambiguous wording for a potentially uncomfortable one. The article “Making murder respectable” alludes to the experience every immigrant knows all too well as a cultural and language outsider. American euphemisms are in a class of their own, principally because they seem to involve words that few would find offensive to start with, replaced by phrases that are meaninglessly ambiguous: bathroom tissue for [toilet] paper, dental appliances for false teeth, previously owned rather than used, wellness [...] Continue reading >
Feb 132012
Trumer Pils is a memory of Salzburg I never had. I visited the city of Trumer’s origin with my father in 1992. We stopped there for a few hours on a train trip to Switzerland. I recall two experiences from our sightseeing walk: We walked up a hill and entered the Maria Himmelfahrt church that belonged to the nunnery Stift Nonnberg. The church was empty. No sooner had I sat down in a pew to take the place in, that the nuns began to sing. The choir’s acapella chant echoed [...] Continue reading >
Feb 112012
There are many nostalgic objects on immigrant bookshelves, and still the narrative as a whole is not that of nostalgia. Diasporic souvenirs do not reconstruct the narrative of one’s roots but rather tell the story of exile. They are not symbols but transitional objects that reflect multiple belonging. The former country of origin turns into an exotic place represented through its arts and crafts usually admired by foreign tourists. Newly collected memories of exile and acculturation shift the old cultural frameworks; [diasporic] souvenirs can no longer be interpreted within [...] Continue reading >
Feb 092012
When I read "You Must Go and Win," I knew I not only had to review it on account of its subject matter’s relevance to American Robotnik, but also try to interview the author Alina Simone. We talked yesterday via Gmail Chat about Russia and Russianness, about music and writing, and about doing your own thing. The first question was hers, about my experience reading her memoir: "Are you scarred?" American Robotnik: In your New York Times T Style interview, you talk about growing up as an American kid and, later, [...] Continue reading >
Feb 072012
Positive psychology shows that the pride in your country correlates with well-being. “Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life,” establishes a recent Science Daily article that highlights new research showing the source of that patriotic pride makes a huge difference in the level of life satisfaction. Civic nationalism makes people happier than ethnic nationalism. Whereas ethnic nationalism is based on ancestral, racial, or religious terms (or a combination thereof), civic nationalism springs from pride in a country’s laws and institutions. A study of [...] Continue reading >
Feb 052012
Articles and Blog Posts "Paved but Still Alive" by Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, January 6, 2012 – How to take parking lots seriously as public spaces. "The US schools with their own police" by Chris McGreal, The Guardian, January 9, 2012 – Kids’ bad behavior gets increasingly criminalized; Foucault is laughing in his grave. "Five Things the Census Revealed About America in 2011" by Brookings, January 17, 2012 "The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, January 30, 2012 – “Why do we lock up so many people?” [...] Continue reading >
Feb 042012
The Devil appears to a man on his deathbed. “I’m going to give you a choice between Heaven and Hell,” he says. “And just to make it fair, I’m going to let you see them first.” Heaven is, well, Heaven: halos, harps—pleasant but dull. Hell, however, looks terrific: drinking, music, dancing girls. “I’ll take Hell,” the man says. Once he dies, though, Hell turns out to be exactly what you would have imagined in the first place: flames, screams, demons, pitchforks. “Wait a minute,” the man complains. “This isn’t [...] Continue reading >
Feb 032012
Alina Simone’s critically (and, on occasion, uncritically) acclaimed collection of personal essays "You Must Go and Win," documents her circuitous path through music industry’s wilderness and the discovery of her Russian roots. You must go and read it. At the risk of overgeneralizing: Simone deadpans as perhaps only an Eastern European can; her voice engages as perhaps only an American storyteller’s is able to. Simone has been called "a frenzied, Eastern European musician’s version of humorist David Sedaris." Both Simone and Sedaris find humor in the banality of life; both are [...] Continue reading >
Feb 012012
One of my fondest memories of Bratislava, where I went to college in the mid-1990′s, is joining my friend Zuzana at the Hungarian Cultural Institute for monthly concerts of Ghymes, a Hungarian folk band from southern Slovakia. The concerts contributed to my sense of Bratislava as a place in Europe’s center. Peoples and cultures have mingled for centuries in the area where the Danube and Morava rivers as well as the contemporary countries of Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia meet. Heard at the foot of the Carpathian Mountain Range, Ghymes reminded us that the vastness of the [...] Continue reading >