Stone Street

Now available, the first ever episode of Stone Street, the new series of podcasts on which I've started work here at Embassy Vilnius.  As the website says,

Every week, in its new series of podcasts called "Stone Street" the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius will explore life in Lithuania, America and the spaces in between through interviews with prominent and interesting people.

The first episode, at the link above, is an interview with Aistė Ptakauskė, a Lithuanian writer/translator/director/producer of novels, plays, screenplays, and television series.  Aistė is currently the head writer for the Lithuanian television production group Videometra.  She received a master's degree from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and was awarded a residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Center for the translation of the novel 'Beautiful Losers', by renowned singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

So far, in addition to the interview with Aistė, I've got two more of these interviews in the can (as they say), and am looking forward to as many more as we can possibly do.  Obviously they're aimed at Lithuanian, American, Eastern-European, Post-Soviet, etc. sorts of audiences, but I hope and think they'll be rich enough to be meaningful for any curious listener.  So please do subscribe to the podcasts if you're able, and enjoy.  Let us know what you think, and tell us about any technical issues you may have, in the comments section.  Happy listening.

Common Problems Associated with Having a Heart

 
Yesterday the US Under-17 boys basketball team, in town to compete in the U17 world championships, visited an orphanage in Kaunas, and I was fortunate to be able to tag along as an extra photographer and minder from the embassy community.  It was a beautiful event.  The American guys were friendly, funny, patient, generous, thoughtful, and the Lithuanian kids, shy at first, eventually lit up like flood lights.  The thing that stays with me though, is what one might call the American guys' honesty.  What do I mean?  I mean that in their natural teenage indifference, I think the guys on the team intuited something that's easy for those of us with overdeveloped senses of empathy and other such molten emotions to run right by: the fact that these orphan kids were more kids than orphans.  Put another way, the American kids didn't care that the Lithuanian kids were orphans.  They cared that they were kids.  And what do kids do?  They goof off with round rubber spheres.  They don't need to tell themselves stories about themselves to do it.  They just play.  This is a blessing.  Because for all the adults, it's maybe a little too easy to look at the orphan kids and see nothing but heartbreak.  (One of the coaches asked if the kids at the orphanage had mostly lost parents to accidents or illnesses or some such; the answer was no, they were mostly just abandoned--my God, what a brutal, unbearable word!  Abandoned!)  To view the kids this way, though, obviously denies them the full measure of respect due them as individual humans.  They don't want to be orphans, they want to be people.  To hell with our pity and clichés.  True, one or two of the tricky, manipulative ones (let's say 'opportunistic') might have caught on that he or she can milk the whole poor orphan thing for some pretty sweet goodies, but even such conniving is a sign of a unique mind at work.  More power to it, I say.

And so here's to the American guys who didn't prejudge, or assume really anything, who just played, and thereby let the Lithuanian kids develop more fully into their own personalities and roles: leaders, observers, hustlers, doubters, clowns, stars.

As for me, I'm such a putz--I stood there with tears in my eyes, wearing my sunglasses the whole time so nobody would know.

Quote of the Week

From the RSO (Regional Security Officer) to his charges here at Embassy Vilnius, urging them not to be gawkers, or worse yet participants, but rather immediately to clear out of any place where they smell real trouble brewing:

"Guys, please, nobody wants to clean up after you.  Fighting is paperwork-intensive."

Just What I Saw in Klaipeda, and No More

Once again I find myself having to account for a very long spell between posts, this one almost two months.  One might think that the flurry of activity which has intervened between the last post and this would have merited some discussion, some reportage at least.  Moving to Vilnius, for instance (which we have done, successfully, I can report at least that).  But I know from experience that there's a danger in over-attending to the emotional and experiential minutiae of one's days.  Put more directly, it's counterproductive, and just dumb to keep talking and talking about everything.  Forming impressions is fine, even good, even crucial for writers, analysts, reporter-types, but trying to wring too much out of them, too much personal meaning, is misguided as hell.  I learned that the hard way, and I'm not going to muck up doing the same thing again.

That said, I understand that there are some few out there, friends, family, associates, who might enjoy hearing some personal news or insights from out here on the edge of Europe, and I don't imagine it would be grossly out of balance to try to provide such.  To snap a picture now and then of old, pretty Vilnius, or to offer a comment on some facet of life here.  Nor, for that matter, does all the content have to be about place.  One still reads books, listens to music, watches films, and those were the things which seemed worthy of mention before--why wouldn't they remain thusly worthy, independent of location?

So in the tone and spirit of this new straightforwardness, I'll post a picture here below.  It's a funny bronze statue in Kleipeda, which is a tough kind of port city on the Baltic Sea coast.  Nina and I went there a couple weeks back, she for work, I tagging along behind for grins.  It was sunny and windy and chilly, it was a bit of an ugly town in beautiful weather.  German tour groups in the hotel, and in the town square, where Hitler apparently once made a speech.  Cranes and barges in the port.  Stalinist apartment blocks, strip joints across from school yards.  Green water.

And this character, weary-seeming, hauling himself up out of that canal for what must feel to him like the millionth time.  That was Kleipeda.  Or at least what I saw there.

Einstein vs. Nietzsche

Apologies, first of all, for the long layoff between posts, but (and here, perhaps, if ever there were one, is a message for the 21st century) sometimes there just isn't a hell of a lot to say.

Recently, though, I ran across a couple of thoughts on creativity which, at first, seem contradictory, and so thought I'd throw them out on the blog, a tidbit for bored readers, friends and checkers-in.

First, from Einstein, the pithier of the two: "Creativity is the residue of wasted time."

Second, from Nietzsche: "The greatest creators are the hardest workers."

I should note that I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche there, but the point, in any case, is that of course the two notions are really not contradictory at all; rather, they're complementary.  This is a distinction too often overlooked these days by rushed undergrads, indignant super-advocates and unctuous pontificators of all sorts.  Right?  But it's fun nonetheless, to think about.  The sickly, desperate Nietzsche urging maniacal devotion from his cold bedchamber, and the zany, incandescent Einstein riding a bus, goofing off, dreaming of light.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? Read a Novel

I don't terribly often link to other sites, and it's not like my flagging an article that was already in the New York Times is going to earn said article any wider dissemination, but I just couldn't resist this one: Your Brain on Fiction.

So apparently reading fiction makes you smarter.  Kinda seems like something a lot of us already knew, but hey, we fiction writers, assaulted, staggering away from the hulking threat of obsolescence, need all the help we can get.  Maybe I should order up some bumper stickers: If you value your emotional acuity, thank a novelist.  

I figure as long as it fits on a ribbon it'll sell, right?

John Adams! St. Paul! America!

 
Nearing 90, well-advanced and suffering his dotage, without the powerful aid of his wife and great friend Abigail for many years, John Adams, the querulous successor to George Washington as president of the newly united states of America, supposedly stopped during a walk in the Massachusetts countryside to marvel at the intricacy and majesty of a wildflower.  He bid his companion admire the sight as well, and the two of them stood in the road quietly until Adams, overcome, shouted to the fields and orchards, and to the heavens, "Rejoice, evermore!  Rejoice!  Evermore!"  As played by Paul Giamatti in the HBO miniseries based on Adams' life, the old ex-president giggled and gripped his walking stick, tried to arrange himself into a position of worship on his knees.  He couldn't do it, he was too old and infirm, but by God he tried.  He tried to meet the moment with all the fervor of gratitude, appreciation, awe, engagement and bursting joy that it demanded.  He had life, and this was what one must do with life: Rejoice in it.  Rejoice!

Two hundred years later, I walk out each day into the Virginia sunshine with Adams and Whitman and Emerson and Saul Bellow and William Kennedy behind me, and with my papers and books and songs, all those consolations of learning and feeling before me, and I think, Yes!  Yes, John Adams, yes!  Rejoice!

Well.  What of it?  Such giddiness and overstatement.  Adams' exhortation was drawn from a letter of St. Paul.  And it occurs to me that had I encountered it in the context of scripture, I'd have bristled at it.  Why?  Why does it move me so as part of an impressionistic (if well-documented) biography, when it would've chafed as a doctrinal imperative?  Am I really so brazen, so completely unwilling to be instructed that I can't recognize or accept fine advice when it comes from any kind of (putative) institutional authority?  Apparently.  But of this growling cockiness I'm sure God is aware, and I suspect that in His better moments He's inclined to forgive me for it.  I am an American, after all, and certain things can't be helped.

The greater difficulty, as I see it, is in accounting for the very sudden luck in my life that has made it rather easier than it otherwise might have been to do all this exuberant hollering.  However cavalier I might be about preferring John Adams' visceral joy to St. Paul's admonitions, I at least can remember that in any event there are a great many people in my life, dear friends and readers of this blog, as well as untold multitudes in America and throughout the world who cannot but consider themselves more bound to heartbreak, emptiness and disappointment than to celebration.  I am not insensitive to the concrete sources of despair in people's lives.  I felt them acutely in my own life until very, very recently.  And I felt vexed and betrayed by joy--I had the strongest sense of it, I understood and venerated it, I felt the aching need of it everywhere.  But I couldn't grasp it.  Now I can.  I can swim in it, and I do, unreservedly.

But how did such a miracle occur?  My best (if still faltering) answer is that it isn't a miracle.  That in fact, it's a mistake to perceive discontinuity in my circumstances, or in any of our circumstances.  Better to understand experience as a spectrum, lived continuously and without end. At each pole of this spectrum is an almost incomprehensible fullness--at one pole, the fullness of joy; at the other, the fullness of anguish.  In their fullness, the two modes find a complimentary perfection.  This is the only way I can make sense of my current joy, by reference to my own (previous) and others' (current) sadness.  And it's the hope of the joyful man that by reference to his joy, others will be able make sense of their sadness.  That's my hope.  It's a blundering hope, this is a blundering post, and mine is a blundering life.  But it's mine now, in a way that it hasn't been before.  It's mine because of the blunders, and so I blunder on, rejoicing.  Rejoicing in fortune!  Rejoicing in art!  Rejoicing in human failure and error and ridiculousness!  Rejoicing in America and animals and the strange design of everything!  Everything!  Rejoice, everything!  Rejoice!