by
n+1
View all notes
In this way I managed to get locked in the archive; I was sitting at my carrel and lost track of time, and suddenly all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way in the dark into the hallway with the administrative offices, where I finally found a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.
“Get out?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”
“Oh,” I said. “But how are you going to get out?”
the website version is slightly different for some reason
We drove by another billboard: “Ted Lempert for State Senate.”
“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”
I said that I didn’t know, but that I thought he wanted to be a senator.
“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladimir. Vladimir Lempert.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “I’m reading a novel by Balzac now about somebody called Louis Lambert.” I tried to say “Lambert” to sound like “Lempert”.
We drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.
i enjoyed this
also, noticed another diff between the print version & the web version: the print version got rid of " but I guess the connection was still pretty weak" before the last sentence (the final result is way stronger and more deadpan imo)
I told her about my freshman advisor, a middle-aged British woman with a kind, weary demeanor, who worked in the telecommunications office and had never once known the answer to a single question I had asked.
“The telecommunications office?” Anna repeated.
I nodded. “I would see her when I went to pay my phone bill.”
“Did she have any other connection to Harvard, other than working in the telecommunications office? Was she an alumna?”
“Yeah, actually, she got an MA in the seventies, in Old Norse literature.”
Anna stared at me. “Old Norse literature? What good is an MA in Old Norse literature?”
“I think it’s useful in telecommunications work,” I said.
the print version cut the last sentence in this extract: "This was supposed to be a joke, but she didn’t laugh." (YES much better without the explanation)
“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”
I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had such different effects on us.
the web version has everything after the colon replaced with "I had been assigned Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose” in a creative-writing class, and it had meant nothing to me! And I had thought it was because I wasn’t Jewish. But even Ma, the Muslim Chinese, nodded when he heard “My First Goose.”"
some of the first para is changed too
The film professor had an even worse cold than I did. It felt magical, like a gift. We met in a basement room full of flickering blue screens. I told him about my mother, and we both sneezed continually. That was the only freshman seminar I got into.
“Thanks,” I said. The following Monday, I went back to the music building to look at the seating chart. My name wasn’t there, not even in the second violins, nowhere. I could feel my face change. I tried to control it, but I could feel it wasn’t working. I knew that everyone and his cousin at Harvard played the violin, it was practically mandatory, and there was no way they could all fit in a single orchestra—the stage would collapse. Still, I had never seriously considered that I might not get in.
I didn’t have a religion, and I didn’t do team sports, and for a long time orchestra had been the only place where I felt like part of something bigger than I was, where I was able to strive and at the same time to forget myself. The loss of that feeling was extremely painful. It would have been bad enough to be someplace where there were no orchestras, but it was even worse to know that there was one, and lots of people were in it—just not me. I dreamed about it almost every night.
I wasn’t taking private lessons anymore—I didn’t know any teachers in Boston, and I didn’t want to ask my parents for more money. For the first few months, I still practiced every day, alone, in the basement, but it began to feel like a sad, weird activity, disconnected from the rest of human enterprise. Soon just the smell of the violin—the glue or the wood or whatever it was that smelled like that when you opened the case—made me feel melancholy. I still sometimes woke up on Saturdays, the day I used to go to music school, feeling excited to go and play; then I would remember how matters stood.
I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn’t understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.
Russian met every day, and quickly started to feel internalized and routine and serious, even though what we were learning were things that tiny children knew if they had been born in Russia. Once a week, we had a conversation class with an actual Russian person, Irina Nikolaevna, who had been a drama teacher in Petersburg when it was still Leningrad. She always came running in a minute or two late, talking nonstop in Russian in a lively and emotional way. Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn’t understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian. Only Svetlana understood almost everything, because Serbo-Croatian was so similar.
Never in my life had I seen such a boring movie. I chewed nine consecutive sticks of gum, to remind myself I was still alive. The boy in front of me fell asleep and started to snore. The professor didn’t notice because he himself had left after the first half hour. “I’ve already seen this film several times,” he said.
After a while I felt worried about leaving Svetlana alone, so I let Ralph walk ahead. “I definitely see what you mean, about how he might be gay,” Svetlana said. Dread shot through my chest. The feeling of having betrayed someone was just as bad as the feeling of being betrayed. It was worse.
“Svetlana!”
“What? He can’t hear me, don’t be paranoid.”
Nothing about Ralph’s back indicated that he had or had not heard her.
How could I have talked about him to Svetlana—how could I have given her any information about him at all? It occurred to me how sorry I would be if even Hannah heard the way I talked about her sometimes. How were you supposed to talk about people?
Casanova see