levi-strauss, nostalgia, deb oh, george harrison, beauty

Nostalgia is such a strange and gut-wrenching sensation, or impetus or a provocation of some latent desire. I suggested, during one of my classes (actually the first time I got up the courage to speak in one of my classes here) that the impetus for fieldwork, or the birth of anthropology and its desire to observe "premodern" man and society, as a desire to see the self in a mirror through which the ethnographer can examine himself, as the "noble savage", or whatnot, without the trappings of modern/Industrial Revolution/post Industrial Revolution, debris (can't think of a better word to end that sentence on). The obsession with the encounter with that which is vanishing, that part of mankind that remains "outside" of the modern world. Of course studying such a group involves an encounter that automatically makes the sacred profane. Overt academic talk aside, this moment really hit a chord within me. First of all, I finally had the balls to speak, as the yanqui, in my class, to point out an opinion that was not exactly where the class conversation was headed, so I was broaching another theme that I was deducing from the texts. I was stating that it was not just a cultural nostalgia that existed in the modern world, but that the very actors that went out and did their research were on some sort of journey on their own that could be read as having a personal search for origins as shaping a desire to find one's self in another, or to escape. Tristes Tropiques is one of my favorite books of all time, and there the narrative of voice of Levi-Strauss is not that of the cold researcher, but of someone in exile; a foreigner who is doing research, but also finds himself on a very personal journey, as he is, after all, not just a Frenchman, but a Jewish Frenchman who finds himself away from his home, looking at sunsets and pondering remembrance. His prose is so incredibly beautiful. How many books dedicate entire chapters to sunsets?

I am very far from home. I listen and look at so many things that my friends are doing in New York, especially those that are involved in art and music. My best friend from high school, Deborah Oh, just has a fantastic article written about her: http://www.in-color.net/index.php/article/deb_oh_up-and-coming_and_here_to_stay/
Upon reading the article, I realized that I haven't heard her sing for two years, don't know any of her compositions. I was listening to them tonight, and it was so strange to hear this voice, a voice I know so well, of someone I truly love, and to hear these words and notes...
One song I had heard before, which is a haunting one anyway, but truly got under my skin because of this maturity in her voice. I remember when Deb first started playing her compositions at Spence, and now I am here, in Buenos Aires, listening to this gorgeous person-gorgeous in every way-and I had this strange mix of feelings: distance and proximity.

In the last few days I have obsessively been watching the following youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utg9inWsSlI&feature=related
The two duets are beautiful. It's Paul Simon doing two acoustic pieces with George Harrison. There are multiple moments that I could go on and on about, but it would be too nerdy and boring and would lose this very thin and already weak line of thought I am pursuing. They do "Here Comes The Sun" first, which just hits me like sharp fine point in the heart. It is flooring in it's simplicity and the harmonizing of the voices is just so fresh and clear. The second song they do is "Homeward Bound". To make the connection between nostalgia and that song, or at least the experience of feeling a bit displaced from "home", or one of multiple homes, would be too obvious. I love George Harrison's voice, especially the verse that begins: "Every day's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines...", and I love the chorus and how, after the arrow that is "Here Comes the Sun", the pain/beauty comes clear to me, because it is directed at people and a place and the experiences I have with these people and with my home city. I am so far away, I love so many of them that I haven't seen in almost two years, but many of them are still quite present in my life. It's not the same as being there, though. But I am on my own journey, too, which is here now. Am I looking for some mirror to see the "pure" me by distancing myself from the familiar?

Buenos Aires makes me feel nostalgic all of the time, which is one of its most powerful and magical qualities. How can I, as someone who is not from here, feel nostalgia? So many things do not relate to me, but I have made them have some relation to me in my mind, through making some emotional connection, a production on my part. I feel such strong emotions about the politics and culture of a place, of it's traditions...How did this happen? Besides my thesis, I am here on my own search, but I also realize, when I watch that youtube video 100 fucking times, that I do feel a displacement, a strange sense of closeness and distance simultaneously. I listen to Deborah and I hear this sexy woman's voice and I think of us being so silly together, and the goosebumps she gave me when would listen to her play for me when I was 16 and how it still has that effect, but this time its more spectral. I can't reach out and touch her, she is reduced to a sound that I can listen to as I do some other activity (although it was hard to use it as background music, I wanted to hear every word so that I could know her, because I don't want to stop knowing anybody I love).

I do feel very at home here, but at some point I will be homeward bound in the most nationalist sense of the term, but it will be more than that. It will be a complete re-adjustment and a coming home that goes beyond just geographical borders. It is a future that is not so close, but then again, "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" and time slips away, or rather escapes through the window while you're not looking. I want to stay on the same plane of time as my friends, I don't want us to feel changes so very differently, although that is inevitable.

I'm definitely not in exile. I am active (not that those in exile usually aren't) and I have very specific plans and goals. I want to do research, but after speaking in class, after watching and listening to moments that fill me with joy and bring me close to tears, I realize that I am doing a project that is much more profound, a project of disassembling; a dissembling that is a type of development. Me estoy desarmando y me estoy desarrollando. Desarmar es desarrollar. I am expanding and breathing and finding spaces and feeling close and distant and beauty and pain. One of the most hair-raising lines of Dylan is "beauty walks the razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine", which is preceded by the line: "I'm living in a foreign country, and I'm bound to cross the line". The first part (which I've written second), literally speaks to my situation and multiple and continual experiences of not being certain of where and how to be, the second part (which I wrote first), always has provoked a strong electric shock through my body. The image of the razor, sharpness, pain. Bob asserts that beauty walks that sharp edge, it's on a border, but it's already in a danger zone. He has a future goal of owning beauty as he is looking back, as the rest of "Shelter From the Storm" is a re-telling in the past tense. He ends his journey with the desire to "turn back the clock to when god and her were born"...we all want to go back, we all want to find what is behind hidden in some secret in the future; we want to find the fulfillment of the present, which aches due to a connection to the past, in the present. Nostalgia is a desire to travel through time, a desire accentuated through a short emotional journey that leaves us with a longing for some higher calling: art, expeditions that lead us to sunsets, cities with crazy taxi drivers.

Maya Angelou has a quote that says that most times we don't remember what people say or do, but how they make us feel. If anthropology is driven by some nostalgia, at least in its formative stages of the discipline, it is based on what we feel, what Claude Levi-Strauss felt when he related remembrance to the sunset. I remember how so many people I love make me feel, even when I hear them singing and know that I am just listening to a recording, or to see something so beautiful it does hurt in such a pleasurable way that you don't wan it to stop. Space is marking distance and proximity as one and the same and anthropology and George Harrison's voice singing about cigarettes are equivalent.

being a masters student in BA

So I enrolled in this public university that has an anthro program run by a friend of a Columbia prof., who I adore and saw when he was here for an anthro conference that I attended at the very end of last September. We had spoken about the fact that I wanted to do a research project about narratives, images, violence and trauma as parts of the struggle to define Argentine national identity, and relating these themes to a specific moment, the 2001-2002 economic crisis (La Crisis). So, it is a Sunday night and I am entering my fourth week of school.

Here is what I can say so far:
The quality of higher education is really really good. The professors are amazing, and even though a masters isn't free at a public university, I'm paying 500 pesos a month. I would convert that into dollars, but by the time I finish writing this, the value of the peso may have changed, so I will leave it up to whoever is reading this to look up the most current value and do the math themselves. The paying on a monthly basis is weird. I paid late, and it really just didn't matter.

There is no: here is your syllabus, now go to BookCulture on 112th St. and they will have all of the books for your class ready for you to go and spend a ridiculous amount of money on. Everything is photocopies. It really adds up, when you have to constantly print and copy, and it's a stupid thing to complain about, but it is such a hassle to even get the readings. I have classes in two different buildings that are their own institutes, both of which make up the Centro de Antropología Social at the UNSAM (Universidad Nacional de [General] San Martin). There are the administrative staff that are in charge, among many many other tasks, of getting all of the materials to the photocopy shop, each institute uses it's own, the closest. One my classes just got it's readings ready the end of the third week of class, but we still had a ton of reading assignments. The prof. kindly suggested that we do more of our reading and we pointed to him that they weren't available yet, which troubled him, but was out of his control. At Columbia one spends a lot of time feeling guilty about the reading they never get to, I am trying to let go of the shit-I-didn't-do-my-reading-for-class guilt, because if you actually are incapable of accessing the readings, it's a good excuse that everyone in your class has.

There are a lot of foreigners. Venezuelans, Colombians, Brazilians, French.

Anthropology is taught in a much more traditional manner, as higher education in Argentina is highly influenced by French and British models, at least in terms of the social sciences, or even classifying anthro as a social science (of course I'm talking about social/cultural, not medical, forensic, etc.). I'm scared that after taking classes called "Anthropology of the War Machine" or "Hidden Worlds, Secrets Spaces: Childhood and Modernity", I'm too out there for sort of conversations or class topics, but it's a an "out there" that really needs this grounding. I need to learn how to do fieldwork, which is a required class, and definitely a huge gap in my ability to do any sort of project instead of just thinking about it.

I was set up with an adviser as soon as was admitted who works on the same theme as want to, which is the anti-undergrad CU experience. He answers emails, he is pushing me hard, he talks ideas and methods through with me and he is quite impressive.

It's weird to be the girl from the States. People just assume I don't know Spanish, which is a sort of a strange assumption, as it would be sort of strange for me to keep going to three hour classes if language were an issue. Also, after almost two years here, I better not have language issues, except for academic writing (that will be my biggest challenge). Of all of the foreigners in my classes, I have been here the longest. On Friday, I was sitting with my maybe sort of new friends, one is from Venezuela, a guy, one girl from Colombia, and four Argentine girls. The passed the mate around, but never offered it to me, which I could write a mini-ethnography on. I've probably had ten million times more mate than the Luis or Marcela, who are South American, but from very different cultures than that of Argentina, whereas I am seen as such an outsider, that I'm considered so distant from so many things, yet I know the city better, or understand the biting irony more. I do have the non-native speaker accent, though, and so I am always thought of as this complete weirdo non-native speaking yanqui who is super-informed about Argentine politics. It's so common to be from the States or Europe and to have an Argentine ask you "why are you here" and laugh a the ridiculous idea of someone from the "primer mundo" choosing to be in Argentina.

I love being a student, which I knew before, but this new huge life change is just really showing. I love talking about ideas, doing reading, being in classes, loving a topic so much you just want to keep reading and talking and researching. So I have confirmed, not surprisingly, what my passion is, and when I do my doctorate in the States I will have had my first graduate student experience in Buenos Aires, and that will be one other reminder of how much this place will mean for the rest of my life. I will always remember this city as being a huge part of my transformation into adulthood, whatever that is, as a space of transformation in general, or of finding myself as I was already, but coming to understand it more...
My time here gets richer and richer. I know that I don't want to spend my life here, but I do know that my life has been and is being hugely shaped by having lived here, now including on an academic and intellectual formation of my mind (if that makes any sense).

taxi rides

I think I could justify blowing all my birthday money away on taxi rides through Buenos Aires. When you know you are getting cheated out of your money, you are at least seeing routes and buildings and landscapes of buildings and people that are all new. Even though transportation can take so much of one's day, it is easy to forgot how very big Buenos Aires is. I saw a different part of the city today, which, once I was at my destination, where I have been before, was no longer different, but the route, which on first thought made no sense to me, brought me there as if it were a different place. I saw a neighborhood, and the lines connecting it to mine, as reconstructed.

I didn't see the underbelly of any neighborhood, but I saw coming from a different geographical angle, coming through from a different street via a route that I didn't even know was possible. And the ride was spectacular! The cabdriver could see that I was questioning his every turn. He repeatedly try to put me at ease, explaining his reasoning (which was very clear, but still seemed unbelievable to me. It was later in the afternoon, probably around 5:30 pm, which is one of my favorite times of day because of how the sunlight becomes really yellow, not just light, but a light with color, and it changes the colors of the buildings and creates shadows and reflections. I always loved walking through Central Park at that time, after 4ish in the afternoon in spring or fall. Perhaps it is one of the most flattering hours for any city, although in Buenos Aires there is something for each hour.

I always loved taking a taxi across central park, from the West Side back home to the Upper-East, at night with the window cracked open. I would feel like I was in some scene from The Great Gatsby, absorbing the grandeur of New York. In Buenos Aires you don't fell the arcing turn in it's elegant half loop, the suavity of the return, you are always subject to the chaos of traffic, or just the possibility of chaos. A violent chaos, but not necessarily violent, as in something will hurt you, but the potential for everything to go off plan. There is so much life in this city, and so much passion, maybe because it's a life that is really incorporated as constant survival instinct, a sensation that everything could go wrong. Preparation is so useless.

I am yet to take a taxi in which the seat belt works, and every time I test to see if it does I feel like I have "tourist" painted across my forehead. A true porteña would probably never even think of the seat belt. I go through this whole neurosis of: I am being such a foreigner to care about the seat belt, if something happens and I die and I could have survived had I just strapped myself in, my father's I told you so will haunt me in the afterlife, and so the seat belt becomes this weird cultural encounter between two mentalities: that which tries to be ready and reduce damage, and that which says, fuck it, this shitty car is going to go really fast and pay no attention to the traffic etiquette and I may as well resign myself to that fact and enjoy the adrenaline. The seat belt betrays me in its inability to even attempt to save through its inadequacy and it betrays me desire to keep a low profile, pretend I am like everybody else here, not be so foreign.

vacation

Back from the south. What a ton of good it did for me. I am seriously so much healthier for having done. It was a very different trip form last year's. First of all I was alone, not with the lovely Noah
Rosenblum nor the incredible Nicholas Hayes.

I went to the Neuquén lake region, San Martín de los Andes and Villa La Angostura. All green mountains, all brilliantly sparkling water. It was amazing to be alone. I felt so safe and it was filled with vacationing Argentines.

On the recommendation of a friend I treated myself to a birthday auto-regalo (probably 506th) and went to a Relais & Chateaux called Las Balsas with a view of the bay with the mountains in the not-to-far distance. Beautiful. Treated myself to the té completo, which is really meant for at least 3 people, maybe 2 hungry people. I went for it. It was exquisite. Finished it off with a scotch and sat there for more than two hours as the sun went down. Treated like a queen for a few hours while bumming around out of one bag and two pairs of pants.

I made sure to bring one nice silk shirt, knowing that I would be attending such a posh place. My shirt, as expected, had gotten quite wrinkled after a few days of sitting in my bag. My mother taught me that if you take a hot shower and hang a garment in the bathroom, it's like steaming your clothes for free. Unfortunately the hostel bathroom was very small and the water didn't exactly stay in the shower stall, so my shirt ended up wrinkle-less and sopping wet. So I ended up 15 km from the hostel, but really in a different world all together, with a damp shirt...at least it wasn't obvious and I was sure to disguise my travel fatigue with make-up. A beautiful day of luxury.

The next day went to go hike to the Bosque de los Arrayanes, this forest of strange trees (although they may technically not be trees, but whatever, flora of some type with trunks and branches). Beautiful.

So much more of Patagonia to see, such a long country. So much more of Argentina to see. What a beautiful, beautiful place. I felt such inner-peace and determination as to what my goals are, what I am striving for. It wasn't like I resolved anything, more like everything was clarified.

My camera broke...second one since I've been in Argentina.