Open Question Details

While reading Fredric Jameson, I came across this quote by Chrystia Freeman (Sale of the Century, 2000): "Yet, at least for the intelligentsia, life in the fin de siecle USSR had its compensations. No one had very much money, but no one had to do very much work, either. The result was a whole society that acted as if it had never left college: intense, emotional, time-consuming friendships; endless hours spent drinking tea or vodka and discussing the meaning of life; the avid pursuit of esoteric spiritual or creative interests. If middle-class Russians sometimes seem perversely nostalgic for the Soviet Union, one reason is that the collapse of communism forced them horribly and abruptly to grow up" (p. 114). Feel free to problematize the related notions of "growing" and "intellectual" and "college" at will.

For Stephanie

Bar Scene Minneapolis: The Hat in the Corner

Not everyone can pull that off,
but you make wearing hats
look good again.
Maybe it is the symmetries
of facial geometry—a
curved brim parallel to the taught jaw—
there is a nostalgic appeal
to the workaday look of 1953,
particularly in these days
of manicured ruffians and
mass-marketed hoodlums.
Or maybe it is the rumpled quality
that draws me in:
tendrils of dark hair escaping
the fabric’s cockeyed slant.
What I like most, however,
is the way the hat shelters
your dark eyes,
winking and mischievous,
until you look up,
laughing riotously at a joke
so inappropriate that it was whispered
behind a swaying fist and a sweating bar glass,
punching the air with exclamations
of “you can’t, you didn’t”
and “again.”

Fireflies in June

Flitting about the lawn outside my window.