Theunionofkevins

Theunionofke

vins!

!! ! .! !

Jun’15!

I read History. Google Hearts BBC Sport - Football - Tables BBC Sport - Football BBC Sport Labour leadership nominations closing - BBC News UK - BBC News Home - BBC News voice over jobs - Google -da axtar Working for Language Partners Language Partners writing, publishing Google-da axtar Job Search Personality test: what job woul… Life and Style The Guardian Job Seeker Creative With Materials? Teach…e Or in St. Petersburg, Russia. Native ESL Teachers/Volunteers… The Coldest City In The World Job Seeker Job Seeker!

!

There’s more. Earlier Today bazar,14, İyun, 2015 Clear History List the concepts rather than cram the page with figurative expressive symbolical depictions of momentarily perceived, let’s call it, moodiness. The self-loathing, for instance, - my own ‘Ma nausée’- wasn’t really self-loathing, just a habit of thought, a prejudice of mine, or to put it, redundantly synonymously and comedically disappointingly, a kind of premature evaluation; and the emptiness pointlessness, just a passing phase. A dog run to the garden gate to bark out its territory. Other metaphors. Gone now. !

!

But before I forget, this is Baku. Life here. The Games are on if you’re interested in that kind of thing, that is, sport and stuff. Not really for me, though History might show Medal Table among my acts of consciousness. It’s been Baku for two months plus now. A few days ago Azad and I were sitting in front of one of those big statues in between walking aimlessly about town. He asked if I had uncles. Yes, but I haven’t seen them for, I calculated, eleven years. It was a wedding. The next time might be a funeral or another wedding. Or perhaps never again. When you were born they came to see you, they took pleasure in you. They have helped to form you. But, you don’t like them, you forget them. You are not interested in them. Now you’re in Baku. You will forget me. The difference is they are not important to me. In Baku perhaps. But not much generally.!

!

A man asked for a light. Where you from? England, where are you from? Thank you.! !

We walked past a woman feeding her baby with a bottle on a bench. You know, where I come from, in some countries, you might see the woman feeding the baby from her breast on that bench.

This is wrong. This is much. She can use a bottle. That is not tradition. It’s her choice, it’s accepted. We accept it, we notice it but we don’t stare. So, it’s right to do it but wrong to look. You keep that much tradition. Yes. You want to get away, you talk about it a lot. To escape. Suppose you escape and in your freedom you see things which you don’t like or don’t understand, have you really escaped or would you return to where you came from? But, wherever you go you will see such things. Most things move change develop, not much stays still. Buildings change, material changes. Technology moves on. Some changes are good. Ideas develop. Identity, for example.

Identity changes or it stays still. It can do both. You will always have identity even if the identity holder has changed its identity. How? It is what we belong to and what belongs to us. We can share it with a group, where we all believe or do the same thing, or say the same things and we can guard it privately. Protect it from attack. We can also say what identity is not: I am this, and not that. I belong but you do not. The question never goes away wherever you escape to. Identity. Yes. Both private and public. Intimate and not. Yes. Did you know that in Ireland recently they voted to accept gay marriage. Two men or two women can now marry each other. Oh. No. Perhaps in the future it will be animals. Marrying animals. You can’t predict such things. But this is a question of

the culture, of ideas moving on. This is about identity. Allowing the identity of the other to be, without bashing it it, you know, hitting it or hurting it. It’s against the tradition. Some traditions are good. !

! !

Today very consciously is June 16th. Consciously because it connects, it has skeins. Some call it Bloomsday. This year I decided to call it Bloomsday to Azad. ‘Ulysses’ etc. was mentioned.

There’s a story here, without wanting to bang on about it. Nevertheless, banging on, today is the day, portentously, I stop smoking. You smoke too much, had been Azad’s words this time near the big monument a few days ago. Yes.!

!

Jun or Jul ’14!

You smoke more than I recall. We are outside one of our old pubs in Bloomsbury. She is over doing some research for a book. We quite enjoy this moment. She’ll write about it too. We’re going to share a room in a cheapish B&B just off Russell Square. We’re doing old haunts. Bloomsbury was our home. The Celtic Hotel is its name. It has significance resonance resilience. It doesn’t disappear, it doesn’t change. We seem to like that unchangingness unuprootableness. Though we don’t take the theology too tangibly. These days she’s in the USA at university in Utah. A literature teacher. Her students are often members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Theology, is there somewhere. When she writes about this she’ll recall some of that year, twentywhatever years ago. She will write that I could be cartoonishly cruel and that I now smoke more than she recalls and that I used to ignore her. All those cigarettes do not unsmoke themselves, will be said or written. I’ll write it differently. I shall say that there will be three separate single beds in our Celtic room. She will occupy the one nearest the window and I the one nearest the door. The middle one will be left empty. I’ll quote my joke about the middle empty bed being that of a dead sibling who (mysteriously) died (in childhood). I’m not sure if that’s how I will have told it. The night will be celibate as all our nights were. That’s me, not her, and it’s not theological.!

! !

Jun ’00!

Could well be 16th or a couple of days either side. I’m in Princeton visiting. She and her new boyfriend both do something academic at Princeton. He’s said to be avant garde. Later he’ll be known as a conceptualist. We are sitting in a their secret bar, where the students don’t go. It’s cool I want to say because I’m in America and they say it. I can use such words. But, not just the word. I feel it, cool. Back on smoking target I abandoned the food for cigarettes. I stopped smoking portentously at the start of the new millennium and have saved money enough to visit the United States and stay with Anne in New Jersey. Six months of no cigs. But commuting to Manhattan I meet Sean have a few beers sushi and some cigarettes. The almost six months definitely ends on June 16th give or take. He’s someone I knew in Prague a few years back, a director writer barman manager. We’ll not maintain contact after this visit. Sean, literary and of Irish extraction, is performing some sort of Bloomsday reading Joyce celebration somewhere in New York. When I get back to Princeton Anne’s mother is gently goodmanneredly disappointed with my new habit.

We go to Maine to the high school graduation of Anne’s step-daughter from her first marriage. But the ex-husband is a bit crazy and he’s kidnapped the daughter from their own marriage. In another fourteen years outside a pub on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, she will recall that this exhusband had died of lung cancer, piteous emaciated chemo-therapeuted, pathetic. She perhaps won’t use all these words, but I render it thus. Pathos is her job. She tells stories about the telling of stories about pathos to her students. !

! !

Jun ’15!

Enough about not smoking. It ought not to be a skein. It’s not interesting, doesn’t deserve the attention. Smoking is cheap in Baku and easy to do.!

!

Feb ’04!

Without attributing cause to effect, without entailment of argument, without saying why, I’m writing a minimum of one hundred words every day about my life with Luca in Rome. A few days ago I was evicted from the apartment we shared by our landlord. Che stronzo. The ‘life with’ Luca was as intolerable as the life now without him. And it’s only been a few days. I wanted to be tough indifferent cruel even at our goodbye and I managed it. He came back from the funeral of a karaoke-singing friend. I waited waited till he came back. Looked at him, ciao, the goodbye one, one word only, and went. Formulaically, this was not a ciao moment. There should have been a summary, a kiss, a pressing together, speechification. Minutes later in the taxi a text arrived. Sei astratto. He blocked me. !

By the way, I stopped smoking sixty-five days ago. I’m counting. I call the writing ‘Sixty-five Days Without…’ I remember his smell is one of the first lines. This piece of writing will grow and hurt and then diminish and then it will be lost. This is imaginable. Maybe I miss his smell. That’s it.!

!

A few days ago the landlord attacked me in our kitchen. I called him stupido, a word ‘non tanto ricercato’ according to my former Italian teacher, who wants to conceive my children in a Tuscan seaside town, as result of which imparted knowledge I ran a mile and found myself in Rome, sharing with Luca, to prune the story for the time being. Lo stronzo knocked me to the floor.!

!

Not exaggerating, not being dramatic, no attention-seeking. It seems he agreed with the childless, by me, and again by me jilted Tuscan teacher of Italian that some of my words are not well chosen.

But really, is violence the remedy for that?!

!

Jan ’03!

This probably isn’t a good idea, but I’m visiting Michaela in her Tuscan seaside town whose name I can’t remember. She was my Italian teacher at the summer school in Siena last year. We clicked.

I’m probably exploiting her because I suspect she’s quite keen on me. And I’m just not like that. !

!

I am fixed on culture, she says. In which case, I suggest going to see Diamanda Galas perform nearby. She was strange. Another day, we go to see an Aki Kaurismäki film. Finns are cold people, they cannot express their emotions. She corrects my many many mistakes. My vocabulary is poor, not well chosen. It seems to annoy her. Is this aesthetic irritation? It annoys me. I am losing the will to speak. I have lost it. I contemplate murdering her. Well, it flashes through. In a restaurant on what will be our last evening, we sit in silence. I am sick of her. I cannot find it in me to speak. And if I do, the moment I start she will start with the corrections. We sit in silence. I formulate how to say I’m leaving. I want to be kind this time. I want to be correct. Decent. Suddenly she speaks. I have something to tell you. This pleases me. Indeed, we both understand this. We both need to say it. I could admire her for saying knowing it. I want to have children with you are the words I hear. I know I’ll be on a train to Rome tomorrow. This will help me understand the nature of error correction, letting the speaker speak, I was not so forward thinking to think. Where power and authority reside in exchanges between native and non-native speaker is a question I shall come to in time. But first, I must begin my English teaching career, and that beginning will be in Rome, after tomorrow. !

! !

’05 - ‘14!

I wake up many times on most days. I cannot find the sixty-five days. It, they, are lost. !

!

Jun ‘15!

I no longer remember or miss Luca’s smell. It bores me even to talk about it, so here I am, talking about not talking about it in this place, Baku, where other things, the Games and stuff, are happening. There’s more to talk about. A couple of days after the monumental conversation with Azad, Mahir and I were also walking aimlessly in mostly the same places. I know you are not a history person. Oh, I am. What do you mean? Can you explain the situation in Ireland, between England and Ireland? The mostly protestants of Northern Ireland mostly identify with Britishness.

We are British is what they say or are characterized as. To the other British this is a strange kind of Britishness. The others. Catholics. Nominally unimportantly not so theologically dogmatically. They

identify with Irishness. In Islam we have Shia and Sunni. All muslims. The difference is theological.

Or is it more. It’s cultural, traditional. But we are all muslims. The Britishness of some Northern Irish is not the Britishness of the English. But all like to call themselves British at explicit moments of self-identification. Explicit moments. When called called on required to or even when slipping into a spontaneous verbal allegiance. Such statements get chanted, are taunted. This is identity.

Strange, the question of identity seems to surface wherever I am. My father is Lezgi from the north.

Close to Dagestan. He speaks Lezgian. I do not. It is also possible there is some Chechnyan in the family. This is complex. It is identity. Which evolves. Goes on changing. My father drinks vodka. He is a muslim. Sometimes at weddings they make a toast. I don’t know the translation. They say Allah brings you good health and they drink the vodka. Not muslim. You know about the Soviet times. Sometimes workers received only vodka for a salary when there was no money. So they drank it. So they drink. My neighbour is a Russian. They are poor. He sends his children to buy vodka. You do not drink. Never. Just healthy. A special case. I was in Oman, once, we discussed the beauty of the Koran over a pint of beer.!

!

’11 or ’12!

One of the Squadron Leaders, Ahmed or Abdullah has a couple of friends over for drinks in the Officers’ Mess Bar. Are you a teacher? At the Technical College. You like the students. I like the students. Low level English. But good. You like Islam? I accept it. Do you respect it? I accept it. But you do not respect it. I repeat the previous. We talk over beer glasses. His elbow in ironed white dishdasha, or my elbow bare, but still pale, Yorkshire pale, in the Muscat sun, slips off the table in a popularized caricature of dipsomania. As an ambassador for all that I am, all that I come from and publicly profess, I’m not the best at pub theology with transgressives, though I’m certainly not the worst. Pub spouting. I’m an English teacher for god’s sake, I appeal theologically. This is Oman. I, or was it you, should not be a teacher in the air force. Not responsible enough. Indeed, not. Since I can’t talk about helicopter specifications, though this is sometimes required listening, and spouting theology leads to the category of dismissives and in this place dismissals and whatever that entails, there is the option of talking about women wives mistresses girlfriends host family landladies and their extra services. I fabricate a divorce. It’s been done before. Sometimes I picture a real person when creating this fabrication, a trusted long-time contemporary, and I list the momentary peccadilloes of our relations as evidence of divorce satisfaction. God forbid, I don’t, I try not to, I forget not to, mention her by name. And really, God, forgive it. !

! !

Jun ’15!

There were three divorces that never were. In a multiple-choice questionnaire, the answers to ‘which divorce?’ might be formulated as a. the Prague one b. the Plovdiv one c. the Princeton one d. none of these. There could be option e where you more cleverly combine characteristics of say a and b or b and c, etc, more suitable for postgraduates who are said to be more adept at textual analysis or at telling stories about the syntactic morphological semantic lexical performative iterative structure of utterances. It is simply a fact that they the divorce options all begin with p, not a rhetorical device, ‘for effect’ as the said graduates might have written in their pre-postgraduate assignments. Though the fact has an effect of its own.!

!

’85 or ’86 or ‘87!

Somebody on the radio is talking about Jesuits. Proud and presumptuous. 2 p words. I think I like the Jesuits still though I have yet to learn not to. I hear that somewhere in the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ Ignatius writes I must see that which is black to be white or the other way round. How to do it is the question. Maybe I’m paraphrasing misquoting misrepresenting. I shall ponder this question and in different pubs and on aimless pavements shall provide differing answers. My answers will sometimes contradict themselves.!

!

’15 and before!

Sometimes I look at the backs of my fingers, and see that others see there are no rings. There’s a story in that or maybe the absence of one.!

!

May ’84!

My grandfather died. My grandmother gave me his ring.!

! !

’88 or thereabouts!

I sell my grandfather’s (my) ring.!

!

Jun ’15!

As well as overformulating every syllable Russian boss is circumlocuting. This is what she does. It is her. Let me reformulate. First, I shall endeavour to see that which is black as white. I shall endeavour to be agreeable. Our exchange of moods, manners and meanings will be for the greater glory of the great inexactitude. Three m words. So, Russian boss is trying to be careful so that there are no inexactitudes in her speech. We are all sheltered protected bound by her exactitudes.

Especially bound. I’m not trying hard enough. A rethink is required. The interrogatives are hidden. I reformulate her utterance. The client can do x, you can do y and I can do z. You are the sole possessor of the missing parts, only you can do the algebra to bring them all together. She begins to reformulate which I suspect is repetition. I notice the ring on her finger. There’s a story there. I reformulate: my taxi is here, I’m going now.!

! ! ! ! ! !