Someone in Los Angeles found this blog by googling "let's just be friends ilya." Who in LA is trying to break up with me?!

Over the last few weeks, I spent three days going to New Haven to look at apartments. On my most recent trip, I was sitting in the Metro-North train about to depart from Grand Central Station, when an umbrella that some man stashed in the overhead compartment fell on my head and scared the crap out of me. It was one of those enormous umbrellas with the collapsible plastic case. I was engrossed in Radiolab (the episode about talking to bots) and was tired so it took me a moment to register what happened. The man was a middle-aged man in a brown suit who was about to sit next to me, but presumably no longer wanted to sit next to someone who'd spend the rest of the ride silently resenting him, so he moved to the seat in front of me. I thought my glasses might be scratched, and when I inspected them I couldn't tell if one of the smudges and streaks was actually a scratch. I tapped the man on the shoulder and asked him to examine (I guess to instill some fear and teach him a lesson). He asked me if I knew about microfiber cloths, and said that he was a microfiber cloth salesman. He then gifted me a microfiber cloth. I wiped the smudges off my glasses, which appeared to be not-scratched. The train was delayed an hour at Bridgeport. I then saw two apartments (one maybe, one definitely not) and ate a pretty good burrito. The Chinese food place I ate soup at in January went out of business, however. Then it started to rain, and I read the Tina Fey book on the train back. May we all eventually write showbiz memoirs with hairy photoshopped man-hands on the dust jacket.

Dear friends,

There has been some news I feel compelled to share with you, my faithful readership of 3-7 great-looking people. The news is (are you ready?) that (seriously, are you ready?) I'd been accepted to a dramaturgy/dramatic criticism MFA program at the Yale School of Drama. Consequently, I'd accepted them. It is really a great and reciprocal thing. So come late August, I'll be leaping back into the sweet embrace of academia after a three-year absence. More Yale stuff later, including my campaign to become the first grad student ever admitted into the Skull and Bones secret society. My strategy is three-fold: charm, dignity, package delivery of a papier-mâché cast of my own foot with a note that says "just wanted to get my foot in the door."

One other fact: of the seven new people in my program, I'm the only male. Predictions: a) I stockpile affectations because there will be women to impress (bemused nonchalance, leather bracelet, steampunk smoking jacket), b) I overcompensate by taking the aggressive, antifeminist view on everything (Nora should've stayed in the doll's house, amirite?), c) I regress to a state of adolescent discomposure and start twitching every time a girl makes eye contact. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the inevitable day on which someone refers to the dramaturges collectively as "ladies" and I don't correct them; the transformation will be complete.

More to the point: I'm back, chronicling. Things will be written here - wondrous, important things. Also hackneyed and pedestrian things. You know, bell curve distribution of post quality.

Ilya

Hello, hello. Sorry this has been on hiatus for a couple of months, but rest assured I am very much alive and will be back to blog more regularly in the upcoming weeks.

I've been rereading Sana Krasikov's story collection, "One More Year," and I'm really taken by it. I first read it a couple of years ago and was unmoved by what I thought was a sober, downcast, and drab style - the only story I remembered was one that took place at an upstate pseudo-rural dacha, similar to the ones my parents have rented or owned for as long as I can remember. These cottages, two or three hours away from the city, always seemed to me fresh and crisp in the daylight, then after sunset turned sorrowful and grim. The contrast always unnerved me - that I could spend the afternoon playing badminton and walking the narrow edge between the oaks and the paved road, and then, when night fell, feel harrowed and alone.

The sharpness and precision of Krasikov's stories are devastating, as are the subtlety and empathy. Her style is so refined and inconspicuous, and everything is stark and deeply intelligent and mature. She shares with David Bezmozgis a mindfulness and attentiveness to journalistic and historical specificity when writing about Soviet immigrants. What's refreshing is the absence of ribald comic hyperbole in exchange for something much wiser and wryer. Most of these characters are either approaching middle age or well in the grips of it, and the way they negotiate deformed relationships and other indignities is quiet and spellbinding. This is all really masterful, and I don't even know what to quote from, but here's a section in which a woman who's returned to Moscow after a few years in Westchester reconnects with an old friend.

“I forgot! Tell me about your trip to Paris this summer.” She wanted to switch to a less desperate topic. It was clear that Lidochka, after eleven years, did not want to bother with small talk. To her, friendship still meant coming face to face with another’s unmediated existence. It was exhilarating, Lera thought, but also exhausting.

It's only a few lines, but I'm already thinking about how people communicate, the habits they fall into, the tradeoffs they're willing to make, old friends growing apart. And I just want to come face to face with another's unmediated existence. What could be better? Here's that whole story.

My show is past, and now I have new obsessions. One is the new issue of the magazine n+1, in which I am loving the discussions of the dichotomy between the popular and academic literary fiction worlds (MFA vs. NYC, as they put it) and a new definition of elitism. By this definition, I am an elitist: a person who uses a fancy privileged education for any purpose that doesn't serve his own rational economic interests. This really takes the fun out of being an elitist - not only are you poor, most of the country thinks you're also pretentious and lack common sense. If this sounds familiar, you might also enjoy the piece of fiction (or memoir, or reconstructed reality) by Sheila Heti in the selfsame issue of n+1; her mix of mordancy and inertia soothes me like a lullaby. I love this story because it's not really about anything, except for biding your time while living on the edge of existential collapse, in a bittersweet way. Every paragraph dwells on some new disappointment - with yourself, with others, with art and history and the world - occasionally tempered by creative discovery or sex. An excerpt:

Standing alone by the bar, I wondered if I could love the boy I noticed at the end of it - the one with the curly brown hair, who looked like a washed-out, more neutral version of the first boy I loved. When he stepped outside onto the front steps, I thought, If he has gone out there to smoke, I will love him. But when I got outside, though I could see a cigarette dangling from his lips, I did not love him.

This is a great magazine, but it's already fashionable so I can't even fish for cred here. Oh well.

I saw Mrs. Warren's Profession last night, a Shaw play about a haughty Cambridge-educated law student in Victorian England who finds out her rich mom made her fortune managing high-class brothels. This must've been edgy in the late 19th century because it's about prostitution, now it's an interesting indictment of a capitalist system that pits mother and daughter against each other in a culture war. Both sides end up looking lame. The daughter asserts her moral righteousness by refusing her mother's dirty money; the mother explains how her morality was shaped by childhood poverty, then calls the daughter a heartless prude, then tries to bribe her into loving her. I think Shaw poses the tragedy of the play like this: Mrs. Warren imbued her daughter with values that are incompatible with the two of them having a healthy, loving relationship. This is how I pose it: Mrs. Warren becomes a prostitute to provide herself and her daughter with a better life. What a heartbreaking sacrifice. But then, it turns out that she's done her daughter a disservice - she's thrust her into the world of intolerant, moralistic, respectable upper-class twits. She's made her daughter into a Tea Partier. Mrs. Warren and her daughter are both victimized by the same ideological and economic system - yet ironically they can't even get along. There are no elitists here, except for a neighbor, Mr. Praed, who drops by, then complains that no one wants to discuss art with him or ask about his trip to Vienna because they are too busy making money and yelling at each other. Obviously he is my favorite character.