Quarantine Survey 😷👽💌🐛🦋

Thank you, @thecynical-idealist! I can’t belt out an optimistic platitude, the times are bleak as fuck… Nonetheless, take care! ❤️ Cheers for the Tom Ford rec, I’ll be sure to check it out 😌

~Where are you isolated? (Country or city too if you like)

My hometown in Slovakia. When uni closed, I caught the first train, thinking I finally got a long weekend and a chance to see my father post-surgery without taking time off. Then the borders closed and I’m stuck here. I’m a bit jealous of my classmates who stayed behind because now is about the only time one can roam downtown Prague without crowds.

~What are you currently reading or watching?

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. I’m a couple pages in & so far it’s touching on interesting themes and I’m half-invested in the protagonist too, though I’m hoping for some Drama to take place – something violent or sublime. Idk, interpersonal dynamics are not enough for me, I’m the kind of reader that needs something inhuman in the mix.

~If you can go outside, what do you like to do during this time?

I sit in an armchair outside, soaking up the sun. The image from Jenni Fagan’s The Sunlight Pilgrims really stayed with me.

~Any fascinating concept you’re studying?

Poetry translation & translator poetics. Specifically Jan Zábrana in his rendition of Sylvia Plath. My class had the most intriguing skype discussion on Friday and I keep coming back to the points raised and aside from the formal (What’s the translator’s style? What does he add and/or subtract from ‘the original’?) it very much aims at the general: We know all translation is a compromise, but what should poetry translation aim for? What’s the role of an individual’s poetics? (Esp if they’re an author in their own right)

~What kinds of acts of creativity/forms of art are you currently doing?

Last night I wrote a poem to my best friend, titled 'I Wanna Be Your Daddy’. No, I’m not showing said friend.

I also picked up the piano again, nothing stellar, the Moonlight 1st movement is where I peak lol. It’s quite joyful to play without the effort to learn: to open up a Chopin and do a couple bars in a lazy rubato and leave it at that.

~A song/s that resonates with your state of mind at the moment?

Listening to Wagner’s Parsifal as I’m typing this. It’s a mood and also floo powder straight to Vienna where I saw a rendition that set Parsifal in a mental hospital with a kind of WW1 vibe to it, and aren’t we all resonating with the kind of isolation it conveys? The sort where you communicate, are forced to, need to, but you just can’t get out, can’t take a leap and step outside? (The entrapment of any myth and tragedy is also more pertinent now, I think. Sure, there’s less catharsis, but you get intimacy instead.)

~Favourite impulsive/’bad’ coping techniques?

Haha haha so I gave up alcohol recently (last week) but I drink atrocious amounts of coffee and I swallow a little more pills than I should instead and I blaze it occasionally. I also watch 30+ mins videos of chefs making pasta for some reason.

I’m tagging @lennuieternel @voyage-borne @diable-boiteux @luxe-pauvre @notmanthelessbutnaturemore @megalomano – I hope this finds you well, dears, stay safe & sane, and as usual: Take care ❤️