This doesn't work for me. Not just because we can't seem to agree on who, if that's the case, it might be, but because it's too obvious, too right in front of our noses. Why couldn't it, say, be some Russian mafia kingpin, with a bent for self-expression, a previously undiscovered talent, and the wherewithal to generate and disseminate the footage? That's deliberately farfetched, but it's not utterly impossible. What I'm saying is that I don't think we're getting lateral enough, here.
She can barely remember posting this. She's never been able to go back and reread her own posts, before, and it probably wouldn't occur to her anyway. Rut now she reads on, following the thread to the end.
And sees that the next thread begins with what she now remembers had been Mama Anarchia's first post.
Really it is entirely about story, though not in any sense that any of you seem familiar with. Do you know nothing of narratology? Where is Derridean "play" and excessiveness? Foucauldian limit-attitude? Lyotardian language-games? Lacanian Imaginaries? Where is the commitment to praxis, positioning Jamesonian nostalgia, and despair—as well as Habermasian fears of irrationalism—as panic discourses signaling the defeat of Enlightenment hegemony over cultural theory? But no: discourses on this site are hopelessly retrograde. Mama Anarchia
Well, Cayce thinks, Mama had gotten right down to it. And she had, Cayce notes, used the word "hegemony," without which Parkaboy will not admit any Mama post as fully genuine. (For a full positive identification, though, he insists that they also contain the word "hermeneu-tics.")
But Cayce Pollard Central Standard is saying it's time to try to sleep, so she ejects the CD-ROM, shuts down and puts the iBook away, and closes her eyes.
And dreams of large men, strangers but somehow Donny-like, in her New York apartment. She is there too, but they can't seem to see her, or hear her, and she wants them to get out.
IN Sheremetevo-2, once past the uniform, very seventies beige of customs and immigration, there seems to be advertising on virtually every surface. There are at least four advertisements on the luggage cart she's using, one Hertz and three others in Russian. As in Japan, she's realized, she's partially buffered by her inability to read the language. For which she's grateful, as the density of commercial language here, in this airport at least, rivals Tokyo.
One sign she can read is above an ATM, and says BANKOMAT, which she decides is what ATMs would have been called in America if they had been invented in the fifties. She uses her own card, rather than Blue Ant's, to obtain an initial supply of rubles, and pushes her cart out, finally, into her first breath of Russian air, heavily laden with yet another nationally specific flavor of petro-carbons. There's a disorderly looking scrum of taxis, and she knows that her job now is to find what Magda had called an "official" one.
Which she shortly does, leaving Sheremetevo-2 in a landlord-green diesel Mercedes of a certain age, its dashboard sanctified by some sort of small Orthodox shrine atop an intricate white doily.
This huge, slightly grim eight-lane highway, she decides, consulting the
She glimpses smokestacks in the distance, and tall orange buildings, but the smokestacks, pouring white smoke, seem to rise from among those buildings in some unfamiliar way, suggesting alien or perhaps nonexistent concepts of zoning.
Billboards for computers, luxury goods, and electronics appear, increasing in number and variety as they approach the city. The sky, aside from the plumes of the smokestacks and a yellow-brown smudge of petro-carbons, is cloudless and blue.
Her first impression of Moscow itself is that everything is far larger than it could possibly have any need to be. Cyclopean Stalin-era buildings in burnt orange brick, their detailing vaguely maroonish. Built to humble, and terrify. But lampposts, fountains, plazas, all partake of this exaggerated scale.
As they cross the eight lanes of the traffic-packed Garden Ring, the high-urban factor goes up several notches, and the advertising thickens. Off to the right, she sees an enormous Art Nouveau train station, a survival from an earlier era still, but on a scale to dwarf London's grandest. Then a McDonald's, seemingly as large.
