From Estonia with Love

I love Tallinn. It’s ancient and modern at the same time. The people are cultured and willing to forgive me for being a stupid American. In fact, an Estonian friend recently gave me the option of being an apprentice Estonian, which I took as a compliment—even though I am and will always be a child of Southern California. Represent.

But after 14 hours of work—writing, teaching, promoting my business, applying to ESL instructor positions—I feel the need for a beer. That’s good. Estonia is deeply in love with beer of all kinds. Unfortunately, the country is also deeply in love with rules—specifically, the rule that no beer is sold after 22:00 (that’s 10 PM for all you yank readers) in stores. Alright, so the intrepid internet laborer who loses all sense of time must go to a bar if it’s 22:27, which it is.

Naturally, in moments like this, I invoke my Irish ancestry and pray to St. Patrick to leave me the fuck alone so Satan can find me the worst, most decadent drinking establishment in Tallinn. I wind up drinking in St. Patrick’s pub in Old Town. It’s okay—fairly standard Irish format with a jovial Irish manager slinging drinks and several nymph-like Estonian waitresses who don’t know how to make a half-and-half. So okay. I can handle that. Guinness it is.

I drink my Guinness. And I am content. It is only after the third pint that I am approached by the poor man’s Cate Blanchett—tall, blonde, blue eyes, and post-apocalyptic survival instincts. Apparently she is Russian because she says, “Do you speak Russian?” in an accent that can only be Russian.

“No,” I say, “I’m an American.”

“You are a beautiful American.”

“Yeah?”

“I would like a cocktail.”

“I voted for Obama. I would like a cocktail.”

At which point, she makes a face at me and says, “Oh, you are not buying me a cocktail. I’m sure you are used to fat disgusting monsters in America.”

I laugh at this for at least 15 minutes. Then I dance by myself amid several married, middle-aged Estonians while a Rod Stewart lookalike sings “I Just Called to Say I love You” with a drum machine and a Peavey 6-string.

Have I mentioned that I love it here?

She takes a new position on the other side of the pub and shoots me a lot of nasty looks while I finish my drinks. I want to say, it’s okay. You should go to the States. And you will find a wonderful guy with a spray-on tan and gold chains who will buy you cocktails. But I don’t say anything.

In Praise of the Weird & Unprofitable

The world of fiction writing needs to move away from the Manhattan literary formula into something weirder and more open to different voices. I’d love to see Isaac Babel and Guy de Maupassant being talked about alongside memoirists like Nick Flynn and fiction writers willing to do interesting things–like Aravind Adiga and early Denis Johnson or Sam Lipsyte or Arthur Nersesian. I think innovative writers like these guys, over the last 10-15 years or so, have been successful in spite of a system that sets a dollar value to every word. And I think they developed unique voices because there were some teachers and writers connected to literary culture who said, “Look, Richard Ford is a really great writer and so was Raymond Carver and so is Alice Munro. But their work has been so commodified–so accepted and worshiped and established and emulated–that we’re boring ourselves to death.” Do we really want another coming of age story focused on a well-off young person discovering new things about relationships and sexuality? Do we want more stories about suburban disillusionment or suffocating marriages or precocious children surviving war and famine? If we have these stories, maybe we want them told in new ways. I think they have to be because otherwise we’re dead; we’re not growing; we’re creating copies of copies.

So I think literary culture–and by this I mean global literature, because I think once something has been written and published at a certain level, it enters a global discourse (another reason we need to keep training good translators)–can change. I don’t think the apoplectic elements of the New York publishing industry necessarily have a lock on all creativity in the western world. And I think that those of us who care about literary art and who have the will to act have a responsibility to add to the creativity and newness in fiction. It could be through individual creative work, but we could also do it through creating local literary environments that teach, promote, and encourage others to create for themselves instead of according to a pre-existing, vetted, marketable formula. There have to be voices out there that wake people up to other possibilities. And every interesting writer, at some point, picked up a book or attended a reading or listened to a teacher who said, “Fuck writing like that guy. Do it your own way.”

How to Celebrate Burundian Independence Day for Beginners

Take your AK-47 out to the street and hold it up with both hands. Glare at everyone passing by.
Go to the flower market. Buy several plastic bags of ground nuts. Shuffle back and forth outside the T-2000, the Chinese convenience store, while eating said nuts. Glare at everyone passing by.
Open a fresh box of grenades in a vacant lot. Let the kids play catch with the dummies. Those are the ones with the red plastic tabs on them. Aren’t they?
Mumble bad French to the aged, syphilitic Belgian who runs the only café with internet. Get seated immediately and order something in a bottle. Try to connect to the internet for 2 hours. Fail to connect. Glare at everyone in the café. Realize it was a bottle refilled from the tap. Go home and vomit for 6 hours.
Take a walk in the public gardens. Witness people healthier than you with better attitudes and better immune systems. Go home and glare at yourself in the mirror.
Go to bed early, vowing to sleep in. Wake up an hour later with a giant cockroach in your hair. Scream for a while. Drink heavily with all the lights on in your house until dawn. Produce a 15-page handwritten short story that you cannot understand the next day.
Talk to the house guard. Learn how to say “good evening” in Kirundi. Come away feeling that you’ve finally met one of the best people alive today.
Attend a Marine Corps pig roast at the US Embassy. Come away feeling that you’ve finally met some of the worst people alive today. Decide that they aren’t really alive after all.
Visit Rwanda. Return with a suitcase packed as follows: 1 jar boric acid; 1 pack candles; 1 pack cockroach glue traps; 3 40oz bottles of Primus Lager; 5 bars “Genital Wash” brand lavender soap; 3 cartons mosquito-repelling citronella incense; 1 small bird carved out of white stone; 1 bullwhip; 1 Chinese good luck medallion for Year of the Ox covered in red foil. Pour boric acid around baseboards by candlelight. Set up glue traps on kitchen countertop. Light some of the incense. Put bullwhip on nightstand outside the bed’s mosquito netting. Drink the beer. Wake up the next day and realize you did it all wrong and lit one of the curtains on fire. What happened to the medallion? Bad luck.
Sit in the living room, trying to train a mustard-yellow gecko to fetch a piece of grass. Do this for hours. Conclude that the gecko is actually training you to throw the piece of grass and fetch it. Wonder about the hidden world of geckos.