Too many words, not enough pictures

or the other way around

[…mutters apology to Herman Melville] Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in our purse, and nothing particular to keep us in our apartment in a cinderblock high-rise in Moscow, my parents and I set out to explore the non-totalitarian parts of the world and eventually found ourselves in a city perched on the westernmost edge of the North American continent.

Here we are, at the westernmost edge of the North American continent

In San Francisco, we discovered the steepest hills and the densest fog and and the most beautiful views and the mind-boggling American practice of garage sales in which people just put stuff in the street and charged next to nothing for it, which is how we ended up with a brown formica table and four dining-room chairs upholstered in turquoise vinyl for $20 and how I came into the possession of a nearly complete set of Golden Book encyclopedias.

I did not want a set of Golden Book encyclopedias. I had not asked for a set of Golden Book encyclopedias. But I spoke no English, and my father decided that a set of Golden Book encyclopedias would help me learn English, and he handed me an English-Russian dictionary and one of the encyclopedia volumes and told me to start reading. (I am not making this up.)

The volume he handed me had too many words and not enough pictures. I had to look up every single word except “the,” “a,” and “and,” and as a result of this exercise I learned exactly one word, which I still remember, but only because I stared at it for so long and with such murderous hatred. The word was “important.” What was important and why it was important, I have no idea, but that didn’t matter, because I soon discovered a far more enjoyable way to learn English: watching television.

Television was how I learned English, but it was also how I learned about America. Gilligan’s Island taught me about American class structure and American ingenuity (and its limits); The Brady Bunch taught me about blended families and pork chops and applesauce and the dangers of picking up native ceremonial objects in Hawaii. The Beverly Hillbillies taught me that people from Appalachia were poor and talked funny but were also honest and honorable and Three’s Company taught me that blondes had more fun (in sixth grade, I had a sideways ponytail just like Chrissy Snow, but I did not have more fun, which must have been because I had brown hair). And from Laverne & Shirley I learned that even if you didn’t go to college and lived in a basement and worked in a brewery, you could still have a fun life as long as you were with your best friend. (I should note that my parents hated Laverne & Shirley almost as passionately as I hated reading the Golden Book encyclopedia entries with a Russian-English dictionary.)

I learned English slowly at first and then all at once. I became fluent within a year of arriving in the US and lost my accent within two. Among Soviet emigres in my parents’ circle, losing your Russian accent was the ultimate sign of having truly arrived. I had always read voraciously in Russian, and now I began reading voraciously in English. I won a national writing contest (ironically, with an essay about getting sent back from a school trip to Europe for having improper paperwork). But TV continued to satisfy a need that books could not.

In graduate school, I watched Married with Children and Herman’s Head, mostly as an antidote to seminars where students talked about phallogocentric constructs in Moby-Dick and (m)others in Anna Karenina. I wanted something uncomplicated and crass and funny, and Married with Children served up Peggy Bundy with her big hair and tight pants and high-heeled mules and nasal whine and Al Bundy with his simmering rage and their epically inept kids and their infuriating neighbors. Herman’s Head was just plain stupid—so stupid that I found it uproariously funny—and my husband would perch on the edge of the couch and say, “I can’t believe someone who’s getting a PhD in Comparative Literature is watching this shit,” and what he didn’t understand was that I was watching this shit precisely because I was getting a PhD in Comparative Literature, because I was overwhelmed by too many words, because I needed a break.

I had become assimilated, sure, but my doctoral dissertation was about Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, two American writers who were not really American. James spent most of his life living in England because he believed that living in the US was incompatible with being an American writer, and Nabokov immigrated to the US after fleeing revolutionary Russia in 1917 and seeking refuge first in Cambridge, then in Berlin, then in Paris. The characters in their novels echoed the lives of the authors: James wrote about Americans in Europe whose wealth and guilelessness make them easy marks; Nabokov wrote about European emigres in America who struggle to reconcile their tragic, complicated history with the relentless optimism of their adopted homeland. There is no such thing as an accident, Freud wrote, and it was clearly no accident that my dissertation continued to grapple with the same question I began wrestling with when I was nine: what it meant to be a person living where they were not born.

I’m still trying to figure it out. One of the plot lines of my book in progress—the one about my mother, my daughter, and me on a road trip to the central coast in the middle of a once-in-a-decade storm—involves the three of us binge-watching the second season of White Lotus. The second season of White Lotus is about a lot of things—infidelity, treachery, history, family, unhappy marriages, transactional sex—but it’s also about what it means to be an American in Europe. The DiGrasso men are in Sicily to discover their Italian roots; Portia hopes to get thrown around by some hot Italian guy; Tanya wants to look like the Italian actress Monica Vitti. I’ve seen the second season of White Lotus twice (I binged it at the end of 2022 and then binged it a second time with my mother and daughter on our trip a week later), and I’m rewatching it now, which I think officially counts as an obsession. What I’m finding almost impossible to do is write about it. Take the mesmerizing opening sequence and its ethereal, driving soundtrack—how do you even begin to describe that? How do you translate sound and image into words? So many sounds. So many pictures.

I know the words will come sooner or later. Sullen, angular, creaky, fat, buttery words. The right words. The wrong words. Stupid words that will get immediately deleted. Nonsense word combinations. Schlemiel, schlimazel, hasenpfeffer incorporated.* All the words are there for some reason. Everything is important.

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*If you know, you know. If you don’t, see below. Does this help explain why Gen X is I am a little bit messed up? (But also, if you have any thoughts about how to describe the second season of White Lotus, tell me!)