Marie Menken comes, her, from Lithuania, her background. She was born here though, and there is a woman, Martina Kudlacek who is working, now digging out all the... she is making a film about Marie Menken and she'll do a book about her and digging out all her background, and the other, a week ago, two weeks ago, she gave me a short story that Marie Menken wrote, like long, 20 pages, about the, her local Philadelphia church and a priest and all those Lithuanians who come there and, very, very down-to-earth, very realistic. But she's also digging out the correspondence and, between her relatives in Lithuania and... but her Lithuanian is... was very limited, but she remembered some songs and because that sort of remains longest, children's songs. And we used to sing Lithuanian children's songs together... and then...

So, Lithuania. Lithuania is next to Russia, and then there's Poland. Russia is this side of Ural Mountains is very wide and plain and you can look for hundreds of miles there and their songs, their folk songs and also some of their more modern, already communist period songs are very wide, like if you sing like: 'Volga, Volga mat' rodnaya, Volga, russkają rěka...' They go wide and big and loud because there are spaces there. Lithuania is small, there are little hills, there are little, there is a hill, say, like 100 metres high and they call it a mountain, and their songs are very little and brittle and fragile, Lithuanian folk songs. In a very sort of lyrical kind of quality as against the wide, big armies, big space, big lands, big wars, big country, and here's everything is small, everything's small. So there is this lyrical quality that I'm talking now about my, the work of Marie Menken, the lyricism in her work and in her temperament and everything and that is territory... I think we have both of us together some of that, and that comes from this background of, ok, the local, where we come from. It determines a lot of what we are, what we do, you know, how we structure what we do, the content of these geographic, tactically... area, the landscape, the climate, the wind, what grows, the trees, the little forests, there are no big hard trees like in California, they are little. Everything is different. So, I myself have not escaped it because it formed me, it's very deep in me and, I think, it will always be at the very bottom of whatever I do. Same as it was for Marie Menken.