Friday, March 21, 2008
auto-otvetchik
Our spring break starts on Monday; I'll be out of town from then until the next Sunday. So I will not be answering e-mail.
Hey, Wanna Hear a Pretty Poem?
I’m supposed to be writing an essay about this Alexander Blok poem, but instead I will translate it for you. It was written during the Russo-Japanese war.
A girl sang in a church choir
Of all those tired in a foreign land,
Of all the ships, gone out to sea,
Of all, who had forgotten their joy.
How her voice sang, flying up to the cupola;
And a sunbeam shone on her white shoulder,
And from the darkness each one watched and listened
To the white dress sing in the sunbeam.
And it seemed to everyone that there would be joy,
That all the ships were in quiet backwaters,
That in the foreign land all the tired people
Had found themselves bright lives.
And the voice was sweet, and the sunbeam was slender,
And only on high, at the royal gates,
Was the keeper of the secret—and the Child cried,
For no one would come back.
1906
A girl sang in a church choir
Of all those tired in a foreign land,
Of all the ships, gone out to sea,
Of all, who had forgotten their joy.
How her voice sang, flying up to the cupola;
And a sunbeam shone on her white shoulder,
And from the darkness each one watched and listened
To the white dress sing in the sunbeam.
And it seemed to everyone that there would be joy,
That all the ships were in quiet backwaters,
That in the foreign land all the tired people
Had found themselves bright lives.
And the voice was sweet, and the sunbeam was slender,
And only on high, at the royal gates,
Was the keeper of the secret—and the Child cried,
For no one would come back.
1906
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
English Lessons, Cont.
I just got back from my first class with a new group, one of the “work and travel” classes for college-aged kids who will be working in America this summer. Almost all of them will be working in Myrtle Beach, and three of those are working for Krispy Kreme. They didn’t really understand why I thought that was so exciting. Anyway, the idea of this class is, as much as language practice, to prepare the kids culturally for American life. Unfortunately, I know nothing about America. I’m sure that there are a thousand things that will blow their cabbage-fed minds as soon as they get off the plane, but I can’t pin down exactly what they are, or how to prepare them for those things. It doesn’t really help that they don’t believe that they don’t know everything they need to know about America from watching TV. But really, whenever people ask me questions about America here, I have no idea how to answer. For instance, I made a vague attempt today to discuss the issue of gender roles. But... I don’t really how to explain the fact that it’s considered ideal for men to try to help out around the house (one of the phrases we learned today, by the way), but they usually don’t much, or that we consider that women are just as smart and capable as men, but they are often not as well paid. While on the one hand America is becoming more and more a lost paradise the longer I am here, on the other hand, I continually have to face up to our pervasive self-denial. This always happened when I tried to teach classes about racism, too. I would start out with the attitude that I had to explain to these racist Russians how to behave in a civilized society, but then I would start talking, and the message would be that it is a very big deal to use derisive terms to describe racial and ethnic identity in America because... we have a long history of violent racial conflict. Sigh. But if any of you have ideas for lessons for this class, let me know. Especially ideas connected to concrete information of some kind—that’s generally what I lack. I currently hide my lack of direction under a distracting cloud of verbal phrases I make them learn: to hang out/ up/ ten; to work out/ around/ through/ on; to wash out/ away; etc. Keeps them from thinking too much.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Trans-Baikalin' it
Along with about 600 other people, literally, I got off the electrichka yesterday at the stop “Dark Valley” and headed toward Baikal. It’s probably the last weekend it’s safe enough to cross the ice, and I think most of the city of Irkutsk was taking advantage of it. Skiers had been getting off at the 4 or 5 stops before mine, and later trains brought new crowds of people. It was quite the colorful party on the half-hour or 45-minute descent to the ice: there were dogs running around in windbreakers, and old women in bright purple jogging suits, and teenagers blaring music, and groups of middle-aged friends loudly singing songs from their youth, and young women in their usual leather boots and fashionable jeans, and young men in the camo that they for some reason find it necessary to wear every time they are involved in outdoor activities of any kind. My favorite members of the parade were the fur-coated women pulling small children in brightly-painted sleds; the best was when the kids would stare at the snow-covered ground intently until they could reach it, grab a handful of snow, and, laughing hysterically, throw it at their mothers’ behinds. This is apparently the official pastime of children in sleds. The official activity of everyone else was basically falling down: it was a long, steep, slippery way down to lake-level.
Towards Baikal somehow the huge swarms of people disappeared- before the lake groups gradually pulled off to make campfires and cook hotdogs or something, and then as soon as we got to the shore the hugeness of the lake just sort of swallowed everyone. I saw some old bridges and tunnels of the Circumbaikal railroad, and had my first picnic on a frozen beach, and then started out across the ice. It was a bright, sunny day, and the snow on the lake glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, and the jagged mountains on the other side were skirted in neon-blue clouds, and often forest-green trains could wind along the mountainsides on the shore. Overall, it was sort of like a Lisa Frank notebook cover, only it was real life, so rather than being horrible and cheesy it was just pretty. And there were no rainbow-colored unicorns involved, just long strings of skiers in the distance.
Towards Baikal somehow the huge swarms of people disappeared- before the lake groups gradually pulled off to make campfires and cook hotdogs or something, and then as soon as we got to the shore the hugeness of the lake just sort of swallowed everyone. I saw some old bridges and tunnels of the Circumbaikal railroad, and had my first picnic on a frozen beach, and then started out across the ice. It was a bright, sunny day, and the snow on the lake glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, and the jagged mountains on the other side were skirted in neon-blue clouds, and often forest-green trains could wind along the mountainsides on the shore. Overall, it was sort of like a Lisa Frank notebook cover, only it was real life, so rather than being horrible and cheesy it was just pretty. And there were no rainbow-colored unicorns involved, just long strings of skiers in the distance.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
History of Religion
I gave a report in my mainstream history class today, on the topic of the influence of New England Puritans on the formation of the government of our great nation. It was fairly painful, I'm sure, for the other students, but it is over with.
The professor then proceeded to talk about Protestantism in general, and he posed the question to the class of why Protestantism game into being. I didn't bother trying to think of an answer, as I knew that Pavel Evfrofeevich would just look sardonically at every attempted answer before explaining, in a tone of presenting the obvious, that the answer was Developments in Agriculture. The answer is always developments in agriculture. Just like in History of Post-Soviet Russia the answer is always "no, that was in fact not a good idea, but a bad one," and in children's sermons at the ER UCC the answer is always "God."
The professor then proceeded to talk about Protestantism in general, and he posed the question to the class of why Protestantism game into being. I didn't bother trying to think of an answer, as I knew that Pavel Evfrofeevich would just look sardonically at every attempted answer before explaining, in a tone of presenting the obvious, that the answer was Developments in Agriculture. The answer is always developments in agriculture. Just like in History of Post-Soviet Russia the answer is always "no, that was in fact not a good idea, but a bad one," and in children's sermons at the ER UCC the answer is always "God."
Spring Group Trip
We all successfully returned from Syeverobaikalsk, I am happy to report. Well, I’m happy that the return was successful, but I’m not all that happy with the return as a basic fact. Syeverobaikalsk is about the coolest place ever. I have no idea why people live in Irkutsk when Syeverobaikalsk is a mere hour and twenty minutes away by plane.
Early in our second morning on the train, we went through a very, very long tunnel. This tunnel just kept going, and going, as the half of the train that was awake fiddled with their teacups and sat on the edges of their beds and waited uneasily for sunlight. And then at last the tunnel ended, and our train glided on through a sunrise over bare, white mountains by little local stations half covered in snow drifts. And then, after the whole car was up and had gathered together their uneaten loaves of bread and remnants of cheese and unused packets of instant soup, and had folded their sheets and returned their blankets to the impatient, blond conductor girl, we pulled into the bright, modern station in Syeverobaikalsk. Our guide was waiting for us, and the marshrutkas into which we piled with our suitcases was new and clean and fairly large and drove us down the wide main street of a clean, crisp city with gracefully curving apartment buildings. After turning onto a few smaller roads, lined with well-ordered cottages, our marshrutka took us to a two-storey wooden house with a different color scheme in each of the three guest rooms upstairs and a table set out with bottled water. That natural conclusion was that the early-morning tunnel had taken us straight through the earth and we were not in Russia at all, but Colorado.
This impression was very soon corrected when we got to the “ski mountain” later that day, which I would describe more as “completely unregulated and dangerous mess,” but I may just be bitter because I was the only one wholly unable to figure out the pull-rope system and spent a lot of time being dragged about through the snow having Russian snow-boarders laughing at me. Or because I was given skis more appropriate in size to a 5-year-old. Or because Marina, our guide, had a very irritating tendency to rush about doing everything possible to humiliate one further after every incidence of incompetence. Anyway. Went skiing. Also, that day... tour of the city, before the skiing, and BAM museum. And after the skiing hot springs, which was fun but involved a lot of drunken Russians, one of whom yelled at Elisabeth a lot for trying to steal her tapochki.
Our basic activities, the whole time we were there, were playing in the snow and taking pictures of Baikal. There were other, more planned activities framing these two, but they were always just covers for the ones mentioned. So it was a good time. Everything was just very pretty, and clean, and free of traffic and trash and crowed sidewalks. One time some ice fisherman let us play with their equipment and try to dig holes in the ice and stuff, and we (they) caught a fish that we then passed around and took pictures with. By the time I got the fish it was fairly dead, but the fisherman kept encouraging me to slap it to make it wriggle around more, the better to take pictures with. The most amazing part, though, was when we passed off the fish to its rightful owners and they conclusively killed it: have you ever seen a fish being punched in the head? Luckily, Elisabeth has a film. I don’t mean there was demonstrative, needless cruelty to fish involved: it was a very matter-of-fact, quick-and-decisive head punching. But still. Another time we climbed a trail that prisoners in a Stalinist camp took to collect mica from the mines near the top of the mountain. Well, I don’t know how much of a mine it was- it seemed to me more like mica sitting around on top of the mountain. But anyway, it was a hard mountain to climb up and down, and I was glad I was not hauling mica, or being shot when I tried to stop. We didn’t actually go to the prison camp, as it’s too hard to get there in the winter, but we had the place pointed out to us from afar. It’s in this place in the mountains where in the winter the sun doesn’t shine at all, and it’s accessible only by ski. If I had a choice between that camp, which is famous and has a name that I should remember because it’s in the title of a book that I have read, and the camp that we saw on the most beautiful beach on Olkhon, I think I know which I would choose. I’m still confused by that Olkhon prison camp.
Our last night, clear and moonless, some of us walked out to Baikal and lay on the ice and looked at the stars. The next morning we took the same road and watched the sunrise over the mountains on the other side of the lake, slowly slowly in its winter course, but beautiful, and the red light hit the big, clear ice-blocks standing around us on the lake very impressively. When the sun had cleared the mountains a rainbow appeared, one of several we saw on the trip. For some reason I still don’t understand, there are a lot of rainbows in that area, though it never snowed or rained.
Early in our second morning on the train, we went through a very, very long tunnel. This tunnel just kept going, and going, as the half of the train that was awake fiddled with their teacups and sat on the edges of their beds and waited uneasily for sunlight. And then at last the tunnel ended, and our train glided on through a sunrise over bare, white mountains by little local stations half covered in snow drifts. And then, after the whole car was up and had gathered together their uneaten loaves of bread and remnants of cheese and unused packets of instant soup, and had folded their sheets and returned their blankets to the impatient, blond conductor girl, we pulled into the bright, modern station in Syeverobaikalsk. Our guide was waiting for us, and the marshrutkas into which we piled with our suitcases was new and clean and fairly large and drove us down the wide main street of a clean, crisp city with gracefully curving apartment buildings. After turning onto a few smaller roads, lined with well-ordered cottages, our marshrutka took us to a two-storey wooden house with a different color scheme in each of the three guest rooms upstairs and a table set out with bottled water. That natural conclusion was that the early-morning tunnel had taken us straight through the earth and we were not in Russia at all, but Colorado.
This impression was very soon corrected when we got to the “ski mountain” later that day, which I would describe more as “completely unregulated and dangerous mess,” but I may just be bitter because I was the only one wholly unable to figure out the pull-rope system and spent a lot of time being dragged about through the snow having Russian snow-boarders laughing at me. Or because I was given skis more appropriate in size to a 5-year-old. Or because Marina, our guide, had a very irritating tendency to rush about doing everything possible to humiliate one further after every incidence of incompetence. Anyway. Went skiing. Also, that day... tour of the city, before the skiing, and BAM museum. And after the skiing hot springs, which was fun but involved a lot of drunken Russians, one of whom yelled at Elisabeth a lot for trying to steal her tapochki.
Our basic activities, the whole time we were there, were playing in the snow and taking pictures of Baikal. There were other, more planned activities framing these two, but they were always just covers for the ones mentioned. So it was a good time. Everything was just very pretty, and clean, and free of traffic and trash and crowed sidewalks. One time some ice fisherman let us play with their equipment and try to dig holes in the ice and stuff, and we (they) caught a fish that we then passed around and took pictures with. By the time I got the fish it was fairly dead, but the fisherman kept encouraging me to slap it to make it wriggle around more, the better to take pictures with. The most amazing part, though, was when we passed off the fish to its rightful owners and they conclusively killed it: have you ever seen a fish being punched in the head? Luckily, Elisabeth has a film. I don’t mean there was demonstrative, needless cruelty to fish involved: it was a very matter-of-fact, quick-and-decisive head punching. But still. Another time we climbed a trail that prisoners in a Stalinist camp took to collect mica from the mines near the top of the mountain. Well, I don’t know how much of a mine it was- it seemed to me more like mica sitting around on top of the mountain. But anyway, it was a hard mountain to climb up and down, and I was glad I was not hauling mica, or being shot when I tried to stop. We didn’t actually go to the prison camp, as it’s too hard to get there in the winter, but we had the place pointed out to us from afar. It’s in this place in the mountains where in the winter the sun doesn’t shine at all, and it’s accessible only by ski. If I had a choice between that camp, which is famous and has a name that I should remember because it’s in the title of a book that I have read, and the camp that we saw on the most beautiful beach on Olkhon, I think I know which I would choose. I’m still confused by that Olkhon prison camp.
Our last night, clear and moonless, some of us walked out to Baikal and lay on the ice and looked at the stars. The next morning we took the same road and watched the sunrise over the mountains on the other side of the lake, slowly slowly in its winter course, but beautiful, and the red light hit the big, clear ice-blocks standing around us on the lake very impressively. When the sun had cleared the mountains a rainbow appeared, one of several we saw on the trip. For some reason I still don’t understand, there are a lot of rainbows in that area, though it never snowed or rained.
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