This Segment was Recorded Earlier

Sorry I haven’t been updating you on my doings lately. They just haven’t been all that interesting to me. I must have been here long enough for things to seem normal, or at least the things that seem interesting to me are not of the culturally-comparative type and would not be good blog material.
I’ll try to think of some things I’ve done recently though.

I just got back from English class (the college-aged group), where I made the students sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we discussed the extended meanings of baseball phrases such as “bush league,” “pinch hit,” “cover your bases,” “screwball,” etc., and I showed part of a Simpsons episode that takes place at a ballpark. Most of the class was taken up by discussion of the rules of baseball, though.

In my recent drive to see all possible theatrical productions in the city, I saw a French play on Friday, a Turgenev play on Sunday (both in the big, handsome Dram-teatr), and Oliver (along with millions of kids on fieldtrips) on Sunday. Tomorrow I’m going to see The Cherry Orchard, also in the Dram Teatr.

I haven’t fallen in my high heels yet.

I forgot to mention a few weeks ago that the high point of the movie Donkey Xote was that the hero’s name, in Russian, was ‘Don Kihot Lamanchaskii.’

Warning: this part is sort of cheesy and belongs on a brochure for the benefits of making spoiled middle-class students study abroad or something.
I’ve recently been feeling a deep sympathy for all who are displaced. I think I have a hard time living in a state of constant incompetence and cultural irrelevance, but really I carry at least some aura of exotic interest, and then people congratulate me at every turn for how great it is that I came here, for how impressive it is that I traveled so far, for how well I am dealing with a foreign culture; no one congratulates the central Asian marshrutka drivers, shouting through static on their cell phones in harsh-sounding languages as passengers snap at them for not hearing their requests to stop the van; no one praises the Mongolian women selling leather gloves near the central market for their resourcefulness; the Chinese venders in Shanghai market get only distrustful glances and unceremonious demands. As an American I will always be part of a privileged class, everywhere; even where I am hated there will be an especial status to the hate. And aside from that I’m not a seller of leather gloves but a college student, middle-class and educated and economically non-threatening. And I know when I’m going home: as alien as I ever feel, I am always aware that it is temporary. I can only catch at the edges of the terror of losing one’s country, of the dehumanization of living permanently outside of one’s context. This weekend I sat in a marshrutka across from a smallish but solid-looking man in jeans and denim jacket, middle-aged, working-class, with sandy hair low on his forehead. He seemed so pleased with his world, to fit so well into it; everything about him, the way he moved, his voice when he called his son on his cellphone about what stop to meet at, the expectation with which he watched out the window, but mainly the way he wore his jacket, was just right for him, fit him. I was unreasonably concerned that he would leave Russia, and that his ease, so utterly un-cosmopolitan, would break against an incomprehensible world. And nothing about the incomprehensibility would be a cultural experience to reflect upon later in a study-abroad forum, or an adventure of youth to store up to remember in later years in a boring, well-paying job, it would just be lonely and humiliating.

It’s supposed to be cold and snowy here for the rest of the week.

Pictures

I've just spent a lot of time on a slow computer putting captions on all the pictures on the album "Irkutsk Semester II" for you people, so you'd better appreciate it. I'm working on finishing up the winter break one.

In other news, I spent most of yesterday eating cabbage to combat "spring weakness."

Things I Haven't Written

A while ago, I guess at the end of spring break, Ilana and I went to a concert in the Organ Hall, despite the fact that I had vowed never to do such a thing again. But this time there were vocalist and violists in addition to organ music, and the aires of vocalists are always entertaining. They find more variations on the bow than one would think possible. And then, the second half of the concert consisted of Bach’s Coffee Cantata, which is not only very entertaining in itself, but was performed by the same singers who had spent the first half of the concert establishing their ridiculousness, plus it was translated into Russian which made it even funnier, PLUS during intermission they gave out free plastic cups of coffee, and it was fun watching all the serious concert-going babushkas standing in a pack and sipping from identical brown cups with pointless little handles. The concert organizers seemed a little nervous about introducing this element of playfulness to the serious realm of classical music, and actually, all irony aside, I rather like the earnestness of the Russian relationship to the arts, free of some level of self-consciousness that that relationship has picked up in America. Ignore the last two sentences: I completely failed to explain what I mean.

Donkey Xote doesn’t make any sense in the Russian translation, or perhaps it was just all lost on me, or perhaps it didn’t make any sense in English either. I don’t know which.

The two days of spring were nice, but there was a snowstorm last evening and we’ve skipped over summer and fall, I think, and are back to winter.

I’m flying home 8 weeks from yesterday.

I bought some amazingly awesome red high-heeled cowboy-ish boots, and also a red leather belt with various rhinestones all over it. I am going to be so Russian by the time I get home, you are not even going to know what to do with me.

There were a bunch of butterflies around Baikal yesterday.

The rest is still unwritten.

Signs of Spring

I think it is spring here now. You can tell because everyone in Irktusk has come out of winter hibernation and is walking around near the river with beer bottles in their hands. Like, every single person in Irkutsk. If they were all drinking the same brand of beer, it would look like a beer commercial: these hordes of young people, dressed like they’re going to a club, stream down the streets from different directions toward some common point, the sun streaming through the glass of the bottles in their hands and making the beer inside shine golden and translucent. The mangy old men are also out drinking beer, of course, but they are huddled on the same benches they always were, further from the main street down to the river; spring does not seem to have affected them much.

This all happened at once, as far as I can tell, Friday afternoon, the first truly warm day of the year. When I went into the movie theater at 4:00 or so, the world was as it always was, and when I left the theater around 5:00 or so, in disgust at the dumbness and ugliness of the movie, all had been transformed. The area around the theater seems to be the new place to be; in a two-hundred yard radius of that historic building, dozens of groups of drinkers are milling about, soaking in the sunlight like I hope the trees are doing, preparing to put out some dang leaves already.

Um

The link to the Black Panther organization was not added to the blog by me. Fie upon for logger-headed knave. You know who you are.

Aimless Indignation

I am tired of cultural philosophizing. I mean about the unfathomable Russian soul, about the great cultural truths we can glean from “the American smile,” about how Germans are logical and French are emotional and Russians suffer as a hobby, etc. It’s just lame. People just pick up these ideas and then bend all reality with which they come into contact to fit them. The source of my especial annoyance today is our literature class, in which all we do is listen to the same unquestioned statements rehashed again and again to fit every poem we read.

Issue number 1: The American Smile
Everyone talks about how Americans smile all the time, and these smile-commenters are very damn smug about the whole thing. If Americans were not so hypocritical, or so naive, or so rich, or so unable to understand suffering (whatever trait the speaker wants to impute to America at the moment), we would stop all our stupid smiling. The most charitable interpretation of the American smile is that it is a cultural unwillingness to discuss unpleasantness, a cultural expectation that everyone should be happy and cheerful and that everything should be great all the time. Whether or not it is true that we feel that we must live up to a high expectation of success in life, I resent the classification of smiling as a form of hypocrisy. Here is my own sweeping cultural theory, based not on ethnic character traits but on the actually cultural basis of forms of nonverbal communication: while Russians think of a smile as communicating only happiness, for Americans the smile serves a double function, communicating either happiness or goodwill (or both, of course). In America, when people smile at each other on the street, they are not saying “I wish you to know that I at this moment am especially happy,” they are saying “I wish you well, and our relationship, even if it is only a relationship of short standing and based only on our sharing the same sidewalk, is positive and friendly.” There is nothing hypocritical about smiling in such a situation, even if each smiler is harboring grief and sorrow. The smile is not, in this situation, an expression of emotion but a social gesture, communicating an honest message. In America, a dishonest smile is not a smile when one is actually sad, but a smile when the smiler is actually working against the smilee, or does not wish him well.

Issue number 2: Only Russian Orthodoxy takes seriously the issues of grief and suffering
The evidence that was brought forth in our literature class today for this was that in western Christendom the most important holiday is Christmas, showing that we are concerned with individualism and positiveness and such (it’s important that God became man, every human being is important, etc.) and in Holy Russia the most important holiday is Easter, before which a proper number of tears have been shed, unhappiness experienced, etc. Um, unfair ignoring of independent variables. Christmas seems like a bigger deal than Easter in the West mainly because it corresponds with the secular holiday celebrated by Russians on New Year. And then, all the evergreen and light imagery of Christmas is about pretty much the same thing that Russians talk about as being their own higher, more atune-to-the-closeness-of-death-and-dispair understanding of Easter: celebrating the victory of life over death, light over dark, good over bad that comes even in the frightening circumstances of winter and want.
And then, where do they get off claiming to have the only form of Christianity is which pain and suffering get coverage? They need to be sent to Spain to look at some gory crucifixes, or read about medieval pilgrims putting stones in their shoes, or watch The Passion of the Christ or something. I find all of those things fairly distasteful, but it’s the principle of this silly psychological analysis of entire cultures that is under discussion. If Russia gets to over-emphasize sorrow and suffering, so do we. Stop trying to hog all the misery for your own country, Rooskies.

I could go on for a long time. People just decide these silly things—American movies always have happy endings, Russian culture is based on the number 3 (because they are so holy), etc., and then they only see what supports them.

Northern Wilds

I went for a walk this afternoon and spent a lot of time trying to take a picture of a magpie. But though they flew right by me many a time, flashing the metallic-green feathers on their back, I never had my camera out at those times. So you will have to take my word for it: there are lots and lots of magpies here.

I did, however manage to photograph one of the other principle factors of physical reality in springtime Irkutsk:


[note especially the depth of mud on the foot in the background]

I promised to write about my spring break. But there’s not that much to say. I spent lots and lots of time on a train with middle-school girls (my host-mother’s choir). I heard the new Brittney Spears song (“Do You Wanna Piece of Me”) many times. I answered lot of questions about whether I had ever seen the king and queen of America, how I liked London, was all we ate hamburgers, doesn’t Irktusk seem small when Americans live in the world’s largest cities, etc. I am still puzzled by how often I get asked about kings and queens. Something is clearly wrong with our democracy propaganda. But then, I think it’s just part of everyone thinking that Great Britain and America are the same place. And not just middle schoolers.

Ust-Ilimsk, the little city to the north where Valentina Petrovna’s choir sang and I hung around, was not really differentiable from any other small Siberian city, except that it’s only 30 years old (like Syeverobaikalsk), so it’s somewhat less run-down looking. Like Syverobaikalsk, it was built by the Young Communist League, and the main streets are called: Karl Marx Street (standard), World Street (the name could also mean Peace Street, but I was told that it was so named because it was built by the whole world), Friendship Among Nationalities Street, Romantics’ Street, and Dreamers’ Street. All these streets were rather broad and un-crowded, and the city had a pleasant, open feel. I spent a nice two days there being away from Irktusk. I mainly hung out with the very nice family I stayed with, especially with their middle-school daughter, Nadya, who was very sweet and non-teenagery. She had also just won the “Little Princess Ust-Ilimsk” pageant or something, and I got to go to her big TV interview with her.



Me being a cool kid and hanging out at the movie theater with Nadya and her friend- here we are pretending to play a motorcycle-racing game. DDR was also played. That’s how cool I am.

Oh, and here I am talking to Nadya’s English class, who did not understand a word of English. Here is how their teacher introduced them to me: “This is the 6-M class. They are the class of English. But they do not like English, because they are not interested in travel or in being well-educated people.” The students were not offended, because they did not understand a word that she said.


Final note: there is special mayonnaise for Lent. But not special cabbage. You must go one eating the same cabbage that once sat in your hallway in the fall, and you must eat it in greater quantities than ever before, because, in the words of the great cabbage-preserver herself, “It is spring! We must constantly eat cabbage! Needed acids!”