The Awesomeness of Russian literature is frequently brought to my attention

All in all, this is one of the more interesting Wikipedia articles I have ever read:

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Чуковский,_Корней_Иванович

Show Business

A conversation overheard by my father at the Dunkin Donuts in Frederick:

Geezer 1: I will tell you this, I no more care about the death and burial of Michael Jackson than I did about Elvis's.
Geezer 2: Did Elvis die?
Geezer 1: Now that Farah Fawcett, that’s a different story. She was one nice looking woman. Though of the three of them, it was Kate Jackson who was my favorite. That other one was eminently forgettable.
Geezer 2: That other what?
Geezer 1: Charlie’s Angels, the three Charlie’s Angels. Jaclyn Smith, that was the forgettable one. She was the most beautiful of them all, but she had no personality. None whatsoever.
Geezer 2: I never did see that show.
Geezer 1: Well if you had you’d have forgotten Jaclyn Smith. And another thing: I have never seen any reason to get any kind of tattoo or piercing.

My contributions to the illustrious Frederick News Post can be found here:

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/online_exclusives.htm

I may post here too from time to time, if I wish to be more whiny or cheesy than I find acceptable by the high journalistic standards of the FNP. A rant about the Lutheran Church of Tomsk was much curtailed in my latest, as yet unposted column, for instance. I wonder why I think people want to read these things?

Our neighbor at the dacha/village house, Vitya with half his teeth, gave me a flower the other day. I was very pleased.

By Mother's Day request, reposting link to White Winter Hymnal: http://www.subpop.com/assets/audio/4264.mp3

There was a beautiful rainbow here yesterday:



The power went out in a big, dramatic thunderstorm (I watched it through the screen in the common room, and at first I thought it was snowing through the rain, which was ridiculous, and then I decided it must be hail, and then I finally realized that thousands of petals from the apple trees were swirling by the window), and just as I was leaving the dining hall with my paper dishes and non-perishable dinner, I saw this giant rainbow, a whole one, over the campus. I rushed upstairs to get my camera, and by the time I got back it had shrunk back onto the mountains, but it was maybe even prettier there, though the top of it wasn't visible against the clouds. It was very nice seeing all the dozens of people standing on the hill over Battel Beach, watching it silently.

When it got dark outside, I stole Chris' headlamp from his room and went exploring around campus. Half the student body was huddled under emergency lights, studying. The library was a little pitiful, with people peering at notebooks and working on papers on dying laptops, but I really liked walking around in the dark stacks. I found a very amazing book called "Let's Mime!" I read a few pages of The Handmaid's Tale out on the library balcony, with the headlamp-- it was pleasantly humid. Half of the street lamps were out along College Street, and the rest of campus was just pitch black. Eventually I ended up in a Ross suite drinking hard cider and sitting around by candlelight, trying to move conversation away from the college dining policy and towards miming in Women's societies in the 1940s. We all booed when the electricity came back on, and turned the lights back off.

A Declaration of Love

I love books in which the author pretends to interview long-dead people. And how, for some reason, they always take on a lofty, rhetorical tone, as if that is how the famous dead must talk. Oh, ye interviews with the dead, would but that I had words to express my ardor. "My eyes cannot see and my aching ears/ Roar in their labyrinths."

Right now reading interview with the Biblical Ruth, in some book about reader-response criticism. Trying to figure out what that is by 7:30 this evening, when I have to give a presentation on my reader-response interpretation of the first three books of Genesis.

Book Review

I got this in an e-mail from a Moscow bookseller:

Армадa [Armada]
by Il'ia Vladimirovich Boiashov

Ilya Boyashov is the 2007 winner of the award, "The National Bestseller". "Armada", is his first novel. Terrorists are on a boat, sailing to the coast of America to destroy it. But during the journey, an event takes place that causes the disappearance of all continents of the world. The world is one big ocean! The terrorists are the last living survivors on the planet.

Also: I'M DONE WITH MY THESIS!!!!!!! Now I just have to give this accursed presentation at the Rohatyn Center symposium on Monday (haven't wrote that talk yet...), and do the defense, and it will be over. It's a little anti-climactic, actually. I never stayed up all night, or raced to the end; one day I was just done writing it, in plenty of time, and I've been leisurely editing since then. I am stressed out about other things, such as some other papers I haven't written and should have by now, and this symposium presentation, but the thesis seems to really be done.

Half Marathon

It was so fun. So much more fun that I thought it would be. I hadn't run a race in about two years, and I had forgotten how great it is. Even the feeling, yesterday, of drinking water on a hot day and the cold hitting your stomach in the way it only does when you're nervous the day before a race in hot weather, was familiar and exciting.
It was a cold, wet, windy day, but pretty good for a long race. I wore a long-sleeved shirt for the first five miles, then was fine in a tank-top. Oh, man, it was so, so fun-- I started far back in the pack, as I wanted to, and tried to stay calm the first few miles, but I kept speeding up without meaning to, and I decided to just go with it. I really like the Sheep Farm loop when it's wet-- the colors all seem richer-- and I was having fun, and I figured I might as well have fun while I felt good, and I would deal with dying at the end when the situation arose. But I felt really good the whole time, and gradually passed people, and every time I passed a mile marker I looked at my split and told myself to slow down but didn't. I did end up dying a little around the 11th mile, but I didn't really mind, as it was so much fun racing. And I didn't get passed, so it wasn't that bad, and I can in strong enough.
I really had forgotten how completely different racing is from going for a run, and how the kind of tired you are is completely different. I need to do this more.

My favorite part of that course, which is the Sheep-Farm loop followed by and out-and-back on South Street, is the part running out South Street when you see the horses from Eddy Farm out grazing on the hill sloping down from the barn. They look just like the horses my toy cowboys used to have, and I always expect and Indian raiding party to come riding over the hill.

Preemptive Nostalgia

It has happened: I am conscious enough that I am leaving Middlebury forever that it now seems to me completely wonderful and idyllic.

On Tuesday I went to a lecture by Eva Brann, an aged tutor at St. John’s College who writes books about Greek philosophy and such and is brilliant. She is a friend of Murray Dry, from whom I took Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy this fall. The lecture, on Plato’s Phaedo was excellent, and everyone there was excited about it. Lots of students from my class this fall were there, and professors I knew, and the atmosphere just seemed to be the ideal one for a university (which I guess we’re not, but it sounds better than college): a little awed, but festive, and students and professors furiously took notes about the eternal questions of philosophy, and asked good questions, an smiled and talked to each other. Then there was a dinner at the Ross commons house, and the festive intellectual atmosphere continued. It was so delightfully nerdy: the boy sitting next to me at dinner talked enthusiastically about Latin grammar, and Risk, and Pavlos talked to Ms. Brann about Greek archaeology, and Prof. Dry and the political science kids had some sort of dorky political science discussion that I half-way joined; none of it seemed artificial or for show, either. Part of its favorable impression on me, I think, was that it reminded me of Prof. Dry’s class, which was one of the most ideal-college-y ones I’ve had, and it was connected to Prof. Dry’s enthusiastically-communicated confidence that a community the enabled people to sit around and talk about Plato’s Republic was about the best thing that ever happened to the world.

This morning my Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian class met at the Town Hall Theater, where they have the farmer’s market until it’s moved outside (next week, actually), and bought Bosnian food from this very nice woman there who explained everything to us slowly and clearly in Bosnian and did not laugh at our attempts to answer. Then we sat out on the town green, where some high school boys were playing drums and an electric guitar in the gazebo, and St. Stephens was having some sort of Earth Day event with a giant revolving globe, and most of Middlebury was sitting around enjoying the beautiful weather. We had very funny, stumbling conversations in BCS.

The Philomethesians meeting last night was well-attended, and we discussed “the end of history,” with readings from Fukuyama, Leo Strauss, Marx, Hegel. It was exactly the topic of my recent melodramatic musings on Notes From the Underground, actually, and it seemed wonderfully fortuitous.

In general it seems to me like I didn’t really do college right. I’m not sure I could do it better if I went back and tried again, but my college career seems significantly lacking in the spontaneous craziness that it seems like it was supposed to have been full of. Plus, college often seems to involve a very odd, un-natural social structure, and have various other significant faults. Sometimes, though, it all seems more than worth it.

OH ALSO

Everyone (meaning the like 2 people who read this, but tell your friends) should go re-read Anna Karenina immediately. I never understand why serious Russian literary scholars all seem to hate it. Spite them, and go delight in the... I can't even find words to describe how good it is. I don't even care that much about the over-all plot, there are just so many perfect scenes.

Otto Rank and Rousseau meet Canticle for Liebowitz

Last weekend I went to an Orthodox Easter service at an OCA (Orthodox Church of America) church near Montpelier. It was very interesting, and I should have written about it. Interesting things always happen when you’re too busy to stop and record them—not coincidentally, just as a matter of course.

I finished Escape from Evil. More evil than escaping from it, frankly. My classmates and I complained loudly about the systematic way in which the book makes meaningful life impossible, with the result that Prof. Schine got sort of annoyed with us and told us that if the result of the book is greater honesty in our views of ourselves and our lives, it shouldn’t be ‘depressing.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually it’s a fairly amazing book. I was a little disappointed for the first fifty pages, as they didn’t seem to serve up the grand drama of good and evil promised by the introduction, at least not in the same medium that the introduction suggested. It has footnotes. Still, when I got over my initial disappointment at its extreme academicness, I was pretty damn impressed by its brilliance. Becker is one of those people who has read everything and then can still see over the pile of books; he just effortlessly tosses around the intricacies of Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, ancient and modern philosophy, pretty much every social theorist ever, and it never seems superfluous.

The argument (I think) is that all human evil is due to man’s attempts to achieve immortality of some kind. It is demonstrated, very convincingly and with many examples, that pretty much everything you do is part of a rather unattractive scheme of some kind to hoard life, generally at the expense of other people. I’m sort of sorry I started on this explanation, because I am not doing a very good job. But anyway, the various forms of “immortality schemes” are traced through history, from primitive ritual to stratified society to economic exchange, and it is pointed out how every cultural structure and ideal is designed to feed the myth that we will not end at death, as do all organisms. Do you like to give other people presents? Part of an ancient ritual of sacrifice, feeling that surpluses pacify fate, expending your possessions to expiate your guilt at the space you take up in the world. Do you admire fast cars? Are you pleased with the numbers on the stock ticker go up? Do you aspire to make a name for yourself in literature, art, academia, anything? Do you love your country? All to cling to constructed ideals that you imagine are undying, and to distract yourself from the primary tragedy of humanity: that we are the only animals that can imagine our own deaths, and every attempt to make ourselves less animal only increases our capacity for evil. Nazis killed out of a drive to create more life for themselves, not from a need to destroy. It’s all more convincing in the book. I think the conclusion is that, as it is impossible to live without myths, we should be aware of the subjectivity of these myths, and try to choose less destructive ones.

The main problem with Becker’s outlook (though I think it is probably a bad policy to argue with someone so much smarter than you), as far as I can see, is that he doesn’t show why we should be guilty about the evil we create. If human beings are animals like any other, why should we feel guilty about taking what we need? If we, as a species, are so designed that we need to subjugate or kill others in order to survive psychologically, why should we feel worse about this than a male elephant does when he kills a rival, or a mink does when it eats a fish? Becker takes guilt as a given for the human condition: man, because of his consciousness of life and death, knows that he is necessarily destructive of life, and he makes great efforts to expiate this guilt, generally then tying into an attempt to deny his own death. But I don’t see any reason why Becker, with his seeming confidence that the ultimate reality is the finality of death, should consider this guilt a consciousness of evil, rather than simply irrationality.

Final note: Becker scored about fifty points with me for his frequent, admiring citation of William James. But he scored about ONE HUNDRED POINTS for citing the “great science-fiction tale Canticle for Liebowitz.”

Floods and Drainage

I have approximately 8 thousand important things to be doing today, and I have put off posting this for many hours now, but I can avoid it no longer.
Today, walking the stacks of the library looking for books about Russian peasants in the 19th century, I found a book called:

Floods and Drainage from the Risks and Hazards Series. The cover is green, with some weird concentric circles on it. How glad my life now seems! No matter what difficulties I may face, I am not in the position of E.C. Penning-Rowsell, D.J. Parker, or D.M. Harding, writing a treatise on British policies for "hazard reduction, agricultural improvement and wetland conservation."

Also notable is the dedication page; I can't figure out whether it's a joke or actually terribly rude. It reads:
"This book is dedicated to Dr Foster who, by retreating in adversity, happily left our research field wide open."

This book is now standing proudly on my thesis shelf. My neighbors in the carrels do not understand my enthusiasm.

What I Wanted to Be a Really Good Blog Post but is this

For the past couple of weeks I have been wanting to write a really good blog post, partially because I'm supposed to be doing so many other things, and partially because I feel like I have something important to say, but I'm not sure what it is. So I have not written a really good blog post.

I read Notes from the Underground a few weeks ago, for the first time. It was probably something I should have done before, because I was in the familiar position of having to face one of those obvious truths of the world that you sort of know and everyone else knows but you all of a sudden have to admit. The list of these things is long, and includes things that seem really dumb to me when other people worry about them, but then at some point turn out to be legitimate, or not legitimate but unavoidable, things to worry about. So in this case it was that human striving seems fundamentally flawed, as the attainment of all our goals would be a disaster. The whole nature of humanity is involved with the building of things, and they are less than useless after they are built. The problem is boring, as I said, and you can just read Notes from the Underground if you are curious. The fact that the book was written with a view to making such a view unattractive is somehow not helpful. It still seems like there's not a lot of point in giving micro-loans to the poor to bring them into a home-owning middle class, when the next step is to despise the empty materialism of the middle class they've gotten into, and well-provided-for middle-class kids just do drugs and shoot their classmates. The answer can't be, I don't think, that the main thing is to stop paying so much attention to society's material needs, but to increase appreciation of art and literature or something. Art and literature have no meaning apart from human imperfection and striving. Michaelangelo's David is all very well, but you only need one of it: it's not usually about perfection.

The point, though, of one of the things I wanted to say, was that that all that doesn't matter. But everyone already knows it doesn't matter, obviously, because they go on working for things and wanting to attain goals and ideals. So I'm not sure why I'm so anxious to reassure you, but I am.

Because even if the good has no permanent reality that is evident in human life, the bad does. Vanquishing evil has to be meaningful, no matter what other evil immediately appears in its place. I think there is probably a philosophical argument to be made about the true ontological existence of evil proving the existence of good, but I don't really care that much. It's very funny how happy I was, sitting in the window seat in the Thunderdragons classroom at naptime last week, when I remembered the unmistakable reality of evil.

The second thing, which I remembered yesterday, is that the summer before my freshman year in high school I lay on my bed at my father's house one night, wide awake, on the blue-flowered sheets with the itchy lace border, and I thought that if I made the varsity field hockey team, as it amazingly looked like I would, if that astonishing trust were actually vested in me, I knew I couldn't say that I would never want or ask for anything again, because I saw with the logic that sees farther than the imagination that I would, but I promised I would never forget that once, in that little room with the lights from the gas station coming through the window, I hadn't been able to imagine making any further demand on the universe. And I would never look back later and laugh at my self, or act like any more adult issue that may have arisen since that night made it any less true.



In a not-very-amazing coincidence, the book we're reading this week for my religion seminar is Ernest Becker's Escape From Evil. All I've read so far is the preface, but it looks so awesome. The ambitious statement of mission: "In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil."

Two final, unrelated notes, but related because they have put me in a very good mood, as have the previous two subjects: 1) I have spent the past two days listening to Steve Earle sing "Sparkle and Shine" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As0XCEjFxpQ; start at 2:00), and 2) I was very flattered that so many people came to my symposium presentation.

Fun Game

I just found my notes from Russian Literature class on Thursday. Here is the game: I will transcribe my notes, in their entirety, and you will try to determine to what each line item refers. Hint: the topic of the class was the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. Notes follow in bold:


--zombies, Pride & Predjudice

--Power Rangers, death row

--Shakespeare, southern accents

--John Grisham, beet payments

--closet rapist/ closet ice tunneler


5 points for each correct answer, partial credit given.

Your Friday plans

I am presenting in the student symposium at 4:30 on Friday in Bi Hall room 311. If you are in Middlebury, Vermont, you should come. I will tell you all about the Virgin of the Burning Bush icon.
I'm concerned that I won't convey how interesting the topic is. I don't have much time to present, so a lot is cut out-- it's basically just describing the icon. I've been thinking about this all year, so I don't remember anymore whether what I'm talking about is obvious to other people, or interesting, or comprehensible, or what. I assure you here, it's very interesting and important, no matter how my talk might turn out.

Dream Job--Vocation discovered

Last night I dreamed that I opened a museum entirely devoted to landscape paintings of bean farms. There were many such paintings, all coming from secret, tormented periods in the artists' lives. The press and public were most interested in a series by Hans Holbein the Younger, about ten paintings in some sort of symbolic sequence. There was another series, though, more violently executed, that I liked, though I think I had a hard time convincing visitors to the museum to look at them, and then I couldn't find them.

Now I have the Ray Wylie Hubbard song "Snake Farm" on my mind, but about a bean farm ("Bean Farm... it's a legume house!").

A distinct possibility

Свидригайлов сидел в задумчивости.
— А что, если там одни пауки или что-нибудь в этом роде, — сказал он вдруг.
«Это помешанный», — подумал Раскольников.

Quantum Jumping-- The Inter-dimensional Quest for a Better You

Look, all my problems are solved!
http://www.quantumjumping.com/lp/manifesting?sr=1&gclid=CJnuiLnC4pkCFRINDQodpgGqVA

Also, I'm going to Tomsk from June 1- August 7. Actually I think I'm in Washington for orientation June 1 and 2. I remember Tomsk from Siberian History textbooks-- it is a little picture of a wooden fort.

Ancient Astronaut Theories

I just read a parenthetical description of a cited website in a wikipedia article. I wish very much that this description belonged to something of my own creation:
"(mostly a site aimed at refuting various ancient astronaut theories)".

Happy Palm Sunday to all. Today in the First Congregationalist Church of Middlebury, after the usual flock of bubbly 8-year-old girls in pastel dresses flitted about handing out the palm fronds in an inefficient but picturesque manner, these two teenage boys, very broad-shouldered and scowling, one in a sort of amazing leather jacket, strode up to the front of the church with the big bunches of left-over fronds. They were supposed to put them in these vases near the foot of the alter, but, much to their embarrassment and the congregation's hilarity, they couldn't get them gathered together to fit, and they stood there at the front of the church looking more and more awkward, shoving these palm fronds into the vase. Eventually they gave up and just let them spill out everywhere, and gave fake triumphant gestures as they self-consciously swaggered back to their pews. The messy palm arrangements looked very nice, actually, and I can't imagine how they could have been improved.

Big with Man

I'm reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It's pretty amazing. I keep underlining spectacular lines, each better than the last.

"Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes in-drawn and aloof."

Tatiana Shestakova

One of the headline's in today's online edition of Irkutsk Komsomolskaya Pravda is "In Irkutsk there occured the Womens' Car Races 'The Crystal Stiletto.'" At least that's what I think it means. The article is about this car race (across the ice, for some reason) for women, and it is just as silly as Komsomolskaya Pravda articles usually are (first sentence: "In vain do some consider that there are no women who love speed").

The important thing, though, is the mention of the race's oldest contestant: 60-year-old Tatiana Shestakova, who has had a driver's license for all of four years. She is quoted as saying that she wanted to test her skills, and to see how the others did. I think your delight with this story will be higher in proportion to the number of 60-year-old Russian women you know.

Here is the link, though unfortunately it doesn't include a picture of Tatiana, or race results.

В Иркутске прошли женские автогонки "Хрустальная шпилька-2009"

The photo gallery is here:
excellent pictures

Click the blue "следующая" to move through the pictures.

REK in NYC

Last weekend Greg and I saw Robert Earl Keen in New York. Greg got me the tickets for Valentine's Day, and we drove down from Vermont early Saturday morning. I here post my review, as slightly modified from the email sent to my mother about it:

He was great. The concert was in this huge place with a big standing-room hall down by the stage and then two big balconies with bars. It was all packed with displaced Texans--the bands kept referencing "Texas' birthday," and I discovered later that it was the anniversary of Texas' independence from Mexico. Anyway, there were three warm-up bands, two from Texas and one from Oklahoma, and there was much frantic waving of Texas flags by the audience, and whole-hearted flashing of long-horn
hand symbols, and some Oklahoma pride as well. I have described it rather weakly, but it was very impressive in the flesh. Most of the audience was younger than 30, lots of West Point cadets (we talked to some of them, and they spent the rest of the night telling everyone else, "there are lots of Yankees here!"); actually it looked a lot like the crowd at a Texas A&M football game. All the many hundreds of them were packed tight together, waving their beer cups and flags in the air, leaning towards
the stage screaming with all the force of homesickness, patriotism, and drunkenness. They knew every song of the warm-up bands, whom I did not recognize. Actually I still have no idea who they were, or how everyone else even knew that there would be warm-up bands, as it was printed nowhere on the website, tickets, signs, etc. There was this one kid with a big, elaborate "Party Never Ends" tattoo on his shoulder. That was pretty impressive.

Anyway, after three hours, REK finally came on, and it was worth all the hours of jostling with drunken Texans, because he was so, so good. By that time Greg and I had wormed our way to the very front row, center, directly in front of the stage-- it was so cool. I knew almost every song he sang, and sang along at as high a decibel level as I could manage (thankfully more than drowned out by the blaring speakers). He sang my mother's favorite, about knocking over the porta-cans at
the 4H rodeo (Shades of Gray), New Life in Old Mexico, Wild Wind, Walkin' Cane, 5 Pound Bass, Buckin' Song, Dreadful Selfish Crime, I"m comin' home, Gringo Honeymoon, that song Townes Van Zandt song Walking Shoes. The best was when he sang "Feeling Good again"-- you could tell how much the audience (which was screaming along with every song) loved it, and you could tell how much REK loved it, and he would sort of look at the audience and see how happy the song made everyone, and
then look really happy himself. He ended, of course, with Road Goes on Forever.

Later note: The warm-up acts were Willy Ray Hubbard (writer of "Redneck Mother"), Charlie Robinson (formerly married to a Dixie Chick, wasn't really very good, not even as good as his CMT music video of "Lookin' for you Baby," which I used to like a lot), and Cross Canadian Ragweed (very good). The concert venue was called Terminal 5.

Here's a picture from Greg's cellphone. As my aunt Margaret noted when I sent her the picture, the wardrobe could use some work, but as I assured her, he is not, in fact, wearing sweatpants.

LIFE IS SO FRUSTRATING, ARG!

Warning: boring catalog of research complaints

If I were to make a list of the things that have caused me frustration in life, these things would be near the top of the list:

1) Dealing with the incomprehensible nature of Russian thought and action
2) Following footnotes
3) Writing footnotes
4) Reading in Russian, which is, like, totally a different language than the one I speak

Writing this thesis tends to combine these things in horrible ways. I am currently looking at a page of a much-respected and cited book, Leonide Ouspensky's Theology of the Icon. This page includes an interesting passage, antiquated in style, about the redecoration of the Kremlin after the fire of 1547, and I would really like to quote it in my thesis. The problem is that I don't know if the passage is antiquated in style because it is from the chronicles of the sixteenth century, which would be great, or if it is merely the wording of the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities of 1847: Ouspensky's footnote doesn't really make it clear. Usually this society's journal (which is not, apparently in any US libraries) is a publication of old manuscripts, so the former seems likely, but then O. doesn't cite it as such.

But what's really annoying is that the footnote continues: quoted in N. Andreev, "The Affair of Diak Viskovatyi" (in Russian). This article, which is central to my research, is sitting on my desk, and I have read it many times, and it is simply untrue that any such thing is quoted in its many pages. What the heck?! This is even worse than when Soviet writers don't cite at all, which they generally didn't, since intellectual property was seen as collective and all (Ouspensky was writing in Paris).

Since I don't know if I can include the passage in my thesis at all, not having much of an idea where it came from, I will at least reproduce it here:

"The sovereign Orthodox tsar... sent people to Novgorod the Great, Smolensk, Dmitrov, and Zvenigorod to find holy, precious icons. Numerous holy and wondrous icons were brought from several cities. They were placed in the Cathedral of the Annunciation to be venerated by the tsar and all the Christians, until new icons could be painted. The sovereign sent for iconographers from Novgorod the Great, Pskov, and other cities. The iconographers arrived, and the sovereign tsar ordered some to paint icons, others to decorate the walls of the palaces..."

In an unrelated note, I really like it when Ivan Viskovatyi complains that the new icons depict the Holy Spirit as an "incomprehensible bird."

Wanted: Counsel

I told someone the other day that my notes for my thesis consist largely of questions. I know that this is good, that it is honest and interesting to admit uncertainty in a scholarly work, etc., but seriously, that can't be the whole paper. And interesting questions aren't ends in themselves: they owe their interest to the possibility of trying to answer them. They are interesting, I mean, because it would be interesting to know the answer.

Here is one of my questions:

In the sixteenth-century icons I'm writing about, there are lots of symbols. A ladder in the hands of Mary symbolizes, by synecdoche, Jacob's ladder, and by extension symbolizes a link between heaven and earth (=Mary), and the fact that the Old Testament prefigures the New. Complex geometrical aureoles symbolize a Burning Bush, and also, by means of Pythagorean number theory, eternity, and also the energies of God, and maybe Divine Wisdom.

Lots of theologians and art critics object to these piles of symbols-- they say things like "the realism of the Gospel is replaced by allegorism," and "a tragedy for Russian painting, which lost the true depth of its spiritual image and acquired in exchange an external beauty and a ritual formula," and complain that "revelation in the world [is] a series of events and not only a chain of symbols."

This all seems very true, and I'm all ready to look sternly upon religious allegory and symbolism, demanding portraiture and historical prototypes. But then the symbols are often cool, and I don't really see why prophets and mystics should get to write in symbols but painters shouldn't be allowed to paint in the same way. In answer to a rather puritan Ecumenical Council's edict forbidding depictions of Christ as a lamb, or as anything but the historical Jesus, this 14th-century patriarch writes: "And then in the age of the new covenant when the shadow of the Law has passed and all is fulfilled in grace and truth, then we find that the Lord himself speaks indirectly and through parables and teaches the apostle the divine mysteries through sacred symbols."

The question is: does an increase in symbolism in art signal spiritual and cultural decline, a sort of diffusion of the intensity necessary to represent ultimate truth in simple portraits, with only harmony of line and color? The question seems generalizable: in writing, in other art forms, even in thought itself, is there an intrinsic danger in symbolism? I don't think I can categorically deny the potentially great power of a symbol, whether based on a historical prototype or not, but it certainly seems the case that one can go overboard with symbols, and the results are cluttered and confusing. Look at this icon, and try to figure out what the heck is going on:



Here is an icon more admired by theologians and art historians, supposedly without allegory:



When do accumulations of metaphors not equal the sums of their subtleties? The question is not rhetorical, I expect everyone who reads this to answer.

HUGE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

URGANT NEWS CONCERNING THE VOCATIVE CASE IN ENGLISH!!!!!!

We don't have one. That's the news. I'm emerging from my state of humble virtual reticence to address this burning issue. Because you know what? This is about the children: the children who are growing up in a cultural, linguistic abyss, in an English language without that subtle adornment, that grammatical concession to human interaction, the stately acknowledgment of personal address of the vocative case.

And so I hereby issue a decree: The English language shall hereby include a vocative case for nouns, and the form of that case shall be the ending "u," pronounced "oo."

I will now answer some common questions.

Q: What is the vocative case, o illustrious Susanna? When do we use it?

A: O respected readero, your very question calls out for the vocative case! The vocative case, for those of you whose education was unfortunate enough not to include Latin or Serbo-Croatian, is used for direct address. A grammatically appropriate form of your question would include the words, "O illustrious Susannu."

Q: Susanno, how do we affix the "u" to the nouns that we wish to decline in the vocative?

A: For words ending in a consonant, simply add "u". For words ending in a vowel, replace the final vowel with "u". Final "y" is replaced by "iu." Examples: "Americu, Americu, God shed His grace on thee!"; "Ceciliu! You're breaking my heart!"; "Hey, babiu, it's the 4th of July"; "Hey hey, good-lookingu, what you got cooking?"

Note in the final example that an adjective used substantively, as a noun, can receive the vocative ending. The judges are still out on this one, though; feedback would be welcome.

Q: I read the response to the last question; won't this mess up the rhyme scheme of a lot of English poetry and music?

A: Pre-existing verbal art will be grandfathered in. We will not change old sentences, just take care, when creating new ones, to give appropriate weight to the circumstances of direct address, a valued commodity in our increasingly impersonal world.

Q: What is being done to educate the English-speaking population about this valuable and important development, Susannu?

A: I thought the best way would be to publish it on this blog that no one reads.

NOTE: This post has been edited from its former version, which favored the "o" ending. An experimental period found the final "o" to be displeasing to the ear. I think the "u" will be more sonorous, and simultaneously more soft, more natural for the tongue.

maintenance post

I became concerned that if I didn't post for too long the blog would be taken down. I should just print out the Russia entries, and then it wouldn't matter.
Also I became concerned that I was doing too much work on my religion paper.