Ужас

The Awesomeness of Russian literature is frequently brought to my attention

2009-07-15T10:26:00.002-06:00

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

2009-07-08T03:46:00.001-06:00

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.

2009-06-22T08:52:00.002-06:00

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.

2009-05-10T15:44:00.004-06:00

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

2009-05-05T08:16:00.003-06:00

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

2009-04-30T17:19:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-26T09:24:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-25T12:18:00.001-06:00

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

2009-04-23T23:02:00.003-06:00

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

2009-04-23T22:59:00.001-06:00

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

2009-04-20T18:37:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-18T15:08:00.005-06:00

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

2009-04-18T08:45:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-14T12:03:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-12T06:59:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-10T08:59:00.001-06:00

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

2009-04-08T18:19:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-05T13:12:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-02T18:00:00.002-06:00

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

2009-03-10T16:11:00.005-05:00

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

2009-03-06T00:39:00.003-05:00

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!

2009-02-24T21:51:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-23T20:14:00.006-05:00

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

2009-02-21T21:10:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-20T10:36:00.001-05:00

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.

Another post with no real theme

2008-05-17T03:39:00.001-06:00

I don’t remember anymore how I felt about leaving America for Russia. I would look for my journal and try to remember but a) it’s packed at the bottom of a box of letters and stuff that is going to cost me a lot of money in overweight luggage and b) I’m fairly sure my journal entries are never true. Anyway, the point is, I can’t figure out how I feel about going home in two weeks (and two days), and I can’t remember my one applicable point of reference.

[assume a long period of time in which I stared alternately at the computer screen and my weird zodiac comforter-cover trying to thing of something appropriate to type]

This is lame-- I just lived for 9 months is a foreign country, saw history, culture, and humanity from new and unfamiliar perspectives, peeled countless carrots and potatoes, and I can’t think of anything at all to say whenever someone asks me things like what my impressions of Russia have been, what I’ve learned, what Russians are like in comparison to Americans, etc. It sort of kills conversations, and essays on final exams. You know that movie whose name I’ve forgotten, with the boxer? Raging Bull. Where the guy is a hopeless lump of inarticulateness and therefore leads a life of violence and eventually tragedy? I think I’ll skip the life of violence and tragedy part, but I am more and more annoyed at how unable I am to say what I want to, in any language or form. Being forced to speak a foreign language for 9 months-- well, like 12 if you count summer school—has brought my annoyance with the situation rather forcibly to my attention.

Here’s a translation of a nice Bunin poem, so I can take advantage of someone else’s artistic use of language by pretending to participate in it:

The flowers, the wasps, the grasses, the grain,
The azure, and the noonday swelter...
The time will come—God will ask the prodigal son:
“Were you happy in your earthly life?”

And I’ll forget everything—I’ll remember only these
paths in the fields between the grain and the grass—
and from sweet tears I won’t manage to answer,
fallen at the merciful Knees.

Ok, it seemed less corny in Russian. Also, anyone who can think of a way to avoid the internal rhyme in the third line, let me know. Mainly I like how the capitalization of ‘Knees’ brings out the funniness of that word. Also, I do sort of miss that sweltering summer feeling, when the heat is so far beyond uncomfortable that the discomfort isn’t worth noticing, and you’re just crushed between the heat from above and the humidity rising off the ground. I mean, I like it in the way you like the freezing cold—I’m glad it exists, to make the universe seem a little less under control and boring, but I don’t consciously decide to be out in it for more than seconds at a time.

Post Written Some Time Ago

2008-05-17T03:38:00.000-06:00

There’s a Morse code for Cyrillic. Of course there would have to be, but it never occured to me.

Victory Day was really cool. I’ve never seen so many people in Square Kirova, and they all had balloons or flowers or ice cream. The weather was nice, and the parade was jolly, and the military salute was fairly cool (the announcer-person would say, “Comrade pilots! I congratulate you on the 63rd anniversary of the glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War!” and the pilots would say “oorah!” in a gruff chorus, and then the military jeep would carry the announcer on to the corrections officers, or the navy (why is the navy even in Irkutsk? There’s not really anyone to fight on Baikal), or one of the other numerous uniformed groups), and the veterans all had lots and lots of metals, such that there was barely room for shirt, and the crowd pushing to put their flowers around the eternal flame was more courteous than your typical pushing crowd, and overall the impression was of great civic festivity. I like how in Russia you are considered a veteran not only if you served in the military during the war, but also if you worked in a factory, or were generally helpful in some other capacity (a “veteran of labor”). This means, as far as I can tell, that everyone who was of working age during World War II is a veteran, including women, and there was many a babushka proudly sporting her metal-covered dress jacket. The only detractions to the prideful but joyful solemnity were a) this weird, long performance by a special operations group of some kind at the end of the military salute, choreographed to “It’s the Final Countdown,” involving breaking beer bottles against their heads, pretending to shoot each other, pretending to kill each other with shovels, some slow shadow-boxing segments, jumping through burning hoops, etc., and b) the sort of retro, campy feel to some part imparted by all the communist symbols. I mean, it makes sense to have the communist symbols, as the war was after all fought by the USSR, and I’m really arguing that they be removed, but I’ve gotten pretty used to seeing that hammer and sickle on teenagers’ t-shirts, an alternate to rhinestone-covered Che Guevara’s, and it was sort of hard to take the same symbol seriously as a political and military rallying point.
Joseph has a pretty picture of the eternal flame with flowers all around it, but I think you will have to wait until we’re both back in America and I can steal it from wherever he posts it on the internet before you see it. Danya has a video of the beer bottles being broken on foreheads.

In the tail dive of my Russian experience, I have entered a period of being completely enamored with the country and everything in it. Before this, there was a brief period of being happy with everything I was doing and seeing but being fully aware that this happiness was tied to the fact that I was leaving in about a month. But now, while I am rationally aware of such a connection, I don’t really feel it.

I went with Valentina Petrovna and Nastya to Listvianka in the silly little red car today. I have long been curious about V.P.’s activities in Listvianka- she goes there all the time, and seems to like it a lot, but I’ve never been able to figure out what she finds to do there. Apparently the answer is that she drives around and drops in on all the eccentric artists who live there. So Nastya and I did that too, and it was pretty cool. I wish I were an eccentric artist. I think I could do the eccentric, but unfortunately, I think that for people to put up with you, you have to demonstrate actual artistic talent. But anyway, it was a sunny day on Baikal, and, what’s actually most important here: Baikal has turned back into a real lake, with water, at least at its southern tip. It was a pretty startling contrast from two weeks ago, when it was a vast expanse of mushy ice.

Other news: did you know that you can eat blini with lettuce and ketchup? You can. If you have lettuce, which is unlikely; I’d never seen it in our apartment until today.

I’m about to break my vow never to eat posi again. There’s a batch cooking in the kitchen in this odd device that V.P. got at the 40th anniversary concert as a present from the alumni; I’ve stalled as long as I could- running, showering- but I think I’m about to be summoned. Yep, there was the summon. It will be the sixth meal of the day.

Patience is a Virtue

2008-05-12T02:03:00.000-06:00

I'm not posting any more blogs or pictures until I get home. I need all my money to mail my books to America. You can contact me by carrier pigeon.

Leaving woes

2008-05-09T20:20:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I used the can-opener in our apartment correctly for the first time ever. And I'm only here for another three weeks. I may never be called upon to open another can.

Update

2008-05-04T20:53:00.001-06:00

In case you are concerned, I think I am over the food poisoining. Even my period of caution was ended this morning: Katya was too proud of having made blini for me to refuse to eat them.

without title

2008-05-04T01:36:00.001-06:00

A week ago the Orthodox Church celebrated Easter. I went to the midnight service in the church near the train station. I would give you further information, but it doesn’t seem very respectful to make flippant comments about what for everyone there was the highest religious event of the year, and I’m not very good at non-flippancy. There were many candles involved, and standing for many hours. It was sort of odd to celebrate Easter twice, actually. My favorite part of the day was how instead of saying “Happy Easter,” people greet each other on Easter by saying “Christ is risen!” to which the other person responds “He is risen indeed!” After reading this in my first-year Russian textbook, I had been waiting to get to be involved in this exchange ever since. Even people I didn’t know who called the house informed me that Christ was risen, not to mention the persons from whom I bought groceries. I bought an Easter cake at the bread kiosk and Adrienne and I ate it here at the Shulga compound.

The next day, Monday, was the big 40-th anniversary concert of my host family’s choir. This concert, held in the big Dram-Teatr, had been looming over the household for at least the past month. It all went off successfully, as far as I could tell. Only one choir member fainted on stage, the small children from the youngest choir who ran about the theater did so with as little noise as could be expected, the congratulatory speeches were much shorter than they could have been, and everyone got lots of flowers. It was all very grand and sequin-covered. Katya and some dignified older gentleman very theatrically led the ceremonies, complete with poems written for the occasion, solemn introductions, and those earnest assurances to the audience of the undying love of the performers that for some reason so fill Russian theaters and concert halls, and Katya’s gown (blue) had more sequins than anyone’s. Nastya directed the younger choir, sang with a choir of graduates, and gave her always-stellar performance of “O Happy Day.” Valentina Petrovna, oh course, was the big star, with costume changes, congratulations via video-clip from professors of local universities, celebration in the aforementioned poems, etc. I wondered more than ever how I ended up in this house. I feel like my presence is bringin down the house-hold glamour factor several points.

May 1 is Labor Day here. Nothing interesting happened. Apparently in the socialist past this was a huge deal and everyone went to big demonstrations and waved flags and yelled cool slogans, but no more. It was, however, a day off school and work, and since it was a Thursday, the school and work that would have been on Friday was moved to Sunday (can we do things like that in America, on a national level? I am impressed.). On Thursday night Sara, Julia, Ben, Joseph, and I left on the train for Ulan Ude, and we arrived at 6 in the morning after a very small amount of sleep. Heroically ignoring our exhaustion, we headed straight for the Giant Head of Lenin, tied with Baikal as the most important object in Siberia. In case you are unaware of this wonder of the modern world, the Giant Head of Lenin is a giant head of Lenin. It is the largest metal head in the world. The location of the corresponding body is unknown. This giant bald head rules over a giant, fairly empty square in the middle of Ulan Ude, and its grandeur and beauty are beyond description. Other activities of the day were a long quest to find these Buddhist temples several miles from the city, walking around said Buddhist temples, eating posi in the Central Market (in a cafe chosen on the basic of asking a passer-by where her favorite posi were), and going to the coolest concert ever in the world. It was called “Nomads,” and I think it was organized as a celebration of Buryat nationalism. Well not nationalism in a political sense, but pride in nation. Aside from the five of us, I think there were 3 other non-Buryats in the big, way-over-seating-capacity theater. We had bought the last 5 tickets early that morning, standing-room-only (we actually sat in the aisle in chairs taken from the cafe), and immediately after buying them the phone in the ticket office rang three times with people begging for tickets. I felt a little bad that we had taken tickets from actual dedicated fans of the performing artists, actually; these were truly dedicated fans. The first half of the concert was all traditional music, with an orchestra of folk instruments, throat singing, awesome clothing, etc. The enthusiastic, beaming little announcer would say things between all the songs like “I’m sure this music returns you to your childhood, and makes you and to get on a horse and ride far out across the plain and just listen, listen, listen to the steppe.” There were a bunch of visiting musicians from Mongolia. Though the announcer generally spoke Russian, he spoke Mongolian when speaking to the Mongolians, and the musicians always spoke Buryat or Mongolian to the audience, which seemed to understand the three languages equally. In the second half the orchestra of folk instruments had been removed, and it all came to resemble an odd karaoke bar. It was still pretty cool though. Mixed with Mongolian pop, a tango, a belly-dance, and lots of flute-playing was a rendition of “the American folk song” Amazing Grace on various traditional instruments and accompanied by ballet dancers. The announcer said that the melody made you want to fly out over the plain, over the steppe, across wide expanses, toward the mountains.” He has clearly never heard it played on an organ. There was a fairly long period of stirring speeches on the part of various representatives of various organizations on the subject of the conservation of Buryat culture and the celebration of the talent of all nations of the Mongolian language family, thanking the organizers of the concert, etc. In one of my favorite parts of Buryat/Mongolian culture, instead of flowers they would give silk scarves in one of the five colors of Tibetan Buddhism. When we were in Ulan Batar we were told that people usually gave blue there, as the national color of Mongolia, the nation of the sky; at this concert mainly white was given, and some yellow. One of the speech-givers, who cried with emotion, wished us all that our children would not forget their native language of Buryat, and that they would always propagandize Buryat culture. I think any future children of mine might have trouble with especially the first of those directives.

The only obstacle to my complete enjoyment of the concert was a rapidly-developing case of food-poisoning. Joseph and I were the only ones to get sick; we still haven’t figured out anything that we ate that everyone else didn’t. Lots of food was eaten that day. The obvious culprit is the posi; even if it was not, in fact, the posi, I am never eating posi again. The results were simply too miserable. We had to check out of our hotel at 7:00 am the next morning, and our train wasn’t until 2:40. We spent the intervening 7 and a half hours sitting still in various places. Luckily, it was a sunny day, and we were able to spend a lot of time sitting on bench in the main square, gazing at the Head.

The train ride home, on the express electrichka, was very pretty. The first few hours were through the forest-steppe, with wooden villages and goats and things out the window. Then we spent several hours along Baikal, on which the ice is breaking up very picturesquely. Luckily, all the tickets had been sold out except for first class, we we had a fairly comfortable place for sitting still in our sickness. Joseph and I were both better enough by dinnertime to eat yoghurt and bread.

I’m glad we went back to Ulan Ude, despite its merciless attack of my digestive system. It’s a nice little city, with snow-covered mountains visible, and a big head of Lenin, and lots of wooden houses, and just a general pleasant atmosphere. The cars stop for pedestrians. We never did get over that. I’m trying to think of more reasons why I liked Ulan Ude so much, but I can’t come up with anything better than pretty and pleasant. And even if I still don’t remember why anyone would ever want to eat food other than white bread, I’ve had my share of ice-cream and cookies in this life

This Segment was Recorded Earlier

2008-04-15T20:53:00.000-06:00

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

2008-04-11T02:03:00.000-06:00

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

2008-04-06T21:06:00.002-06:00

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

2008-04-06T21:05:00.000-06:00

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

2008-04-04T21:55:00.001-06:00

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

2008-04-02T00:28:00.001-06:00

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

2008-04-02T00:19:00.005-06:00

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!”

auto-otvetchik

2008-03-21T02:01:00.001-05:00

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?

2008-03-21T01:57:00.000-05:00

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

English Lessons, Cont.

2008-03-18T22:37:00.000-05:00

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.

Trans-Baikalin' it

2008-03-10T02:03:00.001-05:00

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.

History of Religion

2008-03-06T03:17:00.002-05:00

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."

Spring Group Trip

2008-03-06T03:16:00.001-05:00

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.

Day in Review

2008-02-28T04:01:00.001-05:00

Today I was very stressed out because I have my two mainstream classes on Thursdays. I thought I might have to give a report in history (the due date was not at all clear to me), and I still didn’t know how to say “Congregationalist” in Russian as of this morning, and I hadn’t printed it, etc. And then my spelling class is terrifying by definition. Plus I started taking the spelling class because it was in the room where I thought a different class would be, so I wasn’t sure if I could find the class again. Plus I hadn’t found the questions we were supposed to answer for homework.

So, after grammar class at the mezhfak, I rushed downtown, went to an internet cafe, used Wikipedia to solve some of my translation woes, printed the paper, continued to stress out about how I can’t read out loud in Russian and I can’t speak well enough to give the report without reading, went to the spelling class. The latin class of the group whose spelling class I went to was cancelled, about which they were very happy, so they were combined with this other class that was supposed to have latin at that time... sorry, this story is long and uninteresting so I’ll stop it. But first thing in the class, we did a “dictation.” That is, the teacher, this large woman with very long gray hair that she wears in a whale-spout, read sentences, and we were to write them, with correct spelling. But I never understood a word she said. So that was good. O% on that assignment. Then the class continued, following some textbook I don’t have. Then it was revealed that the class would meet for two class periods today. But I ran away after the first, because I had history class. But we sat in the class for 20 minutes, and no teacher appeared. I chatted with a very nice boy behind me, and eventually I asked, sort of laughing, “So, what are we sitting around not having class?” And he told me that the professor’s son’s funeral had been the day before. Oh. So then we all left, which means I could have gone to the other class period of the spelling class. It also means I didn’t give my report. Mainly, of course, I am sorry about the death of the professor’s son. Interesting, un-death-related note: my report contains the word “Mayflowerski.” I made that word up. It means “relating to the Mayflower.”

We’re leaving on our group trip tomorrow evening, and getting back Wednesday afternoon. I lost the schedule, so I don’t really know what we’re doing. We’ll see a famous hydroelectric plant, I know, and a museum of the BAM, this segment of railroad that the communists spent lots of year and dollars building but is sort of useless. And we’ll go downhill skiing at this famous ski mountain, but Middlebury only pays for an hour. I’m mostly excited about grocery shopping for the 36-hour train ride.

Very warm here the past few days. On my dash from the internet café to the linguistics department I saw the sad sight of a soft, crumbling ice palace. I hope it’s warmer near Syeverobaikalsk, wither our group trip, as I think our travel plans depend on being about to drive on a frozen Lake Baikal.

Homeward Bound, someday

2008-02-25T04:11:00.000-05:00

I called STA Travel, after waiting for it to be business hours in Arizona Standard Time, which was not too convenient, and have successfully changed my ticket home to June 1. I get in at 3:something p.m. In case you wanted to know.

It is muddy and slushy and yet still cold and cloudy here. I have not yet been killed by an icicle.

Yesterday on the television set Valentina Petrovna and I watched a concert of nuclear scientists and the like singing and playing guitars and such. They are big stars. They are also pretty awesome- all these old guys in cardegans up on the stage singing clever songs. At least I was assured that they were clever- I of course did not understand any of it. But the music part was agreeable. I think this is one of the cultural advantages of the absence of free market- in the Soviet Union, musicians didn't have to be good looking.

С Празником

2008-02-23T23:31:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was two important days in the cultural life of Russia. Well it was only one day, but two important anniversaries were noted. Important Thing Number 1: Day of the Defender of the Fatherland. This is the Russian Federation’s replacement of Red Army Day. In effect, this holiday is a combination of Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, and Armed Forces Day (I vaguely remember that we have such a holiday-- we do, right?) But then, as International Women’s Day is coming up, or maybe just as a cultural relic of a time when every man was a veteran, the holiday has picked up the added role of Men’s Day, and you have to congratulate every man. This is especially ridiculous when people congratulate the boys in the Middlebury program, who, as I repeatedly pointed out to them after they were congratulated by babushkas, defended nary a fatherland.

I approve of this holiday: it makes Russians festive and cheerful, which is quite a feat. It is in fact the only holiday other than New Year’s upon which I heard people congratulating each other days in advance, on “the approaching holiday.” This puts it way ahead of Christmas, Epiphany, and Day of the Forest Worker. I personally celebrated this holiday by laughing at Russians trying to get into the post office, which was obviously closed; by going to look at the Eternal Flame by the river, and at the other people going to look at the Eternal Flame; by making a heroic effort to read the long poem on the WWII memorial, about the “Leninist sons of city and of taiga;” by almost getting run over by a group of students from the police academy going to march about by the Eternal Flame; and by attending a concert for veterans in which V.P.’s choir took part. You may point out that I am not, in fact, a veteran, so what was I doing taking the seat of some deserving old man who, were it not for me, would have had a better view of the balalaika orchestra? I do not have an answer for you, other than that when Valentina Petrovna commands, I obey. The best part of the concert was the folk dances, especially when performed by cute little 6-year-old girls. Now I am jealous that I did not grow up in Russia and couldn’t be in an awesome Russian dance troupe.

The second significance of the twenty-third of February is that it is the anniversary of the birth of Anastasia Vladimirovna Shulga, my Chinese-restaurant-singer host sister. This meant that the day was a frantic flurry of salad-making, mostly involving beets, and that the extended family assembled at the apartment for a birthday dinner. I don’t really know how to describe this event. The important elements were 1)“the table” which was assembled before the guests arrived, with the aforementioned salads and strives for the adjective “rich” and 2) the giving of toasts, which as far as I could tell were all very similar but all went on for a long time. This doesn’t sound that OOC, I know, but it was, especially by about the 4th toast. Singing and dancing became increasingly involved, as did the intensity with which V.P. yelled at people who she didn’t think were drinking enough. My response to this problem was to escape whenever possible and play Marble Blast Gold on the computer with the grandchildren, but after a while I would always be summoned back. Ok, I have completely failed to capture this event, but oh well, I can’t think of anything else to say.

Misc.

2008-02-21T05:23:00.000-05:00

I don’t have any exciting new experiences to relate. Still, I’m sure that I am absorbing all sorts of cultural information and such. But I don’t remember anymore what will be interesting to American readers. I’ll try to think of some things.

A) I’ve gotten used to the word ‘Tajikistan’ being pronounced with either angry scorn or with the kind of pity with which people in the western hemisphere say ‘Haiti.’ Apparently it is a place no one wants to be, including the Tajiks, who all seem to live in Russia. All news about Tajikistan involves fatalities. Even in Soviet times, it was always the poorest republic, with few important resources, and I get the impression it was sort of ignored by the government. Before it became a Soviet republic, I think it was ruled by the Uzbeks; Tajiks have tough luck. Am I the only person who didn’t know that there was a long civil war there in the 1990s? At least they probably have good food, being in central Asia and all.

B) This evening, being a conscientious student of Russian language and culture, I read part of a children’s book lent to me by one of my teachers. It is one of the thousands of ‘tales from the history of our great and God-appointed nation’-type children’s books sold everywhere here, with colorful pictures of shining onion-domes and blond men on horseback killing Mongols and such. This one is about the great and holy heroine Evpraksia of Ryazan. The reason that she is great and holy, and a good model for the nation’s youth, is that when Ryazan was invaded by the Mongols she threw both herself and her young son from the highest tower. Our literature teacher talked to us at great length about why this was so heroic and necessary to the patriotism of her fellow Russians (I can’t really say countrymen, because there was no united country), but I am still not sure this is the best subject for a children’s book. Listen well, kids: when in difficulty, the best and most romantic solution is to kill yourself and any minor children under your protection.

C) There are going to be elections soon, but no one cares, because there are no real candidates.

D) We are about to run out of homemade raspberry jam and I am very sad.

Dog Sleds, or perhaps Dogsleds, or Dog-sleds

2008-02-17T02:06:00.000-05:00

We went to Listvianka yesterday, and Middlebury paid vast sums of money for each of us to dog sled for 5 km, which was about 15 minutes. The whole thing was not really remotely adventurous but just completely touristy, but it was still very fun.

It was a pretty, sunny day, and Listvianka was abuzz with activity: cars driving all over the lake, ice-fishing, ice-skating, a hover-craft scooting about, a bunch of dog-sleds on the ice, and a huge walled ice-palace thing with ice-slides and an ice-rink and several ice-castles and sculptures. When we drove in on the marshrutka we had a brilliant view out the window of the mouth of the Angara, never frozen, but a very cold stripe of bright-blue between two endless expanses of ice, with the Shaman Rock sticking up in ice-covered whiteness against the blue too.

The dog-sledding center was far back from the lake up on a hill dotted with dozens of dog-houses with the owners’ little wooden house in the middle. We had to wait around for a long time for a sled to be ready, because it is Russia, and nothing ever works out the way you’ve arraigned it. While we waited, a very quiet woman showed us video clips of a big race in Kamchatka that they enter, and of the fall training they do with the kids from the village, in which dogs pull kids on scooters. They did a 3-day race over Olkhon on such scooters, one dog to each scooter (not razor scooters, but bicycle-size). Meanwhile, a preternaturally serious baby stood by the door and observed us with concern.

The sled-dogs are raised to be completely free of aggression toward people, and they were indeed very friendly. They even had to get a guard-dog at the sledding-center, since the sled-dogs would let anyone come take them away. They aren’t huskies, but some other, smaller breed, in various shades of white and brown. They certainly loved to run; the second the break was let off the sleds they would shoot off down the trail. I think there were 8 dogs pulling the sled, in 4 pairs. The second pair from the back was especially energetic, and when they were all supposed to be resting between runs would object to the lack of activity by leaping as high into the air as their harnesses would allow. Though it was a nice day for us, it was hot for the poor dogs, who did a lot of rolling around in the snow between runs. What else? Oh, my favorite part of my run was when the dogs tried to run off the track to chase some horses. What kind of dogs chase horses? If I were not already fairly used to Russian live-stock practices, my other question would be, why were there horses wandering around Listvianka by themselves?

I have pictures. Maybe if I ever finish posting pictures from break I will put them up on the picture site.

This was to be posted several days ago too. I dislike technology.

2008-02-14T05:16:00.000-05:00

It has come to my attention that my last post was somewhat lacking in content. But here is my question for you: are you people writing any blog posts at all, that you can so freely criticize mine? Well, for all I know you are, and just don’t want me to read them. Hmm. Moving on. I have posted the brilliant observations of Russian culture, whose absence you were so mourning, below. You were not mourning the absence of Russian culture, but of my observations of it. I am too bad at English to go back and fix that sentence instead of writing a lengthy explanation. And since I am supposed to be studying Russian and not English, it doesn’t matter.

I am, however, enjoying passing on my limited knowledge of the English language to the high-paying people of Irkutsk. This evening I worked as a sub in an adult class and made them read “The Gift of the Magi.” I never realized how incredibly difficult to read that story is. The students were fairly alarmed. I think they still liked it though: the copy room had been locked and the printer in the office ran out of ink, so we were sort of lacking in the third and forth pages of the story, and after class I saw them fighting over the few existing copies. For one thing, judging by my own appreciation of Russian rock lyrics, if metaphors are wrapped in incomprehensible grammar and dozens of unknown words, they seem much more clever when you figure them out. And then Biblical allusions were all very fascinating to them, as they had never heard of any of it. They need Barbara to come do the Three Wise Men rap for them, or whatever. Also, Mama, you were quoted as having often told me in my childhood “Who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?” They thought that was very funny. But really, it so difficult to judge how they are feeling about lessons when they just don’t smile. They explained once that it’s very fake and dishonest for Americans to smile all the time, but I’m realizing more and more that for us smiling is a very important method of communication. It is not dishonest to smile when you are not happy if a smile, in the given situation, communicates something that you intend for it to and is true, such as good will.

My main class remains the hooligan middle-schoolers on Monday mornings. After the success of I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor, I’m planning on starting all classes with a short and interesting song, so if you think of any let me know. I really want to make them sing “I don’t want a pickle,” but since it’s a song about mispronouncing words, that might not be the best idea. I wish I had these kids more often than once a week: then I would have much more power over their vocabularies, and I could raise a generation of Irkutsk youth to go around saying all the things I think people should say more often, like “For the love of Mike!” and “befoozled” and “nincompoop.” They would also listen to a lot of country music and Silly Wizard.

More Russian TV News

2008-02-14T05:14:00.000-05:00

There was a news story this evening about a toll road in Belarus. I guess I can see how the concept of a toll road would be odd to people used to the ideas of socialism, but it was still sort of funny how struck they were by it all. They filmed the sign with the list of fees, and they pointed out gravely that often a line forms when every car has to stop at the toll gates.
There was a clear struggle on the part of all involved to reconcile in their minds the concept that roads belong to the public sphere and should be free to drive on the same way the government should be guaranteeing you work and a pension and the argument of the Belarusian officials, repeated many times throughout the broadcast, that the road was a very good one, everyone benefits from a good road, and if a society wants a good road they’re going to have to pay for it.
Personally, I was pretty impressed with the road too. And, as Gogol, or perhaps some other Russian writer, said, in Russia there are two problems: fools and bad roads. So I think the Russians should be taking notes. Incidentally, it is because the roads are so bad that we don’t have McDonalds in Siberia- you never know if you can ship products in a timely fashion, so businesses that depend on providing the same products in a uniform manner are often out of luck. Sometimes all the stores in Irkutsk are all out of the same food item- and then you know that whatever truck was supposed to deliver it all couldn’t get through.

The news anchor was also a little indignant when reporting the next story: in Kazakhstan they’re changing the names of the streets to reflect Kazakh rather than Soviet history. No more 5-Year-Plan Street for you, whatever-the-capital-of-Kazakhstan-is. It was a day of activity in general in the former Republics: a very large factory opened in Kyrgyzstan, record-setting low temperatures are killing everyone in Tajikistan, well-dressed children gave out prizes at an industrial exposition in Moldova, etc.

The last piece of news, at which the anchor was very amused, was that the archbishop or something of Kamchatka has started a blog. It is much more impressive-looking than mine. Unfortunately I don’t think they said the address.

Update:
This semester one of my classes is “Post-Soviet History.” Right now we’re studying the last few decades of the USSR, for historical perspective. The reading, though it is taking me forever to get through, as it is written in a foreign language or something, is pretty amazing; it’s like the world has a whole other, alternate history. Soviet dissidents who I have always heard spoken of as heroes in the struggle for human rights are in this textbook members of a cultural elite far from the life of the people, ready to sell out the country for cosmopolitan glamour; ‘communist’ is not a synonym for ‘evil’, and the account of the Vietnam war is wholly unrecognizable. To confirm that the Vietnam part was not the version I had probably heard before, I just looked it up on the World Book that came with my computer, but it was too depressing to read and I had to switch to an article about ‘lilac,’ the first sentence of which is “Lilac is a beautiful shrub that is loved throughout the world for its fragrant flowers.”

2008-02-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

Fresh Notebooks

2008-02-05T23:18:00.000-05:00

I’m reviewing the notebooks I bought this afternoon in honor of the new semester. I went to two different bookstores on this serious venture; the first one’s notebooks were not up to par. The notebooks are such:

1) black; little raised, irregular, shiny black spots; in the center a little cartoon of a fuzzy cat covered in yarn; above this in cursive “I am a little Kitty”
2) back-drop: photo close-up of some wrinkled canvas clothing item, or maybe bag
center: insane-looking cartoon monkey with crossed eyes, pointing down at his own toussled head; thought bubble: “Jeans style?”; in top right-hand corner- “copybook”
3)Ronhaldhinho theme
4) in lower right-hand corner “fish copybook”; pictured: two tropical fish; glitter is involved
5) white, with Soviet flag across the center; drawing of partially-peeled banana, I guess resembling Warhol, on top of that; across the bottom pictures of Soviet metals and large word ‘tyetrad’ (‘notebook’)
6) one I have long admired: black, with a glitter- covered cartoon rooster crazily running across center stage; scrawled above him “i’m taking OFF’ with ‘i’m taking’ in white and ‘off’ in red

I think it’s a good haul. None of them quite as good as the “Rope” notebooks sold last semester, or as the one with a cartoon Darwin hugging monkeys.

Weekend in Review

2008-02-03T01:47:00.001-05:00

Friday
Today was proclaimed Cabbage Day in apartment 54. I got up and found the kitchen occupied by large-scale cabbage activity; Valentina Petrovna had apparently had an allergic reaction to some food the day before, and thought the rash had disappeared, she had decided that this was a sign from her body that she should stay home from work this morning and make cabbage pie. For breakfast I ate some of the cabbage-carrot concoction from the endless supply, in this particular manifestation with a bunch of ran onion mixed in. Then when the big pot of shredded, frying cabbage reached some edible stage, I was given a plate of that too. Have you, readers, ever seen cabbage being fried in a pot? It’s rather pretty, actually- first the pot is overflowing with a messy ball of long, crisp-looking, bright-white strands, and then it’s all turned over fast fast fast with a fork, rotating through the oil at the bottom of the pot, and then the pot is half full of golden, translucent... cabbage. Ok, so. Then I left for the university computer lab to continue my fruitless search for summer internship or work, but when I returned I was delighted to find that the effusively domestic mood was continuing. I returned to the sunny, busy kitchen and was given cabbage-and-meatball soup, and then several pieces of the fresh cabbage pie, and we sat and drank tea and talked about how cool it was in the Soviet days when university students went off to work in Kamchatka in the summers. Nastya was home, too, but not sharing in the good cheer; she’s having one of those days that Russians claim are so advantageous to one’s health in which you just drink kefir all day and don’t eat anything. Oh, we opened a huge jar of homemade raspberry jam today, much to my delight. I had been mourning the absence of jam.

Do any of you know anyone who would like to give me a job in the northeast for the summer? Or, if you act fast, an unpaid internship, and I will apply for a stipend from Middlebury. No, mother, I do not have in mind Staples.

Here is my other question. Is Vyachislav not an awesome name? I’m considering replacing ‘Methushael’ with ‘Vyachislav’ as my name of choice for my first-born son. I really like ‘Ethelred’ better, but everyone would immediately think of Ethelred the Unready, and I don’t want to burden the boy with historical connotation.

Saturday
Went to Slyudyandka on the electrichka. It was, I believe, the prettiest train ride of my life- sunny train car almost to ourselves (ourselves being Ilana, Joseph, me), panoramic view of snow-covered forests, tracks winding along the side of mountains like in a cartoon, after a few hours views of Baikal far below- it was pretty sweet. There was not really enough to do in Slyudyanka to fill the time until another train returned to Irkutsk, but it was very pretty there, with tall purple mountains surrounding the frozen lake, and boys ice-skating on a snow-plowed patch of ice far away from the bank, and lots of people ice-fishing. The train station itself was all made of stone and was very cute. Other than that Slyudyanka is a pretty unattractive place, taken apart from its natural surroundings, and there is markedly little to do indoors. We spend a lot of time walking around a grocery store; I have now spent about 80 times more hours in Russian grocery stores than American ones, I think. We got back to Irktusk late; we were afraid we would have a hard time getting home, if the public transportation had stopped running, but then an amusingly successful passenger revolution forced the train to stop at the little local station at the east end of town, from when Ilana and I could walk home and Joseph, I hope, found a marshrutka.

Sunday:
Last day of vacation!
Went XC skiing with Valentina Petrovna’s awesome wooden skis. I had long been unable to borrow these skis due to inability to figure out how to fasten them to shoes, but at last I discovered the secret; they do, in fact, have corresponding ski boots, I had just always mistaken that particular footwear for odd-looking dress shoes. So, in my funny leather shoes and snowpants (one of the main reasons I was anxious to go skiing: I love all opportunities to justify having brought snow pants with me to Russia) I set off for the woods. These woods were another long-unsolved mystery: people were always telling me there were these big woods right next to our house, but I had never managed to find them. Apparently you have to go up a big flight of iron stairs behind the pharmacy. So, found woods, attached skis to boots, then finally had to face the fact that I have no idea how to cross country ski. It worked out ok, though. My basic strategy was:
1) Waddle up a long, not-too-steep hill
2) Achieve summit
3) Pretend to be on downhill skis over which I didn’t happen to have control of any kind
4) In the advent of the approach of another person, stop and pretend to admire the scenery

Your Questions Answered on Frozen-Block-of-Cabbage TV

2008-01-31T22:26:00.000-05:00

So, Reading Public, I watched some TV this evening, and I am now able to answer several of the questions that have been plaguing us all.

Q: From what country is the world’s most productive individual milk cow? What other major world power is also very proud of ITS milk cows, thank you very much? What determines how much milk a cow gives?

A: The big list of the top 16 world milk cows came out recently, it seems. Somewhere in Russia, there is a wall covered with large portraits of these bovine beauties, with their names written beneath. At the moment of coverage by some Russian news agency, many Russian “cow collective” administrators stood about cow-covered wall and discussed with pride the milk-producing prowess of ... some Russian cow whose name I did not note but who made the list and who was later extensively filmed in her natural huge-metal-filled-cow-barn environment. But this cow did not occupy first place. The most milk-producing of all cows, in all the world, is a resident of... The United State of America. How about that. Oh, and as for the last part of the question, according to some Russian dairy worker interviewed, milk-productivity is determined by “attitude.”

Q: What is more annoying that rap music as performed by Whoopi Goldberg?

A: Russian dubbing of said rap.

Q: What is much more entertaining that American informericals?

A: American infomercials dubbed into Russian. They have to sound cheery and enthusiastic and stuff, and it sounds incredibly unnatural and forced. I know a lot about the 9-Minute Marinade now, though. It uses the power of the vacuum to get marinade deep down to the inside of the meats and vegetables- everyone will think you soaked the food for several days, but really it all just took nine minutes. They even throw in some handy plastic cutting boards, free.

Q: What is the cause of Russia’s recent demographic crisis, according to the solemn, serious expert on the news show “News”?

A: The population was in a bad mood. You’ll be glad to hear that the situation is improving.

Q: What is totally awesome?

A: The United States has a hockey-with-a-ball team! And they are, even as we speak, playing against Canada in some round of the world championship!

And here is the answer to another question, posed by one of you gentle readers, the answer to which I gleaned not from television sources but from Valentina Petrovna.

Q: In the Russian translation of My Fair Lady, how does Eliza sing about ‘Enry ‘Iggins?

A: In the Russian translation, Elisa has not a colorful accent but a speech defect. Is this sort of lame? I think so. Anyway, I received an account of the sounds that Eliza so amusingly mispronounces, but I don’t remember what they are.

more ice

2008-01-30T00:16:00.000-05:00

I went to a game of Baikal Energia, the Irkutsk hockey team, today. It was pretty dang cool- we got our own, Siberia hockey here, and it does not much resemble the NHL. It reminded me a lot of indoor field hockey, actually, or a cross between that and soccer. The rink is huge, as it is actually just the soccer field with water poured over it; each team plays with 8 players and a goalie; there are no lines painted on the rink to create all those hockey rules I still don’t understand; the goal is big, almost the size of a soccer goal; the sticks are the size of field hockey ones; they play with a ball rather than a puck. What else? There are no walls, just 3-inch barriers around the boundaries that the ball can bounce off of but players obviously cannot; you can’t skate behind the goal; they play out corners like in field hockey, and also corners like in soccer (I actually forgot what those are called in field hockey, when the ball is passed in from the corner of the pitch); I don’t think you can check; the ball was in the air a lot and could be played in the air, which was cool looking; the flow of the game and even the stick-handling just reminded me a lot of indoor field hockey. EXCEPT: IT WAS NOT INDOORS. Seriously, whose idea was it to have a hockey league in SIBERIA IN JANUARY that would play in outdoor stadiums, hours after the sun has gone down? My toes and fingers are still sore. There were a lot of people there though: they’re a tough bunch, these Siberians. There were also a very large number of police officers, maybe one for every 10 people. I didn’t know Irkutsk had so many police officers. They had bullet-proof vests. That is some hardcore hockey. Ok, I can feel Abby’s scorn for this hockey-with-a-ball coming in waves from across the Atlantic, especially after I compared it to field hockey. But... we have a skating nerpa! His costume is just a white tube over his head with a face painted on, but he’s so cute! You can’t hate us, when our mascot has those big melting eyes and is in need of protection from global warming and poaching!

Not very interesting post, but very cheery and stuff

2008-01-29T00:21:00.000-05:00

I think I now take my life in Irkutsk pretty much for granted. I rarely have an urge to rush home and write up blog posts for you people about the hilarious thing I saw on the marshrutka. It all seems pretty normal. This should not be misinterpreted as “comfortable” or “a social system in which I have a place, or can even communicate with people on more than a basic level, due more to cultural than linguistic divides.” Still, though, it’s not only that I am accustomed to my Irkustk life; I do rather love my adopted “historic if vaguely seedy Irktusk,” as Lonely Planet says. Actually I think it’s the seediness that makes affection possible. In any case, as Mary Chapin Carpenter teaches us: you can shoot straight in the dark, but you can’t take love for granted. So instead of complaining about the everyday annoyances of my recent life, as is my wont, I will try to wrest especially beloved aspects of Irkutsk from the realm of the taken-for-granted and list them here.

1) The interior of the Philormonia (Philharmonic hall?)

2) The little colorful plastic ice-sleds of small children, just little flat circle of brightly-colored plastic, and how they carry them about the city and just sled down the ice-covered cement every time there’s an incline

3) When parents pull their children around in more substantial sleds

4) The caramelized evaporated milk that is now sitting in a can in the kitchen, and of which I ate vast quantities at both lunch and dinner

5) When drivers and passengers of marshrutkas engage in yelling arguments about whether the passengers yelled loud enough for the driver to stop

6) 7 ruble ice cream, especially the kind that doesn’t come in a plastic wrapper but just arrives at the kiosk or tiny magazine in a big crate of already-filled cones; especially the brand Angaria

7) people selling plastic bags on the street

8) The occasional person on the street who gives you directions to where you want to go in a pleasant tone, instead of pretending not to know where that place is located and rushing off. Particularly this one woman with gold teeth and fur coat who told me where the post office I was looking for was last week.

9) Fur hats, in all their variety

10) How the Chinese venders sometimes don’t know I’m not a Russian

11) Riding shotgun in marshrutkas

12) The hats, and also the long, green wool coats, of the students in the police academy

13) Handsome wooden houses, especially the ones on Marat street

14) The view behind Everything Will Be OK hypermarket; this view consists largely of high-rises, so I’m not sure why it’s so pretty, but it is, especially combined with:

15) Fog in the morning from the Angara

16) Tapochki (slippers) and their place in culture

17) Seeing eminently-respectable, fur-coated middle-aged women emerging from hideous, aging cement apartment buildings that we would consider ghettos

18) Babushkas sprinting after marshrutkas; well not after them in the sense that they are leaving: the marshrutkas are slowing to a stop, and the babushkas (along with everyone else) want to get to them first and get a seat

19) The little woman who distributes our mail and cleans the blackboards in our classrooms and the rest of the day sits at a desk in the department office looking very stern and being very nice. Mainly it’s her supercilious nod that I like. Maybe one day I will learn her name.

20) Pozi and their juice; pilmyeni; 12 ruble loaves of fresh black bread from bread kiosks; Cartons of fresh, drinkable yoghurt; Tea with whole milk; Mayonnaise made in the “Irkutsk oil-fat factor”- best mayonnaise in Russia, I’ve been told several times; ginger pryaniki (large soft cookie-things); pine nuts; raspberry preserves; in general every food item is a bigger deal, since there is such a small number of them, in terms of variety.

21) the path from my apartment to the university building, which runs alongside a grove of birch and always has picturesquely-frozen or snow-covered reeds and things

22) The reading room of the University Library, with windows looking out over the river, even if its use is rather limited by that fact that the library has practically no books

23) The fact that people buy underwear from street peddlers. Also the very odd male-unitard undergarments that I saw being sold today. Ok, maybe that’s not really on my list of things I love about Irkutsk, it’s just funny.

24) Ice slides and ice sculptures

25) The very seedy-looking Hotel Angara and its dominance of the main square

26) The city/ oblast flag, depicting the non-existent animal the ‘babr’ with a dead sable in its mouth

27) Cement apartment buildings at night, with the windows lit. Clean, modern-looking buildings would not have the same charm.

28) How you can get on an electric train and travel hours away from the city, into the taiga, for less than a dollar

29) glossy mink jackets on men; I’m not sure why I find this more acceptable than fur coats on women

30) The maritime-themed cafe at the marshrutka stop: the horribleness of this establishment, from the rudeness of the waitresses, to the slowness of the service, to the badness of the food, to the cheesiness of the decorations, to the awful music blaring from the wall reaches such an amazing level that it is impossible not to return, weekly, just to make sure it’s just as horrible as it was

31) singing songs from My Fair Lady with Valentina Petrovna

32) the fact that there are buckets of frozen shredded cabbage and carrot on our sitting on our balcony; mainly due to my memory of the shredding process

33) The white, square radio with round speaker in the middle hanging on the kitchen wall; how it only gets one station and has no on/off switch

34) The big salmon-colored building with the round turret on the corner of Karl Marx and Lenin streets; there was a picture of this building in one of our Siberian History textbooks, but I never figured out why it was important. Also the two odd, hermaphroditic-looking neoclassical statues sticking off of one of its walls. Incidentally, I wonder if I will remember, when I get back to America, that English sentences should have verbs.

Лед

2008-01-23T04:13:00.000-05:00

I usually hate it when Irkutsk-ites (Irkutskians? Irkutskers?) act like Baikal is the same as the ocean. Because it’s not. It doesn’t have the same feeling of endlessness at all, where you are seeing the same body of water in Maine and in Florida and for that matter in Africa, should one be there. And it doesn’t smell like salt. But maybe it is more like the ocean than I indignantly internally protest, or I think of it as like the ocean more than I think I do. Because my shock at it being turned into a huge expanse of ice was sort of close to what I imagine it would be like to go out the door of one’s Outer Banks beach rental and find that the ocean had totally frozen. And if people were driving large motor vehicles on top of it. And if you could just go walk around on top of it, and if people who had never seen the Atlantic didn’t quite believe you that the big snow-covered plain they were looking at was not just land. Man, it was so crazy.

Abby and I were at Olkhon a few days ago. You faithful readers may remember that I was there in the fall. At that point it was surrounded by a liquid lake, and there were sandy beaches with waves breaking on them, and there were yellow larch forests. Not so now.

I would subject you all to rapturous accounts of the surrounding beauty, but I think I’ll just wait till I can post pictures. But I won’t be posting the pictures taken of me on the first afternoon on the island, as I bear a disturbing resemblance to an escaped inmate of a psychiatric prison. The chief factors in the creation of this resemblance are 1) the feathers flying out of the sleeve of my sleeping-bag-like coat, torn open by a crazy dog named Foox; 2) The frozen blood on my coat and face, from a bloody nose caused by the extreme cold and having resisted the hasty scarf-clean-up-efforts of myself and Abby; 3) the general look of frantic concern of my face and the hunted haunch of my shoulders, left over from the frantic efforts of the past ten minutes to hide my blood-covered self from the fast-approaching hip young Muscovite professionals, the owners of Foox, who were staying with us in our hotel. Plus my hands were very freezing from being covered in frozen blood. And I had the unsettling knowledge of my blood-covered scarf hidden within my coat. Man, this paragraph is gross. But it was very hilarious at the time. If you pay me $10 I’ll show you a picture sometime.

We could hear the ice forming, sometimes. It was sometimes like sound-effects in arcade games. And sometimes like we were just hearing the upper register of some deep, slow, mournful complaint voiced far below the earth. One night, especially, we stood on big blocks of ice by a previously-sandy beach and listened to the ice forming almost beneath us. It was sort of scary.

The next morning I went for a walk by myself. I climbed as far as I could on the Shaman Rocks (one of the five global energy points for the Buryats, which, as Ivan said the first time we were there, isn’t saying that much considering the rather limited geographical range of that particular ethnic group, but they attract a lot of shamanistic/new-age religious activity anyway), saw a fox run out from a nook in the rocks below, watched the morning light coming over the island and making it to the western shore, where I was. The light hit the sandy beach of the night before very attractively, and I decided to walk there over the ice, saving a lot of trouble from the fault-and-rock-covered shoreline. Far out from the shore, the ice was as smooth as a mirror, and I could see far down into the thickness of it, which was cool. But, as it was after all Baikal, I could see farther than that, all the way down to the bottom of the lake. And that was very, very far down. At that point I got really scared, but I couldn’t get back on shore for a long time, as the banks were just the tall red cliffs that seemed so pretty when I was on top of them rather than beneath them.

And a blog from Irkutsk, where it is sunny and 39 below, Celcius

2008-01-14T00:05:00.000-05:00

Trying again with this blog business. Don’t know how to go about it. I think a mere recounting of principle events, arrivals and departures and tourist sights seen and so on, will give very little sense of the experience of the past week. I am convinced that even the pen/keyboard of the most skilled novelist, endowed with all the strength and dexterity and fineness of syntax accumulated by the English language over the centuries, could not explain why the Tea Spoon Blini Cafe at the Moscow Train station in St. Petersburg was such a very, very miserable place at 9:00 Tuesday, Jan. 8, or why the train on which I wrote my last attempt at blogging was such a wonderful one. But if an attempt at literary representation of the week were to be attempted, perhaps it would center around the ever-popular “light and darkness” theme. It would begin, I would say, with Epiphany, the holiday of Light celebrated 8 days ago. I, on this day, was in Helsinki. For a better literary tone, I would have celebrated Epiphany in some more liturgical, high church setting than the Rock Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. There would be a lot more deep theological insight and more candle carrying and such, and the complete looniness of the skinny little Scottish-accented pastor, crazy African preacher, bizarre congregation of non-native English speakers at an English service, church architecture like a UFO built in 1970s Protestant Church-retreat-center style, all brown and uncut stone and meant to be cozy but actually just sort of dirty looking, loony “praise songs” sung led by swaying loons at microphones, etc., would be passed over. Ecclesiastical looniness or no, the service, in which the theme of light was discussed, including much discussion of the fact that in Finland in winter there is not much light at all, would play a key role. This lack of sunlight in the north of the world will play an important role in the coming narrative.

Abby and I are now trading off in blog writing. And I see that she is doing a very fine job of writing a detailed and entertaining account of our journey, so I feel free to continue talking about nothing. You can all just skip this and click on the link “former compoundmate” or whatever I called that link.

So. Finland was indeed cold, and there were indeed few hours of sunlight, but I remember the sun that there was generally being bright and fully, cheerfully illuminating of the Nordic Walking Amazingness that was occuring. Open Scene 2. Time: 6:30 am Monday morning, Helsinki time. Place: neat, attractive park with paths along lakes. Temperature: fairly crisp, at the time described as freezing cold. Mood: expectant beginning-of-journey feeling, mixed with regret of parting friends. Light: none. Okay no actual scene will be written, just the stage-direction-y bit.

Train ride. Dark for many hours. Finally sort of light, but on crowded bus, little feeling of sunlight. Arrival in Petersburg. About an hour of week light, I think. By 6:00 pm, when our wandering about waiting for our train the next morning was in full swing, Stygian Darkness in full reign. This is very important. It means that by 7:00, as it had been dark pretty much since 4:00, we felt like it was about midnight, and we had been out much of the night already. Long night, impossible to describe. Perhaps the fireworks we saw with Vanya play a symbolic role of some kind. They were nice. Some light shone forth even in the freezing darkness. Petersburg is pretty. Mainly dark and cold though. The main moment, I think, is when we emerged from the metro at about... I don’t know, some hour of the morning at which it should have been light, at which we felt that night should have ended and we should be getting on with the “waiting around in the morning for our train” segment of our lives and finished with the “wandering around St. Petersburg all night” segment. But it was still pitch black. This experience of St. Petersburg, I now realize, was very literarily appropriate. It was just as unpleasant as I imagined from Dostoveyski. Anyway, if the literary development to this point was effective, the horror of this darkness, after our night of life in the shadows, would be clear to you. As we trudged along the dark, icy streets, somewhere around Palace Square, in an alley of souvenir stalls, I slipped on the icy and as my legs shot out from under me they brought Abby down with me. We untangled ourselves, retreated into even darker shadows and laughed rather humorlessly for a few minutes. Then we ventured forth again. Soon after this was our miserable visit to the Teaspoon establishment. We slept through most of the sunlight that day, in seats at the back of our long-awaited train to Moscow. We slept sporadically, the door next to us slamming shut often and letting in cold air and dirty water. We got to Moscow in the dark, crossed the street in an underground walkway to another train station, and set about waiting for our next train, scheduled for departure at 2 am or something, I don’t really remember. There was a lot of cold and damp and sleazy pelmeni restaurant and tea from thin plastic cups and observing the drawn-out-over-several-hours spectacle of one bum being fleeced by another. It was dark. We thought our train didn’t exist. It did. I have already described the amazingness of that train. Also, the daylight portion of our train ride included the sun streaming over snowy fields for a few hours. The boys who played Marble Blast Gold with us later gave us chocolate, and when we got to Kazan they came back to proudly point out the spires of the Kremlin and such. It was very sweet.
So. Back to the light and dark. Such a treatment would perhaps make use of the drastic white of the ancient Kremlin walls. We got to Kazan at 3, and the sun was already setting. Soon these white walls were rising dramatically from a dark, very cold city. And I mean cold. It was 24 below, Celsius, I think. I’m not sure how many times in my life I’ve been more cold than coming down the huge hill from that Kremlin, looking for any open building to go inside. The odd Mordor-like night club with smokestack and underground chambers with glass pyramidical roofs sticking up from the ground would make the cut in the description of the landscape. I spent a lot of our time in Kazan slipping on the ice. At this point in our travels there was a certain abandonment of economy. We ate in a real restaurant- one in which my entree, for which I felt guilty for ordering when more economic options were available, was 4 dollars. Also when we went grocery shopping we bought cheese. Yeah. I don’t know what that has to do with light and darkness. The warmth and light of the “trakter” in which we ate? Our need for material comfort after wandering in the cold, dark world?
At the end of our stay in Kazan occurred a most amazing adventure involving our luggage, a locked train suburban train station, insights into the world of homelessness in southwestern Russia... I don’t really know what to say about it, so I’ll leave it in the realm of the hypothetical author about whose description we are speculating. There were a lot of hours of dark. Then we met Elizabeth and her friends on the platform, we entered the train, and we headed to Siberia at last.
The train was cold. A woman in our compartment bought some dog hair one of the crazy merchants who sneak on the train and sprint down the aisles selling odd things. I have nothing else to say about it. It was very, very cold.

I’m tired of this entry. We were in Novosibirsk. Even colder there, but we weren’t on the street as long. Mainly we hung out in this boring museum, because it was warm there. There was a crazy floral arranging competition. As we were with Elizabeth, there was a lot more order and less craziness occurring. We slept in a hotel and ate in very reputable restaurants. Left Novosibirsk in the middle of the night, on a much warmer train. Spent the morning watching the very, very pretty landscape near Krasnoyarsk. I love Siberia. Then that night was Old New Year and there were obnoxious drunk men and it was awful. Giving the computer to Abby now.

a blog from the road

2008-01-14T00:04:00.000-05:00

Do you want to really, really, really love a bunk on a train? Do you want to feel that getting to spend the night, or even from 1:00 am on, in the crisp, white sheets and thick blanket in platscart, with the train moving under you and the heating system in full operation, is that best thing that ever happened to you? And that a eating a plastic cup of just-add-water soup with a fork is the ideal meal? I have some suggestions as to how this level of appreciation can be brought about. This just seems like a set-up for a long post of whining. But that’s not how I meant it; I am really so insanely happy to be sitting in this train right now, the sun shining on snowy forests and plains out the window, having slept until almost 11:00 in a warm bed, that all discomfort of the past few days seem relevant only as contrast to the excellence of this train.

We left Helsinki Monday morning, Abby informs me; I have very little sense of time, so I would have no idea if asked. So, yes, got up at some very early hour Monday morning, dragged our belongings through the National Finn Fitness Park or whatever it is that lies between the Hostel Stadion and the Helsinki train station, had our last look at the frigid lakes and well-ordered paths along which we have seen so many a hardy Finn striding hardily about walking his or her dog, or engaging in “Nordic Walking” in a purple jogging suit. Sadly said goodbye to Laurel in the clean, well-ordered train station. At this point I’m not entirely sure what happened. We rode on a train for a long time, but there are a lot of trains in this story, and I don’t remember anything about this one. There were a lot of Russians in snow pants. There seem to be set occasions in which Russians wear snow pants, but I haven’t really figured out what they are. Oh, a very cute little boy named Zhenya sat in front of us and he was very awesome and Russian and shot everyone on the train with a toy gun. For a while an almost-equally-cute little girl named Katya sat next to him and they colored together and it was like a ridiculous juice-box commercial or something their conversation was so cute. My favorite part of the train ride was when we crossed the Russian border and Katya’s father, this strapping man with a blond Russian-style almost-mullet, looked out the window at the snow-covered pines and such and said “А, Родина, Вот она такая!» (Oh, the homeland, what a one she is!). I'm not sure why I found this so amusing.

Got to St. Petersburg in the afternoon sometime. Depostited our heavier luggage in a very complex locker in a very crouded lockerroom in the train station. Set our for a night of homelessness, as we hadn't been motivated enough to book a hostel. Hopefully Abby will write a list of the actual things we did, because I don't really remember. We ate a lot of chocolate bars, walked through a lot of shopping centers, etc. Met Ivan around 9:00, I think, in a fasttfood blini restaurant, stayed there until it closed sometime after 10:00. I had always wanted to be one of those people who sits about leisurely in an establishment even as it is clear that it is closing.

Earlier in the evening, Abby had had the brilliant idea of taking a «Night-time Petersburg» bus tour. When we asked at the «expeditions» kiosk how long the tour lasted, and learned that it was from 11:00 to 6:00 am it seemed not only brilliant but genius. So we headed to that expedition kiosk area. Saw some very nice fireworks and laser show on Nevsky Prospect, I think in front of the Russian Museum, on the way. Went to grocery store. bought ice-cream. Got on bus. Very long bus-ride began. Oh man, I don't know how to describe this bus tour. The guide was this little woman in a gray bun. She talked very, very fast. My favorite was at the very beginning, on Nevsky Prospect, when she had to say what every single building was as we passed it, as they are all important. It was like a very enthusiastic radio sports broadcast, I guess. «And, on-the-right the Someone-important-Palace! Minister of Catherine the Great! And on the left Pushkin once ate lunch! And on the right something-or-other-no-one-understands-because-I'm-speaking-very-fast-and-everyone-on-this-bus-is-a-beer-drinking-hooligan-anyway!» You could get whiplash, if you didn't watch out. Every once in a while we would stop so we could go take pictures. Except that is was the middle of the night, so it was sort of pointlesss. But there was a lot of enthusiastic picture-taking anyway. The guide really liked throwing dramatic quotations of Lermantov and Ahmatova into the lecture. I would know a lot about every activity of those persons, as well as of Blok and especially Pushkin, if I had been able to listen to the woman for 6 hours straight. She especially relished describing the deaths of the famous people whose old apartments or schools we drove by. Like of this one poor man who was discribed as having «caught his last tramvai.» There was a lot of half-sleeping in the back of the bus, where the cool kids (me and Abby, of course) were hanging out. It would have been full-sleeping, but there was a crazy babushka yelling about scultures of sphinxes and hooligans poking their girlfriends and trying to wake them up, and stopping of the bus to look at dark churches, interrupting our slumber. And poor Abby was sick and just freezing cold the whole time, and it was very sad. At 2 am we stopped at a cafe and all got out and bought tea. Then back in the bus for more babushka-tour. Agh, it was so out of control. But in many ways more in-control than at 5:45 am when we were set down in the dark streets with no where to go. There was much darkness and coldness and tiredness involved. And cafes with drunk people being chased out of them. And 24-hour bookstores. 24-hour bookstores don't seem like such a good economic venture to me, but we appreciated them anyway. Eventually we just got on the metro and rode it for a long ...

This entry was inturrupted by 100 3rd grade boys swarming the compartment and asking what games I had on my computer. Actually only about 5. Much Marble Blast Gold was played. Gettng into Kazan. Will be there 11 hours. No hotel again. But Abby and I are now pros at this.

Man..........

2008-01-12T05:51:00.001-05:00

I look to my left and see that Abby is beating me in blog posting, so my news will all be old when it's finally posted. Oh well. It was going to be too much work to record anyway.

Filler Blog

2008-01-12T05:13:00.001-05:00

Well, this week has so far been about the most eventful of my life, so you can't expect me to describe it in the mere 40 minutes I have remaining at the Whatever this Novosibirsk Internet Cafe is Called. Just briefly noting that I am alive and safe and such. Leaving tonight for the 30 hour ride to Irkutsk. Also I would like all of you, esp. those of you frequently e-mailing me about the balmy climes of my native land, to know that it is 28 below, Celcius, here. At least it was this morning. I think it's climbed to 24 below or something now.

Dragon Evacuation

2008-01-05T18:02:00.000-05:00

I'm moving to Earl Grey, Saskatchewan.

http://www.earl-grey.ca/

I don't have anything else to say.

Craziness, yo.

2008-01-04T03:54:00.000-05:00

Craziness

I am currently sitting on a sofa outside our room in the Stadion Hostel in Helsinki, looking at a neon green sign with the helpful instruction “ASIAKASKEITTIÖ JA TV-HOUNE ALAKERRASSA.” If you think this is funny looking, wait until you hear someone actually speaking this craziness. This morning I went for a walk/scramble over boulders in some naturey-are by the stadium (our hostel really is an Olympic stadium, not just built in the shape of one as for some reason it seemed to me last night. There are the silly spinning metal gate-things running along the outside, and bleachers beyond the inner walls of the hostel, and everything. Also this place is huge; over a thousand beds I think.) and when I jumped down from some large rock onto the bike path, some elderly Finn in a brightly-colored windbreaker laughed and said “Hi-da-hooh-he-hlip-hip!!” or something to that effect. It was so awesome. I smiled and also laughed. I hope that was the correct response. Then I went looking for signs to read and laugh at. Signs are written first in Finnish and then in Swedish, so there’s double the fun.

Saw the sun rise over Helsinki. I like places much better after seeing the sun rise there. Especially if there’s a spectral sliver moon still high in the sky. My feeling of last night, which can basically be summed up as “I can’t believe we are expected to find our way from the train station to our hostel in this ridiculous country, and what will happen when they review the security film from the tram and find out that Abby and I didn’t pay?” was mostly dissipated.

I almost tried to find a book to trade for one in the hostel book exchange for a crazy Finnish one, but I decided that wouldn’t be all that useful.

today

2008-01-03T17:12:00.001-05:00

I had quite the ecclesiastical tour of Nevsky Prospect today. First, not on Nevsky Prospect at all actually but near Peter and Paul Fortress, I saw a very cool blue-tile-decorated mosque.
Then, directly upon emerging from the Nevsky Prospect metro station, I went to Kazan Cathedral. Kazan Cathedral is ugly enough to have avoided being a museum rather than a church, which was a very nice change. It’s sort of gray and neoclassical and strangly shaped, and it was built after the Napoleonic Wars I think. There were actual people praying in it rather than tourists taking pictures, and the icons were uninteresting, and it was generally pleasant. There was a very long line of people waiting to kiss the icon of the Virgin of Kazan; other than that is was fairly quiet. I don’t know how I feel about churches being used to house the keys of defeated French fortresses... well, yes I do. It’s awesome. These were some sweet keys, and there were plenty to be had of them. There were also captured military banners.
Next went into a rather nondescript Catholic Church. I was the only one in it. I forgot what bare church walls looked like. It was nice.
Further along the street I found a very sweet little blue-and-white Armenian Church. Armenian script is apparently very, very cool. Also the Armenians apparently believe in pews, unlike the Russians. It was a very nice place to sit.
Leaving for Helsinki soon.

Um. I am in Helsinki now. This cannot be a real language that they are speaking here.

State Hermitage Museum

2008-01-02T10:12:00.001-05:00

I was already in sort of a bad mood when we got to the Hermitage this morning, due to having a stuffy nose and maybe living in hostel too long. I think a visit to the Hermitage requires a head unmuddled by stormy thoughts and enthusiasm for planning; it has over 1000 rooms, and there’s no clear path through them, as it’s a palace, after all, not built as a museum. But I was too impatient (and possessed of a realistic estimation of my ability to follow maps) to do anything but walk off randomly into the museum and pretend that whatever part I found first was what I had been planning to see there all along. Unfortunately what I found first was the Rubens collection, and I couldn’t pretend for very long to like Rubens. But I couldn’t find my way out of the “Netherlandish” section, and I was lost in a maze of fat cupids and infants and group portraits of shooting societies... and my annoyance spread from Rubens to Dutch painting to large oil paintings... this was not a good track to be on, in the world’s largest art museum. You can’t just decide half an hour into it that you are annoyed by paintings, in general. Every once in a while I would find a room of not-Dutch painting, and it was always a very cheerful moment- this room of English watercolors (with a bunch of illustrations by William Blake, which I liked muchly), some welcomely ascetic Spanish art... but mainly I just looked at sculpture and old pottery and wood cuttings and things. It was fairly ridiculous. And then every once in a while I would have to sneeze, which would require rushing to the center of the room, as far as possible from works of art, and burying my head in my elbow. But the guard babushkas glared at me anyway.

Eventually I gave up and went downstairs to the “antiquities” section and looked at Roman statuary and cuniform tablets and such. After a long break from painting, I finally got over myself and decided to reenter the fray. I found a map and decided that I would go find the third floor. On my way, I discovered that the second floor was far larger than I had ever imagined, and included a lot more than fat Dutch children. But no number of masterpieces of world art could distract me from my quest for the stairway to the third floor (I did stop for a while to look at the Italian section, as I think you’re required to see to da Vinci paintings). How did the Romanovs ever find anything in that place? I would get lost every day on my way downstairs to dinner.

With the help of directions from a guard babushka, I eventually found the stairs. And the third floor was so cool! I may have thought so even if I hadn’t worked so hard to find it! It was French impressionists, if I am correctly employing that term, and junx. I really like Cezanne, and there was a lot of Cezanne. And Renoir. I should mention that my artistic tastes are almost entirely based on who I read an article about one time. Except for disliking Rubens. And I don’t remember ever having read an article about Matisse but he’s my new favorite.

Very few of the people in the Hermitage were speaking Russian. I really liked it when the language being spoken by the tour groups matched up with the country of origin of the art in the room.

Now I want to watch that movie Russian Ark again. I liked it a lot the first time, but now I know the set firsthand.

New Years Eve in Petersburg

2008-01-01T15:35:00.001-05:00

The Crazy Duck Hostel was the place to be New Years eve, let me tell you. You should read Abby’s blog for some idea of the people staying here. But it doesn’t convey the full bizarreness of this apartment full of drunken crazy people who don’t know each other, speaking in a very confusing variety of languages and accents. The Australians were definitely running the show. They are absolutely insane. They are also at least 30 years old, and I can’t really figure out why they’re just roaming about Eurasia getting drunk every night and engaging in unwelcome displays of PDA, but they were good people to have around to create a festive atmosphere I guess. The Ukrainians are much more quiet, and I think they were sort of intimidated by the Austrailians. They really are very exhausting to converse with though. Do you like Whitney Houston? How much does public transportation cost? Did you know that everything is better in Kiev? What about the Simpsons? Oh, how about basketball? I was relieved when they discovered the Brazilians and started plying them with questions instead.

You know in elementary school when you learn about peer pressure? They need to add a unit on Nationalistic Ukrainians Pressure. Because that’s much harder to resist. “But this is special Ukrainian red champagne! It is the best in the world! And this is Ukrainian beer! It is no mere Russian beer!” And they were very sweet and serious.

At 11:30 we all headed out on the street, to Nevsky Prospect. It was the most awesome thing ever, except Chizhik Pizhik. The metro was packed with this united mass of celebrators, and every once in a while everyone would just start yelling and cheering on the escalators, and everyone was so cheerful it was hard to believe they were Russians. And then on Nevsky Prospect there was a big tv screen and Putin gave an address that I didn’t really listen to but it was awesome that we were all listening to an address by Putin. And then the bells rang midnight and everyone drank champagne on the street and yelling Happy New Year to everyone. And then just roamed around yelling happy new year to random people and dancing about. There was a parade of some kind, and the Ukrainians made us all jump on the back of one of the floats. Abby and Natasha and I only did this for a few seconds and then ran away; I don’t know how long the Ukrainians resisted the dancing girls yelling at them to get off. Anyway, I’ve never seen so many people.

Today we went out walking on Nevsky, and I’ve never seen it quiet and peaceful before. The whole time we’ve been here it has been packed with last-minute holiday shoppers and tourists taking pictures and such. Today everything was closed and it was very strange.

чижик пыжик

2008-01-01T14:28:00.000-05:00

This news is not going to be chronological. But I have to start with the most important.

ABBY AND NATASHA AND I FOUND THE CHIZHIK PIZHIK STATUE! It’s too difficult to explain the deep significance of this event. I estimate that about 1 person understands how awesome it is. But there’s more. People drop coins on the statue, from the bridge. And if the coin lands on the statue, instead of falling in the river, you have good luck. And who should land a coin on Chizhik, on New Years Day no less? ME. BECAUSE I AM THE САМАЯ КЛАСНАЯ ДЕВЧЕНКА. This is going to be the best year ever.

Petersburg

2007-12-31T09:16:00.001-05:00

I realized yesterday that I've never spent as much time in a big city as I have the past few weeks, if you add Moscow and Petersburg together. Actually just the week in Moscow would be the most time I've ever spent in a big city, I think. Which explains why I'm in such a constant state of... well, I don't know - sensory overstimulation? There's just too much stuff. I have, I think, finally stopped thinking constantly and accusingly "this would never happen in Irkutsk," but I'm still sort of overwhelmed. There are, of course, benefits to large cities. For instance, though shopping malls and department stores seem very odd to me at the moment, there's something to be said for always being able to find high-quality goods when you want them. And I guess it's more interesting and perhaps more culturally healthy for there to be variety in the areas of fashion and culture and food and such. And there are things like the Russian Museum, which was awesome. It's the St. Petersburg museum that houses only Russian art, as opposed to the Hermitage, which has non-Russian art. It's in an old and very pretty palace, and it feels more like strolling through someone's beautiful house than like walking through a museum. The experience was much more pleasant than that of the Tretokovskaya in Moscow, I thought, except that the icon collection isn't as good and there's not as much Vrubel, with whom I am still obsessed. Now I want to take a Russian art history class. I would write more about the museum but I don't think my uninformed impressions of Russian art will be very interesting to the reading public.

St. Petersburg is pretty, with icy canals and iron bridges and lots of old palaces. Saw the Peter the Great statue, the square where the Decembrists assembled, the church built on the spot where Alexander II was shot, huge crowds of people doing New Year's shopping on Nevsky Prospect, probably other things as well. Today Abby and I went with some very nice Ukrainians from our hostel to the village of Pushkin and saw a huge palace of some kind. The palace was closed, but we walked around the grounds for a long time, and it was a nice day, and very nice to be away from the noise of the city. I love how the Ukrainians speak Russian- they say 'h' for all the normally 'g' sounds. Like when some police officers walked by and they joked that they were the 'KXB.' It was, however, quite exhausting answering the endless questions of the Ukrainians about America. I apparently don't really know anything about America, especially about how much things costs, which Russians are always asking about too. I answered more cheerfully, however, after we stopped in this odd Pagoda thing and drank some hot, very spicy homemade Ukrainian wine (or something) that they had brought in a thermos. It was very good. We were given numerous explanations of this beverage and its production, but I still don't really understand it.

There are a lot of bookstores here. And people. And ridiculous mechanical toys being sold at metro stations. I can't think of anything else to report. Going to boil some pilmyeni for dinner soon. Happy New Year to everyone!

Novgorod

2007-12-29T14:01:00.001-05:00

Well, the leaving of Yaroslavl and the train ride to St. Petersburg and the 5 hours after our arrival in Petersburg all occurred. But they are better left unmentioned. So, at 4:45 Thursday afternoon we left on the electrichka from St. Petersburg to Novgorod. I think we were the only people in the electrichka station who did not scream at the ticket sellers for not selling them tickets at special discounts of one kind or another. Both we and the ticket sellers seemed satisfied with the half price we received for our student IDs. The elecrichka ride was mainly notable for being very long (5 hours) and including many, many drunken Russians. And a babushka who talked to me for a long time in a muttered monologue, most of which I could not hear or understand. But the tale seemed to be fairly tragic, involving all sorts of relatives abandoning their children and being left by their husbands and preparing for careers that were useless as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. I think every woman in Russia over the age of 30 has been left by at least one husband. Or left by the father of her unborn child without ever being married.

Novgorod is pretty, in an austere way. The churches are white and tall, and if they have domes they are pale silver and gold. The streets are wide with birch trees on the sides and very few people. It still seems to carry some of the sadness of being sacked by Muscovite princes and Swedish armies so often and then torn apart by the Germans in WWII, after its early glory days- founded by Rurik himself, the first Russian city, ruled by Alexander Nevsky, the northern capital of Kievan Rus’, then the proud, independent republic ruled by that governing body whose name I’ve forgotten but whose bell was so important.

This morning Abby and I had a delicious breakfast from our lavishly appointed larder, transported here from Yaroslavl- bread and spreadable cheese, to be precise. Then we went to the Kremlin, which is called Detinyets, as we all know from the audio files included with that king among textbooks, Russian Now! For Students and Instructors. Actually anyone having listened to the appropriate Russian Now! audio files will already feel familiar enough with Novgorod not to need to be reading this blog post right now. We have seen, I am almost certain, the very lake on which Kostya and Vova said hello to Lara and on which they went ice skating with so little success, the very museum that Nadezhda Alexandrovna pointed out to the clueless tourist on her tour, the very bench on which that one old guy read in the paper about that one babushka advertising to change apartments, the very school in which Svetya asked Kostya if he loved Group Avia and in which Vova was scolded for drawing noses in class instead of listening to a lecture about Gogol, etc. It’s pretty exciting.

So, yeah, Detinyets. We saw Sofiski Sobor (Church of the Holy Wisdom), of which my main impression was that it was very dark inside. But it was mentioned in Russian Now! so I was happy. It was fairly impressive, actually, and there was a stern gold-robed batushka striding about looking like a priest in the service of an ancient sun cult of some kind. Then we went to the Detinyets’ museum, which had the most militant guard babushkas ever. Downstairs, in the history section, I learned that medieval Novgorodian soldiers had really funny pointed helmets, that I would have had as much trouble opening ancient Novgorodian locks as I do with modern Russian ones, and that standing too close to the glass in an attempt to read the informational plaques behind it will get you yelled at by the guard babushkas. Upstairs were the icons. I felt bad for spending so long looking at the icons, of which I’m sure Abby tired after about 3, but later she told me that she had entertained herself by trying to find places to stand where the guard babushkas couldn’t see both of us at once. I agree that this would be a very fun activity. These babushkas were very, very concerned if one of us was out of sight, and would constantly shift positions as to gain the optimal vantage point. The icons were stern and simple, as unlike as possible from the Yaroslavl ones I thought. Even in the ‘descent into Hades’ icons, in which people generally look pretty cheerful to be being pulled out of Hell by Christ surfing down on it broken gates, shattered locks and keys raining down before him, everyone looked like they had a stomachache. There was also the most angry-looking Old Testament Trinity ever. The angels were distantly unpleased with whatever Abraham had just placed before them. The icons weren’t really all angry, though, of course, and the severity of style is often very pleasing.

When we left a blizzard of sorts had begun. We walked out past the 1000th Birthday of Russian memorial, out the Detinyets gates, and over the long bridge over the icy Volkov River. It was very, very cold and snowy, with wind whipping all around. It made for a very dramatic approach to the old church a few blocks away on the other side of the river, where the only surviving frescoes by Theophanes the Greek cover the walls. This was really the best part of the day, by far. The entrance to the church involved opening many huge, wooden doors with big iron rings. And then the old woman at the ticket desk was very friendly, and didn’t act like it was annoying that they had to go turn on the lights in the sanctuary for us. And then we were the only people in the huge, cavernous sanctuary, with the alter and everything removed, just the ancient, faded, partially destroyed frescoes covering the walls and the numerous arches and domes. It was so awesome. I especially liked the little, enigmatic six-winged cherubim at the top of the arch over every window. Every one was different.

The rest of the afternoon we walked around looking for a cafe that served both tea and cheap food (ended up eating bread and cheese (I know, the variety of our diet is amazing, but we try to vary it with Snickers bars) as the only customers other than a wedding party), going to the train station to see about getting home tomorrow, buying some apples and a huge bag of crackers for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. We needed something to put our condensed milk on. My attempts last night to eat canned corn with condensed milk were not that successful, especially as we don’t have spoons.

Dec. 29
Arrived back in St. Petersburg. The big news is that our hostel (“Crazy Duck”) has free cheese. Cheese other than the soft spreadable kind is beyond our budget, so this is exciting. There is also free yoghurt. This means that, taking into account the condensed milk and spreadable cheese on which we lived in Novgorod, we live entirely on dairy products and crackers. At least there’s a chainik here; we were in a state of constant discomfort in Novgorod due to absence of tea. Our Russian-trained tea radars were in overdrive. About to go walk about on Nevski Prospect. Oorah.

The Question has Become: Where is the Chinese Sportsman?

2007-12-29T13:59:00.000-05:00

Abby keeps telling me that I have to write about this show we saw the other day with Margarita called “Big Races.” It really was quite amazing. It was an international competition of some kind, with teams from Russia, the US, China, and Kazakhstan. The Russian team, at least, took the whole thing very seriously- the team members were mainly Olympic athletes, and they frequently told the camera how they knew that the nation was counting on their success, and they were doing it all for Russia. In the first round of competition... well, we don’t remember. Oh, they dressed up like frogs and had to hop about on giant lilypads, but they usually fell in the water. These competitions are difficult to describe, actually; I think you had to see them to understand the full ridiculousness. There was this one excellent segment in which they dressed up as ostriches, with huge necks protruding from their heads, and rode bicicles over hills. Between segments there were earnest interviews with the trainers about the likelihood of the competitors breaking all their bones. Or interesting attempts by representatives of the Russian team to have international encounters with the American team (“Vell... I think Rossia!). But the best part were the segments with a “wild bull.” The wild bull was only about a year old and had protective bulbs on his horns, but he still managed to maul the competitors fairly painfully. In the second wild bull segment, in which the competitors dressed up as mice and ran about through foam cheese wedges, tragedy struck. For reasons known only to the young bull himself, the raging beast took an especial dislike to the Chinese competitor, and just chased him around everywhere. The poor man would attempt to take refuge in the cheese wedges, but to no avail: the foam constructions were no match for the crafty animal, whose just charged the whole structure and either knocked it over or chased the guy out the other side of the hole. It was so out of control. At one point the guy was huddled in a corner of the cheese, trying to hide from the bull, and the earnest Russian announcer stopped commenting on the successes of the Kazak mouse to comment: “But at this point the question has become: WHERE is the Chinese sportsman?” We probably should not have found this so funny, as I think the poor guy was later hospitalized. Even more amusing than the actual show may have been the reaction of Margarita to it all. She was very serious about it all. Once when I was almost falling over laughing and asked “Who thought up these things?” she yelled “The French! This is all in France!” She was especially upset at the end, when it was clear that Russia would win and one cocky Russian announced that this victory “shows that Russians are the most capable people!” “It shows no such thing! It’s all luck! Someone slips on the ‘human ocean’ section, someone doesn’t! Last week China won!”

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas. Abby and I spent Christmas Eve at a hockey game, which was very fun, though I admit that my attention span for hockey is sort of limited to two periods, generally the first and last. But I was amused by the crowd, and by the antics of the OOC cheerleaders, and by Abby’s obsession with it all. And by the skating teddy bear mascot. After the game we took one of the famous Yaroslavl marshrutkas and then walked home along the Volga, with lots of pretty lit church spires/ onion domes and new years trees and lights, and was a very nice Christmas Eve activity. We made a very nice Christmas Table in Abby’s room, with the little metal tree Margarita put in here, and every Christmas-themed item we could find. Margarita made us a cake.

Yaroslavl is very pretty indeed. And we did several things worthy of note but I have to go walk around it some more, or sit in a bus and look at it, or something, or otherwise try to think of a way to burn enough calories to be prepared for dinner. We eat a lot here.

Cont.

Well the Yaroslavl internet cafe didn’t feel like admitting the existence of my flash drive, so this was not posted. So now I can think of more interesting things to say...

I get really annoyed when I have to pay the ‘foreigner’ price at museums and things. But I can’t reasonably claim to be Russian, seeing as I don’t really speak Russian. So I’ve decided that I have to come up with a non-Russian ethnic identity for myself that is still a member of the Russian Federation. Unfortunately most of said ethnic groups bear no resemblance to me. Like I can’t really pretend to be a Buryat. All the more European groups left Russia when the USSR broke up. Curses upon you, Estonian separatists. It’s not really that big a deal, I guess, since places will usually accept my Russian student ID. But the clock museum in Yaroslavl didn’t. The icon museum, however, did, and it was an excellent museum, with very busy, imaginative icons with 100 or so narrative events on one panel. It was, however, typical of Russian museums in that about 5 guard-babushkas followed us about the tiny museum as we looked at the icons. They didn’t offer any information or anything, they just positioned themselves in chairs and watched us. We were the only people there, so when we left there was this alarming mass exodus of babushkas, who all suddenly started laughing and talking as they went out the door.

Margarita, Abby’s babushka, has a very awesome cat. His name is Vasya, and he is big and striped and attacks people. It seems that he and Abby had a well-established relationship of mutually ignoring each other, but then I arrived and ruined it all. It’s a good thing Margarita finds this cat to be the most interesting creature on earth, aside from her revolutionary, communist grandson, because anyone else would be alarmed instead of entertained that I spend a lot of time growling at the cat and wrestling with him. And Vasya can apparently open the door to our room, which he never did before I arrived. So now he runs about the room in the middle of the night and jumps on my bed and tries to get me to wrestle with him. And Abby refused to go to sleep before he is caught and removed, so have spent a ridiculous time chasing him out from under the bed. Man, this cat is so awesome. And his front claws are out, so he is very fun to wrestle with.

Abby and I are currently trying to figure out when to leave for the train station. There is one normal time, and one time for if Margarita tries to feed us dinner and we claim we are already late for the train. I cannot believe how much food we eat. Oh man, I’m so excited we’ll be on the train soon, I love trains. Though actually I have yet to be in platscart rather then kupe. That mean... in an open compartment with 6 beds rather than a closed compartment with 4 beds. If you think the 4 bed option is necessarily better, read Natasha’s blog from a few days ago. Then try to figure out what it means that Natasha thinks that she is the same person as her cat.

Moscow Part III

2007-12-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

Friday night
I think we’ve done the absolutely required things in Moscow, and we’ve moved on to the part where we’re actually on vacation and relaxing instead of exhaustingly rushing about the

Saturday night
My attempt at blogging last night was interrupted by entrance into our hotel room of a disgustingly well-informed Russian girl who told us the history of every single building in Moscow and St. Petersburg, along with directions from the nearest metro stop. I thought I would just fall over asleep in the middle of her narration, but luckily I did not.
Today we: walked about while this Georgian restaurant we wanted to eat in was closed, saw lots of alarming upscale Moscow grocery stores, ate in the alarmingly up-scale restaurant and listened to cool Georgian music, went into the huge and unattractive Church of Christ the Redeemer, rebuilt by the crazed Moscow mayor in record time with robotic icon-painters in time for some anniversary of the city, went to “Victory Park,” where we saw a huge and menacing WWII memorial, lots of cold rain, lots of brides being photographed next to the previous two items, and a little, modernistic chapel with icons of all the more martial saints- Alexander Nevsky, George, Dmitry Donskoy, etc. There was also an icon, right in from on the alter in a place of honor, of Nicolas II and his family, Anastasia and all. Walked around Arbat St., came home, cooked pasta with boiling water from the chai-nik and ate it with canned peas and white beans. Oh, at some point we were in a puzzling Tolstoy museum. Why can’t it snow and not rain?
Leaving tomorrow morning. Greatly looking forward to meeting Margarita, of whom I have heard so much.

Live from McDonalds

2007-12-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

There are still marshrutki here, like in Irkutsk, but they don’t make up 50% of the traffic. That would be a lot of marshrutki- there is a lot of traffic in Moscow. I wonder how much the marshrutkas cost, and who rides them, and where they go. There’s something incompatible between the neat little marshrutka system and the hugeness of Moscow. Or maybe just between my familiarity with the marshrutka system and the impossibility of being comfortable or familiar with Moscow.

Our stay in this hostel includes breakfast in the most amazing “cafe” ever, on the other side of this apartment building. They are pretty surprised at people showing up there at 9:15 in the morning; I think most of their business comes closer to midnight. It has a fabric ceiling, and hookah pipes in the window sills, and around the tables those kinds of sofas that you’re supposed to lounge on like at a Roman banquet, and trendy square dishware, and television monitors permanently playing some modern art compilation of shifting images and bizarre photographs. I am very glad we will be going back there often. Such as today, whenever my loud typing finally wakes Abby up. After our awesome breakfast we’re planning to go to the Tretyakovkaya Gallery, about which I am excited.

Someone in the hostel playing Tatu. Awesomeness. Nas ne dogonyat.

Other Middlebury Irkutsk people now having moved west: do we agree that we’ve answered the recent question of our Siberian History class, whether there is a separate culture in Siberia, as differentiated from that of European Russia? That there most certainly is?

Cont.
Went to the Tretyakovskaya Gallery yesterday. There’s something disconcerting about seeing in real life paintings you’ve seen reproductions and photographs of many times. They’re so much different with actual brushstrokes. I saw most of the paintings discussed in my Russian history class at Middlebury, and they were as huge and dramatic as expected.

I also saw lots of the icons I’ve written papers about for Hatjig, and, while I suppose I should be indignant about them all having been stolen from the churches where they should be, it’s certainly easier to be icons in a museum. And it was cool having them arranged by school and time period; I think I actually understand what people are talking about when they talk about different schools of medieval icon painting now. But all of them, all the pre-18th-century icons, were so expressive in their simple, deep colors and in some fuzziness of the edges of the forms from the way the paint was laid on the wood, and the economy of form, that going into the room with more recent icons was rather an unpleasant shock; they all seemed cheesy and garishly colored and gaudy.

But my favorite part of the museum was the Vrubel rooms. The paintings were all much more fantastical and crazed than they seemed on a computer screen, and being surrounded by all the centaurs and seraphim and prophets and Fausts and Margarets and demons was very cool. There were big, towering panels and an amazing tile fireplace from a “Gothic Study” he designed for some person of odd tastes, and two of the famous demons, but the most striking of all was this little head of Christ that was possibly the most frightening painting I’ve ever seen.

In the afternoon Abby and I went to Sparrow Hills, across the Moscow River, and walking around this “monument to nature” or something and looked out over the city. There was this amazing ski-jump structure that we looked at in disbelief for a long, long time; I still don’t know how a person would ever agree to climb onto that thing, or why the flying skiers don’t just shoot out into the river, or into the Olympic Stadium on the other side. Then we met Dennis, after a long period of confusion regarding what the heck he was talking about when he said to meet him on “the terrace,” and we walked around downtown with him. We saw people ice-skating on Patriarch Pond, where Woland (the Devil) first appears in The Master and Margarita. The wintery mix that was occurring covered the ground in what looked exactly like dippin’ dots.

Then today we went to the Kremlin. There were lots of large churches with famous icons, and the tsar cannon and the tsar bell, both very large, and the tomb of lots of tsars and tsareviches and metropolitans and patriarchs. I have decided that a good career goal would be Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. We saw an exhibit of their ecclesiastical robes, and they are the coolest things ever, all covered with embroidered and beaded icons and flowers and such. And the hat things are awesome, with metal icon things hanging down in front sometimes, and sometimes just more embroidered awesomeness, and all just very elaborate and heavy. I was very impressed, actually, to see the actual staffs and robes and things used personally by Filaret and Nikon and other patriarchs who I think of as being legendary figures of the impossibly distant past. Especially Filaret- he just belongs in operas and things. It was the same with seeing the tomb of the tsarevich Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who died in childhood and then had his identity assumed by every crazy Pole who pretended to the throne.

Moskva

2007-12-19T09:47:00.001-05:00

I think I must have lots of news, and have seen many interesting things, but as my main activity in Moscow has been being jetlagged, I don’t really remember what they are. Abby and I have been in Moscow for 2 days- walked around Red Square, walked around lots of amazing malls, generally walked around a lot in our awesome leather boots. Moscow is a very, very big city. I had forgotten that Irkutsk isn’t actually a big city, and that it’s sort of far from centers of fashion and such. Moscow is rather overwhelming, actually, but it’s fun. And there are very pretty, very old churches and monasteries and towers and things, much prettier and older than in Irkutsk. Anything else of especial note? Met Eddie and Sarah in Red Square our first night here and walked around with them, and Eddie and I probably bored Abby and Sarah by our constant “This would never happen in Irkutsk” comments. This comment applies to most of Moscow, but was especially appropriate to the hip cocktail lounge where we were at the time. There are McDonalds here everywhere- none of those in Irkutsk. And less fur, especially on men, and more tennis shoes, and more beggars, and fewer ice cream kiosks, and much more variety in fashion, and I don’t know what else. Hopefully I am currently posting this using the wireless connection in a McDonalds (the fanciest McDonalds I’ve every seen).

Ok, I’m trying again to write something informative. We went to a cemetery this morning (Novodevichy) where Moscow has buried all its famous people- Chekhov, Gogol, Lenin’s wife, all sorts of Veterans of Labor and military heroes I’ve never heard of. It was a very, very impressive place, next to a very impressive walled monastery with big shining onion domes sticking out everywhere. It was quiet and snow-covered and full of trees and brick walkways, and every tombstone was a sculpture of some impressive, generally modernistic kind. I was most impressed.

Ok, that’s all I can think of.

Oh, I want to add that in the airport in Irkutsk everyone plastic-wrapped their luggage. I guess the airport authorities don’t have rules about locks like in America. So I had mine plastic-wrapped too, as I was afraid everyone knew something I didn’t. And I was very amused that the plastic-wrapping cost over twice as much as the actual bag. It also condensed it to the density of a brick, which made it more interesting to carry about. I’ve discovered why people pack in suitcases and not just in plastic bags.

Informal Economy

2007-12-19T09:45:00.000-05:00

Had fun walking around Irkutsk today, watching people selling things. I bought some things- a big square plastic bag-thing to use instead of a suitcase on my trip (I have no idea what to call this item- it’s the kind of bag street peddlers carry their wares in, and it’s sort of like the bag I use for laundry at Middlebury, but not nearly as big), and Mongolian leather, fleece-lined gloves in the Chinese market, and tapochki, finally, from this Chinese guy with whom I talked about how neither of us really speak Russian, and some Christmas presents. It was fun bargaining for things, but mainly it was fun watching everything: the pretty glass jars of bright red berries and frost set out on tables near the Central Market, the old Chinese men yelling at people to buy their leather coats, the interesting section of sidewalk lined with women giving away dogs and cats, the huge section of the square outside the market now covered with tables of venders of garishly-colored stuffed animals for New-Years-presents season, all the old women selling their knitted knee-socks, etc. After that I ran into Natasha and Joseph and some Russian acquaintances of Natasha’s, and we went to the square and looked at the ice sculptures and slid down the huge awesome ice slide. Then we, minus the Russian acquaintances, went to the Posnaya (Posi restaurant) and met Ivan and Eddie and Leonya and Anya. Sat there for a long time. Came home and ate cabbage dishes and drank tea with V.P.

Walking around the ice-sculpture-covered square, just having slid down the awesome unregulated ice slide a few times, among the laughing Russian kids and teenagers splayed out everywhere in the snow at the bottom, I was feeling great love for the city of Irkutsk, when right in front of me a little girl of about five accidentally tripped some man walking through the square. He didn’t fall, or even almost fall, she just cut him off, I guess- anyway, he yelled at her and asked if she was drunk or something. And then my appreciation for Irkutsk was brought back to a realistic level. I think the culture of alcoholism in Russia is enough to keep me from ever loving this country in anything more than a very qualified way. It doesn’t even have character- these are no honky-tonk heroes, they’re just blank-faced, lanky young men hanging around the city drinking beer from paper bags. Many of them wear the exact same hat- light gray, with a thick dark gray strip around the bottom, and their short, thin, dirty-blond, hair is the same, and they have the same smooth, round faces. They remind me of the little rocks at the bottom of creeks, ground to a perfect, glossy, impersonal smoothness. These kids’ fathers have lost that look, and instead of the tight cotton caps of the lanky boys wear shaggy-looking fur hats that better match their weathered faces.

Spent a lot of time in KnigoMir, or whatever that second-floor bookstore near the Centralniy Rinok in called. First I looked at Spanish textbooks for a while, until I realized that nostalgia for subjunctive mood was not all that rational. Then I looked through the sizable collection of English literature, mostly annotated for Russian English-learners. I had read a very small proportion of the books on the shelf. I felt very uneducated. I don’t get it: I have spent a fairly large portion of my life reading literature in English. Why have I read about 2 out of 40 of the books judged worthy for cultural and linguistic export? I can’t decide to buy some of these books or not. On one hand, I should be reading in Russian. On the other, I have a lot of time to read, and it seems like I’m wasting an opportunity to read up a bunch of classics of English literature, I rather like English, and I’m afraid I’m forgetting how to speak it.

Dec. 16

I decided to go to Subway today, on my last day in Irktusk for a while. It was pretty awesome listening to Russians approaching the counter and having the concept of Subway explained to them. There were multiple vegetables, none of which were cabbage or cucumber and only one of which was tomato, and they could put as many as they wanted on their subs. For free. I assume they already understand the concept of a sandwich with more than one piece of bread when they arrive, but maybe they just hide their surprise.

Was commanded to go to another play today, in the same Electrical College as the battling-wives play but by another theater company. I was not very happy about the whole thing, as I was stressed out about getting everything done I had to for my trip, and in general I don’t like being told how to spend my time and money, but it was a good play- a Vampilov (Soviet playwright of whom only residents of Irkutsk have heard as far as I can tell) play that isn’t performed too much because, according to the director, it’s too hard. It was one of those artsy affairs beginning with the death of the main character and from then on following a very confused chronology and interspersed with odd metaphoric choreographed scenes outside the plot entirely, but I eventually forgave it. The basic plot line: young handsome man has charmed life, very nice wife, good job, friends with whom to do a lot of drinking and singing and joking, his own apartment (a big deal 50 years ago when the play was written), multiple affairs with beautiful women. And it’s all very funny and like one of those beer commercials playing to male fantasies. And then his wife is increasingly miserable and has an abortion and all the women leave him except this 17-year-old girl who is in love with him, but by then he’s a big mess and involves her in a drunken scandal in front of all his friends, and his jovial male friendships aren’t that helpful and he jumps off the balcony of his all-important apartment. Very cheery, all in all.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned how small children are pulled about in sleds here. Like instead of pushed in strollers. They’re these little tiny padded sleds, and when the parents get to a place with no ice they just pick them up and carry them like it was just a kid wrapped up in a blanket. There are also larger sleds for pulling around boxes of merchandise of various kinds.

Last day of class

2007-12-19T09:42:00.000-05:00

Electricity just went out. The electricity goes out a lot. It’s never been out for more than 12 hours, though.

Today was the last day of class. I don’t know what to say about the semester ending. I wish I had learned more Russian in it- I’m going to have to do better at that next semester- but I enjoyed my classes as a whole, and I’m sort of sorry for them to be over. It doesn’t quite feel like the end of a semester though... before, ends of semesters involved everyone going home, and the feeling was much different. This just feels like the end of a fall semester in high school, where your classes will be different soon, but it’s not that exciting or important. But it is sort of important; I just didn’t notice, maybe; I don’t really remember the point of this, but I guess what I want to say is that today being the last day of class was fairly important, but with no special final exam schedule and people not packing up all around me, the normal end-of-semester feeling was not present. Classes just went on in their usual way and then today just ended. And we had sort of a tedious end-of-semester lunch, where various university officials who we had never seen before gave speeches about how it was nice that we had come, and our teachers gave speeches about how they liked having us in class and we were all special in our own ways (or in Alexandra Vladimirovna’s case how we should have been less lazy and worked harder and spoken Russian better) and no one knew if they were allowed to eat while speeches were being given.

For the last day of class, I agreed to let Elissa “paint my eyes,” as the Russians say, as a special gift for Elena Miletevna, who often yells at me for my lack of make-up use, and tells me that I will never find a husband. Somehow this make-up application ended up including the application of bright pink sparkly nail polish. But when presented with my compliant-to-her-demands self, Elena Miletevna just asked why I couldn’t have dressed nicely yesterday, when we had the ridiculous event-for-foreigners, to which I very offensively wore a t-shirt. Had I dressed nicely yesterday, as I had today, I would have found a husband at the tea-drinking. She had, in fact, announced at the beginning of the event that one of the traditional purposes of tea-drinkings was the finding of brides and grooms. Apparently after I left, the spin-the-bottle game was followed by a game in which a person just has to walk around and choose the person he or she wishes to kiss. All semblance of organization has been lost in this paragraph.

Had a nice evening- observed another class at ABC language school, taught by this ridiculous Irishman named Sean Hennessey (“the Hennessey family of the famous cognac,” as he informed me and Joseph at least twice), then Joseph and I ate some posi (Buryat dumplings) at a Posaria, then we met everyone else at the Tex Mex restaurant and drank coffee. Leonya and Anya were there, and it was very pleasant. That’s when it started really feeling like the end of something, with everyone together for the last time. Walked around the city for a while after that, many of us ended up in Pizza Domino, got home around 1. It’s going to be very strange to be here without the people who are leaving.

Lights are back on. Rather a waste, as I’m going to bed now.

For those of you who have complained that you soon won't have Natasha's blog to read

2007-12-13T20:39:00.000-05:00

I've added a link to Joseph's. He'll be here all year.

and a continuation, in which I sit around and listen to music (Dec. 13)

2007-12-13T19:59:00.001-05:00

We had a chaipitia (tea-drinking) with all the foreign students and some Russian students and most of the teachers today. It was sort of silly- we all at tables in a huge circle and drank tea from plastic cups- but nice enough, and the Korean students put on a skit and sang a song, and other people performed things, and such. But then at one point we started playing spin the bottle. And that is wholly unacceptable for people who have graduated from middle school. That’s about when I left...

To go to the printing-copy center tent thing at the marshrutka stop to print out a picture for our group thank-you card for Elizabeth. I am becoming good friends with the copy-machine tent. It is one of the most OOC places in Irkutsk. There are always 800 million college students crammed in there, demanding copies of 100-page notebooks. I don’t really understand why- do they have some sort of system where only one students out of every two takes notes, and then they just make copies at the end of the semester? In any case, I have a new addition to my list of jobs I don’t want.

Then I came home, because V.P. called to say she had forgotten her keys. This was the first time I had actually seen her since Sunday or something, so we drank tea and discussed the loss of my wallet and other subjects. Then she left for work, apparently taking both her keys and mine, perhaps feeling that having no sets of keys for the first half of the day and two for the second average out to the normal amount of key-possession. So I can’t leave the house now.

later:
Katya went to English class today, for about the 2nd time this semester I think. She just home and told me she raised her hand and answered every question, or something, thanks to our intensive translating sessions, and was told she didn’t have to take the exam or something. I wonder if she discussed dead ends. I like Katya a lot when she’s in a good mood.

If you are a person who wishes to read a very interesting discussion of the relationship of liturgical music and icons, the relationship of language and music, the art of musical composition in general, and about liturgy in general, you should buy the cd “Lay Aside All Earthly Cares” by the choir “Cappella Romana” and read the liner notes, particularly the article “Some Personal Thoughts of the Composition of Liturgical Music.” The cd itself is also pretty, a collection of Orthodox chants in very good English translations and musical arrangements. It is especially interesting if you are listening to it on your headphones as Katya is playing very loud disco music in the other room. Disco music aside, it reminds me of when Mama told me she considers Handel’s Messiah to be a proof of God’s existence. The Pan-Orthodox Society for the Advancement of Liturgical Music agrees, at least with the principle that religious music should be iconic, and icons necessarily correspond to “hyper-icons.” This is really very pretty. You should all buy this cd. Especially if you are a person in my family, and you want to give it to me when I get home.

Я сейчас слушаю песню «Российский Дед Мороз». It has a disco beat, a heartwarming children's chorus, and patriotic lyrics. Если ты сейчас в России, наверно тебе бы очень понравилась эта песьна.

Oh, and now in the neighboring apartment, where the piano is against my wall, the piano-playing member of the family has taken a break from playing songs from Cats (the usual occupation of that individual) and is playing that song about the New Years tree. Very festive.

I'm excited about my upcoming travels. When I started thinking seriously about this trip, and about how Abby would be seeing Siberia, I think I realized for the first time that living here is totally different than it would be living in, say, Yaroslavl. Like, we don't have «the neighboring cities with beautiful 15th century churches, founded by some tzar with an awesome name and an air of bold and romantic antiquity», (um, those quotes aren't because someone other than me was loony enough to say that, I just wanted to signify that it was one term), we have «the neighboring cities that were hastily built with no attention to aesthetics by Stalin and his army of chipper Komsomol youth when he decided there was entirely too great an expanse of space there with no cities to fill it, now facing major demographic and economic crises because the economically-illogical state-suppored factories that employed all the residents have closed.» Oo, maybe when Abby's here we'll go see Seyernno-Baikalsk. That's supposed to be one of the most poorly-planned and unattractive cities in Siberia. We talk about it in Baikal Studies on occasion, but I've never been there. Apparently it's a big deal that they built the apartment buildings without balconies, so everyone's depressed and demoralized. I don't quite understand this logic- who hangs out on a balcony in Siberia? All we use ours for is freezing the cabbage. But anyway, I sort of want to go see these balcony-less homes. Or we could just take the electrichka out to the middle of nowhere and walk around in the woods. We have a lot of woods in Siberia.

Literary Theory (Dec. 12)

2007-12-13T19:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I decided that it would be a good idea to make a BTL, but the only one of those ingredients we had was T. The place of L was taken by cabbage, and the place of B by Jolly Milkman speadable cheese with little pieces of bacon in it. It was, as a culinary venture... well, better than the time I tried to eat the raw onion. But cabbage is not meant to be put on sandwiches.

evening edit, not having posted this yet due to technical difficulties:

I went downtown to the ABC Language School today to observe an English class, sort of training for my future employment there. And I was going to relate some amusing episodes from the class. But then I came home and helped Katya with her English homework, and all other English-related anecdotes were driven from my mind.

We’re reading this same social-economic theory articles, or course, and there was some discussion of dead-end jobs. I asked Katya if she knew what ‘dead-end’ meant. She said yes, like there are happy ends and dead ends. Happy ends are like in Cinderella, and dead ends are like in Romeo and Juliet.

I just discovered that I have an atlas on my computer that tells me how far cities are apart from each other. I realize that most of you can just look this up on the computer, but I am now delighted when I find something to do on the computer without internet. Anyway, I now know that it is 6,100.8 miles between Frederick, Maryland, USA and Irkutsk, Russia. And 5,781.8 miles between Middlebury, Vermont, USA and Irkutsk, Russia. I’m mostly impressed that Middlebury made it to the world atlas. San Francisco is a mere 5611.4 miles from Irkutsk.

Title

2007-12-11T04:43:00.000-05:00

Went to Listvianka today, on the 11 am marshrutka. Telling V.P. on Saturday that I was going to Listvianka on Monday was enough to keep her happy the whole weekend: she didn’t ever look disapproving when I spent hours in my room working on my Baikal studies paper, as she saw it all as getting things out of the way so I could go to Listvianka. The ride was very pretty; now that there’s snow the white birches don’t show up much, and instead it’s the pines (and I guess cedars) that stand out. It was very foggy, as it so often is, but in a way that enhanced the scenicness rather than hid it.

Misfortune, however, struck when we got out of the marshrutka. I took out my wallet, as one so often does when wishing to pay for things, and gave the driver 100 rubles. I got change and put it in my pocket. We all (Ivan, Eddie, Elissa, me) went into a cafe, about 30 seconds from the bus stop. I looked for my wallet. It was no longer in my possession.

I have no idea how this happened. There were hardly any people around, and it’s hard to see how the wallet could have been stolen. It’s also hard to see how I would just casually toss a wallet away and not notice. I guess I could have dropped it in the marshrutka. In any case, my life is now greatly complicated. And a pall was sort of cast over the rest of my day.

Which is a shame, because the day was really a lot of fun, other than wallet-losing. We ate in the cafe (actually the food there was quite awful), we walked around the village, Eddie threw lots of rocks at the frozen creek but failed to break it, I drank very cold and very good water from a hole someone had made in the creek, and we went to a very nice banya. The banya was what was really fun about the day. It was in this wooden lodge on a hill over Baikal, and while we waited for the oven to be heated up we sat in a sunny, hunting-lodge-like room with a big window overlooking Baikal and watched some awful American movie made worse by Russian dubbing. After sitting in the banya for long enough not to be able to stand it anymore we would run outside in our bathing suits, screaming, and roll around and throw snow at each other. Why don’t we have banyas in the US? They are so amazing- I don’t know how to begin to describe the feeling of every grain of dirt and drop of cold coming streaming out of your body, and the bitter smell and taste of the steam coming off the stones and metal pipe. And after being in a banya you can’t be cold for the next several hours- I think the temperature-sensing faculties of your body are just so confused by the extremes of hot and cold of the experience that they just stop bothering registering. Which is very nice if the rest of your day will involve walking around in Siberia. It’s really rather incredible- you walk down a road on which you remember being freezing cold a couple hours before, pre-banya, and your body is a perfectly comfortable temperature.

The other item of note is my recent capitulation to the Russian practice of putting mayonnaise on everything. It’s sort of alarming. Yesterday I decided I wanted some salad of some kind, so made one from shredded cabbage and tomato. And that didn’t look like it would taste all that good without dressing of some kind, and of course all there was was mayonnaise- and then it was really good. My excuse is that this is especially good mayonnaise, very refreshing and light. The tub says “mayonnaise provencale,” so it must be very sophisticated. And it’s from the Irkutsk Fatty Products Factory or something, so I’m eating local foods, just as the Second Vermont Republic folks advise. Today this mayonnaise made several appearances in my dinner.

Tuesday update:
Went to bus station, spent a long time standing in lines and asking people where things were and being yelled at. No wallets were turned in. I didn’t really think it would have been. I would call and cancel credit cards now but 1) I don’t know numbers to call, 2) my phone doesn’t have any money on it, as I apparently did something wrong when I thought I put money on it yesterday; I guess some Irkutsk resident unexpectedly got some money added to his or her phone, and 3) I’m just going to wait for Mama to call tonight and make her do it. Because I am such an irresponsible person.

Got two packages today, from Gammie and from Mama. So that was nice. I can live on chocolate in the train station now, in my penniless state. I think this wallet loss is judgment for my Scrooge-like miserliness. Oh, and the arrival of Mama’s package means I now have a flashdrive, so at least I can continue to complain and post my complaints on the internet! I know you’re all glad to hear that. As our good friend Julieta Venegas (or whatever her name is) says, “Yo no voy a llorar y decir, que no merezco eso, porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero.”

And as Lady Catherine De Berg says, I am most seriously displeased.

Someone send me some cheese to go with my whine

2007-12-07T00:34:00.000-05:00

I spent a significant portion of the day being very, very tired of being incompetent, and of being a foreigner in general, and of being an incompetent foreigner in Russia in specific. I am tired of everything I do at best being funny and at worst getting me yelled at. Usually just an awkward middle level. And not only with Russians- I feel like in my social interactions with everyone I have just become rather obnoxious. I had this period when I felt like I had found this attractive, simple, honest quality to the values and activities of Russian life, and I rode about on marshrutkas looking with great appreciation at the... well now I can’t remember what I appreciated about it all. Because this week has not really done much for my overall appreciation of Russia. I would try to explain the horrible mood that this week has put me in, but a) my own failures are not my favorite topics of discussion and b) none of it’s really very interesting.

Learned in Baikal Studies that the mink is a “killing machine.” Who knew. They eat squirrels, which are approximately the size of minks, themselves. I would like to appreciate the mink for their control of the squirrel population, but I am more grossed out by dead squirrels than live ones. We probably learned other interesting things in Baikal Studies as well- we usually do- but I don’t remember them.

In History of Siberia we learned various things that I thought were very interesting at the time, but then I realized were only interesting if you live in Irkutsk. Like were the statue of Alexander III came from, and which group of Polish prisoners built the church that is now the Organ Hall, and that the 1912 demonstrations on the Lena river in which 250 peacefully demonstrating workers were shot and killed by their employers (whence Lenin’s name) occurred in the Irkutsk oblast.

Have train tickets from Petersburg to Kazan, from Kazan to Novosibirsk, from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. Woo hoo. Now that I’ve partially gotten over the nightmare of buying the tickets, I’m excited. What I am most excited about, though, is going to Helsinki. I will be a tourist, making not even the barest attempt at cultural assimilation, I will be speaking English, there will not be the Irkutsk train station, I will be with Abby and Laurel... Abby and Laurel, I’m afraid you’re about tied on my list with “speaking English.” Sorry. “Being in Helsink,” in specific, doesn’t seem to have made it to the list; I haven’t really distinguished it in my mind as a specific destination, it’s just “not Russia.” I told V.P. Abby’s prize fact about Helsinki, that it is the most northern city with a metro. I don’t think she showed the required level of impressedness. But then V.P. is hard to impress. The fact that she didn’t throw up her hands and say “normal!” as she often does is a good sign; maybe interiorly she was seized with jealousy that I will soon be seeing this Great Metro of the North.

Agh, I keep being annoyed about the horrible train station again. I shouldn’t complain too much about it, because I personally didn’t have to do that much, I just sort of pretended to be involved when Elizabeth did the majority of the dealing with the unhelpful railroad employees (she’ll be on the train with us from Kazan to Irkutsk). My only real contribution was failing to write Abby’s name down in the accepted last name- first name- patronymic order, and this failure cost me over $20. Abby, this is all your fault for not being named “Elena” or “Natalia” or “Alexandra” like everyone else in the country. 511 rubles... as our good friend Guy Clark says,
“I wish I had a dime... for every baaaaaad tiiiiiiiiime,
but the bad times always seem to keep the change.”

Items of Note:

2007-12-05T04:03:00.000-05:00

Dec. 4
1) Kiosks are decorated for New Years. This combines two of my favorite things: holiday decorations, especially on an overdone, tasteless, and colorful scale; and kiosks. The prize for the best decorated kiosk goes to the ice cream kiosk on Lenin St., near Pizza Domino. It has a whole window covered in pictures of ornaments and flashing lights, and is quite festive-looking indeed. However, I must admit that I am prejudiced in favor of this particular kiosk, as the nicest woman in Irkutsk works there, so any other Irkutskians reading this can feel free to conduct their own research and get back to me.

2) Speaking of ice cream. When Sasha, V.P.’s 10-year-old granddaughter, came to the house this evening, she brought with her an ice-cream cone she had bought for me. I personally consider this to be on the list of sweetest things ever done. Even if it was probably really to bribe me to play Marble Blast Gold on my laptop with her.

3) I’m watching the news, more to improve my feel for the rhythm of spoken Russian than from any real hope for gathering any information about the events of the day. They just showed this huge police raid in Krasnoyarsk, where the camo-clad police officers knocked down a huge door, rushed in with automatic weapons, and found... a bunch of backgammon tables set out for playing. What?! Is backgammon illegal in Krasnoyarsk? Is backgammon a well-known leisure activity of narcotic rings? I am quite confused. Unfortunately, I understood this story better than pretty much any of the others broadcast today. Now some soldiers are wandering about an airport in bright red camo. This seems a bit paradoxical to me, but I guess the Russians know their own military business. Hah! Now they’re talking about Живой Журнал! That means Live Journal. And I understand that. Wait... I didn't really know what Live Journal was in English. Damn. Well, they're saying that in Russia more people use «ЖЖ» than in any European country, and almost more than in the US. This is silly. I'm turning off the news, Putin's already killed all the real journalists.

4) I think I have developed a racial prejudice against Russians. When I see a person clearly not of Russian birth, I automatically assume that that person will be more friendly, polite, and generally superior the Russians around him or her. Today on my marshrutka-ride home, a Chinese girl got in beside me in the front seat (marshrutkas generally seat two people next to the driver, and if you are the person in the middle, as I always end up being, you spend the whole time feeling that you are seriously impeding the working of the stickshift) and in the process knocked her head on the door frame. Now, if this girl had been a Russian, she would have either: a) cursed loudly at the driver for installing such an inconvenient doorframe of b) proudly pretended that nothing had happened and not acknowledged the existence of anyone else in the marshrutka. But this girl was of the genetically superior Chinese race, so instead she caught my eye and we laughed at the amusing incident.

5) I just remembered: a few days ago, when Sasha saw that I was working on a paper, she asked me, «Where are you copying it from?» I don't think she actually meant to imply that I was cheating, that's just her conception of schoolwork, that you find information somewhere and then rewrite it. My appreciation for institutions encouraging original thought is now considerably higher than when I was actually surrounded by those institutions.

6) Why can't I have short, stately and magestic blog posts like Laurel? Maybe because Laurel actually does her schoolwork instead of procrastinating by pretending to have cultural insights and then making her friends and relations read about them.

7) I just attempted an actual productive, academic activity: looking up the spelling of the Russian word for 'felt' for my Buryat paper. But I was immediately distracted by the fact that the Russian word for 'felt-tip pen' is 'flo-master.' With the stress on the second syllable.

8) The lucky ducks (I mean, unfortunate students who will miss out on another semester of language development and increased cultural appreciation) who are doing home after this semester got informational handouts from Middlebury about «reverse culture shock». My favorite advice involved supermarkets; apparently Middlebury fears that our shock at well-stocked grocery store isles will put us in danger of being locked up in a mental ward, or, alternately, make us fat. Especially odd was the advice not to use «controlled susbstances, especially beginning with 'm' and ending with 'a' before going to the grocery store for the first time. Has there been a specific instance of this, forcing Middlebury to take preventative action by warning us now? I don't know whether I'm more curious about the desire to smoke pot to enhance one's grocery-buying experience or about the typical results when high, fresh-from-Russia youths hit the bread aisle. I am considering e-mailing the Moscow office and asking- saying that if I don't hear about the results second-hand, I'm in danger of my curiousity forcing me to try the experiment myself. Wait. I just figured it out. People who are high are very hungry. In a horrible combination of the munchies and hyper-active, long-repressed consumarism, the army of 21-year-olds will buy up every carton of ice cream in Hanniford's, leaving a community devestated and thirsting for revenge.

It occurs to me that some of you may now fear, based on the long-winded and scattered quality of my blogging, that I have in fact taken to the use of controlled subtances myself. I haven't. But if Katya and Nastya sing that song whose chorus includes the words «чем виже любовь, тем ниже поцелуем» (hopefully not the real words) one more time, I may have to resort to chemical means. It's that or the chainsaw.

Dec. 5
9) I'm sort of depressed that the semester is over and I still can't speak Russian. I'm sort of depressed about my lack of knowledge in general, really. We went over our answers from our test in Baikal Studies today. And we had an unannounced test thing in our mainstream.

10) I'm going to attempt to mail New Years cards. If you get an alarming, brightly colored envelope in the mail, and it looks like it will contain coupons to a department store sale, it may be from me. Or maybe the Russian postal service will consider these envelopes too ridiculous to mail. We'll have to see.

11) I have never spent so much time in a post office. But the platinum-blond postal workers were very calm about spending 15 minutes putting stamps on my letters. They didn't yell at anyone, either, the whole time I was there. It was sort of amazing.

What you've all been waiting for

2007-12-04T04:43:00.001-05:00

This is ridiculously long, so I divided it into parts and pretended that solved the problem. You still shouldn’t attempt it in one sitting.

Part 1, in which my disjointed thoughts generally involve winter

Reading public, I think you will be hearing a lot from me in the next week or so, because I have 3 papers due soon. And that means procrastination time. As I have no flash drive anymore, however, you may be waiting awhile to actually read this.

Outside the window of our usual classroom in the International Department is a blacktop, where some middle school (I think) has gym class sometimes, while we sit through less interesting classes. Usually they play soccer. Sometimes they try to play basketball in the snow, which is very entertaining. This week, however, they skied. Seriously, they just skied around in circles around the blacktop. It looked very challenging.

I’m having a very hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to cite and what not, in the writing of these papers. As I mentioned earlier, Russians don’t seem too big on the whole idea of intellectual property. Never having read or written a Russian student paper, however, I can’t figure out the level at which it is acceptable to just recopy what one reads. I fear that I will return to the United States and have forgotten American academic standards and try to tell my professors that I, you know, changed a few words from what I copied, so it wasn’t really plagiarism. And then I will be expelled and, as Laurel would say, grow old with cats.

My other academic complaint of the moment is that Russian books don’t seem to usually have indexes.

It’s after Thanksgiving, which means I may listen to Christmas music. I thought this was much more exciting before I realized that I don’t have any Christmas music, other than “Christmastime’s a-comin’.” I do have various winter-themed songs, but they are almost all depressing. I guess this is sort of fitting for a Siberian winter. Maybe by the end of this winter I will figure out what the heck the song “Humidity Built the Snowman” means. You won’t find me walkin’ around your part of town; humidity build the snowman, sunshine brought him down.

New Year’s decorations are gradually appearing in Irkutsk, in the form of the giant plastic banners of the type used to congratulate the citizenry on all public holidays. I wonder if the city will get any more decorated. Private citizens do not decorate, apparently, just government agencies and businesses. I suggested to Nastya that it would be pretty if everyone decorated their balconies; she told me that that would be very silly, because no one does that. Can’t argue with that logic. I heard some New Year’s music on the omnipresent kitchen radio last night. I can’t believe these people think that Santa Claus comes on Dec. 31. By that time he’s already given all the good presents to children in countries with less of a history of repression of religion. Actually I don’t know whether Grandfather Frost came to Russia before 1917, and if he did for what holiday. I guess if he did pre-date the Communists he may have come on Orthodox Christmas, whose date I don’t remember but which I gather is in January. So, if they would have had the foresight to have a government with a less atheistic agenda, coupled with a church with a less stubborn insistence on the Julian calendar...
Part 2, in which my disjointed thoughts turn to more abstract cultural issues, plus Blues Clues and the fashion choices of drunks on the bus

Were you to have been a person involved in religious politics of 16th century Russia, would you have been a Possessor or a Nonpossessor? Think carefully before answering. It is much cooler to be a Nonpossessor, but perhaps more easily said than done. Plus you lose, in the end. Unless you are Nil Sorsky, in which case you get canonized, finally, in the 20th century, but by that time Joseph Volokolansky has been lording it over you for 4 centuries. And it’s too bad of the Possessors to burn people at the stake, really, and their emphasis on the externals of worship and conduct probably brought about the schism of the next century, but don’t you agree that the Church should take some part in the social and political life of the country, instead of encouraging everyone to go be a hermit? Double-space your answer.

I made very good mashed potatoes last night. At least I think they are very good. But I’m having doubts, now, as to the reliability of my taste. I’m so accustomed to the fat/sweet taste divide, to those being the only two available flavors, that I am afraid that I either 1) put way too much garlic and black pepper in these potatoes to compensate for the usual flavorlessness of food or 2) hardly put any garlic and pepper in them and only think that the resulting dish is flavorful. This is a matter of great concern to me. What will happen when I go back home- what if I don’t like the food anymore? Or become one of those weird people who dump hot sauce on everything? This is tied to my more general concern about the reverse culture shock that I can already tell will be intense when I get home. It seems a little early to be worrying about this, but as each day goes by I am more and more accustomed to the basic realities of Irkutsk life. It’s not that I can identify concrete things that I will miss, or that I can think of any reason to be attached to these streets and skies and snows; it’s just the basic shapes that form this world, the tones and textures, are every moment further internalized, in a way that has nothing to do with whether I like them or not. And I remember what a stressful jolt it was to be wrenched from the American shapes and tones to the Russian ones in the first place. ‘Jolt’ isn’t a good word- it is what the Russians would refer to as an однократный глалол- unsuggestive of length of process.

I saw a few minutes of Blues Clues the other day, dubbed into Russian by a less-than-enthusiastic voice-over. It was pretty silly (I mean aside from any endemic silliness of Blue’s Clues) – most of the point of the show is the little jingles and songs and such, and unimaginative, direct translation did little for the rhythm. Most objectionable, however, is that the offstage children’s voices that yell the right answers to various questions to Steve address him with the formal ‘you.’ No, unacceptable. Steve routinely requires the help of 4-year-olds to aid him in the solving of riddles posed to him by his two-dimensional puppy. He does not get to be вы.

Do any men in America wear fur jackets or coats? Probably not. I no longer find it at all ridiculous here- today on the bus I was much admiring the beautiful black fur jacket (mink?) of the man standing in front of me, but when I tried to imagine such a jacket being worn in Middlebury, or Frederick, I just couldn't. I don't understand fashion. I also really like those brown leather jackets, when they're all old and broken in, and look like the guy is wearing a bunch of old footballs around. An old drunk on this same bus was wearing such a jacket. I was very entertained listening to him annoy the self-important middle-aged women behind me.

Part 3, on academic subjects
11/29, or as the Russians would say, 29/11

morning
I can't believe I ever complained about writing papers in America. There was a library within walking distance, and it was open 'til 1 in the morning, and there were books there, and the books were in a comprehensible language. And I had 24-hour internet access; that was pretty key. And I could actually communicate in the language that the papers were to be written in. This is a disaster. What happens if I just fail all my classes? It's not really a propitoius time of year to run away into the taiga.

evening
Test in Baikal Studies today. I apparently don't know much about Baikal. It was a pretty funny test though. For one thing it was written in exactly the style in which Pavel Alexandrovich speaks- an overly-scientific, official diction and grammer that for some reason I find very amusing. And then he had tried to put in funny options on the multiple choice, which were often just bizarre. Where does permanently frozen material occur? a) at the bottommost depths of Lake Baikal b) under the ground of the northern taiga in Siberia c) at the top of the Sayana mountains, south of Baikal d) in the expanses of outerspace.

Part 4, in which holidays are revisited
I asked today about the history of D'yed Moroz (Grandfather Frost, looks and behaves like Santa Claus). I was told that 1) New Years became a holiday under Peter the Great, and he was the one who started the Yolka (like Christmas tree but for New Years) thing; before Peter the Russians considered the New Year to begin in September, which sort of makes sense actually 2) D'yed Moroz didn't show up until the eras of Soviets and of cartoons, so he was never a Christmas character 3) the Orthodox Church doesn't really have any desire to link this ridiculous character, or the pagan character of Snyegurachka (the Snow Maiden) to church holidays of any kind 4) St. Nicolaus would be hard to link to any winter holiday, because he is already too closely associated with the water to pick up double duty as a reindeer handler.

I went to Web Ugol today (despite my residing anger at their stealing of my flash drive) and spent vast sums of money printing out articles about Buryats (Siberian history) and about the activities of the Orthodox Church, in relation to the Russian government, in the 16th century (Russian history, or, as the course is actually titled, Fatherland history). [I had been thinking, all through the process of the history paper, how much I wished I had brough Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church, and what should I find today, but that some excellent person has put said book on the internet. So I read the appropriate pages. And now I feel informed.] The fact that I paid for these pages of text is making me feel like I should read them. Plus, of course, the fact that I now have less than a week to write about them.

I was asked recently whether Americans celebrate New Years. I wasn't sure how to explain the relationship between New Years and Americans. I guess it's a nice reason for a party, and it provides a sense of new beginnings, but we don't send each other cards, and we are not that upset if we don't get around to celebrating it; it seems like an optional holiday. The only New Years I remember are 1) that totally ridiculous time Jack and I stayed up to see what happened on Animal Crossing at midnight (not much- some confetti fell) 2) one time at Gammie's house when Hailey came over and we watched movies and ate popcorn until the ball fell in New York; then Hailey and I stayed up and read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe until the arrival of midnight in the time zone in which we actually were 3) babysitting one year, for some fairly large group of girls; we made «New Year's sundays» and ate them on the stroke of midnight 4) the year 2000 when there was a First Night thing in Frederick, and it seemed like they hadn't quite come up with enough activities for the residents dutifully roaming the downtown streets for 4 hours, but everyone still seems to have the buttons (or pins? what do we call those things that you pin onto your clothing?) 5) that was all, but I just heard the song «Rollin' and a Ramblin' (the death of Hank Williams)» and I remembered that last year Mama and I watched a Prairie Home Companion special on PBS and somone sang that song. And Emmylou Harris sang also, in silver cowboy boots. And Brad Paisley or someone like that had to show Garrison Keeler around Nashville, and his practiced TV charm somehow just didn't work at all when it ran up against G.K., and he was clearly very confused.
I'm very excited about New Years this year. Abby and I will probably be in St. Petersburg. I have no idea what we'll do, but I hope we get to watch Ironia Sud'by on tv.

Part 5, on identity
Today in History of Siberia we discussed the words used to describe members of national groups and of citizens of governments. They are often different words in Russian; the word 'rooskii,' for example means 'relating the the Russian nationality;' it is used for the Russian language, and for ethnic Russians. Then there is the word 'rossiski'; it means 'relating to the Russian Federation,' and can be used for members of non-Russian national groups with Russian citizenship. Real people (not in government) don't use this word very often, but I notice that Radio Rossiya is making a big push for it; every day there is this segment called «Ya- Rocciyanin» in which someone tells a touching story about how Russia is so happily multinational. So, I had known about this Rooski-Rossiski division, but I only found out a couple of days ago that the word that I considered to mean «German» as in «relating to Germany» actually means «relating to the German ethnic group, whatever that means, and including most Swiss and Austrians». I found this out when my host sister used a totally different word to refer to beer from Germany (I'm not sure why she didn't consider the beer to be ethnically German). I asked about this is class, and we began a confusing discussion of these terms. Finally Elena Nicholaevna said «Yes, no matter where we live, I am a Russian, of the Russian people, and you will be...» She looked at us in confusion. «Well, what are you?»
We told her that Americans are a country without nation. This makes very little sense in English; what we said is that we didn't have «narod,» this very key but somewhat untranslatable Russian word that means something like 'ethnic group' but is often used to mean 'people' in general, or 'the populace. Is this true, that we don't have a narod? Russians, I don't think, would consider 'American' to be narod, as we demonstratably came from various other narodi, and you can't just change narod. But we do lots of things that narodi do: we make up theories about our 'national character,' we eat sort of similar food, we dress pretty much alike (actually not, but our differences in food and dress are not deliniated along distinguishable nationalistic lines, just social and economic ones), and, most importantly, we speak the same language (ignore the fact that this isn't quite true; people who can be easily grouped into a narod other than 'American' are irrelevant to this discussion).

This language point is obviously very interesting to me at the moment. Is language the only truly important determanent of cultural affinity? Nastya, my host sister, told me that the word I thought meant 'resident of England' actually includes me and is the name of a narod. I don't think everyone agrees with this, or Elena Nicholaevna wouldn't have been so confused about coming up with a label for us. But it's still interesting. I noticed, while I was here, that when I hear about the involvement of England or Great Brittain in world history, I feel like England is «my side.» I'm affronted when they get cheated, and mildly triumphant when they win things. I don't remember whether I felt like this in America, and this is a result of some cultural transference through the American educational system, or whether this affiinity with people who speak my language is new, a result of being thrown among all these Russian-speakers. I remember Dadda telling me one time that the wonderful thing about learning a language is that you automatically inherit its linguistic tradition: anyone who learns English has just as much connection to Shakespeare as an Englishman. Or maybe he said something completely different, but that's what I got out of it. Anyway, I think that it's pretty much true; being able to read the words written by another person is a very, very important link with that person's world and self. But does this translate to the entire culture connected to the learned language? If I learn Russian well enough, will I turn into a Russian? I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I've sort of read everything I have to read for this history paper. The actual writing of the first sentence, however, is proving to be a problem.

Dec. 30
Addendum to narod story. Today we sat down in grammer class, and the first thing Elena Miletovna said was «Sonya, what kind of blood do you have, English or German?» I said I didn't know, and great incredulity was expressed; apparently it is totally impossible that I am wholly unware of where my family is from, everyone knows that. Is that true? I know that many of the students in my middle school and high school were very proud of being «50% Irish, 10% German, 10% Latvian, 12% Brazillian, and .2% Cherokee» or some such ridiculous thing, but I am fairly sure that these students were in the distinct minority, and I assumed that they would grow out of caring in a few years. It still seems rather silly to me; national identity seems like a totally self-invented designation to me, and I refuse to believe that cultural traits are transmitted by blood, or by any process but cultural assimilation. I think all recent scientific findings are completley against me on this, but no matter. It just seems to me that people's connection to the history of any group is totally deturmined by identification with that history, and maybe by the fact of living in a world created by that history, not by genetic link. But maybe my lack of interest in geneology is unusual? I'm starting to think that maybe it is. Anyway, I eventually told Elena Miletovna that my grandmother's family was originally from Scotland, which made her happy, and then she told us that it was a good thing I wasn't from Germany, because German girls are not very pretty. Um, thanks? Later in the class we had our usual discussion about how much better it would be if I «painted my eyes.»

Part 6, in which I pedantically discuss the events occuring in my room at the time it was written; entirely in order to avoid doing work

later
Arg. Katya just asked if I wanted her to wash my clothes. I had to say I had done laundry 2 days ago, so no. I couldn't very well go pulling all my supposedly clean clothes off the shelf. But here is why this is very annoying: of course I didn't really wash them, I somehow just ran much of the color out of them in boiling water, with little actual contact with soap. I have no idea how I am so incompetent at washing-machine use, but this washing machine is evil. More importantly, this means that Katya now thinks I know how to use the washing machine, and I have no hope of clean clothing, ever.

In other news, I have written a paragraph of paper. This is going to take a while. Even though I am using 14 font and double spacing and have also slightly increased margin size. How is Abby writing a 20-page paper? I guess she started at a much more responsibly early date. But I have two 10-page papers, plus a 4-page one, so I might win, because I had to research 3 different topics. I guess this is why American professors demand word rather than page production. I don't think «word production» counts as idiomatic English. Will you all still speak to me if I come home having forgotten my native tongue (but not really developed fluency in any other one)?

Also, do you think this can be my job? Sitting around writing whatever I'm already thinking about? It seems like there are some people who get away with getting paid for that sort of thing, but they have generally earned some sort of legitimacy by doing something more useful in earlier life, like writing works of best-selling fiction or being an investigative journalist or famous sports figure. Those things all sound like too much work. Know what I don't want to be my job? Writting 10-page papers in Russian about church-state relations is 16th-century Russia. My lack of actual information is leading to a very ridiculous stretching of what I have into sentences as long as possible. The one I just wrote, for instance, translates to: «Metropolitan Peter at the beginning of the 14th century preparted for the transferrence of the metropolitan office from Vladimir to Moscow, and under Metropolitan Pheogtost [I know the name sounds impossible, but that's what the book said] in 1326 Moscow became the center of Russian Orthodox administrative affairs and of dogmatic normalization.» Except that it's probably all spelled wrong.

Part 7, in which it is December first

Wow, it's December. I must have been here for a long time. Also, the elections are tomorrow, which is sort of too bad, because it will mean that campaign season will be over; the fascist youths striding fresh-faced through the city with their Putin flags are a very cheerying element among the bleak snows. Okay, I guess Putin doesn't count as a fascist, and I guess that's not very funny, since the real fascists in St. Petersburg tend to do un-funny things like kill foreigners. But seriously, I do like all the colorful political campaigners all over the city, and they're all very friendly and cheerful and colorful. And they give you amusing newspapers to read. The real tragedy of the end of election season, is that the LDPR ads will be gone from radio and television. The LDPR is the communist party, but I don't know what it stands for, or why it's running and not the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation). The LDPR ads are very, very awesome. The chief candidate, whose name escapes me, just yells things, basically, in very short, almost grammerless sentences, in a gruff, frightening bark. «Power back to the people! Life was better! More money for bread! Vote LDPR! Number 7! 7! Lucky Number! 7 days in the week! Sunday! The future of your family! LDPR! LDPR! LDPR!» I guess it would be alarming except that the rest of the country has also noticed that he is crazy, and the party is currently poling at 16% or something. Surprisingly, Djoros Alfyodor (I am positive I didn't translate that right), this Nobel-Prize-winning physicist of whom I have only heard spoken with great admiration, as he builds all sorts of admirable schools for the nation's youth and whatnot, is also on the Communist ticket. I mean, he must be somewhat smart. And I have read the material distributed to me by the Communist campaigners, and a smart person would not read it and say, «Yeah! This makes total sense! Listing lots of unfulfilled economic goals from 1950 as if they were the actual economic situation of the country at that tiime, and then comparing them with the current economic reality, is a great way to make conclusions about the effectiveness of different economic policies! Also, I am totally convinced by this cartoon of a capitalist who looks like the guy in monopoly trying to drag that upstanding worker into a pit of repression, despite the fact that I have never seen a single Russian who looks like either of those figures!» I can only assume that Alfyodor is so apalled by the Putin administration that he threw in his lot with the only party he thought had a chance of beating them. I can't totally blame him; I know that Abby is now a Putin fan, but I am very creeped out by the omni-present United Russia raging bear. We will have to read Abby's 20-page paper about the party to find any real information about them, because I have not bothered to be informed; all I know is that I find it very suspitious that their campaign posters are all over what I would consider to be public and governmental space, such as above all the water fountains in the state university's library. And how much of their campaign centers around that message that «this is a democracy! It's very important that we all vote! Every voice is important!» when we know that Putin considers some voices to be so important that he has them killed or locked away in jail. Also, having almost all one's campaign posters be on the «go out and vote!» theme shows a sort of startling confidence that everyone who votes will vote for you. But whenever I start wishing that United Russia would somehow lose, the LDPR starts yelling like a crazy person, and I just give up on Russian politics as all the Russians seem to have done.

later
I'm being very productive right now, so I will not tell you the story of my afternoon, but only say before I forg: this evening Sasha, V.P.'s granddaughter, was sitting in the kitchen while Katya was frying some meat, as she asked «кто это?» when she wanted to know what kind of meat it is. This translates to «who is that?» It was so awesome. It makes sense, because in Russian everything living is 'who' and not 'what,' but when the 'who' was sitting in a frying pan it was very funny, but I think only to me. No one knew the answer, by the way, to her question. Who knows what we ate.

Part 8, in which it is still December first but I felt like I had to break it up; cabbages make an appearance

even later
In the middle of the afternoon today I was called away from my pained paper-writing for various cabbage-related activities in the kitchen; then V.P. decided that there was no way we could salt all the cabbage, because we didn't have enough buckets. We had already made Tatiana take one bag away, but now we decided to take another bag to V.P.'s sister, who lives in an old wooden house in the old wooden house district. The mesh bags that these cabbages are transported in are pretty useless, being made more of holes (not the ones meant to be in the mesh but larger-than-cabbage holes) that of material, so there were cabbages rolling all over the apartment building, and then I had to crouch on the curb holding the bag together and then several stray cabbages in my hands while V.P. fetched the new red car so she could make everyone mad by parking in the middle of the street while we loaded cabbages into it. Lots of people stared at me in the crouching-on-the-curb stage of the operation. Driving to Ludmilla's house was even more interesting. I don't think V.P. understands that you can look in your mirrors as you drive, or that backing up often requires looking behind you, and we would often have conversations such as «Susanna, can I turn around here?» «Can you turn around in the middle of an intersection? No.» «Can I turn left?» «No, there's a red light.» But we eventually got there all in one piece. I really liked Ludmilla's apartment in the wooden house; I think wooden houses are lower on the housing hierarchy than «modern» apartments, as they have no running water or indoor plumbing, but it was very comfortable and clean and classy-looking inside. I think I would take wooden floorboards over running water, but I guess it would be rather a lot of trouble in the winter to fetch the buckets of water from the street.

After the cabbage was delivered we went to a preschool Advent party. It was the first time I had been to a preschool Advent party. It was pretty awesome. Apparently there's some cheesy German fable about a priest or monk or something out in a remote village, and a snowstorm, and a little snake with lights all over its back who tells him that if little children do good deeds Christmas will be brighter... I was not paying that much attention to the story-telling phase of the event, as it was in that insufferable tone that made childrens' sermans such a humiliating experience. Anyway, then we sang solemn Advent songs (there's even a specific song about preschoolers waiting for Christmas, it seems) as the children one by one walked through an evergreen arch and into this big, pretty spiral on the floor made of evergreen boughs and such, a apple-with-a-candle-in-it in hand. They lit their candles in the center of the maze and placed them at various points along the evergreen «snake». It sort of took forever, and I was positive that at any moment a preschooler would kick over a candle and we would all go up in flame, but it really was all very pretty, and it was sweet how solemnly they processed, and watched their classmates. I was told that this was a holiday celebrated only in preschools.

Part 9, in which it is: Dec. 2 (my half-birthday) (Chelsea Powell's birthday) (the half-birthays of that kid Jeffery Huggins from KinderKare and of Miss Mary the Jamaican cook) (Election day in Russia)

I'm afraid the history professor is going to be insulted by this paper. I realized that I'm basically saying that the Russian Orthodox Church spent the first half of the 16th century buying the priviledge of owning huge tracts of land and entire villages and thousands of peasants and such at the cost of being shameless flattering snakes and giving up all real independence. Huh. Maybe the grammer will be so bad she won't notice.

Oh man. Katya and Nastya are loudly singing various pop songs in the other song, mostly awful, but they just started singing.... черный кот! If only they knew that they were joining the illustrious company of historical Chorniy Kot singers, and what a great honor it was to be singing the same song that was once sung on the McCoullough stage by none other than Tatiana Eduardovna Smorodenskaya, with accompanying dance. Oh, how I wish I could be at Middlebury International Karioke (sp?) again. No one will ever be as cool as Tatiana.

I have various questions about the cedar. Last year I decided that one of my goals in life is to be able to identify trees, and so far I have made no progress. And it is because of confusing things like the so-called cedar- who can keep up with these things? Irkutskians are always talking about how they're so cool because they have so many cedars, and cedars are useful for everything, and poor families can survive the winter on the cedar (burning the wood and eating the nuts), but I have yet to identify one. All the trees just look like pines to me. I have done limited research on the cedar, and have discovered: there is no cedar! Cedars are complete posers, as far as I can tell! I feel deceived. It seems that there are two kinds of cedars: ones who are actually pines, and ones who are actually cypress. And not all cypress are cypress: the bald cypress is actually a sequoia. What?! I assume that the 'cedars' here are of the pine variety, since they look exactly like pines, but who started calling all these trees the same thing? I am now looking at a picture from World Book Encyclopedia of a cypress swamp in Delaware, and those trees look nothing like the ones here. But now I'm even more confused, because people here talk about «pine» too. Are those different?

Part 10, last and I would say least
Dec. 3
Monday, so no class- but I was at the Mezhfak anyway, from a combination of a great need to escape the apartment and the need for further research for my remaining papers. Joseph was there, typing his History of Siberia paper; the highpoint of the day was when he silently pointed out to me that the girl at the computer next to him was in the process of buying a paper online. Even if I were to be dishonest enough to buy a paper, there is no way my teachers would ever believe I wrote a paper with even the most elemental grammatical cohesiveness.

discovery: The «soothing, cooling, refreshing» quality of Burt's Bees lip balm advertised on the container is less than enjoyable when accidently applied to one's eye. Avoid this. Actually it could sort of a good idea if you're falling asleep in class. Well, maybe not. You would be very awake, but possibly unable to see any visual materials- chalkboard, powerpoint, etc.- presented by the teacher, due to your hopefully-temporary blindness. Back to reading about the repression of Buryat Buddhism. Now I wish I were a student in a secret lamanist school of the 1950s. I bet students in secret schools pay a lot of attention and highly value their education. Not like me in my studies at the Mezhkak. Certainly not like the Russian students, well, anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe they should tell the little twirps in my history class that they are now forbidden from studying history, but anyone who really wants to [whisper] can join the new underground university being organized by the political opposition. Then the mp3 players might go away.
Did you know that Bandito-hambo-lami is a word, in Russian at least? It is. It means 'Bandito-hambo lamas.' I don't actually know what that means. Or what the plural of 'lama' is in English.

As much as a pain as these papers are, and as bad as the actual product is, I'm glad I have to do them. In the course of my rather-limited research I have read some actual academic articles, intended for an informed and interested audience, with arguable theses and well-organized arguments. Even though they are a lot of work to understand, they are much, much more fun to read than my History of Siberia for 7th Graders textbook, or the awful Let's Compare Cultural Stereotypes!-type thing we always read for speach practice. I actually feel like a college student, reading them, and I don't mean in an I'm-too-good-for-7th-grade-textbooks sense; I mean, this is the reason we're supposed to be interested in the academic process, I assume, because the pursuit of knowledge is challenging and polemical and inspires many intelligent people to produce the best work they can in its service. I think this is the real reason the kids in my Russian history class are totally uninterested in comparison to my classmates at Middlebury. The Russian students are given nothing to be interested in. It's not just the lack of real academic articles; they also never seem to read primary sources, as we do, as much as possible, at Middlebury. My appreciation of the liberal arts educational system is renewed.

So

2007-11-30T04:51:00.000-05:00

I am once again unable to answer my e-mail, so don't be mad at me, people who are e-mailing me. I am about to lamely use my blog for the purpose of answering some e-mails and such.
Mother- sure, call Thursday, I turn in 1 paper on Wednesday and 2 more on Thursday, so I will probably be less stressed out by then.
Laurel and Abby- yes, of course I meant Helsinki. Also Ivan says we can take the Ferry to Estonia or something and it's only an hour. Abby- Elizabeth says she will be on the train from Kazan to Irkutsk on the 10th, until I remembered wrong and she said the 9th, and she wonders if we would like to take the same train. I think Kazan is a night away from Moscow. Also Kazan sounds awesome. Laurel, put some socks on immediately.
If you are a person advising me to start my papers early, thanks, I'm starting them as early as possible, meaning right now, and it's not early enough, that's for sure. AGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGH!

I am writing more normal blog posts, mainly as procrastination from paper-writting, but I don't have a flashdrive, so too bad for you, reading public.

2007-11-27T20:20:00.000-05:00

I just watched Little Miss Sunshine, and it was so awesome. But I don’t think that you want to read about Little Miss Sunshine or my opinion of it in this blog that is supposed to be about Russia. The only part of the experience that was influenced by being in Russia is the fact that I watched it hiding in my room in the dark. Nastya got home from singing at the Chinese Restaurant right when it was starting, and I very much wanted to avoid questions about what I had done to the washing machine. Agh. I hope that the washing machine is less full of standing, indigo water than it was last time I looked. But I doubt it. I do a lot of ridiculous things to avoid awkward social encounters these days. I’m turning into Natasha- at least I can’t hide under my bed, as she has been know to do, as there’s no room under mine.

I think I have all sorts of interesting observations and stories relating to my recent life, but it’s 2 in the morning, which is way past my usual, oh, 10:00 bedtime. The adrenaline of the laundry experience has just about spent itself, so I am going to bed. Which is too bad for my reading public, because I don’t have time to do justice- actually that would be impossible regardless of time or energy- to my walk to the Musical Theater today, so I’ll just say I now have in my bookbag two oranges described to me as a gift from the Lord. And the phone number of a crazy babushka and the address of her crazy Prayer Center. And various moral doubts. Actually the moral doubts are not contained in my bookbag. To make a long story short, I can’t go have tea with the crazy woman, or go to the crazy church, in order to find a topic for my thesis, or out of curiosity, because it is simply too condescending and patronizing. Because I think they are crazy. And also I don’t really want to make up answers when asked when I found God, etc., nor do I feel like trying to formulate and explain why I don’t think those are very good questions. But I feel very bad, now that this woman gave me her oranges, and offered me money and help with any academic problems I may have, and convinced herself that my taking of the wrong road to the Musical Theater was the work of God. But why am I concerned that her belief that the plans of God can be interpreted be dashed? It sort of seems like a belief worth dashing. This is becoming unshort. It could be a lot unshorter though.

Went to the main university library yesterday and today. It is big and impressive and pretty and called the White House though it is yellow. But it used to be white. And you can’t call it the Yellow House because that means insane asylum. In the 1917 Revolution it was defended from someone or other by a small but fearless group of students of some kind; I don’t think it was the library then. The windows of the reading room look out very scenically on the Angara river, and it was especially pretty yesterday when big fluffy snowflakes were drifting by the bare birch trees and the cedars. Other than these factors, the building is sort of useless. It houses about 200 books, as far as I can tell; the others are in some other building a block away, and you have to go through numerous silly steps to get them. Ok you can get any other information about the belii dom from Natasha, I bet she’s writing about it. Good night.
Oh I forgot that the reason I was looking for the Musical Theater was to see Jesus Christ Superstar, and I would offer some comment, but that particular manifestation of total ridiculousness is available in the United States.

Theatrical Productions

2007-11-26T04:49:00.000-05:00

11/26

I saw a play of some kind today. I don’t know what it was called. Or who wrote it. Or who the actors were. I was not a very informed viewer. I also arrived 40 minutes or so late. It was what is known in some circles as ‘OOC.’
Valentina Petrovna wanted to go to this play with me last weekend. The plan was for her to go from work, and Katya and I to go from home. But then Katya decided not to go or something and thought I was with her mother... I don’t know, but I didn’t know where it was and didn’t know what was going on, so I didn’t go. V.P. and her granddaughter saw it, and it was much enjoyed apparently, and I was informed that I must see it the next weekend. So then yesterday I was supposed to go, with V.P.’s sister. But then about half an hour before it was supposed to start the sister called and said she couldn’t go, but she gave me directions to go myself. I did not particularly feel like attending a theatrical performance but assumed, correctly, that not going was not an option, but I didn’t really try that hard to find it, so I didn’t, but rather rode a marshrutka into town and then another one back. I mean, I did make some effort to find it, but it was a stop at which I had never gotten off, and the stops aren’t really labeled, and I can’t say the very long name of the stop so I couldn’t ask where it was, and it was dark outside and the windows of the marshrutka were very dirty. But I could have made more of an effort than I did, probably- but I was having an annoyed-with-Irkutsk-for-demanding-so-much-effort evening. As I returned home, not feeling very good and embarrassed at my incompetence, I much dreaded the explanation to anyone who might be in the apartment of my failure, but luckily only Nastya was home, and she prefers not to acknowledge my existence, so no explanation was necessary. Eventually V.P. did call the house and ask, but by then I was not so bothered by the whole thing, and on the phone I could just pretend not to understand anything she said. I was told I would have to go next Tuesday. But then this afternoon she came in at 5:15 or so, granddaughter Sasha in tow, and told me to get my coat on, as I was being taken to this play. When we got out to the street what should I discover but that V.P. was driving her new, tiny, red car, which I had forgotten she had bought. All I can say about the subsequent drive in this car is that I wish she had forgotten about its purchase too. And that I’m glad that Sasha was in the car- Sasha is a very practical, competent 10-year-old, and is good at convincing her grandmother that headlights should be used in the dark and that cars should be put in park before one exits them and so on. Apparently these two had spent the past few hours driving around in the new car, Sasha pretty much teaching V.P. to drive. Why on earth did the girl’s mother allow this?
After much adventure on snowy roads, we got to the “Electrical College,” where the play was being performed, and I was dragged in, and various people who requested things such as tickets were shouted down, and it was discovered that the play started at 5 rather than at 6, as was thought. Then I was yelled at to take off my coat faster, and had it dragged away, and was myself thrust upon some poor actress who I think sings in V.P.’s choir. V.P. and the granddaughter rushed out to further automotive adventure, and I was led to the door of the theater, repeatedly hissed at for making floorboards squeak, and told to watch hiding behind this curtain thing until there was a scene change. I did so, and then had to be the only person sitting in the front row, where I felt sort of silly. In any case, I saw much of this play.
I’m not entirely sure of what happened, not having seen the first 40 minutes, but the basic idea is that this sailor is married to this domineering, sophisticated, prima-donna-esque ballerina. And then I guess he has an affair with this other woman, Masha? When I came in the were drowning in, maybe Lake Baikal, maybe some other body of water entirely, and Masha told the guy that she was pregnant, and made him promise to leave his wife and marry her if they were rescued, and made him say he loved her, and he very reluctantly obliged. Then they are saved by dolphins, so I guess it wasn’t Baikal, though when I entered this play I was under the impression that it was about Baikal... not important. In the next scene they have 7 daughters, and the sailor dude is signing about the joys of family life to his fellow sailors. And then the 1st wife shows up and sinks the ship, and everyone is drowning, and then the first wife makes the sailor dude say that Masha is totally uncultured and low-class, and he was only really happy with her, and promise to go back to her in case they are rescued, and he reluctantly agrees, and even more reluctantly says he loves her. Then they are saved by a helicopter that just happens to be flying over. In the next scene the guy is back with the ballerina but receiving messages from his other family on the bottoms of the fish that are delivered to the house... then the wives start to have a duel... it was all completely ridiculous, and eventually the sailor leaves everyone and goes to sea, with both wives embracing him at his departure. And then the wives are each going for a midnight swim in the freezing sea when they ironically meet and somehow bond and cease to hate each other, and they swim about wearing fur coats over their bathing suits and singing “oy moroz moroz,” and wife 1 teaches all wife 2’s children ballet, and they are all one big happy family. Agh.
My favorite part of the play was how all the problems were solved by bathing in freezing water. This is a very Russian idea. I still can’t figure out how V.P. yells at me for not wearing tapochki in the heated apartment, but considers it very healthful to stand in the snow in the early morning and pour cold water all over herself. I also like it that Irkutsk has an Electrical College. It had lots of pictures of hydroelectric dams on the walls, and on the class schedules. I wish I had looked at the schedules, but I was engaged in a mad rush at the coat check ladies, along with the rest of the crowd.
I feel that my ride home was fairly emblematic of the Russian experience. I found the bus/marshrutka stop; that is, I found a shelter with a bench under it with large lighted letters over it that said the name of the stop (before you wonder why I had not seen this the day before, it was on the other side of the street from only side I could see out the marshrutka window). And there were a few other people standing there. So I stood there waiting for an appropriate (I really want to say подходящий) marshrutka or bus, and indeed such vehicles were travelling this route. But did they stop, despite being almost empty, and despite my attempts to flag them down? No, no they did not, they went barrelling right on by. After sort of a long time of getting really mad at public transportation drivers and of getting tired of standing around in the snow, I realized: I was going about this in entirely the wrong way. I was putting trust in my own reading of official designations, in the external system, in my individual ability to navigate the system. The fact that some government agency had put a bus stop here did not matter. The huge lighted sign and waiting area were irrelevent. What mattered was what everyone else was doing. I looked around. Half a block away, a large group of people were standing by the curb. I went and joined them. A bus stopped, I got on it, and I went home.
Nov. 26
Still out of tea, somehow. Got the instant coffee blues. «I said it's all done with mirrors, of which they had none, to blend the instant coffee blues into the morning sun.» Guy Clark. My vow to stop listening to English music is not going well. I did, however, very studiously read in Russian, about the Decembrists (not the pretentious American rock band but the pretentious Russian revolutionaries) and actually look up the words I didn't know and write them down, but I think this is just because I bought new notebooks. New notebooks demand concientiousness and the illusion that you will keep it up.

Written While Waiting for Sluggish Internet to Load E-mail

2007-11-23T23:51:00.001-05:00

Hope you all have a nice Thanksgiving, blogreaders. I thought about you, probably.

I had another cultural experience to check off the list on Thanksgiving day: the Russian medical system! It was sort of a process. Actually most of the process involved my sitting around being incompetent and Elisabeth, the RC, putting up with me, when she probably wanted to be cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I think she started calling clinics at 9:00, when they opened, and finally found a place that would take me that day around 10:00, and then we tramped about looking for the place- we went into the wrong side of the building first, which was a big deal apparently. ‘Twas an ear nose and throat doctor. We got put on the list, were told the doctor was out somewhere and that we should come back around 1:00 and he might be back. I went back to Elisabeth’s apartment with her and slept as she cooked Thanksgiving things. I tried to sleep without breathing on her bed, as I thought infecting another person with strep might not get me onto her list of things to be thankful for. Then we went back to the doctor’s office, which seemed like rather a long snowy trek to me but most likely wasn’t. I couldn’t really hear anything due to clogged ears, and also was acting sort of goofy, so in all I was not the best conversational partner. So, after a long walk of the only things I understood being “so, if they think you have dyptheria they’ll put you in the hospital in quarantine for 3 days” and “have you ever had mono?” we got back to the big, pretty red and white doctor’s office, and proceeded to wait for many hours, as every single person who had gone there that day had been told to come back at 1:00, and friends of the receptionist got in first. There was some amount of disorder because they had run out of the little blue plastic things that Russians love to make you put on over your shoes, so everyone was afraid to walk in without them, but we were all forgiven, until they found new ones (I think). I’m not sure what happened, but all of a sudden we all had to go pay 3 ruples for the blue slipper things. And then they yelled at us all to take our coats and put them in the “coat room,” which was actually some coat racks behind a piece of glass, but Russians are great believers in coat rooms. Especially the people who work in the computer labs in the Mezhfak. I’m not entirely sure why coats are considered to be so dangerous to public health and safety. Elisabeth and I read Pravda, and watched the boots of the other waiting people, and played hangman on the borders of Pravda, with words like Communism and Victory and Tovarish. Elisabeth was handicapped by my not really knowing how to spell. Eventually we got into the doctor, and as was the case most of the day, I didn’t really understood anything that was said, from a combination of not being able to hear and not really knowing Russian and not really being in the mood by that point to try that hard to understand to understand Russian. Why do doctors, as a rule, try so hard to be jovial and humorous? I would think that sick people, as a rule, are one of the groups least likely to be amused by teasing. Anyway, after poking various parts of my head for a while, he pronounced that I had strep. He seemed surprised that we’d heard of it. Then he prescribed an unnecessary-seeming number of medicines and we left. We then went to a weird pharmacy guarded by an armed security person, where the pharmacist gave me the large number of medicines and then some more of her own devising, such as these little shreds of metal that I’m supposed to mix in tea until it turns pink and then put in some salt and gargle with it. Uh-huh. I’ll be sticking to the alarming-looking yellow substance the doctor is already making me gargle with.

Then I went home on the marshrutka and was not in a very good mood, and therefore bought a Novosibersk icecream bar by the entrance to the apartment building. When I got to the apartment Katya acted like I was crazy to have gone to the doctor (“In America people never just have sore throats?”) and then yelled at me for eating ice cream. And then I went to bed, and listened to an afternoon of intense home repair and rearrangement. This later turned out to be because Nastya had bought her mother a new wardrobe to replace the old falling-apart one, and the girls were getting it into place, with the help of some neighbors or something, to surprise their mother when she came home. This was very sweet, and it’s a very pretty wardrobe.

So, since then I haven’t been doing much. I watched “The Mexican.” It would have been really dumb except that it was the first movie I’d seen in a while, and I watched it in English. I look for funny names in the Russian Old Testament. I recommend this as an activity, it’s very entertaining. If only these people spoke English, like the ancient Hebrews, they would know the right names for these people. Also, kings are always referred to as tsars.

Oh, I forgot to mention that late Thursday night Adrianne brought over leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner, which was very nice of her.

The Cafe Fiesta people made me buy food and beverages to some enormous value, 150 rubles or something, to get the internet password today. Especially annoying as I do not at all wish to eat, being sick and all. As soon as I can go back to the Mezhfak I’ll be back to my boycott.

Arg

2007-11-20T23:27:00.000-05:00

City of Irkutsk, I glare menacingly in your direction. I lost my flashdrive yesterday, 'lost' in this context meaning 'having it stolen by overdressed hussies in Web Ugol.' Also I still can't find green beans and I'm still sick and I didn't go to class today, though you may notice that I'm not sick enough not to go to the high-school gamers' internet cafe. Also every time I try to send an e-mail Explorer closes; I don't know whether they get sent or not. Also I have to try to make gravy tomorrow and I don't really know how. Also I'm supposed to give some horrible talk about my impressions of Russia tomorrow at some horrible conference. Also I have 3 term papers I'm supposed to be writing and I still don't understand Russian libraries. Going to look for beans again and then going home and going to bed and wishing my host family would find some activities outside the home with which to occupy themselves.

2007-11-20T04:31:00.001-05:00

Aghghghghg I am so tired. After spending pretty much the entire morning in the computer lab of the Mezhfak, in the afternoon I went downtown; V.P. had given me the number of some school she had called and told that I wanted to visit them, and they said I should come “after 2,” so until I figured it was close enough to 2 to call and ask again, I decided to walk around. I walked down Marat street (is that a cool name or what), which is my new favorite street in Irkutsk- it has lots of pretty wooden houses that are not falling down as so many are, and some pretty public buildings, as is generally very cheery looking in the snow. At about 1:30 I saw a sign for a foreign language school; I first walked into some sort of industrial packaging center, but a woman there very nicely showed me where I should have gone, and I eventually got to the language center and asked it they needed anyone to teach English. The woman at the desk looked hesitant; then some other woman in the office immediately gave me her card and took my number and said that her language school needed teachers. This apparently made the woman at the desk decide that they needed me too, and she called the “main campus,” and I was sent off there for a job interview. I thought this was rather exciting, as it was only the second job interview I’ve ever had, and the first was at Mary Johnson’s Children’s Center where they just hire anyone from Middlebury College who walks in the door, and the job interview is just being shown around a preschool. Anyway, my first task was to find this main campus, which involved my following a completely different church dome than I though I was and therefore being very surprised when I ended up not at Square Kirova but at the Church of the Holy Trinity by the History Department. But I did eventually find the building, which was cool and business-y and fancy, and I took the first reputable-looking elevator of my stay in Irkutsk up the 5th floor, to the offices of the ABC Language Center. There I tried to convince this guy named Alexander that my total lack of actual teaching experience was made up for by the fact that I worked in a preschool, where I routinely had to command the attention of people who would rather not have their attention commanded, and three-year-olds are clearly comparable to people who take evening language classes after a long day of work. So I’m being called as soon as Alan, the American working there now, leaves for St. Petersburg, which I think is in a few months. I also think that this is the same Alan that all the Middlebury students, and apparently half the city of Irkutsk, has met at one time or another on the street. Anyway, that was good. But then it was 2:30, and I had to call this mysterious school; I was under the impression that it was connected to an orphanage, but apparently this was a translation error on my part. In any case, I called this number, which if you are a foreigner living in Irkutsk you will understand is terrifying. For one thing I actually had no idea whose number I was calling, all I had was the name of the director of the school, and for another all Russian skills which I may have ever acquired totally dissolve upon picking up a telephone. So I had various stuttering conversations with various secretaries until I eventually convinced them to let me talk to the director, who was very nice, and then I set out for the school. I had already found this school once (which I though was very impressive really considering that my directions were “the second floor of a pink building on the corner of Marat, with no sign”), but apparently I was disoriented from my previous circuitous trek around the city, because I though it was at totally the wrong end of Marat. So my total number of treks of the whole of Marat street was at 4 by the time I finally got to the school, rather later than I said I would. I still didn’t really know where I was exactly, but after various other adventures in direction asking I found the director’s office. I sat down. “All right, I’m listening,” she said. And then I fortunately made no mention of orphans, and she quickly translated my vague comments into “I am ready to be exploited as slave labor,” and when some kids walked into the office to find costumes, among them was Sasha, V.P.’s granddaughter, and I understood where I was. This is a very fashionable school where they study English and German from the first grade, and have fancy invited lecturers, and whatnot, not in any way connected to orphanages. I was sent off to drink tea until the second-graders had their English class, at 4:00. I talked to a nice German teacher. I drank Earl Grey tea, which made me very happy. At 4:00 I went and sat at the back of a bunch of the most chaotic 2nd grade classroom I have ever seen, which isn’t saying much because the only one I really remember seeing was my own. I though I must have just forgotten what 2nd grade was like, but then I though about it more, and I remember 2nd grade fairly well. We never ran around the room kicking each other. I remember the atmosphere being one of, basically, sitting and listening to our teacher, who was very charismatic and entertaining, but did demand that we wrote things down that she wrote on the board, and have orderly discussions of the books we read, and so on. So, this particular class entirely involved the singing of songs (have you ever heard “Bingo” sung with an exaggerated English accent? It’s very entertaining.) and the yelling at Yaroslav and Vlad to sit down, please. I seem to have agreed to go back and meet with this teacher on Friday about helping in her classes. Then I went and talked to an 11th grade class. Their teacher asked me questions like “Do you study the present perfect tense in your schools?” and was rather triumphant when I said that Americans don’t actually study English grammar all that much. I was also asked what I though of the conduct of Paris Hilton and what I hated about Irkutsk. Then, for some reason, the 11th graders danced a minuet for me. The teacher had told me before the class that the students weren’t very enthusiastic about the English-speaking world, and preferred the culture of Germany. Little brats. Then I thought I was done, and I reported back to the director’s office. She told me to go to the 5th grade classroom now. So I got there, and this old teacher was standing in the midst of a group of students whose behavior had clearly not changed much from the 2nd grade, and she looked rather relieved to see me, and said, “are you going to teach this class now?” I said I would like to help, or watch, or whatever she wanted me to do, and she said, “Oh no, my class just ended,” and left. So apparently I was supposed to teach the class. I would not say it was one of the more successful English classes in history. When I ran out of ideas I would just make them dance the hokie pokie. Sasha, V.P.’s granddaughter was in the class, and she was very excited to know the teacher. She also turned out to be one of those students who are shocked by departure from classroom routine; every once in a while she would frown and show me the homework they had done (they had apparently transliterated the poem “whether the weather” into the phonetic alphabet. Who would ever want to do such a thing? Especially as they clearly had no idea what any of the words meant.), and once she called me over and said I should write the day of the week and the date on the board. As they seemed to be studying weather, I tried to make them stand up and give weather reports. But they were handicapped by not knowing a word of English, despite now having studied it 3 times a week for 5 years. So then we acted out weather events, which was more successful. Thunder was especially fun. The last 20 minutes of class we spend writing in our notebooks “Today is [weather word]. Yesterday was [weather word]. I was surprised how wonderfully long this took. It was apparently a very complicated assignment. Anyway, eventually the class ended, and I waited forever for a bus, and the bus was as usual heated to oven temperatures, and when I got home I wanted to sit down and never move again. But instead Katya decided that it was the one day of the year in which she would do her English homework, as Thursday she was actually going to go to class. So we spent a very long time working at the awful 1980s “the poor are their own fault” article, and it went worse and worse as it went, and by the time we finished 2 pages my head hurt so much I wanted to stab out my eyeballs, and I went to bed. This morning my throat hurts and I am not enthusiastic about the prospect of being sick. But we had blini this morning, so life has its compensations.

2007-11-20T04:30:00.000-05:00

I am on a roll here
Nov. 18

Vegetable update (see entry below): The first thing I did this morning is trip over the cabbage in the hallway. It’s still there. It wasn’t a dream. I tasted the vat of salted cabbage/carrot mix, and it is very, very salty. I used a carrot in the soup I made for lunch. Other than that, all is quiet on the vegetable front. I’m awaiting another round of vegetable-battle tonight with mixed excitement and dread.

Went to the detski dom (children’s home) again this morning. Now I want to adopt all the kids. Except that I’m still under the ideological influence of this film we saw in summer school with the underlying message that Russia should stop letting foreigners take its children, and if a foreign family adopts a Russian child then that child’s drug-addicted mother will stop having any reason to try to reform and just kill herself. Don’t remember what it was called. I talked to the teacher in the 5-6 year-old room today. She had a sort of disturbing “blood will out” approach to the future of her young charges. Still, she very proudly showed me the various ancient cloth-bound child-development books she consulted when charting how far behind all the kids were in their development, and also the notebook in which she made the week’s plans. As far as I could tell the day’s plan would be “Math. Drawing. Animals.” but it was plain she was very earnest and sincere about it all. She also related the personal histories of some of the kids; one pretty, smart little girl had a mother in jail for narcotics trafficking, and a grandmother too old to take care of her; one wild little boy had a mother who came to see him but who was often in psychiatric wards, and so on. I thought of what Maggie once said, that she tries not to know anything about the home lives of her students so that she doesn’t make excuses for them. They apparently get adopted fairly often, almost always by foreigners, who come into the room and play with the kids and then choose one. The idea of choosing a child is sort of astonishing; especially by the time they’re 5, and such clearly defined individual human beings. We played musical chairs, and duck-duck-goose, and that was about the end of their tolerance for organized activity, so we did a lot of throwing balls around the room and spinning hoola-hoops. When one would get too crazy it was amazing how effective it was to pick him up and look out the window with him; this almost always is amazingly effective at calming down children, as I found with many a crying Thunderdragon. It is also one of my favorite activities, looking out a window with a kid. The whole world looks different, and it’s so calm and companionable. So I heard about Irkutsk from several different kids today; we talked about the pretty little painted wood houses on the streets nearby, and who lived there; we talked about tramvais and trolleybuses and marshrutkas; we talked about the big, pretty old hospital on the hill far away; we talked about another children’s home, pink and boxy, a few blocks away, and so on. There were slight differences between looking out a window with these kids and with the Thunderdragons, of course: the Thunderdragons are also excited by police cars, but because they want to grow up to be policemen; these kids would go crazy when they saw a police car because they think of them as roving villains who shoot people. The Thunderdragons usually talked about their parents when they looked out the window, and how they related to that outside world, and what their parents were doing right now; Nadya, a sweet little girl with a blond buzz-cut, repeatedly cried out the window for her brother in another children’s home (Bratyik! Can you hear me! Brother! Answer!).

evening update:
We shredded all the remaining carrots. And once again had a dinner consisting entirely of carrots. Next time any of you have to make a meal for a vegetarian with gluten, nut, and dairy allergies, you might consider the option “shredded carrots with honey.” Otherwise I recommend making use of other food items. The non-substantialness of the meal, however, did allow for having tea (the meal rather than the mere drink) about 3 times today. Oh further interesting pieces of carrot news: 1) I somehow managed to cut my finger on a carrot. There was no knife in my hand at the time, so it really was just the vegetable. I have a new respect for the root. 2) When I get tired of Valentina Petrovna’s conversation consisting largely of unwanted personal advice, my new tactic is to start an English lesson; today it turned out that she is a big fan of the English “r,” as in the middle sound of “carrot.” So... after the peeling stage of the process, in which it was possible to actually talk to each other, ended, the shredding stage was entirely accompanied by a very charming pronunciation of the word “carrot” repeated several thousand times.

In non-carrot news, the director of Ironia Sudbi, the film some of you may know as “that one where the wrong guy gets on the plane on New Years,” turned 80 today or sometime this week or something, and there was a huge televised “jubilee,” with every famous old actor in Russia reciting poems and singing parodies of songs from his movies and generally being amusingly theatrical. I was quite impressed at Valentina Petrovna and Katya’s ability to name every person in the audience. I was even more impressed at the event; I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that, impossible though it may be to actually live in this country, they have a superior culture. The whole thing was just so classy. Actually their film industry may have come to the end of class; I think this even was a sort of grand, explosive finale of the Soviet film culture, where censorship and state control prevented the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But I also just made up this theory and know nothing about it really. My only other comment is that I really like when people actually shout “Bravo!” at public events, and my affection for Valentina Petrovna is greatly increased by the revelation last night at the poetry reading that she is a bravo-yeller.

Goin’ my Way on the Carrot Highway

2007-11-18T21:41:00.000-05:00

Nov. 17
Oh man, today was such an amazing day. I don’t even know where to start. After spending pretty much the past 2.5 months trying to make all of my activities last as long as possible, with nothing to do really, I spent today sprinting about in all directions, and the feeling of hurry was so unexpected and enjoyable. And then, aside from that, the insanity factor of the day just continued to rise as the day went on.

First for some foreshadowing: A few days ago, Valentina Petrovna came home with a little container with a cabbage and carrot salad, rather like coleslaw but with big chunks of cabbage. She remarked on how much she liked this salad, and said she was going to ask her friend for the recipe. Yesterday she told me that Tatiana was going to bring over some cabbage. Later she said she wanted to go to Listvianka this weekend, but she had to prepare the cabbage. I thought this was a strange reason to delay a trip to Baikal, boiling a cabbage. On to the day.

I woke up at 9:30, and I was supposed to be at the Central Market at 10:00 to go to the orphanage to... well, I actually had no idea what I would be doing, but it takes 20 minutes to get downtown, so I didn’t have much time to think about it. As I said, I have not been in a hurry for a while, so it was actually sort of thrilling to rush out the door without eating breakfast. I was especially pleased to run out past Valentina Petrovna’s sort of surprised eyes seeing as how she had designated yesterday as “day to lecture Susanna at great length about how she is squandering her youth and should be doing things other than reading and writing, interspersed with a recounting every inspirational fable on any subject she can remember having read.” Actually this lecture was sort of amazing and I would recount more of it but it has been driven out of my head by the events of the day. It involved the romantic potential of hydroelectric dams. Anyway, after an interesting ride on the trolleybus, which I hardly ever take, I got to the orphanage, along with Natasha and Ivan and this super-cheery Russian girl from the Irkutsk Rotary Club, which is I think is our link to this orphanage, and Mary, a girl from Mississippi. And then we played with various small children for an hour or two, and that also had a satisfactorily frantic pace. Russian orphanages seem like the sort of thing I should be describing at greater length in a blog about Russia, but I don’t really have that much interesting to relate; we were in two different rooms, one with 5 kids I think and the other 8 maybe. And I guess they were about 3 or 4 years old, and they were the same as all other kids, except maybe less shy and more attention-hungry. We’re going back tomorrow. Anyway, we with difficulty extracted ourselves from them when they had to go eat lunch, and then we ourselves went and ate lunch, at a place called MacFood’s, where I had an approximation of a cheeseburger. Then I went home, expecting a slower afternoon, perhaps including a search for the main university library, or going to the reading room of the library by our apartment. But such was not to be.

When I got home, I found Valentina Petrovna in the hallway sorting through... well, basically a hallway flooded with every single thing in the apartment, pulled out from its previous place and piled up around her to waist height. I just sort of gave an alarmed look and then went and took a shower. I read a few pages of homework. I got hungry, and went into the kitchen to eat whatever we call meals eaten at 3:00. Valentina Petrovna came in to drink coffee with me, and told me that Tatiana (her oldest daughter) was coming over to deliver to deliver some cabbage from her garden. I nodded. This sounded normal. Then, however, she decided that Tanya would think she was crazy if she came and found the apartment in its current state of reorganization, so I happily joined in a frantic campaign of throwing everything from the hallway into a closet and forcing it shut. Then Tatiana called that she was there, and we rushed downstairs in our slippers. Her whole family was in the car, as were more cabbages and carrots than I have ever seen in my life. It was like a clown car, more huge sacks of cabbage and carrots just coming out, and we all, for some reason, rushed about as fast as possible pulling these sacks out of the car and pulling them into the building (2 people per sack), and then into the elevator and upstairs and into the apartment; I’m not doing a very good job of describing the level of chaos here, with 6 people taking over the apartment building with their frantic vegetable moving, and Valentina Petrovna at every opportunity grabbing a grandchild and kissing her and everyone talking very loudly at once. As soon as all the vegetables were in the apartment, Tatiana and family rushed out as quickly as they had came, leaving us with... I’ll try to post a picture. Our house has been totally taken over by cabbages and carrots. So then Valentina Petrovna said “We only have a half hour before the poetry concert to clean carrots!” and we started a frantic carrot-peeling campaign. We huddled over this bucket of carrots on the kitchen floor, peeling away without really making a dent in the carrot supply, until it was decided that “Agh, we have not time, get ready to go to the Philharmonia!” so we did that, at top speed, and left the kitchen covered in carrot.

And then we were at the Pilharmonia. Ivan was also there. It was fun being there with V.P., as she is a member of the Irkutsk artsy/musical elite, apparently, so she knows everyone and we didn’t have to pay and then coat check people were very nice to us and so on. I had never been to the Pilharmonia building; it’s really the prettiest concert hall I’ve ever been in. It has just the right level of grandeur, it’s not all that big (I think it seats about 300); I don’t really know how to describe it, but it’s just a very pretty little room, light blue and white with dark a deep, dark blue curtain on the stage. It’s a particular kind of beauty that we don’t have in America, and I don’t really know why, but has to do with not trying too hard and state sponsorship of music. The concert itself was a poetry reading by a friend of Valentina Petrovna’s, with piano music by another friend of hers. Actually I think they were both friends of her late husband’s. The poet was in his sixties, probably, broad-shouldered and trim and healthy-looking and generally glowing with good-naturedness, and in the first half of the concert he read short poems about composers before, well, the pianist played a piece by that composer. Much more of the concert, exp. the first half, was the pianist, and this was really one of the most remarkable musical experiences of my experience. The pianist could not have been more unlike the poet; he looked like an old, lean, hungry wolf. Actually he physically resembled Ralph Stanley, but he played with a ferocity I have never seen; without sheet music, he glared into the piano and banged away on in, each note accompanied by a dramatic rise and crashing fall of his stiff old claws of hands. He leaned into the piano and away from in, moving his mouth to a silent but intense “bum-bum-bum” accompaniment. After a set of Beethoven and a set of Chopin and a set of some other person who I’ve never heard of but Vanya has, he played Gershwin, and it was sort of unsettling hearing Gershwin melodies sound like a predator skulking through the underbrush and then leaping out in a loud, fierce, flesh-rending attack. In the second half of the concert the poet talked more, and read more poems, and I almost understood what was said and stopped thinking of the poetry segments as an unwanted distraction from the amazingness of watching the wild old pianist. Gammie, you had a poem dedicated to you, as one was for “my grandmother and all of your grandmothers.” I think it involved these grandmothers’ being the saviors of Russia, which may not be a role in which you typically see yourself. I don’t know how good any of the poetry was really, as I didn’t understand enough of it, but it was all very pleasant, and he was able to make the Russian audience smile and act comfortable in public, so I was very impressed by him. Gregory, you now have a signed book by this guy, and you had better appreciate it, because acquiring it involved a certain amount of getting laughed at for my incomprehensibility in Russian by the poet, his wife, and a large number of other well-dressed and intimidating Russians. As for the music of the second half, the pianist was joined by a bass player, so the interestingness was diluted, but they did play “I could have danced all night” from My Fair Lady, which sort of made my night, especially hearing it not only played but savagely attacked with 52 white and 36 black keys. They also, for those of you who have seen this movie, played “potemlonie sontsye,” the song that ends “nyet..tu lyubvi.”

On the bus ride home, I remarked that I was hungry, and joked “good thing we have lots of carrots!” Apparently this was not actually a joke. When we got home, without changing clothes or anything, we got out this huge, ancient food processor and started shredding all the carrots we had peeled and dumping them into a big metal bucket. Then we piled our plates with shredded carrot and poured honey on it and ate it for dinner. It was good, I guess, but mainly just strange. While we were eating, V.P. said “Oh! We should have gone to the store today! We need salt to do the cabbages.” “Well,” I joked, “Everything Will Be Ok Hypermarket is open 24 hours!” This was apparently not a joke either. V.P. ate quickly and started in on the frantic carrot shredding again, and as soon as I was done washing dishes and started to leave the room for my camera, to photograph the growing mountain of shredded carrot, she said “Sonya! Salt!” And I went out to buy salt at 10 at night. There were a lot of people in the store at that time, actually, but they were all buying vodka. Anyway, I as I approached the apartment with my bag full of pounds of salt, I knew that big events were taking place within. The smell of cabbage was clear from the moment I left the elevator. And sure enough, the carrots had been shredded (only the ones we pealed, maybe 1/10 of the huge sack we still have in the hall), and we had moved on to cabbage. For the next two hours I cleaned and chopped cabbage and fed it into the food processor, while V.P. spread it out on a big counter and salted it and mixed it with carrot. As was the case most of the day, I have no idea what the hurry was, but we acted like we were going for the international cabbage-salting record. My hands are going to be sore for a while. We only stopped when the big vat we were dumping the final product in was too overflowing. Tomorrow, I’ve been promised, we will make a different kind of salted cabbage, and we will do something with carrots. And we will make various other dishes I’ve never heard of. In the words of Valentina Petrovna, “we will engage in housekeeping with cabbage!”

Ok, this may not seem like as exciting a day as the first paragraph promised. But it was wild and crazy at the time, let me tell you; nothing like a cabbage-salting in Siberia to get the adrenaline flowing.

Nov. 16 or something

2007-11-18T21:40:00.000-05:00

My resolution only to listen to Russian music from now on was overcome by my ongoing fascination with Katya’s cd collection. So now I am listening to Coolio, featuring 40 Thevz. Man, America is so amazing. I wish I had the lyrics to this song. “Now little Timmy got his diploma and little Jimmy got life, an’ Tamika ‘round the corner just took her first hit off the pipe; the other homies shot the other homie and took off with his money, an’ when the other homies heard about it, they thought that is was funny. But who’s the dummy?” The last cd I imported was this amazing one of bell peals of famous Russian monasteries and churches. It’s just an hour of a bunch of bells ringing... there’s no tune or anything. It is so cool.

“1,2,3, Now the young get olda’
Don’t try to knock the crow off my shoulda’
‘Cause the result may be a pecking to your death
With nothing but a carcass left of your former self.”
DJ the Crow

Among the random-electronic-sounds tracks are several such gems. When I get back to America, ask to listen to some of these songs. There are many more, including a truly amazing German one I’m listening to right now.

Nov. 18 update:
Found a cd with 7 hours of Alla Pugachova (aged diva). Now very busy. There is an especially excellent song about how she is going to be friends with Anna Karenina in the next life. Oh snap, now she’s singing in English, about how “Ve haf no time for var.”

So

2007-11-16T01:34:00.000-05:00

If you are a person who thinks that he or she should be getting an e-mail from me, sorry, you won't be, because Webmail does not wish to allow me to perform this action. Mama, got a very funny card from you today, loved the "pick-up" joke, amazing article about stabbing with knives and also about knife-selling. Also, pretend that I e-mailed you a birthday message to send Papa. Aged P., hope your entertaining went well and that you have turned on the heat. Aiko, got a very nice postcard from you, with Russian official stamps all over a Vermont spire; I enjoyed the Russian approval of New England church architecture very much. Laurel, I e-mailed you this morning. Abby you are a loon.

To remember that ridiculousness has a healthy existence outside of Russia...

2007-11-16T01:16:00.001-05:00

...I am currently listening to Joan Baez sing Guantanamera.

In Siberian history we are discussing the make-up of the population of pre-revolutionary Siberia. As time goes on, the population consisted more and more of exiles and prisoners. We were reminded that the first exile to Siberia was ... I’ll give you all time to think of an appropriately punishment-deserving state enemy in the 16th century...

the village bell of the town where tsarevich Dmitrii fell on a knife and died (or, if you believe the opera “Boris Gudenov, was hilled by Gudenov’s henchmen, or, if you believe lots of crazy people in Russia and Poland at the time, escaped to Poland the better to grow up to be a physically-unrecognizable person who wanted to hand over Russia to Poland). Our teacher didn’t seem to think it was as odd as we did that a bell was exiled.

In Baikal Studies today, after I gave the best report in recorded history on the extinction of large mammals, we discussed industrial projects of the Soviet Union in Siberia. The basic story is that they were very often more silly than exiling bells. They built things just to publish pictures of them and brag about them, so they were usually much larger than was at all useful, and they were often useless irregardless of size, and they liked to start projects without having enough money to finish them. In the north of the Irkutsk region, apparently, they started building this big road, but only had enough money for the bridges. So there are lots of very, very nice bridges out there with no accompanying road.

Ivan, Eddie, Joseph and I went to a museum today in the house of one of the Decembrists. It was pretty much the least informative museum I have ever visited. I still have no idea what the Decembrists did when they were in Irkutsk, other than make their relatives in Europe send them lots of things that are now displayed in this museum. Who has a grand piano shipped to Siberia? Or who, when moving there to a life of exile, embarking on a journey that I’m pretty sure still at that time took a year or something, brings a collection of china dolls? I guess those two examples both refer to the wives of the Decembrists rather than to the Decembrists themselves... I have even less idea what the Decembrists did with their time. I think we saw a desk where one wrote letters. And we saw the portrait of one’s mother, and were told that she wrote him lots of letters, and also lots of letters to the tzar, which eventually got his sentence commuted. That’s about all the information I gathered, except a re-confirmed dislike for Russian museum emplyees who follow you suspiciously around the museum and act annoyed when you don’t look at things fast enough and yell at you when you listen in on tours but don’t go turn on the lights and things in the next room so you can get away from the tour. At least Middlebury reimburses us for museum tickets.

We’re out of tea in the apartment, so we drank raspberry jam in hot water. It is actually very good. Don’t listen to Eddie.

I’ve gotten tired of speaking in broken, idiotic sentences that are often not only ungrammatical but incomprehensible. I’ve begun a high-intensity campaign to memorize song lyrics so I can sing along and for the moment be eloquent. In Russian, of course; I have no idea where all these Joan Baez in Spanish songs came from. It is certainly the first time I have heard them, and I hope it will be the last.

And some more relation of the events of the day

2007-11-16T01:14:00.000-05:00

The Russian song I am listening to, by the group DDT, is pointing out to me that “life is not sugar, and death is not to us as tea.” Well, I agree, I’m sure. What the heck does that mean? Still, this is my current favorite song, it’s very pretty. And I know very well that that last sentence is not grammatical, Microsoft Word grammar check, thank you very much, it was for stylistic effect. I do badly enough at Russian all day without being corrected in my native tongue.

Today in Baikal Studies Eddie gave a presentation that several times involved his use of air-quotes, to demonstrate that he was, well, quoting. After the report was over someone asked why air-quotes do not translate into Russian; Russians are generally very puzzled by the gesture. Pavel Alexandrovich explained that, basically, it is not only the use of air quotes that is unfamiliar to Russians but also the entire idea of crediting another person’s work. Citing sources is individualistic and promoting the idea of intellectual property, while plagiarism is part of the spirit of the collective. And it is good for the country if students cheat, too; sometimes, for instance, a boy who has to have his classmate write all his papers for him ends up being a good scholar, and what if he had failed his classes because the good students had selfishly refused to help him?

Well, this sanctioning of blatant plagiarism is certainly aiding me in the writing of my report on Megafauna extinctions of the late Ice Age, that’s all I have to say.

I tried to go running today, in the middle of the day when it was less cold. First this old woman who was walking home with her groceries just stopped and stared at me. Then after about 5 minutes this large group of Tajik construction workers yelled at me that I would freeze to death. By this time I had pretty much come to this conclusion independently, and was on my way home. Then, turning back onto the main road, I fell on the ice, to the great amusement of another group of construction workers. So now I just have scrapped knees and am living in the same state of constant calorie imbalance as ever. Or more so, since I brought home the jar of peanut butter that Joseph’s parents sent him and he didn’t want. I now have several peanut-butter-and-homemade-raspberry-jam sandwiches with every meal. Or peanut butter and honey- we now have the world’s largest jar of honey in the kitchen, in the row of Huge Jars with the pickled things, and there’s always a dish of it sitting on the table. As far as I can tell I’m the only one who eats it.

I hate computers

2007-11-16T01:06:00.000-05:00

But only because they hate me. I have two blog post sitting around being unsent. And rather a lot of other things I want to do. But it doesn't seem to be working out.

Disapproval

2007-11-13T20:24:00.000-05:00

I asked Katya, my host sister, what she’s been doing in English class. She said that for the entire semester, more than 2 months now, they’ve been reading the same article. She showed me the article. I read it. It was very long, and in a completely ridiculous, opaque style, and this horrible thing from the 1980s about how America has a problem with poor people because these poor people are insufficiently versed in traditional American values. Namely, they keep having illegitimate children and they refuse to work at McDonalds. And the fault for the moral failure of these poor people lies with whining intellectuals, hippies, feminists, and the black power movement. It was really sort of an amazing article, actually. Aside from the fact that I am fairly certain that a very small percentage of the graduating class of Frederick High School, let alone these poor Russians could read this article, who searches conservative political journals for texts for language classes? And incidentally, why would teaching school children about “the Pilgrims and Squanto” solve the problem of the widening economic gap? Wait a minute, I just remembered that Squanto escaped from an English slave ship... school children are supposed to learn about subversively bowing to the land-stealing exploits of their former capturers? And who is named Squanto, seriously.

Today in grammar class we read a sentence including a verb meaning “to laugh ironically once.” Our teacher did not appreciate our inability to come up with an English equivalent. She just sat there and repeated her request, waiting for us to come up with something. So we just talked among ourselves about various funny words for ‘laugh,’ such as ‘chortle.’ Natasha kept advocating the word “smirk” as a solution to our translation problem, and we tried to convince her that smirk is only for smiles and not for laughs, and this went on for a while... then at some point it turned out that Natasha never understood we were only talking about laughs and not smiles... the whole conversation was basically a good opportunity to demonstrate various smiles and laughs, which was good practice for the end of the class period, in which we all had to read these little monologues demonstrating correct use of the imperative, but with “good, Russian intonation, with gestures,” which turned out to mean “in theatrical style with hands flying everywhere.” I no longer blame Russians quite so much for smiling so little. It turns out that, when one is out of practice, it is difficult to use the necessary muscles- my own facial muscles were quite sore after just a few minutes of this unaccustomed smiling business.

I don’t think anything else interesting happened today. I showed Valentina Petrovna the singing Hallmark card Mama sent me, and she explained to me that it was completely unimpressive, that they also have singing cards in Russia. Including ones that sing “Hibby Birzvet tooyoo” or some equally interesting interpretation of that traditional American song. She’s hard to impress, Valentina Petrovna, I’ll give her that.

I’m posting the link to Joseph’s blog, and you should all click on it and scroll down until you find the post with a picture of the moon over the water, and read the post above that picture, because it is very funny, and well represents the way I often feel about Russian-American relations as well. And explains why I find myself doing things like defending the war in Iraq. ‘Cause we’ll do what we want, you commies, and we don’t need any advice from you.

Here, for instance, is a somewhat-accurate transcript of an exchange in grammar class today, representing the combativeness of all involved in discussion of the relative merits of America and everywhere else:

Irina Milyetavna: Susanna, when was the Statue of Liberty erected?
Me: Um, I don’t know, in some period in which the French were particularly happy with us.
I.M.: Hah! An American, and doesn’t know when the Statue of Liberty was built! When approximately?
I give some wildly inaccurate date and am further mocked. Eventually other students come up with the right date.
I.M. And what does the Statue of Liberty commemorate? Monuments and statues are always for some reason.
Students: It is for freedom.
Further discussion reveals that France gave America the statue upon the signing of some international agreement. Irina Milyetavna is satisfied that we did not erect the statue just for the silly idea of freedom, but as a pawn in the game of international politics.
I.M.: So, did you know that in China there is a statue bigger that your Statue of Liberty? [look of triumph]
Me: The Statue of Liberty is not important because it is big. It is important because it symbolizes freedom.
Natasha: I would rather have more freedom than a bigger statue.
Someone else: Is the Chinese statue the same thing except bigger?
I.M.: Well, no, of course not, it’s a statue of Buddha. It’s bigger than your statue.
Eddie: Well, I guess they won. We’ll all have to become Buddhists.
Me: Is it bigger than Cristo Rey in Brazil?
I.M.: No, the statue in Brazil is bigger. The one in Brazil is the tallest, and the Buddhist one is in second place. The Chinese built a statue that is bigger than yours.

Irina Milyetavna likes China because they are still pinko commies like her. She is always talking about how silly it was to try to become capitalists, and how everyone should just stick with what they used to think, as a general rule for the world. I feel that studying abroad is supposed to make me more accepting of other countries views of the world, and lead me to accept that every country has its own advantages, and whatnot. Actually it is making me rabidly nationalistic. I expect this problem to be solved when I get home and have to deal with the DMV (or does Maryland have an MVA? I forget) because I lost my drivers license on the number 7 bus.

I ate moose the other day

2007-11-12T05:21:00.000-05:00

with potatoes. Artur, the husband of Tatiana, Valentina Petrovna’s oldest daughter, shot it, and Tatiana did whatever one does to animals to turn them into food, and Valentina Petrovna cooked it with potatoes. Man, I am so cool.

Today Natasha and I were on the marshrutka to Cafe Fiesta, when a guy flagged down the van as it pulled out of the stop. The driver proceeded to, well, hit this person with the moving vehicle, which was sort of a surprise to all involved. Then the guy got into the marshrutka and the driver yelled at him for not being more careful, and that was the end of it.

Then we got to Cafe Fiesta, and waited in a very long line for pizza, and then in a very long line to ask for the internet password, only to be told that to get the internet password one must now order from the pastry line, the pizza line does not count. They make these sorts of rules up every once in a while, because they are Russians and like dumb rules and because they are too lazy to turn on the machine to print out the passwords. So we left and went to an internet cafe where I spend obscene amounts of money. I almost always use the labs at the university now, but I didn’t want to leave downtown until I knew whether the hiking club was meeting, in which case I would take a bus from the statue of Lenin. It wasn’t meeting.

In the evening we all went to dinner with Ivan’s father, who got in the day before. It was an odd oasis of English-speaking in our Irkutsk lives. And it was also very nice of Ivan’s father to take us out to dinner. We could, I think, have chosen our restaurant better; it was on the second floor of the building of Cafe Fiesta, and I think some of the unpleasantness and overpricing of Cafe Fiesta seeped upstairs. For instance, what kind of restaurant charges and entrance fee? Especially without telling you about it until you get the bill? On the ... well, I can’t decide whether this an upside or not... we saw many half-drunk business-class middle-aged Russians get up and dance with the supremely horrible pop music playing at ear-splitting volumes. And you have not seen bad dancing until you have seen this particular demongraphic.

Sept. 10, Saturday
Went to the bus station this morning to get a ticket to Listvianka, got one, then had almost an hour to wait; decided to go into the odd, bright pink church I always see when I go to the bus station. It was much prettier inside, and they were having a service, and there was a very pretty choir, four older women in sensible black shoes and shawls and the standard headscarf (I was wearing a winter scarf on my head, but I hardly got any strange looks). I am impressed by Orthodox choirs in general, because they sing for so dang long, almost the whole service straight. But this one was just particularly angelic-sounding. After the main service, when people dispersed to light various candles and kiss various icons, one of the priests went over to the left of the sanctuary for the usual prayers for the dead (I am almost certain that is what is going on, but I could be wrong) in front of the candles people lit for the purpose. The little choir went and stood behind him and sang most of the prayers. Sometimes the priest would have a part to chant though, and his voice was seriously damaged; it was gravelly and gruff except when a word would get stuck in the back of his throat until he finally pushed it out in a painful shriek. The circle of women behind him with their perfect harmonies of soaring music in encouraging response to his pained efforts, though, made it anything but unpleasant; one might think that the contrast would make his chants more ugly, but they seemed in harmony with him as well as with each other; they beautified rather than anything, and his voice beautified theirs as well.

Listvianka was very nice. Ivan and his father were there, and we ate omul and cedar nuts, and walked around a lot, looking at the huge ridiculous new mansions and the old cottages, and at half-frozen streams, and at boys riding bicycles on the ice, and at weekending Russians.

Now I should be preparing report for Baikal Studies about the causes of extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age. Apparently my fascination with woolly rhinoceros was noted. What was not noted, however, is that my fascination extends only to the concept of the existence of these creatures; this long article I’m supposed to be reading is utterly impossible. I don’t know what any of the words mean in English; they all refer to eras and events of geological history. I am also supposed to be writing an essay for speech practice about something lame like what it means to be an individual. I’m going to make dinner to avoid doing those things.

In the always-sensical words of everyone’s hero Ozark Henry:
Indian Summer
Opiate company
As bare as truth can be
without apologies
I feel the summer
The humming I inhere in
Indian Summer
has no apology

Well, I made dinner, and ate it (rice and butter and cheese and tomato; I have finally found a dish other than pasta and ketchup that I can make), and read another paragraph about large mammals of some climate zone some distance from the arctic. My best estimation of what it says:
It has been suggested that the extinction of mammals was in great degree a matter of the hand of man and connected to the Mesolithic revolution. The unique role of man as the most specialized super-consumer, forming itself on the basis of the active half-day predator, corresponds well with the conception of the out-stripping of the victim of the specialized predators. The disappearance of megafauna in the Golarctic landscape, having studied it’s [I think the antecedent is megafauna] enormous function in all types of grassy biomes on all continents, obviously, there should have resulted also global landscape perestroika. It was enabling by the result of the extinction of big figaphors’ (?! my new theory is “animals who eat figs”] eating resources and the ceasing of the allowing-them-to-influence-small-growing-mammals...
At this point I gave up. This sentence goes on for a long time and I don’t know where the subject and object are exactly. I’m going to find another course of dinner. Maybe another Mesolithic Revolution, whatever that is, will occur between now and the time I have to give this report and I will be saved. Other than that possibility, I don’t know what I’ll do. There are 30 more pages. I haven’t even finished 2, and I still don’t understand the premise. On to writing about being a unique snowflake, as Eddie recently described this assignment, or, as he much less logically said another time, a unique sunflower.

Sunday Nov. 11
Snow in the night, still at it. I decided to walk around in the snow and while I was at it see what time there were services in the ugly Catholic Church. So, after a pretty walk I got there at 10:00, and a notice on the door informed me that the Sunday morning service was at 11:00. So I walked around the apartment blocks and little ice cream stands and unused playgrounds all the other omni-present elements of Irkutsk outskirts for half an hour, and then it was just too cold and I went into the church. It was almost as odd inside as outside; as did the exterior, it displayed a notable fondness for severe angles with an absolute value as far as possible from 90. The backs of the chairs where the priests sat were trapezoidal, the whole front of the church jutted out at the congregation alarmingly, the pews tilted backward oddly, even the doorways, which were by necessity rectangular, were framed by jaunty slanted lines. There were 4 huge statues in the church, each maybe 20 feet high; off to the far left there was a dark metal, sort of impressionistic construction of the baptism of Jesus, with figures suspended confusingly in tongues of water and perhaps fire; on the near left was a light wooden pillar item with very bright gold figures of an elongated Joseph holding the infant Jesus, with a huge lily of the same gold halfway down the pillar; in the center of the complex multi-angled jutting alter area was a crucifix about which I remember little but I think it was wooden with a metal Christ in all the usual gore of the scene; and on the right was the oddest of them all, made of the same materials as the Joseph and Jesus: a big tree with the trunk a wavy construction of the light-colored wood and the leaves the oddly-bright gold, extending very far out into the church, with a cloaked, hooded, long-faced Mary standing lightly on one of the branches. But despite the bizarreness of the architecture and interior decorating, the general atmosphere was shockingly identical to that of an American suburban Catholic church, or at least the 7 or 8 that I’ve been in; I swear they imported the turtle-neck-sweatered, pious-faced little girls, who for some reason always find 100 reasons to be bustling in and out of the sanctuary and whispering to each other and reprimanding their brothers, but very seriously cross themselves every time they cross the alter, from northern Virginia. And they were just as talented at finding the least catchy or attractive music possible for their hymns, and about the same proportion of people actually sang them. In general, it was the same atmosphere of self-satisfied nice-family-ness that in my native climes find rather repellent, but here I was just amused and pleased at its familiarness. Plus, despite my cynicism and unfair scorn of what I’m sure is honest and good, the basic experience of being in a congregation was nice. Orthodox churches in Russia, like Catholic churches in Mexico, don’t feel like congregations at all; people can go to a different church every week and no one would think it odd or notice at all, as far as I can tell. And it had many of the elements common to the Western Christianity and not Eastern that are nice, such as pews and the passing of the peace and conduction of the service in the vulgate and everyone saying the Lord’s Prayer. It also had the attraction of having priests with really funny accents; I wish I knew where they were from. One attraction it was definitely lacking was heat; man, it was freezing in there. After the service I went to there was going to be a mass in Polish, as today is the “National Holiday of the Polish Diaspora.” How can you have a national holiday of a diaspora?

Back in the Grindstone

2007-11-08T04:22:00.000-05:00

[Um, I mean back to the grindstone, I realize several hours after typing this. I am sort of sad that I no longer know how to speak English.]
I am engaging in my new favorite procrastination activity, looking for pictures on my
computer to set as the "album covers" of all the songs in i-Tunes. This would be much
less challenging if I had the internet. I had, until this moment, been limited to my i-Photo
library, but I just discovered that I have clip-art; this is a very, very strange clip-art
library. And this is a boring blog post, but I'm too lazy to stop, so the force of inertia is
going to continue to propel it along its uninteresting path. So. There are the normal
unattractive drawings that look like someone drew them with Paint, but then there are
also random photographs. Like, in the "food" category, there are crude graphics of fruit
bowls and lemonade stands, and then there is a photograph of a man reading a newspaper
in a coffee shop. The title is "breakfast." I have just set as the image for the Ozark
Henry song "This is all I Have" a photograph of a row of rubber ducks fading into the
distance. These bizarre photos have come at a good time for Ozark; I had just run out of
Dali paintings. There is also now a picture of Aiko blowing out some very fateful
birthday candles to accompany the song "Jocelyn, it's Crazy we Ain't Sixteen Anymore."
And a ________ _________ from summer school to accompany ЗIntersexual.И

Natasha and I went to Baskin Robbins today, and Ivan and Eddie joined us after eating at
the Sailer Cafe. It was rather a disappointment, especially in relation to how long we
have been planning this excursion. They may have Western capitalistic businesses, but
they do not understand the aspect of capitalism in which businesses wish for their
customers to have a postive experience and therefore spend more money and return. I am
becoming a big fan of capitalism. Maybe the little man is forced out of business, but at
least he gets prompt service from salespeople and a wide variety of attractive of
consumer goods on the way down. I don't even want to discuss the disappointment of
this experience any further. I have more clip art to search through. Oo, I just found an
awesome one called ЗMen with Laptop.И Also, I just realized that the rubber ducks refer
to the expression Зget your ducks in a rowИ or something.

Agh. Valentina Petrovna just came in and took a picture of me Зstudying.И So I can
send it home. This is a response to my horrible failure to make everyone take lots of
pictures of me with my camera while I was in Mongolia. I was much rebuked for this.
ЗWho cares about these other people?! Will your mother want to see a picture of this
girl? No! She is totally unimportant!И Sorry, Natasha. I believe in your fundamental
importance. To be fair, I think this was a response to the picture of you looking like you
are dying after the horseback ride; lacking in the stately and majestic pictures that she has
explained to me are needed. I picure of Joseph making chololate-covered apples was
similarly censured. Now she is looking for the computer cord (well, making Katya look
for it) so I can put it on my computer immediately. Maybe I should look more studious
when she comes back.

Read enough about the history of the Chinese-Russian border in the 18th century not to
feel bad about returning to clip art. I wish I could think of a use for this amazing photo of
ЗbusinesspeopleИ. Or the one of Зdental tools.И I guess if I had the soundtrack of...
dang, what's the name of that musical with the man-eating plant and the sadistic dentist?
Ooo, just found a boxy drawing of a smocked figure plugging in an electric plug as big as
him or herself. It was too awesome not to use, so it is now adorning a Russian rock song
I don't understand, so for all I know it's about human-sized electrical outlets and the
geometrical humanoids who use them.

ЗMake me an angel that comes from Mongomery; make me a poster of an old rodeo. Just
give me one thing that I can hold onto; to believe in this livin' is just a hard way to go.И

Nov. 8
I made a sandwich today with two rather than one pieces of bread. It was a big deal.

We learned in History of Siberia today that the most effective way that Russians found to
subdue unruly Siberian tribes was to confiscate their children and send them to Moscow.
In Moscow, or St. Petersburg, the children were treated as nobles, given good educations,
and allowed to Зmake careersИ. The only thing they couldn't do was return to their
homeland. And then the tribes of their parents happily paid their taxes, so as the ensure
the safety of their children. And wars stopped, and peace was restored to the land. Our
teacher could not understand why we insisted on using verbs like ЗstealИ when we asked
questions about this policy. It's not stealing children, it's the policy of amanatstvo. And
it was only when the native tribes refused to recongnise Russian rule. And they weren't
being heald for ransom, they were being held for taxes and to end wars. Actually I'm not
sure why I'm so much more indignant over these practices of European Russians than I
am over the much more bloody wartime policies of these tribes themselves, often; many
of them were doing a pretty good job of killing each other off before the Russians ever
showed up, it sounds like. But non-Europeans are not allowed to be judged; their
seeming cruelties are cultural differences. I guess the charity of history and anthropology
is small compensation for totally loosing actual autonomy, or being decimated by desease
and firearms, and whatnot, though.

So. Apparently my plan to be able to transport this post to the university computer lab by flashdrive worked except that converting it to text only for the purpose makes it sort of difficult to read. Sorry.

Fillin’ N

2007-11-06T03:24:00.000-05:00

I don’t know if Mongolian children can spell chicken; there are no chickens in Mongolia, I don’t think. I assume that, as our History of Siberia textbook says of some Siberian livestock-breeding group, “domesticated birds are unknown to them, as are bees.” As for non-domesticated birds, we saw some very huge vultures, some sort of brown speckled hawk, lots of little dart-y birds that were never still long enough for me to really see them, and lots of a bird that is apparently magpie, though I have never known what a magpie is in English, so I don’t know whether this is so. If a magpie is a biggish black-and-white bird with a puffy-looking chest and really long tail, that’s what they are. I like them a lot.

I don’t remember what I said in my last two blogs. I planned on writing some sort of linear, narrative account of our trip to make up for their scatteredness, but then Natasha already did that, so just read Natasha’s blog. I wish I had it to look at right now, so I could see if there was anything deserving further comment, but I am sitting in a train at the Russian border rather than in a place with internet access, so it is not available. Let’s see what I can come up with in the way of interesting (well, only for me maybe) details.

We went to a museum in Ulan Baataar (apparently, judging by the sign on the train station, I have been begrudging the capital of Mongolia one if its rightful ‘a’s) where there was some sort of bronze-age petroglyph that looked most strikingly like one of the pages in a Richard Scarry book- that page with all the different kinds of cars, the banana car and the apple car and whatnot. Except the bronze-age people weren’t as advanced as Richard Scarry and they just had carts. But it was the same basic organizational pattern of page. Or large stone, as the case may be. It was a cool musuem, all in all. Made me sort of wonder, though, how out of all the civilizations to have occupied the Mongolian territory, only the Genghis-Khan crowd managed to take over most of the world. There were these amazing artifacts of several highly advanced civilizations before Genghis, high-quality tools, beautifully-decorated building materials, systems of writing, etc. And then we got to the Genghis Khan era part of the museum, and it was evident civilization had taken a few steps back; everything was suddenly rudely made and basic. Maybe ruthless military campaigns takes a certain unconcern for art and culture. I don’t know though.

Food in Mongolia had taste. This corresponded with a recent plunge in my appreciation of Russian food, so I was constantly delighted. Russian food is not bad, necessarily, it is just sort of without imagination. There are only two tastes: sweet and fat. These are both good tastes. But there are others, that these people refuse to consider. Tomato sauce, for instance, is beyond them. And salad dressings other than mayonnaise. And meat that is not fried or otherwise infused with fat. [Speaking of meat, they eat a lot of horse. It is surprisingly good. I can’t figure out why it’s illegal in the United States; maybe this is a result of my prolonged exposure to a less squeamish culture, because I don’t remember ever asking this question in my American life.] In Mongolia there is taste that does not rely on fat or sugar. The meat has taste, the milk is unpasteurized and therefore has a lot of taste, the bread is less heavy even, they drink tea other than Lipton’s Yellow Label, etc. The country even smells bold, a mix of the strong milk and some bitter cooking grease and the horse-dung fires burning in the metal ovens. Most of the country lives in gers, even in the city; this is sort of amazing to me, a whole country of people who live in tents, not just some colorful fringe population.

Hey, it looks like we’re finally moving. We have been sitting on the Mongolian-Russian border since 4:00 this morning. It is now 2:30 pm. About half the time on the Mongolian side of the border, half on the Russian side. They like uniforms here. The variety is impressive. I should note in all these hours on the border my bags were not inspected once. So I’m not entirely sure what we’ve been doing. There are these women who roam the corridors trying to get other passengers to help them smuggle goods over the border; we refuse, but most other compartments seem to agree. I have no idea why; the women don’t seem to be paying for this, just asking as a favor. Maybe there is some part of this system I don’t understand. For instance: how do they know people will give back the very nice coats they are transporting, after they cross the border with them? They certainly would have no legal redress.

We had a nice Hallowe’en celebration on the 3rd, as we were in a ger on the day most people celebrate that holiday. I am very proud of the tangerines I carved like pumpkins. Just the skin, of course. We also made lollipop-tissue ghosts. And bought lots of bad, cheap Asian chocolate, eaten by our fellow hostel guests. We’re not actually going anywhere in this train right now after all, by the way; we just go back and forth every once in a while, maybe joining up to new cars. But back to the hostel, there was an amazing number of people there spending many months just travelling around Asia. I don’t get it; does that much of the western world not have a job but have money to spend on constant travel? I’m not sure I would like that; staying in hostels is cheap and interesting, and I like trains, but they are activities that depend on their temporary nature to be enjoyable, as far as I am concerned.

I like Ulan Baataar a lot. It is quite unpretentious, and is totally lacking in the closed, guarded feel of Irkutsk. It seems to bear not grudge against foreigners. People try as hard as they can to find common languages. Stores wish to sell you things, people want to talk to you, Mexican and Korean and Italian and American restaurants cheerfully coexist with Mongolian ones. It is incredibly touristy but without being fake; it doesn’t seem to be trying to create an image of any kind, just to sell things that people want to buy. Lots of people wear traditional robes, but not to make cultural statements, or lure people into restaurants, or in a self-consciously historical way at all, just because those are the clothes that they wear. The main square is huge and open and has a huge monument to Genghis Khan. There is cheap internet everywhere. The city is just bustling and colorful and comfortable; I’m sure I would get tired of its unapologetic capitalism in a few days, but its contrast with Irkutsk put off such irritation for the entirety of my stay there.

The musician we saw our last night of our trip through the steppe was so cool. Throat-singing is awesome; I had heard it before on cd’s, but it’s a whole different experience when you see the human throat that these weird sounds are coming from. The instruments, though, I though were even cooler, and just the melodies of the songs. And the little, wrinkled singer exuded ancient, proud nobility, from his careful, courteous English and Russian to his devoted attention to his songs (mainly about horses, as I remember), to the beauty of the big flat harp he built himself, to his pointed hat. I’m so amazed that he works as an air-traffic controller.

I guess I should do my homework. We will get back to Irkutsk about an hour before our classes start, and I have a lot to do.

Note: We were on the border for almost 12 hours. It was ridiculous. At least the ridiculous officials had awesome hats.

Further note, regarding my swift transformation into a very bad student: I just wrote an essay for History of Siberia, the last sentence translating to: “Mammals are doubtlessly the true wealth of Siberia.” Agh.

Sad note: I left my tapochki at Golden Gobi. This made the train ride back considerably less pleasant.