I went to Listvianka, the nearest village on Baikal, today. It was very nice. I didn’t really do anything there, but then I never do anything here either, and it’s much more pleasant doing nothing while looking at a large lake and mountains than when looking at sophisticated urbanites stride about in their leather boots. And then, no one knows, when you’re not in a city, that you aren’t doing anything, and there aren’t any busy people around to make you feel guilty. So, I left Irkutsk on the marshrutka from the bus station, and even the marshrutka was superior to intra-city marshrutki, in that it wasn’t a route people take all the time so no one else knew what was going on either. Near Listvianka, about 5 of us realized that none of us had any idea when we were supposed to be getting off, so that was an amusing conversation. The driver was slightly rough-mannered but actually very helpful, so everyone ended up where they needed to be (“What? You want the Baikal Sanatorium? Of course you should get off here! What did you think? I’ll go show you where it is.” And the wealthy-looking middle-aged couple with leather Gucci bags with giraffes printed all over them hurried off.). Once I got to Listvianka I found, as I expected, that there wasn’t much to do there; you should not be imagining a cute little tourist town with shops and such, I don’t know that Russia has those, Listvianka is a few big hotels, some garish dachas of very rich Russians, and then the wooden cottages that have been there since before the village became a tourist destination. So I walked around the few streets and looked at wooden houses for a while, and got barked at by lots of dogs, and was amused when I picked out a group of people walking down the street as Americans in considerably less than a second (probably recently-retired women, no make-up, backpacks, no fur, a few with that interesting gray-hair-afro look), then found a way into the woods behind the houses and had fun climbing this large steep hill overlooking Baikal. It was challenging because of the pinecones everywhere- sort of like trying to run on one of those roller conveyor belts. I sat in the woods and hung out for a while, and then ran down the hill again and fell down a lot, then walked along the road where lots of Russian families were picnicking, complete with guitars and fur coats and tea cups. I headed back into town and bought an omul- I think I was supposed to haggle over the price, but I couldn’t bring myself to argue with $1.20 for a meal-sized fish. And I was busy being sort of taken aback by the fish-selling woman letting me taste the fish before I bought it. What would she have done with the fish had I decided I didn’t want it? Anyway, I tried to sit on the little beach and eat, but apparently that cost money, so my fish and I trekked back out of town and ate in the woods at a picnic table, which was prettier anyway and had a nice view of the lake, and I gave the omul head to a very patient stray dog. For some reason this particular omul seemed to be the most delicious fish ever in the world, and the dog seemed to agree. After that I went to the world’s tiniest grocery store, back where the dachas are and not where the hotels are, and bought a very good and very cheap ice cream bar, and then wandered around the woods for a few hours and read Paradise Lost and then went back on the marshrutka. I admit that I was rather counting down the hours to when the marshrutka would go back, and I like the idea of sitting around my myself in the woods looking at a lake slightly more than I really like doing it, but I would have been a lot more bored in Irkutsk. And it really was nice looking out at Baikal from the trees, though not nearly as the more remote places we visited on our group trip.
When I was dropped of in Irkutsk it was at the Central Market, and I looked around at the interesting fruit and things being sold for a while, and then I bought a kilogram of grapes, and then I started looking for a marshrutka home. For some reason, while it is incredibly easy to take a marshrutka to the central market, I have enormous trouble getting home from there, though I have now done it about 5 days a week for a month. Anyway, I got on a marshrutka that goes to Universitetski, where I live, and that was going in the same direction that other marshrutki go that are going to Universtitetski, but apparently this was not enough to ensure that this particular marshrutka was going in that direction. Then I figured, oh well, I have nothing else to do and I’ve never seen this part of town, and I can just take this marshrutka back the other direction. So we drove through some large segment of city filled with car shops and smoke stacks and inflatable clowns, but then instead of the result being that I turned around and went back, the result was that I got yelled at a lot by the driver and kicked out along a highway. Anyway, after a certain amount of trudging around morosely eating grapes (which by the way are incredibly good, almost black and very juicy and full of seeds that can be moodily spit out), and the taking of several more marshrutki and standing in long lines, I finally got home, fully appreciative of not having spent the day in Irkutsk. Curses upon you, marshrutka number 84.
Side note: I went to Natasha’s house for lunch yesterday, and I now believe her many statements about the stress connected with food. The meal had a definite tone of challenge, with eating of more kinds of food and the completion of more helpings praiseworthy accomplishments and the failure to do these things a source of shame. I was happy enough to enter into the spirit of competition, and it was great fun as a guest, but I can see how it would get sort of stressful after a few days. On the other hand, it was pretty much the best food ever. I had never had borscht, and I had rather thought of it as a dish to be put up with while in Russia but in general avoided, but apparently it’s extremely good. As are these meat pies of some kind that we had. At the moment I’m sort of jealous of people who are having food cooked for them, as my host mother’s oldest daughter is currently on vacation in Spain or something, so the mother is house/ small-children sitting. I am more and more aware that I am very bad at cooking. I tried to make scrambled eggs this morning, which I assumed was a very simple task, but something went rather wrong... I think they were too scrambled, or I put in too much cheese, or both. So, would someone like to explain to me how to, say, bake a potato? Or do anything else to a potato? Or rice or pasta, other than just boil it and eat it?
Sorry these posts are becoming so dull and overly narrative. I’m inordinately proud when I fill my time with something narratable.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Saturday, October 6, 2007
pictures
Some pictures of our trip are here:
http://middlebury.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022408&l=ab356&id=4403857
Because the picture site isn't working very well right now. This also means you're all spared lots of pictures of Baikal with no people in them, and similar boring things.
http://middlebury.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022408&l=ab356&id=4403857
Because the picture site isn't working very well right now. This also means you're all spared lots of pictures of Baikal with no people in them, and similar boring things.
Sunday Morning update
I went to the Holy Trinity Cathedral/ Church/ whatever it is that the word hram means exactly this morning. My strategy of randomly showing up without knowing what time services are didn’t work very well, but it was good because the library was empty so I could go talk to the babushkas working there for a long time. I really have absolutely no idea what they said. But they talked a lot. I think they gave me directions to every church in the city, all based on a system of public transportation codewords of which I am wholly ignorant. We also discussed many saints I had never heard of and the choirs of various churches. I looked at lots of photographs. The only things I fully understood was that the church was only re-opened 10 years ago and that the white walls that I like so much are soon to be covered in very expensive paint ordered from France, and the consultation to determine which saints and angels and things to paint where was very expensive. The expensive paint was sitting in oval-shaped cans in the library. I may go back at some point and get a membership to this library. They have a copy of “What Will the Batushka Advise?”
Mickey and Minnie Mouse walked through the Cafe Fiesta a few minutes ago. It was alarming. Also, a girl at another table is wearing knee-length leather boots from Adidas. It’s very depressing that even sporting goods stores here are really boutiques. A Donald Duck cartoon is playing on the big-screen TVs, and it combines interestingly with the Russian pop over the sound system.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse walked through the Cafe Fiesta a few minutes ago. It was alarming. Also, a girl at another table is wearing knee-length leather boots from Adidas. It’s very depressing that even sporting goods stores here are really boutiques. A Donald Duck cartoon is playing on the big-screen TVs, and it combines interestingly with the Russian pop over the sound system.
Another Saturday Night and I ain't got nobody
Despite the whininess of the title, I didn’t have such a bad Saturday. After a couple of days of extreme... I don’t know, sitting around being depressed about being in Irkutsk with no purpose in life and not doing anything... I was determined to go find good things to do despite being “tired of these dirty old sidewalks.” It was rather a stretch, but it worked out pretty well.
I ran in the morning, through these interesting woods I found yesterday, with trails leading by the creepiest cemeteries (not sure about the plural- probably all the same one- but in groups with considerable tree-age between them) known to man. I don’t know how to impart the creepiness of these grave plots; there’s nothing at all calm or stately about them. It’s partly being in the woods instead of on a sun-drenched hill, or wherever it is that we seek cemetery real estate on the East Coast, it’s partially the lack of orderly rows, it’s partly the replacement of the two-barred Orthodox cross on many of the gravestones with red Soviet stars, but it’s mainly, I think, the use of iron: most plots have falling down, unattractively-painted iron fences around them, for some reason, which gives the whole thing the look of a rusting carnival. And then many of the gravestones themselves are not stones, but iron pyramid-things, with photos at the top. In a few instances, there are normal-looking stone markers that have been stuck on iron posts, so as to allow them to fall over at the correct jaunty angle. Some of the fenced-off plots have little benches inside them, and most of them have mounds where the body is. When these woods are free of creepy graves, though, they are very nice, and the path interestingly leads to the hideous Catholic church that is very far away by the marshrutka on which I pass it twice a day. I’m very curious about the interior of this church, so I’ll have to make use of this path to visit it sometime. This is a seriously ugly church. It’s cement, and very huge, and rounded- I guess it’s in a general cut-off cone shape, one of the ones that yields one of those geometrical shapes I briefly knew the names of when I did a report of Hypatia in forth grade, but this shape is more suggested than fully developed by the architecture. At the top there is this odd suspended bishop-hat thing, also cement, and above that a big metal cross that looks like it’s being shot up there in a fire-works display, with the other metal bars connecting it to the roof.
Then I lifted weights and generally pretended to be busy in Alex’s Gym for an amazingly long amount of time. The skinny boys with funny shoes were there again, spinning their arms about in their odd calisthenics. One of them was wearing argyle socks today. A very hip young woman in expensive, matching exercise/ runway clothes was being given what was clearly her first training session by an equally hip Alex’s Gym employee. The poor trainee had a hard time with the treadmill of death.
I got back to the apartment slightly after noon, and found to my delight that Katya had made blini. Katya and Nastya left just as I was entering, leaving me alone with a very huge stack of flat pancake things, that I ate with apricot jam.
After blini-gorging and showering, I headed out to purchase a cell phone to replace the one I lost on our group trip. Unfortunately, however, the ATM near us was out of service, so I was unable to complete this mission. I did decide to investigate this jutting-out addition to our apartment building with pictures of Russians in traditional dress in the windows. I still don’t know what it is, actually, but it had a reading room, and I sat in it and read for Siberian History. Oh, I left out the part of the morning before my run where I actually did my homework for conversation class. Being motivated enough to do my homework is fairly unusual. Anyway, I’m still rather curious about where exactly I was. Some sort of cultural library? It had lots of rooms and hallways and newspapers and official-looking desks with official-looking people. And I was sort of embarrassed every time someone saw that I was reading a 7th grade history book. Especially considering I gave up trying very hard to understand it after about 2 pages; apparently the vocabulary used by seventh-graders to discuss Cossacks making perilous sea-voyages through ice-and-walrus rich waters and is not that with which I am most familiar. There are apparently a lot of ways to say “some icy land-formation you’ve never heard of,” “skirmish with fierce natives averse to having all their walrus hunted,” “obsolete term for tsarist functionary” and “bad thing to happen to your boat.”
Then I went downtown, and spent what seemed to me to be huge amounts of time pretending to be really interested in the two old churches I decided to visit. They’re the most oft-visited, I believe, being very old and very downtown and on all the PR material of the city. So there were lots of other tourists there, though I think all Russian. I didn’t really like either as much as I like the little Holy Trinity church near the history department, and over half the interiors were taken up by tables selling paper icons, and I didn’t really know what I was looking at anyway. I bought a Bible; I figure it’s a pretty good way to practice reading since, you know, I already know what happens and all.
After leaving the church district I found an ATM and then bought a cell phone, the cheapest possible and very annoying to use, it now turns out. If any of you are desirous of my new number for any reason it is: 8 914 955 6871. Unless you aren’t in Russia- then I think it’s +7 instead of 8 at the beginning. Oh before this I walked around a random grocery store for a while.
Soon after leaving the site of my cheapo phone purchase, a most amazing thing happened- I saw a bunch of folding tables set out on the sidewalk, and what should be on them but used books! I had never seen used books being sold in Russia, and I was nearly run over by a bus in enthusiasm crossing the street to examine them. The old guys selling the books were very nice, and they tried to speak English to me, and I tried to speak Russian to them, and no one really understood each other but I bought a lot of pretty, old books of poetry that I was assured everyone who speaks Russian has to read. And a book of Vampilov plays, because I often walk by a monument to him. I am never going to read these books, because all my reading energy is devoted to 7th grade history textbooks, but it’s nice to own them.
As I wished to know the phone numbers of the other Americans, my next stop was the Cafe Fiesta, where one is almost guaranteed to find one of us at all times, and sure enough there was Adriane, who had magically received 3 HOURS of internet time on her receipt, a new record. So I copied lots of numbers from her phone, and talked briefly to this Russian guy I had met one time before in the good ol’ Cafe Fiesta, then went to the internet cafe, as I had not brought my computer, which was a good thing because by this time I was carrying around 8 tons of books.
Found Ivan in the internet cafe, and he told me that we can’t go to Listvianka tomorrow because apparently our turning-in-travel-forms-every-time-we-go-somewhere requirement now extends even to when we aren’t spending the night outside of Irkutsk, and we have to turn in forms two days ahead of time or something. So I look travel forms for me and Ivan to Elizabeth’s apartment for Monday and began to dread the morrow.
Stood around in the cold and dark waiting for a marshrutka for a very long time, but it wasn’t cold enough to be painful, just enough to be invigorating, and I was concerned that I was going home too early anyway. Eventually, however, I gave up on the correct marshrutka ever coming and just got on one that was going to the correct region of the city, which meant I had to figure out where to get off, which I did rather badly. After I walked to where I should have gotten off, this babushka asked me where Universitetski was, and I was very proud to be able to direct her. I told her I was walking there right now, but then I felt sort of bad when she and her grandson decided to walk with me, as it was sort of far away and non-cheap people would have taken another marshrutka, but I was glad enough of their company anyway, though they didn’t talk to me; the grandmother spent the whole time trying to convince her small grandson that she knew where she was going the whole time. He was having none of it.
I don’t really understand how Cossacks ever had children. They seem to go on 10-year expeditions all the time. It seems like this would cause a demographic problem. But then, maybe their numbers were considerably supplemented by runaway peasants and things. I know if I had a choice between being a peasant and being a bold Cossack I would go for the bold Cossack. They have cool stripes on their pants and know no master.
If you live or study in the northeast United States, you should start looking out for opportunities to see performances of the Dartmouth Aires, the oldest and probably coolest Dartmouth a cappella group, now better than ever with the addition of the one and only John Thomas Mayfield Merrill.
And if you are a person who wishes to hear the stirring tale of a feral child’s encounter with the founder’s staff at Middlebury convocation, as written by Greg Fulchino and Adam Irish, you should either listen to the Middlebury College Radio Theater(re?) of Chills and Suspense, or get the podcast of that episode, or something, I gave a very fuzzy notion of time as regard the other side of the Atlantic. Anyway, Ronny Lieb stars as himself.
And if you are a person who knows Aiko Weverka, you should start making plans to bake her a cake. I think you have less than a week. And do not let her blow out the candles under smoke detectors, as piteously as she might beg, because Officer Sandy is impervious to bribes no matter how delicious the cake, and she is also very bad at turning off fire alarms.
Okay, I have to go to bed before anyone comes home and I have to have an awkward social interaction. It’s after midnight, so maybe no one will come home. They often don’t. Actually I was sort of disappointed no one was here to witness my late arrival home- I felt like I had spent lots of time in the dark and cold for nothing.
Man, this is long. But I haven’t written in a while.
I ran in the morning, through these interesting woods I found yesterday, with trails leading by the creepiest cemeteries (not sure about the plural- probably all the same one- but in groups with considerable tree-age between them) known to man. I don’t know how to impart the creepiness of these grave plots; there’s nothing at all calm or stately about them. It’s partly being in the woods instead of on a sun-drenched hill, or wherever it is that we seek cemetery real estate on the East Coast, it’s partially the lack of orderly rows, it’s partly the replacement of the two-barred Orthodox cross on many of the gravestones with red Soviet stars, but it’s mainly, I think, the use of iron: most plots have falling down, unattractively-painted iron fences around them, for some reason, which gives the whole thing the look of a rusting carnival. And then many of the gravestones themselves are not stones, but iron pyramid-things, with photos at the top. In a few instances, there are normal-looking stone markers that have been stuck on iron posts, so as to allow them to fall over at the correct jaunty angle. Some of the fenced-off plots have little benches inside them, and most of them have mounds where the body is. When these woods are free of creepy graves, though, they are very nice, and the path interestingly leads to the hideous Catholic church that is very far away by the marshrutka on which I pass it twice a day. I’m very curious about the interior of this church, so I’ll have to make use of this path to visit it sometime. This is a seriously ugly church. It’s cement, and very huge, and rounded- I guess it’s in a general cut-off cone shape, one of the ones that yields one of those geometrical shapes I briefly knew the names of when I did a report of Hypatia in forth grade, but this shape is more suggested than fully developed by the architecture. At the top there is this odd suspended bishop-hat thing, also cement, and above that a big metal cross that looks like it’s being shot up there in a fire-works display, with the other metal bars connecting it to the roof.
Then I lifted weights and generally pretended to be busy in Alex’s Gym for an amazingly long amount of time. The skinny boys with funny shoes were there again, spinning their arms about in their odd calisthenics. One of them was wearing argyle socks today. A very hip young woman in expensive, matching exercise/ runway clothes was being given what was clearly her first training session by an equally hip Alex’s Gym employee. The poor trainee had a hard time with the treadmill of death.
I got back to the apartment slightly after noon, and found to my delight that Katya had made blini. Katya and Nastya left just as I was entering, leaving me alone with a very huge stack of flat pancake things, that I ate with apricot jam.
After blini-gorging and showering, I headed out to purchase a cell phone to replace the one I lost on our group trip. Unfortunately, however, the ATM near us was out of service, so I was unable to complete this mission. I did decide to investigate this jutting-out addition to our apartment building with pictures of Russians in traditional dress in the windows. I still don’t know what it is, actually, but it had a reading room, and I sat in it and read for Siberian History. Oh, I left out the part of the morning before my run where I actually did my homework for conversation class. Being motivated enough to do my homework is fairly unusual. Anyway, I’m still rather curious about where exactly I was. Some sort of cultural library? It had lots of rooms and hallways and newspapers and official-looking desks with official-looking people. And I was sort of embarrassed every time someone saw that I was reading a 7th grade history book. Especially considering I gave up trying very hard to understand it after about 2 pages; apparently the vocabulary used by seventh-graders to discuss Cossacks making perilous sea-voyages through ice-and-walrus rich waters and is not that with which I am most familiar. There are apparently a lot of ways to say “some icy land-formation you’ve never heard of,” “skirmish with fierce natives averse to having all their walrus hunted,” “obsolete term for tsarist functionary” and “bad thing to happen to your boat.”
Then I went downtown, and spent what seemed to me to be huge amounts of time pretending to be really interested in the two old churches I decided to visit. They’re the most oft-visited, I believe, being very old and very downtown and on all the PR material of the city. So there were lots of other tourists there, though I think all Russian. I didn’t really like either as much as I like the little Holy Trinity church near the history department, and over half the interiors were taken up by tables selling paper icons, and I didn’t really know what I was looking at anyway. I bought a Bible; I figure it’s a pretty good way to practice reading since, you know, I already know what happens and all.
After leaving the church district I found an ATM and then bought a cell phone, the cheapest possible and very annoying to use, it now turns out. If any of you are desirous of my new number for any reason it is: 8 914 955 6871. Unless you aren’t in Russia- then I think it’s +7 instead of 8 at the beginning. Oh before this I walked around a random grocery store for a while.
Soon after leaving the site of my cheapo phone purchase, a most amazing thing happened- I saw a bunch of folding tables set out on the sidewalk, and what should be on them but used books! I had never seen used books being sold in Russia, and I was nearly run over by a bus in enthusiasm crossing the street to examine them. The old guys selling the books were very nice, and they tried to speak English to me, and I tried to speak Russian to them, and no one really understood each other but I bought a lot of pretty, old books of poetry that I was assured everyone who speaks Russian has to read. And a book of Vampilov plays, because I often walk by a monument to him. I am never going to read these books, because all my reading energy is devoted to 7th grade history textbooks, but it’s nice to own them.
As I wished to know the phone numbers of the other Americans, my next stop was the Cafe Fiesta, where one is almost guaranteed to find one of us at all times, and sure enough there was Adriane, who had magically received 3 HOURS of internet time on her receipt, a new record. So I copied lots of numbers from her phone, and talked briefly to this Russian guy I had met one time before in the good ol’ Cafe Fiesta, then went to the internet cafe, as I had not brought my computer, which was a good thing because by this time I was carrying around 8 tons of books.
Found Ivan in the internet cafe, and he told me that we can’t go to Listvianka tomorrow because apparently our turning-in-travel-forms-every-time-we-go-somewhere requirement now extends even to when we aren’t spending the night outside of Irkutsk, and we have to turn in forms two days ahead of time or something. So I look travel forms for me and Ivan to Elizabeth’s apartment for Monday and began to dread the morrow.
Stood around in the cold and dark waiting for a marshrutka for a very long time, but it wasn’t cold enough to be painful, just enough to be invigorating, and I was concerned that I was going home too early anyway. Eventually, however, I gave up on the correct marshrutka ever coming and just got on one that was going to the correct region of the city, which meant I had to figure out where to get off, which I did rather badly. After I walked to where I should have gotten off, this babushka asked me where Universitetski was, and I was very proud to be able to direct her. I told her I was walking there right now, but then I felt sort of bad when she and her grandson decided to walk with me, as it was sort of far away and non-cheap people would have taken another marshrutka, but I was glad enough of their company anyway, though they didn’t talk to me; the grandmother spent the whole time trying to convince her small grandson that she knew where she was going the whole time. He was having none of it.
I don’t really understand how Cossacks ever had children. They seem to go on 10-year expeditions all the time. It seems like this would cause a demographic problem. But then, maybe their numbers were considerably supplemented by runaway peasants and things. I know if I had a choice between being a peasant and being a bold Cossack I would go for the bold Cossack. They have cool stripes on their pants and know no master.
If you live or study in the northeast United States, you should start looking out for opportunities to see performances of the Dartmouth Aires, the oldest and probably coolest Dartmouth a cappella group, now better than ever with the addition of the one and only John Thomas Mayfield Merrill.
And if you are a person who wishes to hear the stirring tale of a feral child’s encounter with the founder’s staff at Middlebury convocation, as written by Greg Fulchino and Adam Irish, you should either listen to the Middlebury College Radio Theater(re?) of Chills and Suspense, or get the podcast of that episode, or something, I gave a very fuzzy notion of time as regard the other side of the Atlantic. Anyway, Ronny Lieb stars as himself.
And if you are a person who knows Aiko Weverka, you should start making plans to bake her a cake. I think you have less than a week. And do not let her blow out the candles under smoke detectors, as piteously as she might beg, because Officer Sandy is impervious to bribes no matter how delicious the cake, and she is also very bad at turning off fire alarms.
Okay, I have to go to bed before anyone comes home and I have to have an awkward social interaction. It’s after midnight, so maybe no one will come home. They often don’t. Actually I was sort of disappointed no one was here to witness my late arrival home- I felt like I had spent lots of time in the dark and cold for nothing.
Man, this is long. But I haven’t written in a while.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Big City Turn me Loose, Set me Free
So, that last entry was rather inadequate in describing the fact that I really, really liked not being in Irkutsk. I had sort of forgotten that in my normal life, not in Irkutsk, there is natural beauty and things to do other than spend money and get yelled at by marshrutka drivers and one can smile and laugh and such. And now I am not very enthusiastic about being back in the city. Also, Baikal, is really, really pretty. One day I'll post pictures. Sometimes it's very tranquil, and sometimes it looks like the Atlantic Ocean, almost, like Holden Beach, and I couldn't believe that the water wouldn't be salty until I scooped a handful of water off the top of a white-capped wave and drank it.
Snow today.
In Baikal Studies today we learned that at one point when they wanted to further populate Eastern Siberia, around Irkutsk actually, and couldn't get anyone to move out there fast enough, they rounded up all the old soldiers (well, ones who had completed their terms of service) and all the prostitutes and paired them off and marched them off to the church and then gave them farms and made them move there. For some reason I was the only person in the class who asked lots of questions about this. Seriously, this would be the best reality tv show ever. Old soldiers and prostitues who know nothing about farming are plopped down on Siberian farms? Excellent!
Snow today.
In Baikal Studies today we learned that at one point when they wanted to further populate Eastern Siberia, around Irkutsk actually, and couldn't get anyone to move out there fast enough, they rounded up all the old soldiers (well, ones who had completed their terms of service) and all the prostitutes and paired them off and marched them off to the church and then gave them farms and made them move there. For some reason I was the only person in the class who asked lots of questions about this. Seriously, this would be the best reality tv show ever. Old soldiers and prostitues who know nothing about farming are plopped down on Siberian farms? Excellent!
Things about trip
I have given up on ever writing a full account of our group trip, and it would mainly involve over-enthusiastic descriptions of trees and hills that would probably not be very interesting anyway, so just a few things that come to mind right now:
1) Russian trains are really pretty, and Irkutsk is pretty at night from a train window with a full moon over the Angara River, and the Irkutsk train station is also pretty. And the cups, glass in decorative metal holders, that they give you on the train are also pretty. I loved our little sleeping car, and turning out all the lights in it and sitting in the dark and looking out at the moon-lit world. Elizabeth (our coordinator) made us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which was very, very nice of her; I have no idea how she got the peanut butter.
2) We saw an Old Believer church, and the museum across the street that is the private collection of this one Old Believer dude, and both were very cool. The museum consists basically of stuff this old guy picked up around the village, from the trash, or when people got rid of stuff or found something interesting and didn’t know what to do with it, so the collection was amazingly varied. There was a beautiful 17th century iconostasis, and old hand-written books about the appropriate construction of churches, and lots of old farm implements, and old clothes and quilts, and a piece of petrified wood, and some mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones (!), and a bunch of old hinges, and this amazing huge old wooden hanging balance that very dramatically registered the weight of the plastic cigarette-lighter our long-bearded host put on one side. There was pre-revolutionary money, and old Chinese coins, and for some reason an American dollar.
3) Driving around the woods in the fall is very nice.
4) Singing along to Aqua in a van is very fun.
5) Old vans break down and get stuck in sand a lot. One should not attempt to use them as beach buggies.
6) We climbed a large mountain with snow on top, and it was very pretty. Then for some reason we ran down it.
7) We ate a lot of... cedar nuts, I guess? Like pine nuts but from cedar. We got them straight from the cedar cones, and cracked the shells with our teeth, and there was the delicious meat. Unlike the pine nuts Jack and I bought in the Sierra Gorda one time, these shells one could crack without breaking one’s teeth, and keeping a bunch in one’s pocket provided a good activity for when one was standing around on ferries or waiting for ferries or waiting for one’s van driver to come back from randomly pulling over and going swimming in Lake Baikal, which happened a lot.
8) Lots of other fun and interesting and memorable things happened.
Now I have a quiz for you all. It is called Полезьно для здоровы? or Useful for the Health? This is a phrase we heard a lot. So, these are yes or no questions- are these things good for you or not? You might wish, before taking this quiz, to research the life expectancy in Irkutsk. Ok, here goes:
1) On a cold day, running into a freezing cold lake.
2) Drinking beer, on any occasion.
3) Drinking homemade hard liquer offered to you by unknown persons.
4) Eating sausage consisting of 60% fat at every meal.
5) Drinking tea with large amounts of sugar and 6% milk at every meal
6) Covering all food in mayonaise or sour cream.
7) On a hike, drinking water.
8) When with large groups, having everyone drink from the same mugs, and occasionally all eat from the same spoon, passing the dish in question around in a circle.
9) On a hike, eating trail mix along the way.
10) When climbing a mountain, choosing as an eating location the snow-covered peak.
11) Eating large handfuls of raw cranberries.
12) Sitting on a rock.
13) Eating snow on a remote mountain.
14) Sitting on a folded-up pair of jeans, and a sweatshirt, with a rock under these.
15) Not having any shock-absorbers in one's van.
16) Running very quickly from freezing lakes to boiling hot springs, many times in succession.
I think there were more amuzing things than these, when we were on our trip, but now I don't remember them. Anyway, here are the answers:
1) Obviously healthy, especially if said lake is Baikal, which for some reason seems to be especially healthy
2) Especially healthy after swimming in Baikal, and when one is driving a van.
3) Alcohol is almost always medicinal, the higher the concentration the better. Homemade liquer is probably more natural, and therefore probably more medicinal.
4) Meat is natural and healthy.
5) Tea is also very healthy.
6) Dairy products are very healthy.
7) Very bad. Weighs down your body, slows you down. Does various other bad things that I don't understand. Carrying metal thermoses of tea with sugar in one's backpack, on the other hand, does not weigh one down.
8) Not distinctly polyesna dlya zdoroza, but there is no question of it being nipolezna either.
9) Bad. Still don't know why.
10) Good. Where else would you eat?
11) I guess it's true that this is healthy. But it still seems like an odd thing to do. Actually the cranberries we ate were pretty good, if still requiring a certain stoicism.
12) This is the worst thing you can possibly do, especially for women but for men too. People who do this will never bear children. Refer to the birth rate in Russia. Also to the answer to number 1. Our attempts to bring these things up to our guides were uncomprehensible to them. But, for serious, for all Russians, this is very, very bad.
13) Bad. It will make you urinate too quickly or something. I'm not sure why this is bad.
14) Refer to number 12. Bad. One's childbearing potential is still sucked through the clothing into the cold rock.
15) Apparently not a problem. We started referring to one of the vans as the marshrutka of death.
16) Despite the concern over the cold involved in number 12, same as answer as number 1.
1) Russian trains are really pretty, and Irkutsk is pretty at night from a train window with a full moon over the Angara River, and the Irkutsk train station is also pretty. And the cups, glass in decorative metal holders, that they give you on the train are also pretty. I loved our little sleeping car, and turning out all the lights in it and sitting in the dark and looking out at the moon-lit world. Elizabeth (our coordinator) made us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which was very, very nice of her; I have no idea how she got the peanut butter.
2) We saw an Old Believer church, and the museum across the street that is the private collection of this one Old Believer dude, and both were very cool. The museum consists basically of stuff this old guy picked up around the village, from the trash, or when people got rid of stuff or found something interesting and didn’t know what to do with it, so the collection was amazingly varied. There was a beautiful 17th century iconostasis, and old hand-written books about the appropriate construction of churches, and lots of old farm implements, and old clothes and quilts, and a piece of petrified wood, and some mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones (!), and a bunch of old hinges, and this amazing huge old wooden hanging balance that very dramatically registered the weight of the plastic cigarette-lighter our long-bearded host put on one side. There was pre-revolutionary money, and old Chinese coins, and for some reason an American dollar.
3) Driving around the woods in the fall is very nice.
4) Singing along to Aqua in a van is very fun.
5) Old vans break down and get stuck in sand a lot. One should not attempt to use them as beach buggies.
6) We climbed a large mountain with snow on top, and it was very pretty. Then for some reason we ran down it.
7) We ate a lot of... cedar nuts, I guess? Like pine nuts but from cedar. We got them straight from the cedar cones, and cracked the shells with our teeth, and there was the delicious meat. Unlike the pine nuts Jack and I bought in the Sierra Gorda one time, these shells one could crack without breaking one’s teeth, and keeping a bunch in one’s pocket provided a good activity for when one was standing around on ferries or waiting for ferries or waiting for one’s van driver to come back from randomly pulling over and going swimming in Lake Baikal, which happened a lot.
8) Lots of other fun and interesting and memorable things happened.
Now I have a quiz for you all. It is called Полезьно для здоровы? or Useful for the Health? This is a phrase we heard a lot. So, these are yes or no questions- are these things good for you or not? You might wish, before taking this quiz, to research the life expectancy in Irkutsk. Ok, here goes:
1) On a cold day, running into a freezing cold lake.
2) Drinking beer, on any occasion.
3) Drinking homemade hard liquer offered to you by unknown persons.
4) Eating sausage consisting of 60% fat at every meal.
5) Drinking tea with large amounts of sugar and 6% milk at every meal
6) Covering all food in mayonaise or sour cream.
7) On a hike, drinking water.
8) When with large groups, having everyone drink from the same mugs, and occasionally all eat from the same spoon, passing the dish in question around in a circle.
9) On a hike, eating trail mix along the way.
10) When climbing a mountain, choosing as an eating location the snow-covered peak.
11) Eating large handfuls of raw cranberries.
12) Sitting on a rock.
13) Eating snow on a remote mountain.
14) Sitting on a folded-up pair of jeans, and a sweatshirt, with a rock under these.
15) Not having any shock-absorbers in one's van.
16) Running very quickly from freezing lakes to boiling hot springs, many times in succession.
I think there were more amuzing things than these, when we were on our trip, but now I don't remember them. Anyway, here are the answers:
1) Obviously healthy, especially if said lake is Baikal, which for some reason seems to be especially healthy
2) Especially healthy after swimming in Baikal, and when one is driving a van.
3) Alcohol is almost always medicinal, the higher the concentration the better. Homemade liquer is probably more natural, and therefore probably more medicinal.
4) Meat is natural and healthy.
5) Tea is also very healthy.
6) Dairy products are very healthy.
7) Very bad. Weighs down your body, slows you down. Does various other bad things that I don't understand. Carrying metal thermoses of tea with sugar in one's backpack, on the other hand, does not weigh one down.
8) Not distinctly polyesna dlya zdoroza, but there is no question of it being nipolezna either.
9) Bad. Still don't know why.
10) Good. Where else would you eat?
11) I guess it's true that this is healthy. But it still seems like an odd thing to do. Actually the cranberries we ate were pretty good, if still requiring a certain stoicism.
12) This is the worst thing you can possibly do, especially for women but for men too. People who do this will never bear children. Refer to the birth rate in Russia. Also to the answer to number 1. Our attempts to bring these things up to our guides were uncomprehensible to them. But, for serious, for all Russians, this is very, very bad.
13) Bad. It will make you urinate too quickly or something. I'm not sure why this is bad.
14) Refer to number 12. Bad. One's childbearing potential is still sucked through the clothing into the cold rock.
15) Apparently not a problem. We started referring to one of the vans as the marshrutka of death.
16) Despite the concern over the cold involved in number 12, same as answer as number 1.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Scattered notes accompanying my packing for our group trip
I have returned to good old apartment 56 (I think that’s our number) somewhat earlier than is my wont today as 1) we’re to meet at the train/bus station at 8:00 this evening and I don’t want to go downtown and back in the afternoon, only to return in the evening, 2) there’s not much to do on this side of the river, and I already went to the Всё Будет ОК Гипермаркет (Everything will be OK hypermarket) with Natasha, Ivan, and Joseph, where I bought deturgent (in our last attempt Natasha and I actually bought fabric softener, so this time we carefully matched the box with the one Natasha's hostmother uses) and a chocolate bar for the train journey and an ice-cream bar for lunch; and then walked around numerous very small stores looking in vain for a hat and gloves to purchase; and put money on my cellphone in one of the between-kiosk-and-stores along where the marshrutkas stop; and bought a pair of running pants, as it is officially too cold to run in shorts; and I tried to go to the hole-in-the-wall small-boy-infested internet cafe, but all the computers were taken by small boys, 3) since I'm leaving this evening I just don't feel as guilty as I usually do about coming home to sit around, and 4) I want to be sure to be the first one home around the dinner hour, so I can make dinner myself, a major event in life if one has pretty much absolutely nothing else useful to do in life. I was going to make dinner yesterday, but then I was downtown at the History Department until 4:00, and went to the Cafe Fiesta while in was in the area (actually fairly far away, but not technically requiring paying for a marshrutka), so didn't get home in time to be the first one here, as I usually am. I am planning to make potatoe soup, which seemed like a pretty good idea yesterday when there was a little bag in the kitchen with 10 potatoes in it, and seems like an even better idea today, when all of a sudden there are two of the BIGGEST BAGS OF POTATO EVER sitting in our hallway. I guess the special potato delivery man brought them? I have a hard time imagining anyone carrying them, so maybe there is a special potato cart. I like how I am spelling potatoe differently every time. So, anyway, these bags are about as big as I am. This is important, because I no longer have to fear using the last of the potatoes, because you know what happens then: the last potato leaps out of the oven and runs out the door, singing some sort of rhyme about the «magic sack» one can procure at his capture, and you are forced to pursue him, weeping, crying «Potato, Potatoe, come back, come back, or my mother will beat me, alas, alack!» And it is an open question whether the magic, bottomless potato sack that you do indeed procure at his capture makes up for the psychological trauma of the afternoon. I hope I can buy a hat and gloves in Ulan Ude, before our mountain climbing, or I will be very cold. I do have a scarf, I think. Off to start some packing.
I just looked through the Lonely Planet guide for the Baikal region. I have a lot of 3-day weekends to spend. I feel like I should be going off and seeing things, but I'm not sure what I should do when I get there. Also, I have not seen anything in Irktusk that I am supposed to. I guess I should get started... but apparently this guidebook's Siberia section hasn't been updated for many years, so I don't know what's still true.
Packed, I think. Got my tapochki. And Chekhov, in my continued campaign to like him. And long underwear but no hat or gloves. And lots of Siberian history to read and not really understand, and the course description of the mainstream Russian History class to attempt to read without freaking out about how much work I have to do and how I have no idea what is said in class. And... I forgot my scarf. Ok, got that. I just got concerned that the sweater I packed will not fit under my jacket- I'll wear another one to the bus station. And I have a lot of packyeti, as they are always needed.
Note to all fans of Caps for Sale: a girl in Baikal Studies class asked today if there were any monkeys in Russia. There are not. It seems like something you shouldn't ask: if you never ask, you can just go on thinking that maybe, somewhere, you will come across a monkey, you just haven't happened to hear about the Great Siberian Ice-chimp yet. Baikal Studies class continues to be amazing. The fact that I understand about 8% of it, both because of it being in Russian and because it's usually about ancient metal-working or prehistoric geology, or geography, or biology, or some other subject that I don't understand in English, makes that information a highly-prized store of wonderfully disconnected statements. They don't seem quite so important in English, and out of the context of the long periods of complete incomprehensibility that preceeded them... my notes, actually, show a remarkable, rather admirable, I think, delight with the mere existence of things. What, by the way, does 'existentialism' mean, exactly? I think it's one of the many words that I have pretended to understand for many years now without actually having any idea. Living in complete language-confusion in Russian has given rise to great irritation when I can't think of the English word I want, or realize I don't know what English words mean, or in general that English is not a perfect haven of absolute linguistic confort. Anyway, back to my notes – they're mainly things like:
«Exoskeletons!!!!»
«Lots of volcanoes!!!!»
«Mammoths, retreating to northern island, turning into mammoth graveyard, running toward the south, nowhere to go now; were they hunted, or just eaten as soon as they died?»
«The Transgression of the Sea!!!»
«The northern sea, in Jurassic Period, had long tongue.»
Actually the mammoth facscination is fairly ongoing. I am almost as entrigued by mammoth as by wooly rhinosauroses. I think it's part of my odd new enthusiasm over things that are Big and Dramatic and just Happened, if that makes sense. Perhaps this is what it's like to be 3 years old. I don't understand the intricacies of anything, I haven't really formulated any connection between historical events or cultural realities and and any grand narrative significant to me in any way (I don't know if that's true for 3-year-olds or not), and as far as I can tell most of what I see has no purpose or explanation: so, I'm just impressed by the Large. And the idea of hundreds of people racing through dense pine forests with stone weapons after huge hairy beasts, fighting to survive the very ice that is necessary for the life of their prey and is shrinking every minute in a huge, global weather shift that takes no account of human or animal life, seems like the coolest thing ever. And the mammoth bones piling up at the very north, when they had all, the mammoths and the people, run as far as they could, with the people maybe just waiting across the channel from the island for the too-dense mammoths to starve to death, is endlessly fascinating in its awfulness.
Running out to see if the small boys are still in control of the internet cafe.
Returned. Not a place to be had. My correspondents will have to just hold their horses, or reindeer, or moose, or whatever it is that they use to pull their buggies or sleighs, until Wednesday, when I return, at 7 in the a.m. Tuesday evening, for you east coast types, late afternoon for those of you living further into our nation's heartland. I walked past the potatoes again as I came back. They aren't really as big as me (as I) (as I am); that was apparently wishful thinking stemming from my love of the large. They are half as big as I am, which means that, if you put them together, my initial estimate was correct. Other events of my return for the internet cave: trying to kill the flies in the elevator with my huge brass key that makes me look like a robber, trying to open the big iron door opening to our and our neighbors' doors, with said key, quickly enough that the neighbor did not once again come out and annoyedly open it for me.
What reflections can I offer as I wait around for 6:00, a reasonable hour for dinner preparation? So, the university. It is pretty much like high school, or like a movie about high school that you're glad isn't really quite true. Since students only study in one department (scattered about in completely different parts of the city), they're all in the same building all day, and classes are usually all in a row and always with the same students as in all your other classes, and there are bells between periods, and in this between-periods interval the hallways are too crowded to squeeze through. The students sort or have the same air as high-school students too, a sort of flouncing confidence that sizes up everyone's outfit as they pass by, and they gather in the same gossipy bunches, and the atmosphere of the bathroom is the same, with the girls all fixing their hair and reapplying make-up. Unlike high school, the toilets have no seats and the stalls have no toilet paper, and, on the second floor, the stall doors are only waist-height. Judging by my one mainstream class, which perhaps isn't fair because it's for freshman and for all I know they improve with age, the students are about as attentive and respectful in class as in high school too, with the difference being that they are never disciplined. They play with their cellphones, they pass notes, they sleep, they whisper to each other – it's sort of amazing. In our last class in the history department, my slight offense at this behavior was entirely overshadowed by my excitement when Eddie and I, who were at the same table-thing, got a note passed to us. It said, in English, «We have to write an essay about gender discrimination. Do you know anything about it?» We replied that we did, in fact know something, and in our opinion it was, in general, bad; maybe we were supposed to offer to write the essay for them? We have heard that Russian students take a rather collective approach to the grading process.
Would it make sense to describe my enthusiasm in Baikal studies class by saying that I have a new delight in the 'ontology' of things? For some reason this word was before me constantly in the past academic year, like 'hegemony' the year before, and I always found it a little odd that such a word existed, let alone that so great a use was made of it in everything I read. But maybe this is an appropriate time for it? I don't know... I don't really care about the nature of being, which I think may be the actual definition of the word, but whenever I read it it seemed to just mean something like 'existing in state its name suggests that it would,' or 'by the nature of its existence as itself.' Hmm, I just searched my hard drive for instances of the word 'ontological' and I have apparently used it myself, in the sentence «While every icon is ontologically an invitation to transcend the visible world for the invisible, “a road we must travel on in order to transcend it” (Evdikimov 235), Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity uniquely embodies this invitation by the appeal of the summons at the icon’s narrative level and by its success in convincing viewers of the existence of its Hyper-icon.” I wonder what the heck that means. Oh, man, I just did a search for ‘hegemon,’ with depression results. At least, I am glad to find, I have never (at least in a document saved on this computer) used the word ‘suasion.’ That may be my least favorite made-up-for-some-academic-article-and-then-copied-by-the-entire-academic-world-but-perfectly-useless word.
Edit: I have returned, and the trip was most excellent, but I don’t have time to recount it right now. I’ll just say, so as not to leave you all in suspense, that when I went back to the internet place after dinner, with 40 minutes until I had to leave for the train station, the small boys had been replaced by ‘nagers. It was sort of unsettling, like the boys had aged 10 years in the two hours I had been away. But anyway, I still couldn’t use a computer, and I was annoyed. On the other hand, the expedition was most fruitful, as the Central Asians selling jars of things they had pickled had been replaced, at some magical evening hour, by Central Asians selling hats and gloves. It was amazing. I bought some.
I just looked through the Lonely Planet guide for the Baikal region. I have a lot of 3-day weekends to spend. I feel like I should be going off and seeing things, but I'm not sure what I should do when I get there. Also, I have not seen anything in Irktusk that I am supposed to. I guess I should get started... but apparently this guidebook's Siberia section hasn't been updated for many years, so I don't know what's still true.
Packed, I think. Got my tapochki. And Chekhov, in my continued campaign to like him. And long underwear but no hat or gloves. And lots of Siberian history to read and not really understand, and the course description of the mainstream Russian History class to attempt to read without freaking out about how much work I have to do and how I have no idea what is said in class. And... I forgot my scarf. Ok, got that. I just got concerned that the sweater I packed will not fit under my jacket- I'll wear another one to the bus station. And I have a lot of packyeti, as they are always needed.
Note to all fans of Caps for Sale: a girl in Baikal Studies class asked today if there were any monkeys in Russia. There are not. It seems like something you shouldn't ask: if you never ask, you can just go on thinking that maybe, somewhere, you will come across a monkey, you just haven't happened to hear about the Great Siberian Ice-chimp yet. Baikal Studies class continues to be amazing. The fact that I understand about 8% of it, both because of it being in Russian and because it's usually about ancient metal-working or prehistoric geology, or geography, or biology, or some other subject that I don't understand in English, makes that information a highly-prized store of wonderfully disconnected statements. They don't seem quite so important in English, and out of the context of the long periods of complete incomprehensibility that preceeded them... my notes, actually, show a remarkable, rather admirable, I think, delight with the mere existence of things. What, by the way, does 'existentialism' mean, exactly? I think it's one of the many words that I have pretended to understand for many years now without actually having any idea. Living in complete language-confusion in Russian has given rise to great irritation when I can't think of the English word I want, or realize I don't know what English words mean, or in general that English is not a perfect haven of absolute linguistic confort. Anyway, back to my notes – they're mainly things like:
«Exoskeletons!!!!»
«Lots of volcanoes!!!!»
«Mammoths, retreating to northern island, turning into mammoth graveyard, running toward the south, nowhere to go now; were they hunted, or just eaten as soon as they died?»
«The Transgression of the Sea!!!»
«The northern sea, in Jurassic Period, had long tongue.»
Actually the mammoth facscination is fairly ongoing. I am almost as entrigued by mammoth as by wooly rhinosauroses. I think it's part of my odd new enthusiasm over things that are Big and Dramatic and just Happened, if that makes sense. Perhaps this is what it's like to be 3 years old. I don't understand the intricacies of anything, I haven't really formulated any connection between historical events or cultural realities and and any grand narrative significant to me in any way (I don't know if that's true for 3-year-olds or not), and as far as I can tell most of what I see has no purpose or explanation: so, I'm just impressed by the Large. And the idea of hundreds of people racing through dense pine forests with stone weapons after huge hairy beasts, fighting to survive the very ice that is necessary for the life of their prey and is shrinking every minute in a huge, global weather shift that takes no account of human or animal life, seems like the coolest thing ever. And the mammoth bones piling up at the very north, when they had all, the mammoths and the people, run as far as they could, with the people maybe just waiting across the channel from the island for the too-dense mammoths to starve to death, is endlessly fascinating in its awfulness.
Running out to see if the small boys are still in control of the internet cafe.
Returned. Not a place to be had. My correspondents will have to just hold their horses, or reindeer, or moose, or whatever it is that they use to pull their buggies or sleighs, until Wednesday, when I return, at 7 in the a.m. Tuesday evening, for you east coast types, late afternoon for those of you living further into our nation's heartland. I walked past the potatoes again as I came back. They aren't really as big as me (as I) (as I am); that was apparently wishful thinking stemming from my love of the large. They are half as big as I am, which means that, if you put them together, my initial estimate was correct. Other events of my return for the internet cave: trying to kill the flies in the elevator with my huge brass key that makes me look like a robber, trying to open the big iron door opening to our and our neighbors' doors, with said key, quickly enough that the neighbor did not once again come out and annoyedly open it for me.
What reflections can I offer as I wait around for 6:00, a reasonable hour for dinner preparation? So, the university. It is pretty much like high school, or like a movie about high school that you're glad isn't really quite true. Since students only study in one department (scattered about in completely different parts of the city), they're all in the same building all day, and classes are usually all in a row and always with the same students as in all your other classes, and there are bells between periods, and in this between-periods interval the hallways are too crowded to squeeze through. The students sort or have the same air as high-school students too, a sort of flouncing confidence that sizes up everyone's outfit as they pass by, and they gather in the same gossipy bunches, and the atmosphere of the bathroom is the same, with the girls all fixing their hair and reapplying make-up. Unlike high school, the toilets have no seats and the stalls have no toilet paper, and, on the second floor, the stall doors are only waist-height. Judging by my one mainstream class, which perhaps isn't fair because it's for freshman and for all I know they improve with age, the students are about as attentive and respectful in class as in high school too, with the difference being that they are never disciplined. They play with their cellphones, they pass notes, they sleep, they whisper to each other – it's sort of amazing. In our last class in the history department, my slight offense at this behavior was entirely overshadowed by my excitement when Eddie and I, who were at the same table-thing, got a note passed to us. It said, in English, «We have to write an essay about gender discrimination. Do you know anything about it?» We replied that we did, in fact know something, and in our opinion it was, in general, bad; maybe we were supposed to offer to write the essay for them? We have heard that Russian students take a rather collective approach to the grading process.
Would it make sense to describe my enthusiasm in Baikal studies class by saying that I have a new delight in the 'ontology' of things? For some reason this word was before me constantly in the past academic year, like 'hegemony' the year before, and I always found it a little odd that such a word existed, let alone that so great a use was made of it in everything I read. But maybe this is an appropriate time for it? I don't know... I don't really care about the nature of being, which I think may be the actual definition of the word, but whenever I read it it seemed to just mean something like 'existing in state its name suggests that it would,' or 'by the nature of its existence as itself.' Hmm, I just searched my hard drive for instances of the word 'ontological' and I have apparently used it myself, in the sentence «While every icon is ontologically an invitation to transcend the visible world for the invisible, “a road we must travel on in order to transcend it” (Evdikimov 235), Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity uniquely embodies this invitation by the appeal of the summons at the icon’s narrative level and by its success in convincing viewers of the existence of its Hyper-icon.” I wonder what the heck that means. Oh, man, I just did a search for ‘hegemon,’ with depression results. At least, I am glad to find, I have never (at least in a document saved on this computer) used the word ‘suasion.’ That may be my least favorite made-up-for-some-academic-article-and-then-copied-by-the-entire-academic-world-but-perfectly-useless word.
Edit: I have returned, and the trip was most excellent, but I don’t have time to recount it right now. I’ll just say, so as not to leave you all in suspense, that when I went back to the internet place after dinner, with 40 minutes until I had to leave for the train station, the small boys had been replaced by ‘nagers. It was sort of unsettling, like the boys had aged 10 years in the two hours I had been away. But anyway, I still couldn’t use a computer, and I was annoyed. On the other hand, the expedition was most fruitful, as the Central Asians selling jars of things they had pickled had been replaced, at some magical evening hour, by Central Asians selling hats and gloves. It was amazing. I bought some.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)