Isolde u down teh rivers.

This is the most brilliant thing I have ever seen.
Ever.

Dude

I'm not sure exactly how long I've been waiting for a movie that has Sam Elliott, Eva Green and bad-ass warrior bears all wrapped in to one awesome package, but I'm pretty sure it's been a long time.
Anyway, the time has arrived:



'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' got close with the polar bears that pulled the White Witch's chariot, but it didn't take the obvious next step - which was to have the yoke's bolts come loose somehow, and the terrible duo go on and wreak their ursine havoc on the advancing Narnians.

Creativity is hard like that. Things that seem so obvious to us now - Newtonian mechanics, sterilization, warrior bears - are in truth nontrivial summits to mount, requiring a few exceptionally inspired souls to look up from the confused morass that defines their world and step beyond.

Bold Move Pays Off

Bold Move Pays Off
Originally uploaded by 4durt

Hmm...

Maybe Fred isn't so strange after all...


Natural Born Killer?

Cats kill "not only for sustenance, but also seemingly for the sheer pleasure of it. 'Even when fed regularly by people,' Temple and Coleman wrote, 'a cat continues hunting.' ... Various studies credit alley cats with up to 28 kills [of birds] per year. Farm cats, Temple and Coleman observed, get many more than that. Comparing their findings with all the available data, they estimated that in rural Wisconsin, around 2 million free-ranging cats kill at minimum 7.8 million, but possibly upwards of 219 million, birds per year.
That's in rural Wisconsin alone."

-Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

Campaigning

Sick of the presidential campaign already? Not sure if you can take another 14 months of inane sloganeering and ridiculous posturing?
Then rejoice that you don't live in Russia, compared to which American elections look downright subtle and thoughtful.


"Putin's plan is the victory of Russia!"
-The United Russia Party

Milan Was Funny

Or maybe I was in a mood.

The Duomo
Brought to you by Marie Claire.


Milanese Fashion
Dude's reading a McDonalds health summary chart.


Not to put too fine a point on it...



...It's Super-Photographer

Get Your War On

One of the unexpected results of living in Moscow has been a slight - how to say - realignment of certain ideas. Don't worry - I'm not talking about a creeping cosmopolitanism, no jejune cultural epiphany that has liberated me from my mental encumbrances and opened me to the wisdom of other cultures. In fact, if anything, it's just the opposite. Let me explain.

Russia has a holiday regimen similar to ours, if a bit strange. Our Christmas is divided into their New Year and Christmas. Their New Year's is when all the festivities happen, all the secular folderol that we celebrate on Dec 25, while their Christmas retains a strictly religious import. Then there is International Woman's Day - Soviet in origin, it is still a relatively important day in which all the men give gifts to the women in their lives. Its parallel is Defenders of the Fatherland Day, which has become equivalent to a 'Men's Day.' (I suppose given Russia's universal male service requirement, this is a reasonable extrapolation, however, the day was originally intended as a type of veterans day). Russia has an Independence Day (June 12) that, while a federal holiday requiring the day off, passes unremarkably. The big day, the biggest day of the year, the holiday to end all holidays comes on May 9. Victory Day.

It is impossible to overemphasize the shear scope of the 'Great Patriotic War' in the Russian imagination. If you sometimes balk at invocations of 'The Greatest Generation,' and sundry other forms of WWII mythologizing in the US... you ain't seen nothing.

'Is it true that Americans think that they won the war?' I've had this conversation a couple of times, and don't even bother asking which war.
'Well, yes, it's true that most Americans overestimate our role in the conflict, forgetting that we didn't even deal with the lion's share of the axis forces, nor were we the ones to sack Berlin. At the same time, it's not at all clear that the Soviet Union could have won the war by itself.'
'But we lost 11,000,000 soldiers, the U.S. only lost 11,000. [Yes, they really have casualty statistics memorized] You see, we beat the Fascists!'
Of course, were I a less diplomatic person, I would take issue with the invocation of military deaths as a measure of military strength, but at this point I usually defer, and leave my interlocutor confident in the superiority of their educational system.

Nor has the myth-making changed in the new Russia. When Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," it was hard for us to understand how this could be anything other than naked Soviet revanchism. That's true to an extent, but only in the sense that the Soviet era is to many just one manifestation of a more foundational, epochal, Russian empire.

For these reasons and others, I've grown to a sort of loathing of national triumphalism. And it is in this context that I read one of the more odious statements of the U.S. presidential campaign so far.
Right says Fred:

Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.

Now, the falseness of this statement should be apparent to someone with even the most casual acquaintance with history. On this account, Larison supplies the necessary figures. But almost worse, in my estimation, is the sentiment.
What if it were true? Would it, then, give us the right to be proud? Could we swagger into the bar of nations, aura of martyrdom shining around us, and expect all our nation friends to quail in the shadow of our magnanimity?

Again, its difficult to say what's worse about national myth-making: its fraudulence, or the supercilious Christ-complex it promotes.
"If it weren't for us, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys the French would all be speaking German," is a refrain I've heard more than once.
Nevermind the fact that France and the Low Countries shared a long, unobstructed border with the greatest martial power ever to exist at that point; nor pay heed to the fact that Naziism was never linguistically imperialistic, preferring the German tongue only be used by pure-blooded Germans. Nor, finally, that we fought to save half of Europe from a maniac who slaughtered people for their race, only to give the other half to a maniac who slaughtered indiscriminately.
We're practically Christ: We died to save the world from harsh gutturals.

Dyin' Ain't Much of a Livin', Boy

These words from "The Outlaw Josie Wales" have been the only non-essential bit of information on my Facebook profile for at least a year now, and now I see that it has been brazenly robbed by Andrew Sullivan for his series: "Best. Movie. Line. Ever."
To the victor and all that...
But the link to the YouTube clip may have been worth it.

Interesting

So I saw Harry Potter today.
Before I get to the film, some background. All movies in Russia are dubbed. Actually, from what I hear, all foreign movies in most countries are dubbed, and America and a handful of Western European countries seem to be alone in preferring subtitles, the clearly superior way of consuming this medium. If that doesn't spur your nationalistic pride I'm not sure what will.
Anyway, it has only been since films began to be distributed digitally that the dubbing has even been worth a damn. Before, the local studios basically received a product with the audio tracks already integrated, so in order to keep the sound effects, you had to retain the voice tracks as well. Watch any movie on TV more than a few years old and you get this ridiculous mish-mash. For 1.9 seconds you hear the actor's original voice until the dubbing kicks in and almost drowns it out. Now, for someone who has to concentrate to understand the dubbed language and who fully understands the native language, this makes the movie watching experience something akin to watching those war sequences in Saving Private Ryan. (You can talk as much as you like about it conveying to the viewer the confusion, brutality and senselessness of war; I call it shaking the camera around really fast: A technique my dog Max could surpass with a camera tied to his back, thanks to the mollifying quality of his canine corpulence). Anyway, Harry Potter was rather well dubbed, so three cheers for the digital revolution.

Secondly, I noticed that Voldemort's name in Russian is Volandamort. The first two or three times that He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was... well... named, I thought I misheard. But then, I got it. Voldemort, to our Anglophone ears, is a very sinister sounding name: partly from the deep, round, o sounds; partly from the Latinate influence (from mors, mortis meaning 'death'). But Russians don't have the same associations that we do (whether conscious or not). So, the question is, how does a Russian translator make the name sound sinister to the popular Russian imagination?

Volandamort.

Thirty-two brownie points to the person who guesses why.

God Damn It

If you'll recall, among the topics I enumerated in my list was an in-depth from-the-trenches report on Moscow's Mullets, the hairstyle of the new elite. Well, I see that The Exile has not only scooped me, and has probably done a better job than I would have, but it was published on the same freakin' day that I made that post. Oh well. For those who can't be bothered to click through, here are the money quotes:

To understand the Russian mullet, you have to go back to the early 1980s, to the beginning of Russia's "rock renaissance." Specifically, to Viktor Tsoi, the legendary dead front man of Kino, who sported a classic 80s I-used-to-be-stadium-rock-but-now-I'm-New-Wave mullet of the sort you'd see on a Steve Perry of Journey or a Billy Squier. The mullet somehow vibed with Tsoi's Asiatic features (he was half-Korean) and immediately spawned a trend among his millions of fans.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the mullet collapsed like so much inefficient state industry, giving way to the worst of the West's imports: the eurofag techno hairstyles of the 90s. Like, who can forget the Caesar?

Turn and Face the Strain...

Changes are in the cards for your humble blogger...
Having been somewhat dissatisfied with my job for a while (due to a number of issues, the chief among them being the rather ridiculously high work/pay ratio), I decided to drop that business like a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
I sent a letter of resignation giving one month's notice on the 19th of July and for nearly a week received no reply, despite several follow up emails, until one of my colleagues told me that she was taking over my classes and asked me why I was leaving. Stay classy, Language Link.
The same day, finally, my supervisor called me and said that, instead of staying for the rest of the month, it would be easier to replace me at the beginning of August. Fair enough... it is a rather difficult juggling job to seamlessly replace teachers, especially for those that teach In Company.
Long story short, I'm still waiting on a second letter from the director (who seems impossible to get a hold of by other means) confirming that I can have the full month that I gave as notice to stay in my apartment as well as some questions about visa issues.
In any event, I got a job as a copy editor at the English language paper in Moscow, The Moscow Times. I've been working there for a few Sundays and think it will be something much more to my taste and skills. Also, it won't inflict the stress that traveling all day on the Moscow metro entails.
I also found a new flat, as my current abode is controlled by Language Fink Link. Its a bit nicer than my current place, and in a somewhat nicer area.
Lastly, in changing employers, it is necessary to get a new work visa, which can only be done by leaving and re-entering the country. Italy will probably be my mandatory vacation destination as I can stay with a friend there. I'm still waiting (see:above) to find out if I can stay until the 28th on my current visa or if I have to leave on the 18th.

Scary Picture of the Day - Part 2!

So I charted the places I've been onto this Facebook application, and the picture that emerged in Europe was a little strange.



Flip it along the y=-x axis and you have a perfect sickle and hammer (minus a hammerhead).

On the other hand, I just finished reading Foucault's Pendulum a few hours ago, so maybe I am a little susceptible right now to hermetic and occult inferences.

Update: It just occurred to me that today's date on the Julian Calendar is 2/7/2007! Add the digits together and you get 18 - the only number that is twice the sum of its digits. And those digits together and you get 9 - the maximum number of cubes that are needed to sum to any positive integer! 9! The number of circles of hell and spheres of heaven! 9! The number of planes of existence according to our Norse fathers!

Is anyone else, like, totally freaked out?

Scary Picture of the Day!

More Here.

A List

Of topics that have occurred to me for blog posts that I haven't gotten around to making yet:

• An in-depth 'from the trenches' report --- Mulletology: A Hairstyle and the Moscow Elite. (With Pictures!)
  
• Why doesn't the Blogspot built-in dictionary recognize the word 'blog?'
• The evolution of titling schemes over the centuries.
  
• What I've learned after (almost) 6 months of teaching English.
• Nostalgia Blogging: What ever happened to heads of state leading their armies into battle?
• What Russian Women Want.
• Why Russian Women Are Wanted.
• Political Incorrectness and English Language textbooks.
• Alcoholism in Russia. (NB: I really don't have anything to say about this, so it would, sadly, only be pictures of men passed out a variety of places and positions at 10 am).
• Why the Die Hard cycle is the best thing that ever happened to movies. Ever. (NB: this isn't some counter-intuitive argument about how its badness acts as some kind of cure for the malaise that contemporary cinema finds itself in. It's about how hard Die Hard rocks.)
• Why the Beatles really suck. (And why George Harrison was their only redeeming quality (though insufficient to counter the John-Paul axis of stupid)).
• The peculiarities of Western art penetration into the former Soviet Union. Why are Deep Purple and O'Henry huge over here, but no one has ever heard of the Who or Melville?

Since it is doubtful that I will ever write all of these, I am soliciting requests.

Invention

If God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

-Voltaire

If Dick Cheney didn't exist, he would be invented by a communist propogandist.
-Me

A Letter

Here is a letter I just wrote to my health insurance provider, Tonik. (A subsidiary of Blue Cross aiming at the post-college demographic)

From: pfrance@gmail.com
Date: June 13, 2007 10:48:21 PM GMT+04:00
To: tonikhealth@wellpoint.com

To Whom It Concerns,

As a member of Tonik for over a year now, I would like to inform you of some concerns that I have come to have with your program.
I understand that Tonik sells policies aimed to a specific demographic; namely, recent college graduates - many of whom who have probably recently become ineligible for their parents' policy - who are looking for a rather basic policy that they can afford. In that, you have certainly succeeded; I, after all, thought it reasonable enough to subscribe.
My concern, however, is that you have have taken the advice of your marketing advisors too far. In order to believe that you have mounted an effective marketing campaign and have constructed a useful product image you would have to believe the following things:

1) People of my demographic appeal to tastelessly colored neon backgrounds on web-pages.
2) Condescending to your clients by titling the booklet containing the actual terms of the policy 'the fine print' is an important aspect of your product image. (Apparently proper punctuation - including capital letters - is, like, so unhip!)
3) Your target demographic is more likely to respond to verbal marketing that uses the word 'like' gratuitously thrown into sentences.
I recently received an email from your company whose subject line read 'Do we, like, rock your world?'
4) Recent college graduates like myself respond better to hackneyed movie-speak and vacuous phrases than to substantive communication. (see above)
5) Your clients are more likely to respond to a survey if you couch the request in oh-so-punk-rock terms of 'selling out.' 'Have we sold out by getting so popular?' your latest email seems to ask, 'let us know!'

I realize that all of this is part and parcel of a non-formal image that you are trying to project to potential clients who may feel overwhelmed by the daunting challenge of selecting their first health insurance policy. And I am sure you have invested a fair amount of money in market surveys, case studies, and focus groups. And yet... and yet, I can't help but believe that your interests would be better served by finding an image less condescending and ridiculous. Surely you can follow some other, more respectful path while still emphasizing informality.

Respectfully,
Peter France


What prompted this unsolicited marketing advice? Well, their last email sorta sent me over the edge. Take a gander (looking especially at the subject line):

From the 'Mote in thy Brother's Eye' Dept.

Behind these astonishing achievements was the triumph of freedom in the battle of ideas. The communists had an imperial ideology that claimed to know the directions of history. But in the end, it was overpowered by ordinary people who wanted to live their lives, and worship their God, and speak the truth to their children. The communists had the harsh rule of Brezhnev, and Honecker, and Ceausescu. But in the end, it was no match for the vision of Walesa and Havel, the defiance of Sakharov and Sharansky, the resolve of Reagan and Thatcher, and fearless witness of John Paul. From this experience, a clear lesson has emerged: freedom can be resisted, and freedom can be delayed, but freedom cannot be denied.
President Bush. June 5 2007

Others understand the historic importance of our work. The terrorists know. They know that a vibrant, successful democracy at the heart of the Middle East will discredit their radical ideology of hate. (Applause.) They know that men and women with hope and purpose and dignity do not strap bombs on their bodies and kill the innocent. (Applause.) The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear -- and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march. (Applause.)

I believe in the transformational power of liberty: The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom. As the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq seize the moment, their example will send a message of hope throughout a vital region. Palestinians will hear the message that democracy and reform are within their reach, and so is peace with our good friend, Israel. (Applause.) Young women across the Middle East will hear the message that their day of equality and justice is coming. Young men will hear the message that national progress and dignity are found in liberty, not tyranny and terror. Reformers, and political prisoners, and exiles will hear the message that their dream of freedom cannot be denied forever. And as freedom advances -- heart by heart, and nation by nation -- America will be more secure and the world more peaceful. (Applause.)

President Bush, September 2, 2004

Photoblogging

In the Caves Monastery.



A Walk in the Monastery.




Fear Death By Snake.


Run Down.


A Turkish Fortress on the Black Sea Coast.

Stereotypes

When teaching English, the big goal is always ‘Keep ‘em talking.’ As such, conversation tends to tread on alot of rather disparate topics. National stereotypes, of course, come up, and it’s always interesting to hear what different peoples think of other peoples. Personally, I’m a big fan of stereotypes, rightly conceived. I think talking about what makes us different from each other is fun and important. Where stereotypes go wrong is when we persist in those that are demonstrably false or use them to impeach the dignity of the individual.

Anywho, even more interesting than stereotypes, sometimes, are meta-stereotypes. I’m talking about beliefs a people holds collectively about another people’s stereotypes. As it turns out, pretty much everyone in Russia just knows its true that Americans and Westerners in general all believe Russia to be such a wild place that bears, yes, BEARS roam the city streets. ‘Are you surprised,’ one student asked me, ‘to see no bears in our streets?’

Has any American ever associated Russia with bears roaming its big cities’ streets? I certainly hadn’t and so far, I haven’t talked to anyone whose stereotypes of Russia go beyond the big three: Commies, Matryoshka Dolls, and COOOLLLDDDD. ..

But who knows... after all, I didn’t even know Jews were usurers until I went away to college (thanks Shary!), so it’s possible that I’ve just led a sheltered life.

That said, I couldn’t but recall the summer I spent in St. Petersburg:

Cool

Vive la résistance!

Maize's empire begins to show cracks.

For more on all that is wrong with that hideous grain, see here.

My Apologies

Apologies are a good thing. To apologize is to convey the best side of ourselves: our humility, compassion and grace. When we apologize for some past action we've committed, it is also a sign of strength as we have overcome our pride.

However, there is another, quite different, kind of apology -- one which I find quite repulsive. But before getting into that, a character study:

Pierre might be considered strange for any number of reasons: his alpha-male attitude towards women clothed in decidedly zeta-male trappings; his whiny eccentricism; his career as a 42 year old traveling day-trader; his obnoxious manner and cultural solipsism whilst living in different countries; or, of course, his Canadianess. All of these things make him an interesting character, but it is his remarkable obsession with silver that puts him over the top.

It was buying old, tarnished silver on Ebay, and then selling it to the melter -- an 'economic inefficiency,' to put it politely, that very few seemed to be aware of -- that gave him the capital necessary to become a traveling investor. And, as an investor specializing in the resource sector, he is well versed in the various extraction technologies and commodity trends connected with the valuable metal. ("Gold gets rarer as you dig deeper, silver more plentiful. Soon, silver will eclipse gold in price." "It's the best electrical conductor in existence." "It's the world's best antibiotic.").

Pierre became interested in the hostess at the hostel where we were staying, Helen, and bought her a bouquet of flowers. I certainly can't blame him on this one: All four of the women who worked at the desk were smokin' hot, a fact which might have led you to certain conclusions about the Australian owner of the place... if you hadn't walked the streets of Odessa and found yourself on your knees thanking God for leading you, at long, long last, to the land of milk and honeys.

Anyway, Pierre (The AGgravating AGoraphile... I can hear the groans already.) brought flowers each day for Helen. He also brought flowers for Tanya, who complained about the lack of attention being shown her --an action which was looked upon none too favorably, let me tell you, by Helen. Helen changed the water in the vase one day and I casually mentioned it to Pierre.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Unless someone else brought her flowers, yeah," I grunted.
"Damn."
I looked at him quizzically.
"I put silver in the water... it helps the flowers last longer."

I was at an underground (literally and metaphorically) bar with Pierre and Maria, a sweet, bubbly, quadrilingual girl from Moscow also visiting Odessa. Pierre, who you might have mistakenly thought to be Quebecois, is very monolingual.... if that. What I mean is, every sentence he speaks in intoned as though it were coming from a six year old boy complaining to his mother because she won't let him have ice-cream for dinner.

No really, it goes like this:

Pierre had a way with woman. He would approach them with his whiny English, hoping he would find someone he could talk to. To the Romanian from Transylvania who spoke a little English, he pulled down his collar, exposing his neck, inviting the woman to bite him. To the Ukrainian babe who didn't speak English, he pointed to her, then to himself, and then pressed his hands together flat under his tilted head.

Towards the end of the evening, sitting in a group of natives (most Ukrainians in this region speak Russian), Maria and I lowered our eyes as Pierre made an ass of himself. Or maybe I'm projecting, Maria doesn't really seem like the time to be embarrassed of another person -- she's far too good natured for that. One of the natives kept telling Pierre how much he loved him (whether because he is an extremely amicable drunk, or because those are the only English words he knew, I'm not sure). Another of the group kept talking trash to him in Russian -- something Maria and I both neglected to translate.

When we got outside the trash-talker, himself quite trashed, punched Pierre on the forehead - a solid blow, but too drunk to be well-aimed. He responded in the same Ice-Cream-wanting petulant voice "Oww... What was that for?" as he ran away. Trash-talker's friends grabbed him and pulled him away.

Earlier in the night I had said to Maria, "I'm sure we're embarrassing you."
"What?" she didn't hear.
"Nothing."

Part of me was gratified to have a Canadian drawing the stigma of the obnoxious Anglophone away from the American and towards himself. Another part of me felt indicted just the same.

But that's not right. Nor would it have been no matter how close the connection. I'm hardly a rugged individualist, disconnected from bonds of culture, country, or family. But it seems to me that feelings like guilt and shame are only properly emoted when one feels guilty or shameful for one's own actions. And, paradoxically, I think it's the person who feels collectivist guilt that is the most solipsistic. To him, nothing matters except how the actions of his kin, countrymen, or civilizational brethren affect him. That there might be another person who thinks and feels and acts in a certain way for a certain reason is unimportant and unconsidered. It's a craven, and ineffectual way to live one's life...

... and I'm embarrassed for all you who think that way.

Steps

When I was in Odesa, I visited some famous steps.



Somehow, they aren't as impressive in real life.

For Those Who Know...

1 Load of Passengers from Moscow to Kiev.
$1500 Roubles.

Event Card:
Get Drunk on congnac with Ilya the Communist on the train. Lose a day.

Dept of "Puttin' it on"

What Ever Happened to Peter?

Oh, he got caught up in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of English language teaching. He doesn't come around much anymore.

Not really... but sort of. Fast-paced it certainly is, flying around from office to office on the sardine can that is the Moscow Metro. And high-stakes? 'High,' of course, is relative. But it can be pretty damn relative when you get yourself some oligarchs to teach.

Since I am technically in an 'internship,' my company requires that every three months I do a project, upon which my quarterly pay raise is contingent. My first one is due this Friday. I plan to do it, of course, and do my best. But it is really hard to take the whole thing seriously when I make more money for talking to my oligarch for an hour and a half about his natural gas fields, than my entire monthly pay raise will give me.

orthodoxy

After my post on travel snobs, I started thinking... what's the deal with orthodoxy? Why do we find it necessary to ensure that others believe in True Things™? I'm certainly not immune from this impulse, but when I am able to think about it rationally it always seems a little ridiculous. One's own quest for truth is natural and reasonable, and one can certainly believe in the inviolability of that truth should one choose to, but what interest do we have in what others choose to believe?

I can think of a few reasons:
1) Compassion. One truly believes that another's false belief is detrimental to him, and therefore the impulse of orthodoxy is altruistic.
2) Power. The power of a person or group depends upon another person or group holding a certain thing to be true.
3) Ontology. If a group, which is based upon a system or series of beliefs, enforces those beliefs, it will exist longer than a group that does not enforce its beliefs. Thus, orthodox groups are selected by the nature of their practice.

I think 3 is the most common followed closely by 2 with 1 somewhere in the distance. Any other ideas?

Happy Easter

from The Passing of Arthur
Tennyson

But when that moan had past for evermore,
The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn
Amazed him, and he groaned, "The King is gone."
And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,
"From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

Whereat he slowly turned and slowly clomb
The last hard footstep of that iron crag;
Thence marked the black hull moving yet, and cried,
"He passes to be King among the dead,
And after healing of his grievous wound
He comes again; but--if he come no more--
O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat,
Who shrieked and wailed, the three whereat we gazed
On that high day, when, clothed with living light,
They stood before his throne in silence, friends
Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?"

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

In Defense of Parochialism

You meet them most, surprisingly enough, when traveling. The conversation starts off stimulating enough: where you've been, where you're going, impressions, observations... sometimes insightful, often not, but you know you're talking with good folk none the less.

And then you start to get a feeling. Talk shifts to 'the problems of the world'... soon the conversation is being peppered with the word 'cosmopolitan,' being used here as an approximate synonym to the word 'virtuous.' And after they begin lamenting the 93% of Americans who don't own a passport (or something like that), and just before they draw a correlation between this and the specter of 'ignorance' (being used here as an approximate antonym to 'virtue'), you think to yourself: "Oh no... It's one of them."

You're dealing with a Travel Snob.

There are, as I see it, a few problems with cosmopolitanism, but the biggest of them all are the cosmopolitans themselves. Humanity, you see, has been floundering for far too long in the chaotic waters of tribalism and provincialism. ''We are all equal, and whoever doesn't experience for themselves the rich cultural differences this world offers is a bigoted nincompoop" they say with no apparent hint of irony.
The logic of cosmopolitanism --at least as I see it frequently expressed -- goes something like this:
1) Knowledge is good. By corollary, therefore, ignorance is BAD.
2) Travel produces knowledge in the traveller. (But not just any knowledge. That's boring. You can just FEEL that the knowledge gained by travelling is better than other kinds of knowledge.)
3) Therefore, the traveller is, necessarily, wiser than provincial folk.

The problems, of course, are 1) the assumption that travel necessarily produces some kind of non-trivial knowledge and 2) the idea that, assuming one does obtain some kind of new cultural understanding, this kind of knowledge is somehow superior than other kinds of knowledge (from the understanding of cellular respiration to knowing how to fix a broken toilet.)

1) should be self evidently foolish. But if it is not, can someone please explain to me how getting ripped on Mykonos among a cadre of anglophones makes one a wiser person?
2) seems more natural to believe, but is it true? I'm not sure.

One could make the argument, I suppose, that transcultural knowledge is, though not necessarily superior, contingently superior because of the increasingly globalized world in which we live. This may be true, but it still misses a very important point which is that, in most cases, cultural knowledge, or whatever words we use to express this concept, is so abstracted an idea that it means very little in practice. Ask a cosmopolitan what he has gained from travelling and make him answer in concrete terms and he will blush a little, because much of the time, he either has no answer or the answer, when expressed nakedly, seems so trivial and quotidian.

The explanation of cosmopolitanism is as prosaic as it is natural: a person takes something that is true of me and not of thee, and uses it to beat thee over the head. Classic In-Group Out-Group dynamics. When we were hunter-gatherers, discerning who was in 'our group' was essential to group survival. If we gave a hunk of Zebra thigh to someone who wasn't in our group it would endanger our own group. Of course, nowadays material subsistence isn't the issue, so we do it with ideas.

Now that's progress!

In Which Alanis Masters Irony

In Which We Discuss Bigness

Moscow is huge, man. Huge in a way that facts and figures don't really express, but here are some anyway:
In 2004 the population inside the city limits is 10,101,500. All these folks are crowded into an area of 1,081 sq. km. That makes it, as near as I can tell, the second densest city with a population over one million. Only Paris is denser, but it has a measly 2,153,600 residents. (Los Angeles, by comparison is 1,290.6 km² with a population of 3,844,829).

All that, true though it is, isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Moscow is BIG; exhilaratingly, oppressively, inescapably, exasperatingly, sublimely HUGE. It partakes, in its totality, of the Platonic form of BIGNESS. It's BIG: as Big as Leroy Brown is Bad; Bigger than the Brobdingnagians; Big like Tom Hanks at a carnival. I mean BIG! Or, as a Russian Billboard advertising a new 1 liter bottle of beer put it: "a BIG taste for a BIG country."

You see it in the parades of giant concrete tenements, 10 stories high, 100 metres long, that march off in ranks as far as you can see.
You hear it in the car alarm symphonies that play in the distance (and not-so-distance) at night, each a fitting sub-melody gracing the grand cacophony.
You feel it in the body warmth of that smokin' hot Russian babe who, on the train in the Metro, is stacked up next to you as tight as cigarettes in a pack.

A Gift From My Student

"The Da Vinci Cat"

(Kot, the Russian word for 'cat' and Kod -- "code," sound very similar in Russian)

Oh, While on the Topic...

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. Now we're having to deal with it, and will."
George W. Bush. Sept 1, 2005.

"If it keeps on rainin', the levee's goin' to break,
When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay."
Robert Plant. 1971.


Robert Plant for Prez!!!


NB: I realize that the song was written by Kansas Joe McCoy... but he's dead now. Therefore, Robert Plant for Prez!!

Teaching Tunes

I think I'm an OK teacher. Probably not great, but not terrible either. I hedge my bets, though, by trying to maintain a good rapport with the students. They may not learn anything while I'm with them but, damn it, they'll like me... they'll really like me!

So, I try to be the cool teacher. It's not just that I'm laid back -I am, but that's only because I haven't yet found that confrontational bone. I try to do things that will make class a little less tedious, like bringing to the class the sweet sweet sound of English language music.

Everything is permissible, of course, but not everything is beneficial. I try to find some pedagogical justification for rockin' out in class. Last night, I was reviewing conditionals - you know: if... then.. statements. If you're like most people, you just say them without knowing what they are called. Some examples:

1st Cond: If I don't go to work, I will get fired. (If + present tense... future tense)
Used when talking about probable consequences.
2nd Cond: If I got fired, I would piss on the photocopy paper. (If + past simple... would+infinitive)
Used when talking about hypothetical or improbable situations.
3rd Cond: If I hadn't come to Moscow, I wouldn't have known all this crap. (If + past perfect... would + present perfect)
Used when talking about actions that were possible in the past.

So, the play list I have come up with is this:

For 1st conditionals: Led Zeppelin When the Levee Breaks

If it keeps on rainin', the levee's goin' to break,
When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay.

For 2nd conditionals: Lyle Lovett If I Had a Boat

If I had a boat I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat.

The problem is, dear readers, I can't think of a song for 3rd conditional. Any suggestions?

Ours

In my Russian class I read a short story by Sergey Dovlatov. He was a Soviet émigré who moved to New York in the seventies where he later died. His prose is stark and spare and powerfully moving. Anecdote and observation are blended and time and tense collide in the mind of the narrator to create an intensely subjective experience. Here is my translation of his autobiographical short story.

Ours

“Our world is absurd,” I say to my wife, “a man has enemies in his own house!”
My wife is angry and I hear:
“Your only enemies are cheap port and fake blonds!”
“In that case I am a true Christian, for Christ taught us to love our enemies,” I say.

These conversations have lasted for twenty years. Almost twenty years...

We met in 1963. It happened like this. I had a room with a separate entrance, and every evening friends would gather at my flat.

Once, I woke up in the middle of the night. I saw dirty dishes on the table and boringly thought about yesterday. I remember running out three times for more vodka.

I suddenly feel that I’m not alone. On the divan between the fridge and the radio someone is sleeping.
I asked:
“Who are you?”
“Lena,” answered a surprisingly calm female voice.
I thought for a moment, and then asked:
“And who are you, Lena?”
A calm female voice said:
“Guryevich forgot me.”
“How did that happen?”
“Guryevich got drunk and called a taxi.”
Finally I remembered her. Thin and pale with Mongolian eyes.

The day began strangely and mysteriously. I took a shower. After showers I am always apprehended by a feeling of clarity.

I get out in three minutes. Coffee is on the table with pastries and jam.
We ate breakfast and talked about nothing. Every thing was nice, simple and even pleasant. Lena took her things, put on her boots and said:
“I’m going”
“Thanks for the pleasant morning.”
Suddenly I hear:
“I’ll be back around 6.”
“OK” I say.
I thought that maybe she had confused me with someone. Perhaps with some close friend?

In the evening we ate dinner. I ate to occupy myself. Lena cleaned the dishes. I can see that it is nearly one. Time for bed.
Lena says:
“Go sit in the kitchen.”
I sit, I smoke. I read the evening paper. I go to my room and sleep. We sleep on the same divan.

I lay awake and listened. Not a single sound. I waited another ten minutes and then fell asleep.

In the morning: everything all over again. Light confusion, shower and coffee with milk.
In the evening I said:
“Lena, Let’s talk. I don’t understand what’s happening here. I have several questions. If I can be blunt...”
“I'm listening,” she says.
I ask:
“Is it that you don’t have anywhere to live?”
She was a little offended. Or, to be more precise, slightly surprised.
“Nowhere to live? I have a flat in Dachny, so what?”
“Nothing at all... It just seemed to me... I thought... Then there is one more question. Again, I beg your pardon, but.... could it be that you like me?”
There was a long pause. I feel myself blushing. Finally she said:
“I have no pretenses towards you.”
She was absolutely calm. Her gaze was cold and hard like the corner of a suitcase.

“And the last question. Please, don’t be angry... You aren’t, by chance, a member of the KGB?”
It happens all the time, I think. I am, after all, a rather noticeable person. I drink more than enough. I talk a lot. The radio station ‘The German Wave’ has talked about me.
I hear:
“No, I am a hairdresser.”
And then:
“If there are no more questions, let’s have some tea.”

And so this is how it all began. During the day, I ran around town and looked for work. I would return upset, humiliated and evil. Lena would ask:
“Do you want tea or Coffee?”
Or:
“Where is our laundry detergent?”
My daily regimen had changed. Ladies almost never called. And why would they when there’s a calm female voice that always answers?
We remained perfect strangers.

On Saturday morning I said:
“Lena, listen! Let me be frank. We live like man and wife... but without the most important element of married life... You cook and clean... Explain it to me, what does it mean? I am about to go mad...”
Lena calmly looked at me.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“I don’t know what I want! I want to understand...”
Lena was quiet. She lowered her Mongolian eyes and she says:
“If that is what you need - then go ahead.”
“No,” I say, “What for...?”
How could I, I think to myself, so rudely disturb this peace.

Two more weeks passed. Vodka saved me. I drank in one progressive reaction. I came home around 1 AM. Well, and how should I say it... I forgot myself... I infringed...

This wasn’t love. It wasn’t even a moment of weakness. This was an attempt to escape from chaos. We hadn’t even even called each other by the informal ‘you.’

In a year our daughter Katya was born. And this was how we met...

My Flat

Language Link is a British institution, and I, wouldn't you know it, teach British English. Having lived there for a year, this isn't really a problem: the difference really only entails a slightly different vocabulary and some very subtle grammar nuances.

Some of the differences I like. Lazy speaker that I am, I will always prefer to say anything in as few syllables as possible. Therefore, I am quite keen on using the succinct 'flat' over the longer and more cumbersome American version 'apartment.'

Other differences I like include: 'Ginger' to refer to those of us whose hair color is similar to that of a carrot, rather than the inaccurate 'red-head;' and 'boot' to refer to that part of a car which we store things for transport -- i.e. the trunk -- seems much more fitting for some reason that I can't quite explain.

In other differences American English is clearly superior. One erases pencil marks with an Eraser... the damn British would have you believe that you use a prophylactic. And I must count any language an impoverished one that doesn't include such wonderful euphemisms as: 'Sticking it to The Man.'

Anyway, my intention was to post pictures of my modest abode. And here they are:

Housekeeping

Apparently some people don't like that you have to sign in to comment on the blog. For the voyeuristically inclined, anonymous comments are now permitted.

Hint Hint

For those interested, I can receive mail at:

Russia
Moscow 127055,
Ulitsa Novoslobodskaya 5/2,
Language Link
Peter France

If You Can't Do...

During my many years as a student, I developed a theory concerning teaching. My experience on the other side of the pedagogical stick seems to rather have confirmed this suspicion:

The relationship between teaching aptitude and aggregate pupil performance is not linear, but rather a very shallow curve. In other words, while there may be a big difference in the performance of the pupils of a 1st percentile teacher and a 20th percentile teacher. The difference between, say, a 50th percentile and a 70th percentile teacher is MUCH smaller.

Once a teacher has a basic level of competence, the most he can ever hope to effect are the marginal cases. The good students will still be good students with a poor teacher, and bad students will still be bad students with a excellent teacher. I've seen several teachers enter the profession who have vague Stand-and-Deliver type dreams of making a difference, but it seems to me that these are almost certainly doomed to failure. (After all, Edward James Olmos' class consisted of self-selected students who wanted to take Calculus. Not random brothas from the barrio.)

Experiments in Lighting

Last Thursday I went to Sergiev Posad and had a whompin' good time. I did some experiements with lighting on my camera, and came out with a few shots that I thought were pretty good.

Pictures!

Ginny!

'Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer,' said Lawson. 'What has nature got to do with it? No one knows what's in nature and what isn't! The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist. Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended. It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were coloured, and by Heaven, sir, they were black. If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint grass red and cows blue, it'll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue.'

'To hell with art,' murmured Flanagan. 'I want to get ginny.'

--W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage


Is it just me, or does that sound a lot like Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory?
Further, I think Flanagan's response mirrors my own when I hear someone earnestly discourse on the topic.

9 Things You Always Wanted to Know About the TEFL Racket

*but were afraid to ask*

What's with all the damn acronyms? TEFL, CELTA, ESL, FCE, DELTA... all these have something to do with teaching English. TEFL, incidentally, stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

Learning English is Big. Big like Whoa! It should be no surprise, then, that teaching English is big business. I've heard Language Link --my employer -- referred to more than once as 'The McDonald's of language schools.'

In fact -- and this is where it begins to get Russia-specific-- demand is growing furiously, leaving the supply of teachers soundly in the dust.

As with other big industries, chain schools naturally move towards product uniformity. In this situation, that means that one or two certification processes have become the gold standard, and sine qua non of teaching English. CELTA is the chief of them all. It stands for Certificate for English.... something something something...

So what do you do when you run out of certified English teachers? Any company worth it's salt will find creative ways to meet the demand. Language Link solved this by soliciting people who lacked Certification, seemed to have some faint whiff of competence and hiring them as 'interns' for less pay. (I don't mean this bitterly... It's a better deal for me to do this then drop $5000 on a damn CELTA course).

But... you might think this would make a difference in one's responsibilities. You would be wrong. Here, the only distinguishing thing about interns is their paycheck. (That and they have quarterly 'projects' whose satisfactory--ie. >60th percentile -- completion is a prerequisite for pay increases.

'But Peter,' you ask, 'Don't the students care whether they are being taught by an experienced teacher rather than an inexperienced schmuck like yourself?' They may, but on this, where possible, they are kept safely in the dark. Teachers are tacitly encouraged to keep the lights off, as well.

But what if it isn't possible to keep the client in the dark? In my area of employment -- 'In Company' teachers who go to corporate clients -- most of the corporate clients demand resumes of their prospective teachers. On this I have nothing to say... Only that, I might have heard of some occasions where a teacher found out from independent sources that unbeknownst to him, he had become 5 years older and earned a Master's degree in Linguistics, according to his CV. Or, I might not have heard that...

I can't complain, though. The new Russia is a hard place to work, and they make this whole process damn easy. If you can't stand the grime (and Language Link is most certainly that... quite possibly the grimiest in Russia, which would place it high in the running for grimiest worldwide) find someone else to clean. If not...
Forget it Jake, it's Russiatown.

Kittens!

I grinned at her. The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.

Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

Winter Kept Us Warm

Sympathies

What determines where our historical sympathies lie? I'm talking about that purely arational affinity that you feel when reading about a conflict. I've certainly picked a side in nearly every history I've read. Sometimes your rational and arational sympathies coincide: you want your civilization to win because you like it more than the other. This doesn't mean you necessarily condone the conflict or your side's actions, just that you like them better.
Other times your rational position and arational affinities are opposed. You know, intellectually, that one side is better than the other, but there is something just irresistible about that other side.

Most of the time it is predictable: You root for the side which has a greater civilizational similarity to your own. For me, a partial list of these cases are:

Protestants over Catholics in 30 yrs war
Catholics over Umayyads in Spain
Crusaders over Arabs in Palestine
England over France pretty much always, even though
America over England in the Revolution
(remember, these are arational sympathies -- they don't have to make sense)

What about civilizations whose connection to your own is more tenuous? For me:

Byzantines over the Turks --indeed, over those Crusader dogs as well!
Arabs over the Turks in WWI
Chinese over Japanese, pretty much always (although if a conflict developed today it might be different)
Greeks over Persians
Persians over Arabs
Britons over Normans

For conflicts like these, the causes of our sympathies are not immediately obvious. A lot of the time, it can be something as simple as this: you sympathize with the side whose part was taken by the first book you read on the subject. Other times, you might see one side as more blatantly aggressive than the other, and throw your sympathizes toward the victim. Still other times, its simply a mistaken instinctual feeling of civilizational continuity. For example, its likely that I would have found much more in common with the Normans in 1066 than with the Britons. But, because of the names, it FEELS like I am siding with those damn frogs! As for my sympathies for the Arabs over the Turks, I can narrow it down to two causes: THAT movie; and the fact that I am still bitter over that 1453 business.

Post Facto

I know I'm about two months late on this, but I was just thinking...

So, a man gets hanged. His killers are a bloodthirsty mob, who, while doing the deed, shout out the name of the county's biggest terrorist. They called it justice, and after the hanging they went back to their day jobs --- exterminating people from the other clan.

The man gave them nothing - he died with stoic equanimity, muttering a single 'Go to Hell,' before his neck is snapped.

So who am I supposed to sympathize with: the snakes, or the man who locked them in their respective bags?

Oh Work

I've had a bit of a strange start. I was assigned to 'In Company' teaching, which means that I will be going to various businesses and giving lessons there. Apparently the In Company department twisted quite a few arms to be able to get more teachers as soon as possible. However, when I finished training they said they wouldn't have anything for me for 2 weeks. This pissed off the principal who made some calls. Anyway, I have my first lesson tomorrow. I'm a bit nervous since it is an individual lesson with a beginner, but I'm sure all will turn out.

In other news, Moscow is COLD! And I like it! It has confirmed what I have always thought -- that I prefer extreme cold to extreme hot. As long as one is properly dressed (which I am, thanks to my new keen winter coat), it is quite pleasant to go for walks in the snow.

Statues!

I took a walk in the snow on Saturday, and came upon many a statue.

This is my favorite. It is Vladimir Vysotsky, the famous Russian bard. His music being trenchantly anti-Soviet, it was, obviously, banned. He gained a huge underground following, though, and, as is clear from the picture, is remembered quite well.




During life, though, he was most famous for being an actor, his defining roll being that of Hamlet. Here he is preforming Hamlet's famous monologue.




The others don't get so extensive a description.

Here is Nikolai Chernyshevsky.


He was a famous Socialist author and philosopher as well as an influence of Lenin.

This is Mikhail Lermontov.


Poet and novelist, his most famous work A Hero of Our Time is one which, unfortunately, I have yet to read.

Aliens

The view of the biological anthropologists can be likened to the film series Star Wars, whose aliens have different physical anatomies but are rather disconcertingly united by an unshakable human nature. The view of the cultural anthropologists is more that of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose protagonists take human form but retain their alien natures. (the film that got it right is Independence Day: If not human, it correctly suggests, everything is alien.)
Consilience E.O Wilson

Top Ten Things That Were Not as Expected

10. I have a TV in my room, and have already watched more MTV here than I ever have in the States.

9. I have no roommate. Apparently, they were expecting some fellow named Mike - in the same program - but he never came, and they still haven’t heard from him.

8. My training period will be only two weeks, now. It was to be three, but Language Link is short on teachers, and it is not a company to let lack of training get in the way of business. Seriously, though, I think I will be OK with two weeks.

7. Since I didn’t limit the expectations to me, I guess it’s appropriate to include the fact that my colleague Giorgio, an Italian who speaks English well, but as a second language, will not be teaching Italian as expected, those positions being filled, but English instead.

6. I guess the fact that I was always intended to teach in Moscow was never in question. Not that I have a problem with that.

5. I was under the impression that there was a dress code for teachers. In fact, that doesn’t apply to regular teachers, who seem to wear whatever they desire, but only to those teaching ‘In Company.’ That is, those who teach businessmen.

4. In fact, it seems likely that I will be one of those who teach ‘In Company,’ and constrained by the dress code after all. They ‘don’t normally have interns teach In Company,’ but are short on In Company teachers, as British and American males who dress well are the only ones who Russian businessmen take seriously, and of those, they are in short supply.

3. I’m writing this on my laptop in Kofe Khaus (Coffee House), where I thought would be Free WiFi. In fact, it requires some code, which I have no idea where to obtain. I will have to post this elsewhere.

2. There was no snow when I got here. It was been, as Artyom, the man who picked me up from the airport, said, ‘like summer.’ This is a bit of hyperbole, but the weather is, nevertheless, very very strange.

1. It’s snowing! For the first time since I’ve been here.