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?