And the train does indeed go slow...whoa, whoa, whoa!
I have just arrived at my hostel in St. Petersburg, where I will be staying tonight and tomorrow night while I see what Russians call their Northern Capital, and what my guidebook refers to as the Venice of the North. Having about an hour until I can formally check into my hostel, I felt now was as good a time as any to catch up on some blogging.
Yesterday, after quite a bit of running around Moscow teaching and taking care of a few loose ends, I collected my ticket, my bags, and my mind and headed out to Leningrad Station to catch the train north. I came the station at 8:30, almost two full hours before my train was to leave, thinking that boarding might be a hassle (ah, the habits we develop flying in the United States!). I needn't have bothered; when I arrived, the platform number for my train had not even been posted, so I was forced to find some way of filling the time. I went into a restaurant in the station and had some beef about the texture and toughness of shoe leather, with mashed potatoes that could have passed for spackle. For this I paid the princely sum of 200 rubles (about $8 American). That may not seem like much, but it is high for that kind of food in Russia.
I had hoped a meal and a quick read-through of my St. Petersburg guide might kill the full two hours, but it didn't. I was forced to go sit in the main hall--or rather stand, as there was not a seat to be found for love or money--until my train's platform number appeared on a big screen. Eventually it did so, however, and I was at last able to proceed to my train.
I have noticed a couple of differences between Leningrad Station and, say, Grand Central. The first is that long-distance passengers are much more in evidence in Leningrad Station; there are far more suitcases around and far fewer men in Armani suits. Largely, this has to do with the popularity of night train service in Russia. In Russia, many cities are located at distances from each other that make a night's journey on a train the most pleasant way to travel between them. The other major difference is on the platforms. In Leningrad Station, the platforms are littered with little kiosks where every kind of food and drink imaginable is on sale. I managed to buy a Pepsi and a bag of chips before boarding my train.
Russian train service come in four main classes. The highest class ticket gets one a berth in a two-person compartment; the lowest gets one literally a seat. I had chosen a second-class ticket, which got me a berth in a cramped but still quite comfortable four-person compartment with a door. Luck was on my side, as my berth turned out to be a lower berth, more convenient than an upper berth because it affords the space under it for storage.
My fellow traveling companions were nice enough, but not especially talkative. That was just as well, because they and I were all quite tired. As soon as the train had departed and the provodnitsa (train stewardess) had come around with light refreshments and bottled water, we all turned in.
I can't say that my bed was the most luxurious I've ever slept in, but it was comfortable enough, and even compared favorably with the convertible bed in my Moscow apartment. Far from disturbing my sleep, the rolling of the train actually seemed to help, as did the light noise from the wheels gliding over the track. I slept quite pleasantly until about 6:00 in the morning, when the provodnitsa awakened us all and told us we were approaching St. Petersburg. I hurriedly gathered my things together and dressed.
More later...a line is forming for the hostel computer.
26 August 2008
A Defector for 100 Percent Americanism
Long ago in a life far, far away (4,676 miles away, to be precise), I spent an hour and a quarter every Tuesday and Thursday seated in a Barnard Hall classroom, avidly following the lectures of a woman I now think of as my favorite college professor. Celia Deutsch was not one of the "star" professors at Columbia who develops a cult following among Columbia students, or who ends up appearing in every PBS documentary about her field (her field being Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, there are few such documentaries for her to appear in). A devout but liberal Catholic--I used to describe her to college friends as a plainclothes nun--she was simply a woman who had a deep passion for her subject and an ability to pass that passion on to the right kind of student. And in the autumn of 1999, I was just that kind of student--intrigued by religion but knowing very little about it, just the kind of student who would not only take but excel in her Introduction to Western Religion class.
I have described Professor Deutsch as liberal, because, though she never devoted class time to tirading against it, she plainly had no sympathy for fundamentalist religion. But if she had no sympathy for fundamentalism, she was not the kind of academic fool who thinks that any viewpoint must be treated as "valid" or "true" simply because someone, somewhere happens to hold it. Words for her actually did have meanings (an idea I did not often hear expressed during my Columbia days).
I remember wel when I realized this fact of Professor Deutsch's character. It was during one particularly pitched battle with another student in class, who insisted that someone could be a theologian in a religious tradition without being a believer in that tradition. Professor Deutsch, no doubt thinking of Thomas Aquinas's definition of theology as faith seeking understanding, insisted that the world theologian had never been used this way, inside of any known religion or by scholars of religion. She explained carefully but firmly that a person can be a scholar of religion without being a believer, but to be a theologian, one must be an adherent.
Several years have passed since I had any cause to think about what properly makes someone a theologian. But my memory of this day in Professor Deutsch's class came flooding back to me this weekend, when I had the chance to watch online a documentary called The God Who Wasn't There.
Briefly, The God Who Wasn't There is a vitriolic film that, I had read, advocated what scholars of religion call the Jesus Myth Hypothesis--a theory held by a tiny minority of scholars that there was, in fact, no historical Jesus. I had read a little about the Jesus Myth Hypothesis when I was in college and had not been particularly impressed by it. Though I am not a Christian and do not consider Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, or anything else that Christians generally consider him to be, I had never felt a need to question whether a man called Jesus had ever lived and preached in Israel. But I was open-minded enough to be interested to see if The God Who Wasn't There would make an interesting case.
The film I actually saw on my computer was nothing like what I had read it would be. Although the film did spend some time discussing the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, it was, in the end, more a diatribe against what I would call a caricature of Christianity in general and of fundamentalist Christianity in particular. I suppose it's asking too much for an hour-long film not to boil down incredibly complex scholarly and theological issues into rhetoric, but The God Who Wasn't There did this to an extent I found shocking.
The worst of this boiling down came when filmmaker Brian Flemming, having presented his case that there was no historical Jesus and having made a number of scriptural and moral arguments about fundamentalist Christianity, set his sites on liberal Christians. His entire thesis about liberal Christianity amounted to this: liberal Christianity makes even less sense than the fundamentalist version, because it claims that the Bible is God's word but then decide it will only "sort of" follow it.
There are two main problems with this assertion. The first is that it does not accurately state the claim liberal religious movements make about the nature of scripture, Christian or otherwise. Fundamentalist religion takes the view that scripture is God's direct dictation; liberal religion takes a view that it is God's word as understood by people in a particular time, place, and context. For a religious liberal like myself, then, the Bible, though written by fallible human beings, is nonetheless a reflection on a real experience of God. But Flemming leaves this important distinction completely out of his film.
The other problem with this assertion is that it assumes there is agreement about what the Bible "actually says" when in fact there is not. In the film, Flemming commits this error most greviously when he condemns "Christianity"--he does not say "fundamentalist Christianity", just "Christianity"--for its treatment of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, he quotes Leviticus 18:22 and just assumes the most literal reading of this verse is "what the Bible actually says."
Coming from a religious denomination--Conservative Judaism--that has been wrestling particularly hard with this verse in the past few years, but which has nonetheless liberalized its position on homosexuality, I know that the more traditional, literal reading of this verse is not what the Bible inherently says. In fact, the verse in Leviticus is situated between two sets of laws--the first dealing with family relationships, the second dealing with idolatry. As evidence has come to light that homosexuality is likely genetic, liberal religious movements, Jewish and Christian, have tended to reexamine their assumption that this verse is an unbendable, unchangeable law regarding the family, akin to the Bible's prohibitions on incest. Instead, liberal readers of this text tend to see it as a historically contextualized condemnation of a type of ritualized homosexual sex that took place in the ancient Near East, and which is referred to elsewhere in the Bible. So the most literal reading of this text is not inherently "what the Bible actually says".
Flemming is not the first atheist I've encountered who has made clear his belief that a fundamentalist version of a particular religion is that religion in its purest form. He will probably not be the last. But to me, people like Flemming are not even really part of the discussion, because they have taken themselves out of it. They are like the student Professor Deutsch challenged that day long ago and far away, in my Introduction to Western Religion class--people who think they can be theologians without being believers.
To me, people like Flemming are like defectors from American citizenship. A person who renounces his American citizenship can, of course, express any opinion he wants about the American presidential election, or about what is best for America, but his opinion is no longer meaningful. Once you give up your membership in a community--as Flemming has done by declaring himself no longer a Christian--you don't get to say what the truest or best form of that community is. Once you defect, your opinion about what constitutes 100 Percent Americanism is not one anyone can or should listen to.
Not only do I not accept the claim, made by fundamentalists and by atheists like Flemming alike, that liberal religion "makes even less sense"; I do not understand it. As near as I can tell, there is nothing that makes extremely conservative interpretations of a religious tradition more authentic than liberal ones (indeed, I would argue that, in the case of homosexuality at least, the conservative interpretation of the tradition is less authentic, since it denies the religious values of compassion and intellectual honesty). The claim of fundamentalists and other religious conservatives that they are is only that--a claim.
It often frustrates me that we religious liberals seem unable to say this often enough or loudly enough--that we don't expose The Man Behind the Curtain for who he really is. Perhaps we don't because a liberal understanding of religion is one that, by its nature, admits that infallibility is neither achieavable nor even desirable.
But far too much is at stake for us to remain silent.
I have described Professor Deutsch as liberal, because, though she never devoted class time to tirading against it, she plainly had no sympathy for fundamentalist religion. But if she had no sympathy for fundamentalism, she was not the kind of academic fool who thinks that any viewpoint must be treated as "valid" or "true" simply because someone, somewhere happens to hold it. Words for her actually did have meanings (an idea I did not often hear expressed during my Columbia days).
I remember wel when I realized this fact of Professor Deutsch's character. It was during one particularly pitched battle with another student in class, who insisted that someone could be a theologian in a religious tradition without being a believer in that tradition. Professor Deutsch, no doubt thinking of Thomas Aquinas's definition of theology as faith seeking understanding, insisted that the world theologian had never been used this way, inside of any known religion or by scholars of religion. She explained carefully but firmly that a person can be a scholar of religion without being a believer, but to be a theologian, one must be an adherent.
Several years have passed since I had any cause to think about what properly makes someone a theologian. But my memory of this day in Professor Deutsch's class came flooding back to me this weekend, when I had the chance to watch online a documentary called The God Who Wasn't There.
Briefly, The God Who Wasn't There is a vitriolic film that, I had read, advocated what scholars of religion call the Jesus Myth Hypothesis--a theory held by a tiny minority of scholars that there was, in fact, no historical Jesus. I had read a little about the Jesus Myth Hypothesis when I was in college and had not been particularly impressed by it. Though I am not a Christian and do not consider Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, or anything else that Christians generally consider him to be, I had never felt a need to question whether a man called Jesus had ever lived and preached in Israel. But I was open-minded enough to be interested to see if The God Who Wasn't There would make an interesting case.
The film I actually saw on my computer was nothing like what I had read it would be. Although the film did spend some time discussing the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, it was, in the end, more a diatribe against what I would call a caricature of Christianity in general and of fundamentalist Christianity in particular. I suppose it's asking too much for an hour-long film not to boil down incredibly complex scholarly and theological issues into rhetoric, but The God Who Wasn't There did this to an extent I found shocking.
The worst of this boiling down came when filmmaker Brian Flemming, having presented his case that there was no historical Jesus and having made a number of scriptural and moral arguments about fundamentalist Christianity, set his sites on liberal Christians. His entire thesis about liberal Christianity amounted to this: liberal Christianity makes even less sense than the fundamentalist version, because it claims that the Bible is God's word but then decide it will only "sort of" follow it.
There are two main problems with this assertion. The first is that it does not accurately state the claim liberal religious movements make about the nature of scripture, Christian or otherwise. Fundamentalist religion takes the view that scripture is God's direct dictation; liberal religion takes a view that it is God's word as understood by people in a particular time, place, and context. For a religious liberal like myself, then, the Bible, though written by fallible human beings, is nonetheless a reflection on a real experience of God. But Flemming leaves this important distinction completely out of his film.
The other problem with this assertion is that it assumes there is agreement about what the Bible "actually says" when in fact there is not. In the film, Flemming commits this error most greviously when he condemns "Christianity"--he does not say "fundamentalist Christianity", just "Christianity"--for its treatment of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, he quotes Leviticus 18:22 and just assumes the most literal reading of this verse is "what the Bible actually says."
Coming from a religious denomination--Conservative Judaism--that has been wrestling particularly hard with this verse in the past few years, but which has nonetheless liberalized its position on homosexuality, I know that the more traditional, literal reading of this verse is not what the Bible inherently says. In fact, the verse in Leviticus is situated between two sets of laws--the first dealing with family relationships, the second dealing with idolatry. As evidence has come to light that homosexuality is likely genetic, liberal religious movements, Jewish and Christian, have tended to reexamine their assumption that this verse is an unbendable, unchangeable law regarding the family, akin to the Bible's prohibitions on incest. Instead, liberal readers of this text tend to see it as a historically contextualized condemnation of a type of ritualized homosexual sex that took place in the ancient Near East, and which is referred to elsewhere in the Bible. So the most literal reading of this text is not inherently "what the Bible actually says".
Flemming is not the first atheist I've encountered who has made clear his belief that a fundamentalist version of a particular religion is that religion in its purest form. He will probably not be the last. But to me, people like Flemming are not even really part of the discussion, because they have taken themselves out of it. They are like the student Professor Deutsch challenged that day long ago and far away, in my Introduction to Western Religion class--people who think they can be theologians without being believers.
To me, people like Flemming are like defectors from American citizenship. A person who renounces his American citizenship can, of course, express any opinion he wants about the American presidential election, or about what is best for America, but his opinion is no longer meaningful. Once you give up your membership in a community--as Flemming has done by declaring himself no longer a Christian--you don't get to say what the truest or best form of that community is. Once you defect, your opinion about what constitutes 100 Percent Americanism is not one anyone can or should listen to.
Not only do I not accept the claim, made by fundamentalists and by atheists like Flemming alike, that liberal religion "makes even less sense"; I do not understand it. As near as I can tell, there is nothing that makes extremely conservative interpretations of a religious tradition more authentic than liberal ones (indeed, I would argue that, in the case of homosexuality at least, the conservative interpretation of the tradition is less authentic, since it denies the religious values of compassion and intellectual honesty). The claim of fundamentalists and other religious conservatives that they are is only that--a claim.
It often frustrates me that we religious liberals seem unable to say this often enough or loudly enough--that we don't expose The Man Behind the Curtain for who he really is. Perhaps we don't because a liberal understanding of religion is one that, by its nature, admits that infallibility is neither achieavable nor even desirable.
But far too much is at stake for us to remain silent.
15 August 2008
Bulls and Flower Guardians
One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is in a minor Meg Ryan romantic comedy from the mid-1990s called French Kiss. The film is a fairly conventional story about a timorous wallflower of a woman who finally comes into her own when, on a journey to France to recapture the heart of a fiance with a wandering eye, has a series of adventures with a French con-man with whom she ultimately falls in love. The con-man, played to perfection by Kevin Kline, is everything the heroine is not: he is rough around the edges, adventurous, and uninhibited about nearly everything. When the first meet, seated next to each other on a flight to Paris, he shocks her by asking very personal questions about how she lost her virginity.
Naturally, Meg Ryan replies that this is none of his business. Kline tells her that people fall into two categories with respect to losing their virginity: those who guard it like a delicate flower and those who rush to lose it "like a bull". Naturally, he insists on telling her that he lost his virginity "like a bull," at the age of twelve.
When it comes to language study, I am like a bull; I want to charge right into speaking a language. Having had experiences learning Latin, Classical Greek, and French in high school, and having taken Hebrew and a smidgin of Russian in college, I feel I have a good idea what to expect in learning a language. Some linguists have compared the world's languages to a giant machine, with a multiplicity of switches; the trick to mastering the grammar of a language is know which switches have been turned on and which have been turned off in that particular language.
My background has given me an idea of what the switches are. I may know that Russian does not have the second conditional as we have it in English, but I know that Russian must have a way of making contrary-to-fact statements in the present, and I am curious as to how Russian chooses to deal with these situations. Grammar seems like the easy part of a language to pick up; it's the slogging through dictionaries of vocabulary that becomes more tiresome, where I becomes less of a bull and more of a flower guardian.
It is thus a source of great frustration that my study of Russian is progressing rather slowly. The biggest reason I find I make little progress is that opportunities to use what I am learning are few and far between. I have found two language exchange partners with whom I have met, and with whom I hope I will eventually have many opportunities to speak in Russian. But as both of them have a much higher level of English than I have of Russian, I tend to think they get more out of our conversation sessions than I do. People who are not paid language teachers seldom want to spend their free time going over basic language tasks like practicing clothing vocabulary or ordering tickets at the train station. These, however, are the kinds of things I really need to be doing with my Russian.
My efforts to learn Russian may get harder. For about six weeks, I have been taking Russian lessons with another teacher at my school. Today, however, he told me that he wishes to end our joint class and start taking lessons on his own, as he feels he needs to go slower and consolidate what he knows. In truth, we were not truly at the same level when we signed up for a class together. He had had no previous formal instruction in Russian, although he has picked up an impressive vocabulary living with his Russian girlfriend. I think he has chosen to stop taking lessons with me because he is a bit of a flower guardian, but has sensed that I am, at heart, a bull.
For the next two weeks, my Russian teacher will unfortunately be on vacation. I cannot really blame her for going away this time of year--I am making plans to go away myself at the end of the month--but her departure has dashed my hopes of using the next two weeks to consolidate some more Russian before the hustle and bustle of the autumn EFL season begins. So I will likely not be able to begin charging head-first, like a bull, until September arrives.
None of the other teachers taking Russian lessons is at quite my level; what this means is that I may be forced to take private lessons less often, and work more on my own, instead of being in a class. To me, this is a shame, because I feel I actually benefit more when I am not the only student. Learning to speak a language, as I am realizing from my own teaching, requires a lot of practice speaking, and I find I have more motivation to do that speaking when there are multiple people to whom I can speak.
Naturally, Meg Ryan replies that this is none of his business. Kline tells her that people fall into two categories with respect to losing their virginity: those who guard it like a delicate flower and those who rush to lose it "like a bull". Naturally, he insists on telling her that he lost his virginity "like a bull," at the age of twelve.
When it comes to language study, I am like a bull; I want to charge right into speaking a language. Having had experiences learning Latin, Classical Greek, and French in high school, and having taken Hebrew and a smidgin of Russian in college, I feel I have a good idea what to expect in learning a language. Some linguists have compared the world's languages to a giant machine, with a multiplicity of switches; the trick to mastering the grammar of a language is know which switches have been turned on and which have been turned off in that particular language.
My background has given me an idea of what the switches are. I may know that Russian does not have the second conditional as we have it in English, but I know that Russian must have a way of making contrary-to-fact statements in the present, and I am curious as to how Russian chooses to deal with these situations. Grammar seems like the easy part of a language to pick up; it's the slogging through dictionaries of vocabulary that becomes more tiresome, where I becomes less of a bull and more of a flower guardian.
It is thus a source of great frustration that my study of Russian is progressing rather slowly. The biggest reason I find I make little progress is that opportunities to use what I am learning are few and far between. I have found two language exchange partners with whom I have met, and with whom I hope I will eventually have many opportunities to speak in Russian. But as both of them have a much higher level of English than I have of Russian, I tend to think they get more out of our conversation sessions than I do. People who are not paid language teachers seldom want to spend their free time going over basic language tasks like practicing clothing vocabulary or ordering tickets at the train station. These, however, are the kinds of things I really need to be doing with my Russian.
My efforts to learn Russian may get harder. For about six weeks, I have been taking Russian lessons with another teacher at my school. Today, however, he told me that he wishes to end our joint class and start taking lessons on his own, as he feels he needs to go slower and consolidate what he knows. In truth, we were not truly at the same level when we signed up for a class together. He had had no previous formal instruction in Russian, although he has picked up an impressive vocabulary living with his Russian girlfriend. I think he has chosen to stop taking lessons with me because he is a bit of a flower guardian, but has sensed that I am, at heart, a bull.
For the next two weeks, my Russian teacher will unfortunately be on vacation. I cannot really blame her for going away this time of year--I am making plans to go away myself at the end of the month--but her departure has dashed my hopes of using the next two weeks to consolidate some more Russian before the hustle and bustle of the autumn EFL season begins. So I will likely not be able to begin charging head-first, like a bull, until September arrives.
None of the other teachers taking Russian lessons is at quite my level; what this means is that I may be forced to take private lessons less often, and work more on my own, instead of being in a class. To me, this is a shame, because I feel I actually benefit more when I am not the only student. Learning to speak a language, as I am realizing from my own teaching, requires a lot of practice speaking, and I find I have more motivation to do that speaking when there are multiple people to whom I can speak.
14 August 2008
Motion Sickness
"They always departed in that school," Willa Cather once wrote about a group of writers of whose work she disapproved. "They never went anywhere."
I think of that quote often, now that I am studying Russian again. I have written a bit before about Russian's infamous verbs of motion. In Russian, you do not simply go anywhere; you walk, ride, fly, or sail, but you do not simply go. But until today, I was not prepared for just how complicated these verbs are going to get.
Verbs of motion are actually a ways away in the Russian course I am currently taking through my school, but the subject of them came up today when I told my teacher, in Russian, that I had gone to the train station to buy tickets for St. Petersburg, and that I was going to St. Petersburg the last weekend in August. My teacher wisely seizedthis opportunity to begin verbs of motion and, after I thanked her, told me we would do more of them in our lesson tomorrow.
Well, here's the score from what I learned today:
1) There is one main verb, Идти ("eed-tee") that refers to motion on foot. When one is going within town, however, Russians don't much care whether the action was on foot or by transport, so it was possible to use this verb for my trip to buy tickets, even though I went to Leningradskiy Station not on foot but by Metro.
2) There is another main verb, Ехать ("eh-khat", similar pronounciation to the Hebrew word for "one") that refers to motion by means of transport, whether a plane, a train, or an automobile (there are also verbs corresponding to the English "to fly" and "to sail", but that's for another time). This is the verb I have to use for my going to St. Petersburg, because one does not walk from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
3) These verbs both refer only to movement one time in one direction. For repeated movement (like one's daily commute), each of these verbs has another corresponding verb.
4) Concepts like arriving, departing, and passing through can be expressed by adding prefixes to the various verbs of motion. In Russian, an airplane does not take off; it leaves by flying.
At first, this all seems quite complicated, but I have come to realize that English also has many different verbs of motion: go, walk, ride, transfer, fly, sail, arrive, depart, and return are just a few of the more common ones. Russian's system also builds on itself and allows for more information to be conveyed succinctly than is possible in English. When we say, My friend went to London, we are saying nothing about whether the friend went there by train, plane, steamer, or kayak. But in Russian, this information can be conveyed with more brevity and less awkwardness.
My teacher has also told me that, when dealing with verbs of motion, it is better to think of them in terms of specific situations rather than abstractly in terms of grammar. I think this is likely to improve my retention of them, and help me avoid a major case of motion sickness.
I think of that quote often, now that I am studying Russian again. I have written a bit before about Russian's infamous verbs of motion. In Russian, you do not simply go anywhere; you walk, ride, fly, or sail, but you do not simply go. But until today, I was not prepared for just how complicated these verbs are going to get.
Verbs of motion are actually a ways away in the Russian course I am currently taking through my school, but the subject of them came up today when I told my teacher, in Russian, that I had gone to the train station to buy tickets for St. Petersburg, and that I was going to St. Petersburg the last weekend in August. My teacher wisely seizedthis opportunity to begin verbs of motion and, after I thanked her, told me we would do more of them in our lesson tomorrow.
Well, here's the score from what I learned today:
1) There is one main verb, Идти ("eed-tee") that refers to motion on foot. When one is going within town, however, Russians don't much care whether the action was on foot or by transport, so it was possible to use this verb for my trip to buy tickets, even though I went to Leningradskiy Station not on foot but by Metro.
2) There is another main verb, Ехать ("eh-khat", similar pronounciation to the Hebrew word for "one") that refers to motion by means of transport, whether a plane, a train, or an automobile (there are also verbs corresponding to the English "to fly" and "to sail", but that's for another time). This is the verb I have to use for my going to St. Petersburg, because one does not walk from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
3) These verbs both refer only to movement one time in one direction. For repeated movement (like one's daily commute), each of these verbs has another corresponding verb.
4) Concepts like arriving, departing, and passing through can be expressed by adding prefixes to the various verbs of motion. In Russian, an airplane does not take off; it leaves by flying.
At first, this all seems quite complicated, but I have come to realize that English also has many different verbs of motion: go, walk, ride, transfer, fly, sail, arrive, depart, and return are just a few of the more common ones. Russian's system also builds on itself and allows for more information to be conveyed succinctly than is possible in English. When we say, My friend went to London, we are saying nothing about whether the friend went there by train, plane, steamer, or kayak. But in Russian, this information can be conveyed with more brevity and less awkwardness.
My teacher has also told me that, when dealing with verbs of motion, it is better to think of them in terms of specific situations rather than abstractly in terms of grammar. I think this is likely to improve my retention of them, and help me avoid a major case of motion sickness.
13 August 2008
Georgia, Georgia, No Peace Do I Find
Teaching is a profession full of surprises. You can be surprised when a diligent student fails to do an assignment. You can be surprised when a child student insists on demonstrating her new blowable marker pen and in the process gets red ink all over your clean, white shirt.
But on Monday, I got a very different surprise when the students in my adult business class (actually, my only class at the moment--my other students are on holiday and no new classes have been assigned to me) somehow got onto the topic of the war in Georgia and wouldn't get off of it. And ever since then, though I am thousands of miles from the Peach States (don't grimace--you knew this article would contain at least one U.S. Georgia-country of Georgia joke), I have had Georgia on my mind.
In case you haven't heard yet (you probably have, since apparently Washington is very interested in the matter), war broke out between Russia and Georgia over the weekend. I learned of this Saturday night, while having dinner with some of the other teachers at my school. Knowing nothing of the conflict, and assuming it was likely to be a small-scale military action, I was greatly surprised when my students told me 2,000 people had already died. My students were deeply concerned about the conflict because they all knew people who had sons the right age to be serving compulsory military service in the Russian army.
As near as I can tell, from having looked at what the BBC, the New York Times, and the all-reliable source of Wikipedia have to say about it, the dispute between Russia and Georgia concerns two breakaway provinces called South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These regions wish, for some reason, to secede from Georgia and become part of Russia. Georgia naturally doesn't wish to cede territory to Russia. Over the weekend, Russia went into Georgia on the pretext of aiding Russian citizens; I say pretext, because a teacher at my school who has studied Russia's foreign relations for years tells me that Russia has been issuing Russian citizenship and Russian passports to people in these regions solely to be able to justify military action on the grounds that these are Russian citizens.
My students had quite a lot to say about Russia's actions with respect to the crisis, none of it good. One student who had spent much of her youth in the Caucusus region said that the region has always been volatile, that virtually every man in the region totes a gun, and that at the tender age of twelve, boys are considered men (I knew not how to suggest to her that the people in the Caucusus might emulate Jews and wait until the ripe old age of thirteen, and confer manhood by gift of a fountain pen, but I digress).
Other students told me just about everything they could about military service in Russia. As I have already noted, Russia compels all male citizens to serve in the army for a period of two years unless they fall into various exempt categories. At one time, exemptions were given for males entering higher education, and, as higher education was free, this policy enabled many men to avoid military service. In recent years, however, the higher education exemption has been lifted, and so many men end up in the army who would not have a few years ago.
All three of my students were interested in contrasting Russia's military recrutiment with that of the United States. I explained that, in America, we do not currently have a draft but have had one in the past and may have one again if circumstances make it necessary. I explained further that, because college costs so much in America, many people enter the military in order to gain money toward their schooling. In America, many people think of this system as grossly inequitable and hypocritical, but to my Russian students, it seemed more enlightened than the egalitarian system Russia uses to supply troops to her armed forces.
The most surprising fact my students apprised me of is that the Russian army is considered a dangerous place to be even in peacetime. More seasoned officers are ruthless to younger, newer recruits, and I was told that the suicide rate in the army is quite high. This is undoubtedly another reason my Russian students are so enamored of the way America's military functions with respect to enlistment.
Looking at the conflict, I find myself uncertain who and what to believe. My own government says it is determined to support Georgia's efforts to maintain her territorial sovereignty because Georgia is now a free and democratic republic. Russia claims that it is acting to protect Russian citizens and that Georgia's actions provoked the conflict. Both sides insist they are acting in the interests of justice, not for geopolitical gain.
I find it difficult to accept either side's claims about the morality of the conflict because American history offers no real parallels for this kind of situation. Like any American, I know my country has dealt with a secession crisis that led to Civil War. I know full well that the Union had to fight the war; the alternative would have been the total unravelling of the fabric of the American nation.
But when the South seceded from the Union, it did so in a bid to establish itself as a separate country. Had the South seceded with the intention of, say, joining itself to Mexico instead, I don't know that, slavery or no slavery, the Union would have been as justified in fighting to prevent its departure. And that, as I understand it, is what Russia claims is happening in Georgia.
On the other hand, I cannot take at face value Russia's claim that it is acting only to protect Russian citizens. Certainly a nation is justified in using its military to get citizens residing abroad out of harm. But the "citizens" Russia is claiming to protect were made citizens solely to enable military intervention. The immorality of such actions is plain as day.
Today, peace broke out. Or, I should say, may have broken out--major news outlets disagree about whether Russia is honoring a cease-fire agreement. It remains to be seen what Russia and Georgia will do over the next few days. For the time being, like an old sweet song, Georgia will be on my mind.
But on Monday, I got a very different surprise when the students in my adult business class (actually, my only class at the moment--my other students are on holiday and no new classes have been assigned to me) somehow got onto the topic of the war in Georgia and wouldn't get off of it. And ever since then, though I am thousands of miles from the Peach States (don't grimace--you knew this article would contain at least one U.S. Georgia-country of Georgia joke), I have had Georgia on my mind.
In case you haven't heard yet (you probably have, since apparently Washington is very interested in the matter), war broke out between Russia and Georgia over the weekend. I learned of this Saturday night, while having dinner with some of the other teachers at my school. Knowing nothing of the conflict, and assuming it was likely to be a small-scale military action, I was greatly surprised when my students told me 2,000 people had already died. My students were deeply concerned about the conflict because they all knew people who had sons the right age to be serving compulsory military service in the Russian army.
As near as I can tell, from having looked at what the BBC, the New York Times, and the all-reliable source of Wikipedia have to say about it, the dispute between Russia and Georgia concerns two breakaway provinces called South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These regions wish, for some reason, to secede from Georgia and become part of Russia. Georgia naturally doesn't wish to cede territory to Russia. Over the weekend, Russia went into Georgia on the pretext of aiding Russian citizens; I say pretext, because a teacher at my school who has studied Russia's foreign relations for years tells me that Russia has been issuing Russian citizenship and Russian passports to people in these regions solely to be able to justify military action on the grounds that these are Russian citizens.
My students had quite a lot to say about Russia's actions with respect to the crisis, none of it good. One student who had spent much of her youth in the Caucusus region said that the region has always been volatile, that virtually every man in the region totes a gun, and that at the tender age of twelve, boys are considered men (I knew not how to suggest to her that the people in the Caucusus might emulate Jews and wait until the ripe old age of thirteen, and confer manhood by gift of a fountain pen, but I digress).
Other students told me just about everything they could about military service in Russia. As I have already noted, Russia compels all male citizens to serve in the army for a period of two years unless they fall into various exempt categories. At one time, exemptions were given for males entering higher education, and, as higher education was free, this policy enabled many men to avoid military service. In recent years, however, the higher education exemption has been lifted, and so many men end up in the army who would not have a few years ago.
All three of my students were interested in contrasting Russia's military recrutiment with that of the United States. I explained that, in America, we do not currently have a draft but have had one in the past and may have one again if circumstances make it necessary. I explained further that, because college costs so much in America, many people enter the military in order to gain money toward their schooling. In America, many people think of this system as grossly inequitable and hypocritical, but to my Russian students, it seemed more enlightened than the egalitarian system Russia uses to supply troops to her armed forces.
The most surprising fact my students apprised me of is that the Russian army is considered a dangerous place to be even in peacetime. More seasoned officers are ruthless to younger, newer recruits, and I was told that the suicide rate in the army is quite high. This is undoubtedly another reason my Russian students are so enamored of the way America's military functions with respect to enlistment.
Looking at the conflict, I find myself uncertain who and what to believe. My own government says it is determined to support Georgia's efforts to maintain her territorial sovereignty because Georgia is now a free and democratic republic. Russia claims that it is acting to protect Russian citizens and that Georgia's actions provoked the conflict. Both sides insist they are acting in the interests of justice, not for geopolitical gain.
I find it difficult to accept either side's claims about the morality of the conflict because American history offers no real parallels for this kind of situation. Like any American, I know my country has dealt with a secession crisis that led to Civil War. I know full well that the Union had to fight the war; the alternative would have been the total unravelling of the fabric of the American nation.
But when the South seceded from the Union, it did so in a bid to establish itself as a separate country. Had the South seceded with the intention of, say, joining itself to Mexico instead, I don't know that, slavery or no slavery, the Union would have been as justified in fighting to prevent its departure. And that, as I understand it, is what Russia claims is happening in Georgia.
On the other hand, I cannot take at face value Russia's claim that it is acting only to protect Russian citizens. Certainly a nation is justified in using its military to get citizens residing abroad out of harm. But the "citizens" Russia is claiming to protect were made citizens solely to enable military intervention. The immorality of such actions is plain as day.
Today, peace broke out. Or, I should say, may have broken out--major news outlets disagree about whether Russia is honoring a cease-fire agreement. It remains to be seen what Russia and Georgia will do over the next few days. For the time being, like an old sweet song, Georgia will be on my mind.
10 August 2008
I've Got a Ticket to Ride
For the past couple of weeks, I have been toying seriously with the idea of going to St. Petersburg at the end of August. It seems to me there is no better time I could go. The summer being the slow season for EFL teachers in Russia, I know I am unlikely to have so much time for travelling later in the year. And though a major purpose of my being in Russia is to save money, I also know that my being here is, most likely, a once in a lifetime thing. To come so close to what many describe as the most beautiful city on earth and not go see it would be not only tragic, but tragically stupid.
There is really only one viable means of getting between Russia's former and current capitals, and that is by train. Russians have told me it is not even worth considering flying; a flight between Moscow and St. Petersburg will actually take longer, when pre-flight time at the airport and traffic going to and from airports is factored in. Busses are available, but I gather that traveling by bus is even less comfortable in Russia than it is in the United States (having taken busses to Washington and Philadelphia and occasion, I had a hard time imagining that such a thing could be possible, but apparently it is). And so buying a train ticket seemed absolutely necessary.
I had been told a lot of horror stories about how difficult it might be to purchase a Moscow-St. Petersburg ticket at this time of year. The summer is the most popular season for travel between the two cities, not just for foreign tourists but for Russians as well. I figured chances were good that tickets might be expensive, hard to come by, or both. And so for a long time I vacillated about whether I should even try to get to St. Petersburg at this time of year, or put off my visit until January or February, when getting a ticket might be easier.
Multiple options exist for buying rail tickets in Russia. Nowadays, of course, there is the Internet. Tickets can be purchased online and retrieved at the train station or, for a fee, be delivered to one's home or office. Another possibility is using ticket kiosks located in various locations around the city, including near my school. Because Russia has only recently developed a credit card culture, and still has no tradition of using checks, these kinds of kiosks are necessary for making all kinds of purchases and paying all kinds of bills for which Americans would use the phone or the internet.
I quickly found out, however, that online booking and kiosks carry surcharges, however, and so these did not appear to me to be attractive options. For a shorter journey to cities on the Golden Ring (more about those later, I hope), I might be willing to pay a surcharge. But on what I assumed would already be expensive Moscow-St. Petersburg tickets, I felt it was better to pursue a different option. I felt I would be forced to buy my tickets in what I was forewarned was the most time-consuming and difficult way, by going to the train station itself.
Foreigners in Russia tend to think buying tickets directly from the train station is the least convenient method of purchase, for three main reasons. The first is the language barrier. Russia is not a country known for making things easy for those who don't speak Russian, but at a travel agency or kiosk, chances are good that you can find someone who speaks English. No such luck at train stations; there, the staff speak only Russian and, I am told, are generally impatient with non-Russian speakers.
The second reason foreigners prefer not to buy directly from the station are long lines. I had been told to expect a wait of an hour or more to reach an actual cashier and make a purchase. I have the general impression that long lines are not as much a feature of Russian life today as they were in Soviet times, but there are still a few places they occur, and train stations tend to be one of them.
The third reason foreigners often prefer not to purchase tickets directly from the station is that it requires going to the exact right window at the exact right station. This is not always easy to ascertain. Moscow is served by a bewildering multitude of train stations. There is Belarus Station, for trains bound to Belarus and destinations requiring transit through Belarus (this includes Warsaw and most of Western Europe). There is Kazan Station, for tickets to Central Asia and the regions Americans lump together as the "Stans". There is Yaroslavl Station, serving trains bound for Yaroslavl and other cities on the Golden Ring, to Moscows north and east. And last, for my purposes, there is Leningrad Station (still so called), serving trains to Russia's tsarist capital. There are a few others, but these are the main ones, located on the Metro's Circle Line.
Simple enough, it would seem. But three of these stations are located at one Metro stop, Komosomolskaya, and one square. Finding my way to Leningrad Station, I thought, might prove difficult. And this would be before I joined an interminable queue at what might prove to be the wrong ticket window entirely. I did not relish the thought of having to make a station purchase.
Nonetheless, this morning I bit the bullet and headed out to Komsomolskaya Station, prepared for the worst. I took with me cash for my purchase as well as my passport (required of all train passengers in Russia, not just foreigners). But instead of the worst, I was pleasantly surprised.
I had expected, when I exited the Metro, to find myself in the middle of a square with three stations around me. Instead, I found myself in a warren of kiosks and small shops of the kind one finds everywhere in Moscow. A couple of large buildings fitting the general appearance of train stations were behind them. I walked toward the first, where I saw an outdoor ticket stand. I inquired of someone whether this station was Leningrad station and was told it was not, but that I should go the other direction. I turned around and headed where I had been told to go.
Very quickly, I found Komsomolskaya Square itself and saw the other two stations on it. One had enormous lettering on it reading Kazan Station. By process of elimination, I knew the other one must be Leningrad Station and quickly walked over to it.
Inside, I found, instead of a confusing mess, clear signage indicating where to buy Moscow-St. Petersburg tickets. And, instead of the hour-long queues I had anticpated, I found only a handful of passengers at each window making bookings. I could not have been more pleased.
Having expected the actual purchase to be a hassle, I had gotten a co-worker who studied Russian at university to write down for me what I should ask for. As soon as I got to the head of the line, I read off what had been written down for me and handed my passport. The cashier indicated the price for a return ticket in 2nd class would be about 4,500 rubles (a little under $200 U.S.), about what I was willing to pay. I handed in my passport, was issued my tickets, and went on my merry way.
It's comforting to know I can handle this kind of basic transaction reasonably well in Russian. I hit only one snag; the return ticket I was issued is for the wrong time, and I will have to go back and get it changed. But I now know when to go (Sundays around noon) and how to make clear what I want.
But I've got a ticket to ride, and I don't care.
There is really only one viable means of getting between Russia's former and current capitals, and that is by train. Russians have told me it is not even worth considering flying; a flight between Moscow and St. Petersburg will actually take longer, when pre-flight time at the airport and traffic going to and from airports is factored in. Busses are available, but I gather that traveling by bus is even less comfortable in Russia than it is in the United States (having taken busses to Washington and Philadelphia and occasion, I had a hard time imagining that such a thing could be possible, but apparently it is). And so buying a train ticket seemed absolutely necessary.
I had been told a lot of horror stories about how difficult it might be to purchase a Moscow-St. Petersburg ticket at this time of year. The summer is the most popular season for travel between the two cities, not just for foreign tourists but for Russians as well. I figured chances were good that tickets might be expensive, hard to come by, or both. And so for a long time I vacillated about whether I should even try to get to St. Petersburg at this time of year, or put off my visit until January or February, when getting a ticket might be easier.
Multiple options exist for buying rail tickets in Russia. Nowadays, of course, there is the Internet. Tickets can be purchased online and retrieved at the train station or, for a fee, be delivered to one's home or office. Another possibility is using ticket kiosks located in various locations around the city, including near my school. Because Russia has only recently developed a credit card culture, and still has no tradition of using checks, these kinds of kiosks are necessary for making all kinds of purchases and paying all kinds of bills for which Americans would use the phone or the internet.
I quickly found out, however, that online booking and kiosks carry surcharges, however, and so these did not appear to me to be attractive options. For a shorter journey to cities on the Golden Ring (more about those later, I hope), I might be willing to pay a surcharge. But on what I assumed would already be expensive Moscow-St. Petersburg tickets, I felt it was better to pursue a different option. I felt I would be forced to buy my tickets in what I was forewarned was the most time-consuming and difficult way, by going to the train station itself.
Foreigners in Russia tend to think buying tickets directly from the train station is the least convenient method of purchase, for three main reasons. The first is the language barrier. Russia is not a country known for making things easy for those who don't speak Russian, but at a travel agency or kiosk, chances are good that you can find someone who speaks English. No such luck at train stations; there, the staff speak only Russian and, I am told, are generally impatient with non-Russian speakers.
The second reason foreigners prefer not to buy directly from the station are long lines. I had been told to expect a wait of an hour or more to reach an actual cashier and make a purchase. I have the general impression that long lines are not as much a feature of Russian life today as they were in Soviet times, but there are still a few places they occur, and train stations tend to be one of them.
The third reason foreigners often prefer not to purchase tickets directly from the station is that it requires going to the exact right window at the exact right station. This is not always easy to ascertain. Moscow is served by a bewildering multitude of train stations. There is Belarus Station, for trains bound to Belarus and destinations requiring transit through Belarus (this includes Warsaw and most of Western Europe). There is Kazan Station, for tickets to Central Asia and the regions Americans lump together as the "Stans". There is Yaroslavl Station, serving trains bound for Yaroslavl and other cities on the Golden Ring, to Moscows north and east. And last, for my purposes, there is Leningrad Station (still so called), serving trains to Russia's tsarist capital. There are a few others, but these are the main ones, located on the Metro's Circle Line.
Simple enough, it would seem. But three of these stations are located at one Metro stop, Komosomolskaya, and one square. Finding my way to Leningrad Station, I thought, might prove difficult. And this would be before I joined an interminable queue at what might prove to be the wrong ticket window entirely. I did not relish the thought of having to make a station purchase.
Nonetheless, this morning I bit the bullet and headed out to Komsomolskaya Station, prepared for the worst. I took with me cash for my purchase as well as my passport (required of all train passengers in Russia, not just foreigners). But instead of the worst, I was pleasantly surprised.
I had expected, when I exited the Metro, to find myself in the middle of a square with three stations around me. Instead, I found myself in a warren of kiosks and small shops of the kind one finds everywhere in Moscow. A couple of large buildings fitting the general appearance of train stations were behind them. I walked toward the first, where I saw an outdoor ticket stand. I inquired of someone whether this station was Leningrad station and was told it was not, but that I should go the other direction. I turned around and headed where I had been told to go.
Very quickly, I found Komsomolskaya Square itself and saw the other two stations on it. One had enormous lettering on it reading Kazan Station. By process of elimination, I knew the other one must be Leningrad Station and quickly walked over to it.
Inside, I found, instead of a confusing mess, clear signage indicating where to buy Moscow-St. Petersburg tickets. And, instead of the hour-long queues I had anticpated, I found only a handful of passengers at each window making bookings. I could not have been more pleased.
Having expected the actual purchase to be a hassle, I had gotten a co-worker who studied Russian at university to write down for me what I should ask for. As soon as I got to the head of the line, I read off what had been written down for me and handed my passport. The cashier indicated the price for a return ticket in 2nd class would be about 4,500 rubles (a little under $200 U.S.), about what I was willing to pay. I handed in my passport, was issued my tickets, and went on my merry way.
It's comforting to know I can handle this kind of basic transaction reasonably well in Russian. I hit only one snag; the return ticket I was issued is for the wrong time, and I will have to go back and get it changed. But I now know when to go (Sundays around noon) and how to make clear what I want.
But I've got a ticket to ride, and I don't care.
Sex and Another Me
Today, I am a criminal.
No, I am not confessing to any involvement in the JonBenet Ramsey case (is there anyone left out there who doesn't think her parents did it for the insurance money?). I am not fessing up to a jewelry heist or a bank robbery. But I am a criminal nevertheless:
Tonight, I watched a copyrighted film, currently in theatres, via an illegal downloading site.
Now, unlike most of the people out there who do this, I like to think I have an excuse. At the present moment, I am at least a three-hour flight from any English-speaking country. Moscow gets more than its share of American movies--heck, I cannot recall the last time I saw a billboard ad for a film that wasn't American--but they are almost invariably shown dubbed in Russian. A few theatres, I am told, show the films dubbed but with an English translation provided by voice actors and delivered over headphones (I almost took a gig doing this myself), but few films are shown with the original English audio track because of complicated disputes between American studios and Russian distributors. So my ability to see an English-language film as it was intended to be seen is next to nill.
Generally, I consider myself not quite a technophobe but definitely not someone on the cutting edge of technology trends. It took graduating from college with no definite plans to get me to get a cell phone, and grad school exploration to get me to join Facebook. I took my plunge into streaming Hollywood films only because a fellow teacher with whom I had dinner mentioned how easy it was. That's about what it takes to sell me on new technology; if I am convinced a six-year-old could do it, I'll give it a whirl. Otherwise, I can't be bothered.
What movie did I choose for my foray into criminality, you ask? A thriller like Hitchcock? A splash musical like Mamma Mia? A guilty desire like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2?
No, not any of those. I turned criminal for, of all things, a peek at Carrie Bradshaw's nuptials in the Sex and the City movie.
People who know me well know that I have a complicated relationship with Carrie and her galpals. For a long time, I have been somewhat fascinated but mostly repulsed by these women. For all the hype about how modern and "liberated" the gals on Sex and the City supposedly are, I mostly find them to be shallow and vain. What Manolos have to do with modernity for women has always escaped me.
And yet, for a long time, I felt a need to gape at these women and, through them, at the life they seemed to represent, the life I associate with what I still call The Other New York. The Inescapable New York. The New York of New York Magazine, a fantasy world that, if it ventures beyond the Upper East Side at all, does so only to take a yardstick to property values in Carroll Gardens so that it can feel even richer.
And though I hate to confess it, for a long time I was under the spell of that New York.
When I first encountered Carrie and company, I had just moved to Brooklyn, to what I saw as my delxue apartment in the sky (only on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse, but what the hey?). A few months previous, a year of searching had finally landed me my first job, a position as a corporate paralegal at a big firm in Midtown. In September of that year, I had my fifteen minutes of fame when the New York Times real estate section did a piece on my apartment hunt. For a brief, shining minute, I was like the people at the opening of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, convinced that all my days would be sunny and fair.
Reality ultimately didn't turn out that way, of course, which is how, after a long series of events, I ended up here. But for a time, I thought I was on my way up, up, up in the world. I bought a bedroom full of white IKEA furniture and painted my rented walls a deep shade of blue. Interior decorating became as much my obsession as strappy sandals were Carrie Bradshaw's. And I felt an urge to find out about what I understood to be the sophisticated world Sex and the City represented. Over the course of two and a half months, I rented all six seasons of SATC on DVD and watched them from under my gold jacquard bedding.
Over the course of those six months, my feelings about the Carrie Bradshaw world soured. I was seeing appalling behavior from the attorneys at my office and appalling behavior from the computer screen at home. Yet somehow I felt trapped into having to pursue that kind of life, even if, deep down, I knew I didn't really want it. My family had just spent a lot of money to help me get up and onto my feet, and I couldn't just throw it away just because it didn't really make me happy. Or so my thinking went at the time.
Eventually, things came to a head. Depression set in. And to make matters even worse, I lost the job I had spent so much time desperately trying to find. But instead of reassessing whether this was really a life I wanted, and taking steps to get one I did, I told myself I had no choice but to look for another, similar job. A period of unemployment was not the time, I believed, to try to find a new career, let alone a new life.
Shortly before I lost my job, the final touches to my efforts at decorating arrived at my door: cheap reproductions of vintage travel posters I had bought to give my bedroom a funky, retro feel. I had bought them thinking they would make my room into an oasis of escape, not the thing that prevented my escape. I can still see them now, in their gorgeous yellows and greens, beckoning me to see far off France and Italy, places I was sure I would never actually set foot on.
I still don't know if I'll ever make it to France or Italy, though at the moment my sites are set on St. Petersburg (I hope to get there at the end of this month). Now I am off traveling instead of creating a fantasy world of travel in my bedroom. It took another lost job, and months and months of searching for a position that would give me a shot at joining The Other New York, before I finally sold off the IKEA furniture, gave the vintage travel posters to a friend for safekeeping, and got on a plane.
Seeing Carrie Bradshaw again makes me realize just how much I have managed to grow up in the past four years. Despite all the drama and all the problems, I have made progress. I have gotten on pills and conquered my depression. I finally mustered enough self-respect to take a job in a country I actually did want to go to, to do work I actually did want to do, after an abortive stint in a country I had never had any eagerness to see.
But most of all, I am no longer under the spell of The Other New York. First, I looked on the Carrie Bradshaws of the world as people to envy, then as people to hate because I thought they were keeping me down. But now, finally, I can look on them with what they deserve: my complete and total indifference.
I still harbor dreams of making it back to the Big Apple. But my dreams now center around a graduate program at Jewish Theological Seminary and hopes of finding work that gives me meaning and self-respect, not just a paycheck. I know now that there are many, many different New Yorks, not just one.
And I just may have a good shot of finding mine.
No, I am not confessing to any involvement in the JonBenet Ramsey case (is there anyone left out there who doesn't think her parents did it for the insurance money?). I am not fessing up to a jewelry heist or a bank robbery. But I am a criminal nevertheless:
Tonight, I watched a copyrighted film, currently in theatres, via an illegal downloading site.
Now, unlike most of the people out there who do this, I like to think I have an excuse. At the present moment, I am at least a three-hour flight from any English-speaking country. Moscow gets more than its share of American movies--heck, I cannot recall the last time I saw a billboard ad for a film that wasn't American--but they are almost invariably shown dubbed in Russian. A few theatres, I am told, show the films dubbed but with an English translation provided by voice actors and delivered over headphones (I almost took a gig doing this myself), but few films are shown with the original English audio track because of complicated disputes between American studios and Russian distributors. So my ability to see an English-language film as it was intended to be seen is next to nill.
Generally, I consider myself not quite a technophobe but definitely not someone on the cutting edge of technology trends. It took graduating from college with no definite plans to get me to get a cell phone, and grad school exploration to get me to join Facebook. I took my plunge into streaming Hollywood films only because a fellow teacher with whom I had dinner mentioned how easy it was. That's about what it takes to sell me on new technology; if I am convinced a six-year-old could do it, I'll give it a whirl. Otherwise, I can't be bothered.
What movie did I choose for my foray into criminality, you ask? A thriller like Hitchcock? A splash musical like Mamma Mia? A guilty desire like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2?
No, not any of those. I turned criminal for, of all things, a peek at Carrie Bradshaw's nuptials in the Sex and the City movie.
People who know me well know that I have a complicated relationship with Carrie and her galpals. For a long time, I have been somewhat fascinated but mostly repulsed by these women. For all the hype about how modern and "liberated" the gals on Sex and the City supposedly are, I mostly find them to be shallow and vain. What Manolos have to do with modernity for women has always escaped me.
And yet, for a long time, I felt a need to gape at these women and, through them, at the life they seemed to represent, the life I associate with what I still call The Other New York. The Inescapable New York. The New York of New York Magazine, a fantasy world that, if it ventures beyond the Upper East Side at all, does so only to take a yardstick to property values in Carroll Gardens so that it can feel even richer.
And though I hate to confess it, for a long time I was under the spell of that New York.
When I first encountered Carrie and company, I had just moved to Brooklyn, to what I saw as my delxue apartment in the sky (only on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse, but what the hey?). A few months previous, a year of searching had finally landed me my first job, a position as a corporate paralegal at a big firm in Midtown. In September of that year, I had my fifteen minutes of fame when the New York Times real estate section did a piece on my apartment hunt. For a brief, shining minute, I was like the people at the opening of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, convinced that all my days would be sunny and fair.
Reality ultimately didn't turn out that way, of course, which is how, after a long series of events, I ended up here. But for a time, I thought I was on my way up, up, up in the world. I bought a bedroom full of white IKEA furniture and painted my rented walls a deep shade of blue. Interior decorating became as much my obsession as strappy sandals were Carrie Bradshaw's. And I felt an urge to find out about what I understood to be the sophisticated world Sex and the City represented. Over the course of two and a half months, I rented all six seasons of SATC on DVD and watched them from under my gold jacquard bedding.
Over the course of those six months, my feelings about the Carrie Bradshaw world soured. I was seeing appalling behavior from the attorneys at my office and appalling behavior from the computer screen at home. Yet somehow I felt trapped into having to pursue that kind of life, even if, deep down, I knew I didn't really want it. My family had just spent a lot of money to help me get up and onto my feet, and I couldn't just throw it away just because it didn't really make me happy. Or so my thinking went at the time.
Eventually, things came to a head. Depression set in. And to make matters even worse, I lost the job I had spent so much time desperately trying to find. But instead of reassessing whether this was really a life I wanted, and taking steps to get one I did, I told myself I had no choice but to look for another, similar job. A period of unemployment was not the time, I believed, to try to find a new career, let alone a new life.
Shortly before I lost my job, the final touches to my efforts at decorating arrived at my door: cheap reproductions of vintage travel posters I had bought to give my bedroom a funky, retro feel. I had bought them thinking they would make my room into an oasis of escape, not the thing that prevented my escape. I can still see them now, in their gorgeous yellows and greens, beckoning me to see far off France and Italy, places I was sure I would never actually set foot on.
I still don't know if I'll ever make it to France or Italy, though at the moment my sites are set on St. Petersburg (I hope to get there at the end of this month). Now I am off traveling instead of creating a fantasy world of travel in my bedroom. It took another lost job, and months and months of searching for a position that would give me a shot at joining The Other New York, before I finally sold off the IKEA furniture, gave the vintage travel posters to a friend for safekeeping, and got on a plane.
Seeing Carrie Bradshaw again makes me realize just how much I have managed to grow up in the past four years. Despite all the drama and all the problems, I have made progress. I have gotten on pills and conquered my depression. I finally mustered enough self-respect to take a job in a country I actually did want to go to, to do work I actually did want to do, after an abortive stint in a country I had never had any eagerness to see.
But most of all, I am no longer under the spell of The Other New York. First, I looked on the Carrie Bradshaws of the world as people to envy, then as people to hate because I thought they were keeping me down. But now, finally, I can look on them with what they deserve: my complete and total indifference.
I still harbor dreams of making it back to the Big Apple. But my dreams now center around a graduate program at Jewish Theological Seminary and hopes of finding work that gives me meaning and self-respect, not just a paycheck. I know now that there are many, many different New Yorks, not just one.
And I just may have a good shot of finding mine.
07 August 2008
Livin' La Vida Moskva
One thing I find myself doing over and over again as an EFL teacher is asking basic "getting to know you" questions: What's your name? What do you do? Where are you from?
The last of these is the one that tends to come up the most. At all levels of English, students have to be prepared to discuss their background and life story with people they meet. A beginner can get by with, "I'm Russian"; more advanced students may have to discuss tourist accomodations in their native cities. But I guess asking questions about strangers' origins is part of human nature, since every foreign language textbook I have ever seen--for English, Hebrew, French, or Russian--dwelt on it. Only when I was forced to take Latin and Greek in high school do I not recall having to ask and answer these types of questions. Homer pretty much told us where Achilles was from.
When I ask this question of Muscovites, I have found, one answer tends to be repeated over and over again: Moscow. For a long time, I suspected that there was almost no one in Moscow who was not born here, or who would admit to not being born here. I had heard a bit about Russia's system of registrations and internal passports, and read a few news articles to the effect that millions of people are now living in Moscow without proper registration, and figured that people not born in Moscow might have difficulty getting official permission to live here and might therefore have a status akin to that of illegal immigrants Stateside.
I was very surprised, therefore, on Tuesday, when Volodya told me he had been born in Riga but raised in a city of about 300,000 located about 1000 kilometers from Moscow. This gave me all the cue I needed to ask about how registration actually works in Russia. I told him that few people I had met so far hailed from anywhere far from Moscow and inquired about the registration process in Russia. To make my point clear, I told him that in the United States, the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to live where he pleases.
Volodya told me that the same right exists under Russia's constitution. Though it originated in tsarist times and was most extensively used to control population movements by the Soviet regime, Russia's registration system is no longer a means of keeping people under a tight fist. Rather, it is a means of forcing compliance with ordiannces about how many people can live in one apartment.
As I gathered from Volodya, the system works as follows: if a person changes his place of residence for more than ninety days, he has to go and register with the police in his new locale. Any police officer may, at any time, ask to see people's registration documents. Registration is not difficult to get if you buy a house in your new location, but if you rent, you need the cooperation of your landlord. Violation of the registration laws carries a fine, but it never involves being forced to leave the city in which you failed to register properly.
Once I processsed what Volodya had said, I realized this system was no more oppressive than having to change your driver's license when you move in the United States. It may not be as common for Americans to carry their passport around with them as it is in other countries, but I am beginning to realize this is more because our driver's licenses have information that, in other countries, is only on a passport.
So indeed, it's not very difficult for Russians who wish to relocate to Moscow to do so. No efforts are being made to limit who can live here.
Any Russian who wants to can live la vida Moskva.
The last of these is the one that tends to come up the most. At all levels of English, students have to be prepared to discuss their background and life story with people they meet. A beginner can get by with, "I'm Russian"; more advanced students may have to discuss tourist accomodations in their native cities. But I guess asking questions about strangers' origins is part of human nature, since every foreign language textbook I have ever seen--for English, Hebrew, French, or Russian--dwelt on it. Only when I was forced to take Latin and Greek in high school do I not recall having to ask and answer these types of questions. Homer pretty much told us where Achilles was from.
When I ask this question of Muscovites, I have found, one answer tends to be repeated over and over again: Moscow. For a long time, I suspected that there was almost no one in Moscow who was not born here, or who would admit to not being born here. I had heard a bit about Russia's system of registrations and internal passports, and read a few news articles to the effect that millions of people are now living in Moscow without proper registration, and figured that people not born in Moscow might have difficulty getting official permission to live here and might therefore have a status akin to that of illegal immigrants Stateside.
I was very surprised, therefore, on Tuesday, when Volodya told me he had been born in Riga but raised in a city of about 300,000 located about 1000 kilometers from Moscow. This gave me all the cue I needed to ask about how registration actually works in Russia. I told him that few people I had met so far hailed from anywhere far from Moscow and inquired about the registration process in Russia. To make my point clear, I told him that in the United States, the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to live where he pleases.
Volodya told me that the same right exists under Russia's constitution. Though it originated in tsarist times and was most extensively used to control population movements by the Soviet regime, Russia's registration system is no longer a means of keeping people under a tight fist. Rather, it is a means of forcing compliance with ordiannces about how many people can live in one apartment.
As I gathered from Volodya, the system works as follows: if a person changes his place of residence for more than ninety days, he has to go and register with the police in his new locale. Any police officer may, at any time, ask to see people's registration documents. Registration is not difficult to get if you buy a house in your new location, but if you rent, you need the cooperation of your landlord. Violation of the registration laws carries a fine, but it never involves being forced to leave the city in which you failed to register properly.
Once I processsed what Volodya had said, I realized this system was no more oppressive than having to change your driver's license when you move in the United States. It may not be as common for Americans to carry their passport around with them as it is in other countries, but I am beginning to realize this is more because our driver's licenses have information that, in other countries, is only on a passport.
So indeed, it's not very difficult for Russians who wish to relocate to Moscow to do so. No efforts are being made to limit who can live here.
Any Russian who wants to can live la vida Moskva.
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