Yes, you understood the title right: the Far East Side Minyan has been delivering the finest in commentary on Taoyuan, Taiwan; then Wichita, Kansas; and now Moscow, Russia there is to offer, for almost one solid year. On September 30th, 2007, I sat down at my laptop, in the home of a couple of good friends on the Upper West Side with whom I was then staying, and set to create the blog I had promised various friends I would keep during what I expected to be a stint of a year or two in Taiwan. Before I even left New York, I had already written five posts.
Well, things have been topsy-turvy since then, as those of you who have been following this blog for a solid year already know. Taiwan aggressively did not work out. The Far East Side Minyan became, temporarily, the Midwest Side Minyan, then (albeit without a formal change of name) the East Side of Europe Minyan.
But in a way, it was the beginning of the end--the end of dealing with life in a spirit of desperation, clutching at any straw that floated into my field of vision instead of figuring out what I really wanted out of life and how to go about getting it. Bit by bit, I know I am getting to where I belong in the world. Moscow is an important step--but just a step--in that direction. But things are working out here better than I expected or even hoped when I accepted the position in January. I know I have a long-term future in teaching (though probably not in teaching EFL), and I am taking steps to prepare for that future. My application to an education program at American Jewish University remains pending, but I have most of my materials together for an application to an education program at Jewish Theological Seminary, which I will dispatch in a couple of months.
So progress has happened the past year, even if not in the ways I had hoped for when I left for Taiwan. I am doing something amazing, each and every day, and am on the cusp (if being a year away from something can be called the cusp) of something even more amazing. It's hard not to look on all of that with a great measure of gratitude.
The realization that my life in New York is almost 525,600 minutes behind me has had some effects. I suppose homesickness was bound to set in sooner or later; it's an evitable side effect of deciding (or in my case, feeling forced) to roam the world. But I find my thoughts turning toward the mess of a city between the East River and Nassau County more and more these days. Part of the reason for that, I know, is that I am nearing the anniversary of my departure. I timed leaving New York to make sure it happened after the cycle of the Jewish holidays in the fall that begins with Rosh Hashannah and ends with Simchat Torah. And behold, Rosh Hashannah is upon us once again. This year, my body will spend the High Holidays at a synagogue two blocks from my apartment building (to think I had to go halfway around the world to end up within walking distance of a shul), but my heart will spend it where it spends it every year: at 100th Street and West End Avenue, among cherished friends I have seen in almost a year.
Today, peering through the New York Times website to find information on Wall Street's financial meltdown, I noticed a story about a new Google service that will give subway directions in New York. There have been services like this before; I got a lot of cheers three years ago when I introduced my friends to a site called hopstop.com that did much the same thing (previously, only driving directions had been available online, which are pretty much worthless in a city where even the billionaire mayor is a straphanger). The big difference in Google's service is that it coordinates with other regional transit authorities, like the PATH trains between Manhattan and New Jersey and the Long Island Rail Road. Curious to see how well it compared to what I remembered of hopstop.com, I clicked on a link and set about investigating Google's service.
Here's what I found out: the service failed to give the best directions between my last address in New York and my last place of employment. In twenty minutes of trying different addresses, not once did I get directions involving a bus line--something I regularly pulled up on hopstop.com when I lived in New York. But I did get to see, on the now all-too-familar Google maps (they appear on television news these days, for goodness sake), a red line snaking up from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side, the route I cursed every Saturday morning for two years as I rode the G train, then the A/C, then the 2/3 (often at a snail's pace, since far more weekends than not, the 2/3 express became the 1 local because of track work).
And that somehow brought back a host of other memories--afternoons browsing at the Strand bookstore near Union Square, the cozy look Park Slope had at sunset in autumn, the annual announcement from my rabbi that "Manhattanhenge" (a day in the summer when the sun perfectly aligns with the Manhattan street grid) was nearing. All afternoon, as I prepared for a new class I started teaching tonight, home flooded back to me.
It's weird to think I've now been in Moscow almost five months, a fact I let my students discover tonight during a getting-to-know-you activity. And it's weirder still to think that the chance are good of my being back in New York, and in New York's Jewish community, only 525,600 minutes from now.
24 September 2008
21 September 2008
The Fanta Menace
I ended up having a rather dull weekend for two main reasons. The first is that I was stuck in the apartment much of Saturday while a repairman came and installed our new washing machine. Installed the machine is at last, but it is not quite ready for prime time; apparently, in order to get it to work, I need to turn some kind of tap under the sink, and the tap in question absolutely refuses to budge. The repairman tried to show me how to get it to work, but the language barrier inevitably got in our way. I will have to try to sort this out in my school's Central Office tomorrow.
The other reason I had a dull weekend was that I signed up to proctor mock examinations at my school. Preparation classes for the First Certificate Exam (FCE) and Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) are a big part of our business, it seems, and a few Sundays a year, we run mock examinations to help our students get used to real exam conditions. My part in this was to proctor two young women taking a practice FCE exam--that is to say, reading a travel guide to Ukraine while the young women in question worked away. Later, I got to be part of the listening section of the test, which involves getting two test-takers to try to have fairly mundane conversations with the "interlocutor" (as we are called...the name makes me wonder where Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones are hiding), and with each other.
In the midst of all this tedium, however, I got to spend a bit of time watching YouTube videos. I have discovered lately that, because of lax enforcement of copyright laws, YouTube is a gold mine of film and television treasures and "treasures" from years past. So far, I have seen History Channel documentaries on the Ku Klux Klan, the Reformation, and religious conceptions of Hell; the entire ouevre of James Burke, famous for Connections and The Day the Universe Changed; and a couple of recent Jane Austen adaptations (including a version of Sense and Sensibility that actually managed to get the book damn near spot-on). But having little better to do this weekend, I ended up tackling Michael Moore, in his own Bowling for Columbine and in an indy documentary from five years ago called The Corporation.
When it first appeared, The Corporation was the kind of movie I would have rather died tha go see. I was far more politically conservative then, and the last thing I felt a need to watch was what I presumed would be a three-hour diatribe on the evils of the capitalist system. But, my views having mellowed a bit since then, I thought it might be time to give The Corporation a fairer hearing.
The main thesis of The Corporation is that the modern corporation, which not only claims but has been given many of the legal rights of a person, is an essentially psychopathic person: devoid of ethical standards, remorseless, and willing to do anything and everything to achieve its malevolent ends. At best, the film contends, corporations are amoral, and worst actively evil. The film traces the rise of corporations all the way back to the enclosures of the commons in England that ultimately led to the industrial revolution.
Naturally, the film trots out numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing over the years, from Bechtel's attempts to corner the Bolivian water supply in 2000 to the "business plot" to depose Franklin Roosevelt by force. Allegations that IBM was involved in the running of the Nazi death camps are given ample screen time.
While I am more sympathetic to discussions of this kind of corporate wrongdoing than I was a few years ago, I found myself largely unconvinced that the existence of the corporation per se was the ultimate cause of all these horrors. In the absence of limited liability corporations, wealthy businessmen acting alone might have committed many of the same injustices the film lays at the feet of corporations. In some instances, the film clearly chose to ignore inconvenient counter evidence (ignoring, for instance, that IBM lost control of its German subsidiaries in 1941 and also manufactured weapons for the Allies during the Second World War, all of which would indicate that IBM was not simply a villain with respect to the Nazi regime).
Moreover, the film frequently faults corporations for blind indifference to what economists call "externalities" (effects of a transaction that are borne by people who are not parties to the transaction). But the film ignores that, as economists use the term, an externality is not simply a euphemism for evils like pollution but a term that encompasses positive as well as negative effects borne by the general public. For instance, when the owner of a seed store sells someone seeds he uses to plant a garden in front of his house, this may have a positive impact on both property values and perceived quality of life in a neighborhood. But by only discussing negative externalities, the film in many ways distorts the record of corporations.
At other times, the film simply failed to prove that the evils it discussed were caused specifically by the existence of corporations as such. A case in point is its discussion of how a Fox television station chose to squelch a news story about how a hormone Monsanto manufactured to be used on cows was linked to cancer in humans. It is clear that the story was squelched largely because Fox became concerned that Monsanto would pull its advertising. But this kind of manipulation of the news occurred long before the modern corporation (look at how biased reporting was in the days of Adams and Jefferson).
But what I found hardest to stomach were the times The Corporation veered completely off the deep end. The biggest example of this came in a discussion of how Coca-Cola reacted to the beginning of the Second World War. As the film presents it, Coke's biggest concern was that it would not able to keep its bottling plants in Germany churning out Coca-Cola during the war. This ultimately proved to be the case as the war interrupted supplies of the kola nut to Germany. Coke's solution to this was to start producing an orange drink called Fanta (still marketed and popular in many countries, including the United States).
My big reaction to this was a big "So What?" It's hard to see any way in which selling or not selling Coca-Cola in Hitler's Germany would have had any effect on the Nazi regime. Selling sweetened and flavored carbonated water is a morally neutral act. Unlike in the case of South Africa, it's unclear that divestment in Nazi Germany would have produced any results, particularly with a madman like Hitler at the helm. The film made no allegation that Coca-Cola benefitted in any way from concentration camp or other unfree labor during the Nazi years, nor even that it sought to do so. Calling Fanta "the Nazi drink" (as Michael Moore did at one point in the film) is a bit like saying that, because people in Communist Russia ate bread, eating bread is somehow immoral.
In another instance, the film failed because it failed to differentiate between a real solution and mere grandstanding. Showing scenes in which a group of California attorneys called for the state attorney general to revoke Unocal's charter because of its "many crimes against humanity," the film seemed to argue that goverment can reign in corporate power by using existing powers to disband corporations that are acting against the public interest. What this argument ignores, however, is taht Unocal and myriad firms like it can just re-establish themselves in places where the law is more lax (like Delaware or South Dakota).
To The Corporation's credit, however, it at least did not devolve into calls for a communist revolution; indeed, the film did acknowledge (however briefly) that injustice has been committed in the service of proletarian revolution as well as in the service of profit. But in a way, this failure actually worked against the film, insofar as it presents no real alternative to the existence of corporations. Especially in the modern world, there does not seem to really be one. There are whole industries (automobiles, computers, airlines) that not only could not operate with their present efficiency, but could not operate at all, if they were not operated by corporations. No individual--not even a Bill Gates--has the capital to maintain and run Motorola or General Motors. In these instances, the only viable alternative to the corporation is government ownership.
I am not saying that government management of a field of human endeavor is inherently a bad thing; clearly, we are better off having municipal fire departments than we were in the days when fire protection was a private business and a fire company would just pass you buy if you weren't one of its customers. But living in a country that is still suffering the after-effects of far too much direct government management of industry, I know that having the government produce our automobiles and our toothpaste is not really a solution, either.
The other reason I had a dull weekend was that I signed up to proctor mock examinations at my school. Preparation classes for the First Certificate Exam (FCE) and Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) are a big part of our business, it seems, and a few Sundays a year, we run mock examinations to help our students get used to real exam conditions. My part in this was to proctor two young women taking a practice FCE exam--that is to say, reading a travel guide to Ukraine while the young women in question worked away. Later, I got to be part of the listening section of the test, which involves getting two test-takers to try to have fairly mundane conversations with the "interlocutor" (as we are called...the name makes me wonder where Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones are hiding), and with each other.
In the midst of all this tedium, however, I got to spend a bit of time watching YouTube videos. I have discovered lately that, because of lax enforcement of copyright laws, YouTube is a gold mine of film and television treasures and "treasures" from years past. So far, I have seen History Channel documentaries on the Ku Klux Klan, the Reformation, and religious conceptions of Hell; the entire ouevre of James Burke, famous for Connections and The Day the Universe Changed; and a couple of recent Jane Austen adaptations (including a version of Sense and Sensibility that actually managed to get the book damn near spot-on). But having little better to do this weekend, I ended up tackling Michael Moore, in his own Bowling for Columbine and in an indy documentary from five years ago called The Corporation.
When it first appeared, The Corporation was the kind of movie I would have rather died tha go see. I was far more politically conservative then, and the last thing I felt a need to watch was what I presumed would be a three-hour diatribe on the evils of the capitalist system. But, my views having mellowed a bit since then, I thought it might be time to give The Corporation a fairer hearing.
The main thesis of The Corporation is that the modern corporation, which not only claims but has been given many of the legal rights of a person, is an essentially psychopathic person: devoid of ethical standards, remorseless, and willing to do anything and everything to achieve its malevolent ends. At best, the film contends, corporations are amoral, and worst actively evil. The film traces the rise of corporations all the way back to the enclosures of the commons in England that ultimately led to the industrial revolution.
Naturally, the film trots out numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing over the years, from Bechtel's attempts to corner the Bolivian water supply in 2000 to the "business plot" to depose Franklin Roosevelt by force. Allegations that IBM was involved in the running of the Nazi death camps are given ample screen time.
While I am more sympathetic to discussions of this kind of corporate wrongdoing than I was a few years ago, I found myself largely unconvinced that the existence of the corporation per se was the ultimate cause of all these horrors. In the absence of limited liability corporations, wealthy businessmen acting alone might have committed many of the same injustices the film lays at the feet of corporations. In some instances, the film clearly chose to ignore inconvenient counter evidence (ignoring, for instance, that IBM lost control of its German subsidiaries in 1941 and also manufactured weapons for the Allies during the Second World War, all of which would indicate that IBM was not simply a villain with respect to the Nazi regime).
Moreover, the film frequently faults corporations for blind indifference to what economists call "externalities" (effects of a transaction that are borne by people who are not parties to the transaction). But the film ignores that, as economists use the term, an externality is not simply a euphemism for evils like pollution but a term that encompasses positive as well as negative effects borne by the general public. For instance, when the owner of a seed store sells someone seeds he uses to plant a garden in front of his house, this may have a positive impact on both property values and perceived quality of life in a neighborhood. But by only discussing negative externalities, the film in many ways distorts the record of corporations.
At other times, the film simply failed to prove that the evils it discussed were caused specifically by the existence of corporations as such. A case in point is its discussion of how a Fox television station chose to squelch a news story about how a hormone Monsanto manufactured to be used on cows was linked to cancer in humans. It is clear that the story was squelched largely because Fox became concerned that Monsanto would pull its advertising. But this kind of manipulation of the news occurred long before the modern corporation (look at how biased reporting was in the days of Adams and Jefferson).
But what I found hardest to stomach were the times The Corporation veered completely off the deep end. The biggest example of this came in a discussion of how Coca-Cola reacted to the beginning of the Second World War. As the film presents it, Coke's biggest concern was that it would not able to keep its bottling plants in Germany churning out Coca-Cola during the war. This ultimately proved to be the case as the war interrupted supplies of the kola nut to Germany. Coke's solution to this was to start producing an orange drink called Fanta (still marketed and popular in many countries, including the United States).
My big reaction to this was a big "So What?" It's hard to see any way in which selling or not selling Coca-Cola in Hitler's Germany would have had any effect on the Nazi regime. Selling sweetened and flavored carbonated water is a morally neutral act. Unlike in the case of South Africa, it's unclear that divestment in Nazi Germany would have produced any results, particularly with a madman like Hitler at the helm. The film made no allegation that Coca-Cola benefitted in any way from concentration camp or other unfree labor during the Nazi years, nor even that it sought to do so. Calling Fanta "the Nazi drink" (as Michael Moore did at one point in the film) is a bit like saying that, because people in Communist Russia ate bread, eating bread is somehow immoral.
In another instance, the film failed because it failed to differentiate between a real solution and mere grandstanding. Showing scenes in which a group of California attorneys called for the state attorney general to revoke Unocal's charter because of its "many crimes against humanity," the film seemed to argue that goverment can reign in corporate power by using existing powers to disband corporations that are acting against the public interest. What this argument ignores, however, is taht Unocal and myriad firms like it can just re-establish themselves in places where the law is more lax (like Delaware or South Dakota).
To The Corporation's credit, however, it at least did not devolve into calls for a communist revolution; indeed, the film did acknowledge (however briefly) that injustice has been committed in the service of proletarian revolution as well as in the service of profit. But in a way, this failure actually worked against the film, insofar as it presents no real alternative to the existence of corporations. Especially in the modern world, there does not seem to really be one. There are whole industries (automobiles, computers, airlines) that not only could not operate with their present efficiency, but could not operate at all, if they were not operated by corporations. No individual--not even a Bill Gates--has the capital to maintain and run Motorola or General Motors. In these instances, the only viable alternative to the corporation is government ownership.
I am not saying that government management of a field of human endeavor is inherently a bad thing; clearly, we are better off having municipal fire departments than we were in the days when fire protection was a private business and a fire company would just pass you buy if you weren't one of its customers. But living in a country that is still suffering the after-effects of far too much direct government management of industry, I know that having the government produce our automobiles and our toothpaste is not really a solution, either.
15 September 2008
Life's Grand on the Collective Farm
I ended up staying home sick today (I'll spare you any graphic details of illness; let's just say this was all due to a bad plate of Hungarian ghoulash and leave it at that). Whatever I had, I knew was not serious enough to warrant a trip to the doctor, so I self-medicated with Sprite and plenty of Web browsing until, in the late afternoon, I felt well enough to venture outside in search of something to eat.
In retrospect, though, it was a good thing I did stay home, because it meant I was home when a woman in my school's central office rang about 4:00 to ask if I would be home at six. I told her I would and asked why she needed to know. And then I heard words I have been longing to hear ever since I arrived in Moscow four months ago:
"Alexei [the school driver and sometime handyman] is delivering a washing machine to your flat."
For the past four months, I have managed my laundry situation (if you can call it managing) through a method I call Ignoring the Massive Pile of Dirty Clothes on Your Bedroom Floor. Basically, I wash clothes every two to three days, on an as-needed basis, but always planning ahead to be sure I won't run out of clothes faster than air-drying can get anything dry enough to wear. I assume this to be about two days for a pair of slacks hung on a hanger in the hall closet, a bit less if I can get a bit of steam pipe in the bathroom free to clean them (trickier now that a new roommate has moved in and I must now share the steam pipe with him).
I guess that, in the modern age, we don't get much chance to be rhapsodically joyful about technology. The latest in digital television may get a few oohs and ahs at a trade show, but it doesn't seem magical the way television must have when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Even the Internet we take for granted. I finally have a great Internet connection that doesn't cut out every two minutes, and what do I use it for? Mostly, online Scrabble (and the occasional Blog post, of course).
But after living without a washer for four months, finally having one gives me a feeling I can only explain by describing, fittingly, a piece of retro Soviet art. All over Moscow, there are souvenir vendors selling reproductions of Soviet propaganda posters, I assume mostly to foreign tourists. One of them shows two figures in the foreground: a man in overalls and a cap and a woman with her hair in a kerchief, obviously farmers. In the background is a tractor, probably the first these people have ever had or seen. The woman has her hand cupped up to her mouth and is shouting, presumably, at the people of the 1930s who would have seen this picture. Underneath this scene is something in Russian that, while I can't translate it, probably means something like, "Ain't life grand on the collective farm?"
Okay, obviously this is a propaganda poster and a total distortion of life in Stalinist Russia (a more realistic poster would say something like, "ain't life grand now that Pop's been shot for having five kopecks more than our neighbor down the road"). But something like that excitement over a new piece of technology is what I briefly got to experience today. This machine will mean no more massive pile of clothes on my floor. It will mean no more having to hope to God that a pair of socks dries in time for me to wear it tomorrow, when I realize I didn't have quite as many clean pairs saved up on my dresser as I thought I had.
And so, for one shining moment at least, life is grand here on the collective farm.
In retrospect, though, it was a good thing I did stay home, because it meant I was home when a woman in my school's central office rang about 4:00 to ask if I would be home at six. I told her I would and asked why she needed to know. And then I heard words I have been longing to hear ever since I arrived in Moscow four months ago:
"Alexei [the school driver and sometime handyman] is delivering a washing machine to your flat."
For the past four months, I have managed my laundry situation (if you can call it managing) through a method I call Ignoring the Massive Pile of Dirty Clothes on Your Bedroom Floor. Basically, I wash clothes every two to three days, on an as-needed basis, but always planning ahead to be sure I won't run out of clothes faster than air-drying can get anything dry enough to wear. I assume this to be about two days for a pair of slacks hung on a hanger in the hall closet, a bit less if I can get a bit of steam pipe in the bathroom free to clean them (trickier now that a new roommate has moved in and I must now share the steam pipe with him).
I guess that, in the modern age, we don't get much chance to be rhapsodically joyful about technology. The latest in digital television may get a few oohs and ahs at a trade show, but it doesn't seem magical the way television must have when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Even the Internet we take for granted. I finally have a great Internet connection that doesn't cut out every two minutes, and what do I use it for? Mostly, online Scrabble (and the occasional Blog post, of course).
But after living without a washer for four months, finally having one gives me a feeling I can only explain by describing, fittingly, a piece of retro Soviet art. All over Moscow, there are souvenir vendors selling reproductions of Soviet propaganda posters, I assume mostly to foreign tourists. One of them shows two figures in the foreground: a man in overalls and a cap and a woman with her hair in a kerchief, obviously farmers. In the background is a tractor, probably the first these people have ever had or seen. The woman has her hand cupped up to her mouth and is shouting, presumably, at the people of the 1930s who would have seen this picture. Underneath this scene is something in Russian that, while I can't translate it, probably means something like, "Ain't life grand on the collective farm?"
Okay, obviously this is a propaganda poster and a total distortion of life in Stalinist Russia (a more realistic poster would say something like, "ain't life grand now that Pop's been shot for having five kopecks more than our neighbor down the road"). But something like that excitement over a new piece of technology is what I briefly got to experience today. This machine will mean no more massive pile of clothes on my floor. It will mean no more having to hope to God that a pair of socks dries in time for me to wear it tomorrow, when I realize I didn't have quite as many clean pairs saved up on my dresser as I thought I had.
And so, for one shining moment at least, life is grand here on the collective farm.
14 September 2008
Mapping Out a Future, Part Two
From Palace Square, I proceeded to the main entrance of the Hermitage (not on Palace Square but very close to it). The Hermitage is actually situated in two main buildings that have been connected, the Old Hermitage and the Winter Palace, the latter having served as the official residence of the tsars before the October Revolution. The building is a giant confectionary work, a masterpiece of baroque architecture. Currently it is painted sage green, but when it was first built, it was a kind of turquoise blue. During the nineteenth century, apparently, it was painted Venetian red (I am rather astonished the Bolsheviks did not retain this color after the Revolution).
When I reached the entrance, a line was already stretching, in anticipation of the museum's opening at half past ten. Though not at long as my guidebook indicated it would be on a warmer day (at the height of the tourist season in August, the line can stretch as far as the arch of the General Staff Building), it was still fairly long, and I resigned myself to a long wait. A stroke of luck, however, made the wait unnecessary. No sooner had I entered into the line than a guide approached me and offered to let me join her group for a two-hour tour of the Hermitage State rooms. She said that if I did, I could skip the line and would not have to buy a ticket, as she already had several tickets purchased for this group. I felt the price was reasonable and followed her to her group.
At precisely half past ten, the museum opened, and we all went inside. The first marvel to be seen in the Hermitage is called the Jordan Staircase. Above the staircase is an opulent baroque painting that, I was amazed to find out, was not a fresco but rather a work on canvas held into the plaster. The climate of St. Petersburg being extremely moist, fresco was not really a practical form of art. So where palaces in other cities would have frescos, the Winter Palace stretched canvases and suspended them in plaster.
It was not the only trick of the eye I was to see in the Hermitage. Virtually all of the "marble" in the building, it turned out, was not really marble but rather plasted coated to look like marble. This is due not to the cheapness of the tsars but rather, once again, to the St. Petersburg climate. Though elegant, marble apparently prevents blocks heat from entering a building. In an age before modern climate control systems, building in marble would have made for an intensely cold palace.
It would take several blog posts to describe all of the wonders I saw on my tour through the Hermitage State Rooms, so I will be brief and relate only a couple that made a real impression on me. One long room, painted a deep red, contains portraits of all of the generals and commanders of the War of 1812 (known in Russia as the Patriotic War, and, I suspect, as the Great Patriotic War before World War II took that title). My guide indicated that, at the time, there were only a quarter as many generals in the Russian army as there are today.
The room is narrow but very long; the effect is that it seems to stretch on interminably. I doubt there could be a better way of making a visitor aware of the importance of this war in Russian history. But in an altogether different part of the museum, I found something rather incongruous with this gallery: large portraits of Napoleon and Josephine.
All in all, I can say the Hermitage completely overwhelms in its opulence. If I ever needed a primer on why there was a revolution in Russia, the Hermitage provided it. What was most amazing, from what the guide told me, was how often rooms were redone in the Hermitage. It seemed that every czarina from Catherine the Great on felt a need to have completely new drawng room done up. By this, I mean not that the czarinas redecorated the old drawing rooms, but that they had completely new ones made within the Winter Palace.
The day following my jaunt to the Hermitage, I made my way to another of St. Petersburg's great palaces, Peterhof. Situated a bit out of the city center, Peterhof was the summer residence of the czars for many centuries and is most famous for its Grand Cascade, a series of water fountains and gilt statues one sees upon reaching the palace by boat (as I did, enjoying a short trip over the Gulf of Finland in a hydrofoil). The cascades themselves are breathtakingly beautiful, and I look forward to adding my photos of them to the blog whenever I find the cord to my digital camera, or figure out some other way of transferring them. While I did not go in the palace itself, I spent a splendid, albeit cold, afternoon exploring the Peterhof grounds.
My last day in St. Petersburg was, unfortunately, a bit of a disappointment. My leg began to hurt tremendously--I half-suspected I had twisted my ankle at Peterhof--but I forced myself to go to the Russian Museum, for a glimpse of the famous icons there. The Hermitage contains few works by Russian artists, these being instead held in the Russian Museum. I was hoping for a glance at the treasures of Russia's medieval past.
When I got to the museum, however, I found that the medieval section of the museum was closed for renovations. I did, howver, get a good look at various works from the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia, including Repin's famous painting of the barge haulers on the Volga that seems to be in every European History textbook's section on 19th-century Russia. Largely unknown outside of Russia, Repin enjoys great popularity in his native country. I feel I lack a sufficient knowledge of art to say one way or the other whether he is a great artist, but the paintings I saw of his I enjoyed quite a bit.
Overall, as I have said, my time in St. Petersburg has given me a bit of the travel bug. All kinds of destinations in Europe are floating through my head: Kiev, Vilnius, even London (a British teacher at my school has told me cheap flights to England can be had out of Riga, the capital of Estonia). The big question for me becomes whether I will stay in Russia long enough to let this bug run its course. I imagine it would take a couple of years here to earn enough money and have enough free time to see everything I want to see on the Continent.
The map is spread out before me. Which way I will go, I know not yet.
When I reached the entrance, a line was already stretching, in anticipation of the museum's opening at half past ten. Though not at long as my guidebook indicated it would be on a warmer day (at the height of the tourist season in August, the line can stretch as far as the arch of the General Staff Building), it was still fairly long, and I resigned myself to a long wait. A stroke of luck, however, made the wait unnecessary. No sooner had I entered into the line than a guide approached me and offered to let me join her group for a two-hour tour of the Hermitage State rooms. She said that if I did, I could skip the line and would not have to buy a ticket, as she already had several tickets purchased for this group. I felt the price was reasonable and followed her to her group.
At precisely half past ten, the museum opened, and we all went inside. The first marvel to be seen in the Hermitage is called the Jordan Staircase. Above the staircase is an opulent baroque painting that, I was amazed to find out, was not a fresco but rather a work on canvas held into the plaster. The climate of St. Petersburg being extremely moist, fresco was not really a practical form of art. So where palaces in other cities would have frescos, the Winter Palace stretched canvases and suspended them in plaster.
It was not the only trick of the eye I was to see in the Hermitage. Virtually all of the "marble" in the building, it turned out, was not really marble but rather plasted coated to look like marble. This is due not to the cheapness of the tsars but rather, once again, to the St. Petersburg climate. Though elegant, marble apparently prevents blocks heat from entering a building. In an age before modern climate control systems, building in marble would have made for an intensely cold palace.
It would take several blog posts to describe all of the wonders I saw on my tour through the Hermitage State Rooms, so I will be brief and relate only a couple that made a real impression on me. One long room, painted a deep red, contains portraits of all of the generals and commanders of the War of 1812 (known in Russia as the Patriotic War, and, I suspect, as the Great Patriotic War before World War II took that title). My guide indicated that, at the time, there were only a quarter as many generals in the Russian army as there are today.
The room is narrow but very long; the effect is that it seems to stretch on interminably. I doubt there could be a better way of making a visitor aware of the importance of this war in Russian history. But in an altogether different part of the museum, I found something rather incongruous with this gallery: large portraits of Napoleon and Josephine.
All in all, I can say the Hermitage completely overwhelms in its opulence. If I ever needed a primer on why there was a revolution in Russia, the Hermitage provided it. What was most amazing, from what the guide told me, was how often rooms were redone in the Hermitage. It seemed that every czarina from Catherine the Great on felt a need to have completely new drawng room done up. By this, I mean not that the czarinas redecorated the old drawing rooms, but that they had completely new ones made within the Winter Palace.
The day following my jaunt to the Hermitage, I made my way to another of St. Petersburg's great palaces, Peterhof. Situated a bit out of the city center, Peterhof was the summer residence of the czars for many centuries and is most famous for its Grand Cascade, a series of water fountains and gilt statues one sees upon reaching the palace by boat (as I did, enjoying a short trip over the Gulf of Finland in a hydrofoil). The cascades themselves are breathtakingly beautiful, and I look forward to adding my photos of them to the blog whenever I find the cord to my digital camera, or figure out some other way of transferring them. While I did not go in the palace itself, I spent a splendid, albeit cold, afternoon exploring the Peterhof grounds.
My last day in St. Petersburg was, unfortunately, a bit of a disappointment. My leg began to hurt tremendously--I half-suspected I had twisted my ankle at Peterhof--but I forced myself to go to the Russian Museum, for a glimpse of the famous icons there. The Hermitage contains few works by Russian artists, these being instead held in the Russian Museum. I was hoping for a glance at the treasures of Russia's medieval past.
When I got to the museum, however, I found that the medieval section of the museum was closed for renovations. I did, howver, get a good look at various works from the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia, including Repin's famous painting of the barge haulers on the Volga that seems to be in every European History textbook's section on 19th-century Russia. Largely unknown outside of Russia, Repin enjoys great popularity in his native country. I feel I lack a sufficient knowledge of art to say one way or the other whether he is a great artist, but the paintings I saw of his I enjoyed quite a bit.
Overall, as I have said, my time in St. Petersburg has given me a bit of the travel bug. All kinds of destinations in Europe are floating through my head: Kiev, Vilnius, even London (a British teacher at my school has told me cheap flights to England can be had out of Riga, the capital of Estonia). The big question for me becomes whether I will stay in Russia long enough to let this bug run its course. I imagine it would take a couple of years here to earn enough money and have enough free time to see everything I want to see on the Continent.
The map is spread out before me. Which way I will go, I know not yet.
Mapping Out a Future, Part One
The past few weeks, I have definitely been bitten by the travel bug, in a big way. Most of the other teachers in my school--the Brits especially--have done quite a bit of travelling around in Europe. I find myself pressing them for information about every aspect of their travels: what it cost to take the train to Kiev, whether Paris affords any reasonably priced hostels, how one can get to Talinn, Latvia (where cheap flights can be had all over the continent) without going through Belarus (a country that seems to have designed its visa regime with no other end in mind than ripping off people who need to cross it).
It's hard to say when exactly all of this began. One answer is that's been going on, in a low-level way, for five years, ever since I graduated from college. At the time, I think that, despite my conscious desire to remain in the New York Jewish community I had grown to love, and to which I hope one day to return, part of me had real wanderlust, even then. It took chronic unemployment and financial ruin to give in to it, but looking back now, I realize it had been there for a long time. I just tried to repress it, because I didn't think traveling was a real possibility. I know better than that now.
But the more immediate answer is that the travel bug bit me in a big way a few weeks ago, when I had my last Russian lesson through my school. As part of that lesson, my teacher, a wonderful woman named Ludmilla, brought in a map of the Russian Federation, to help us practice the Russian words for north, south, east, and west. Somehow, looking at that map, it suddenly dawned on me what an enormous country Russia is. I had known this intellectually for some time--every office I've been in here seems to have a map of the country on a wall somewhere, and quite a few have clocks showing the time in various Russian and world cities--but I guess Ludmilla's spreading out that map really made me realize the vastness of Russia in a new way, especially when she pointed out for us the island near Vladivostok where she had been born and raised. Something sort of clicked inside of me, saying, "Stay here, see all of this!"
Then, of course, there was my foray to St. Petersburg. I have promised you more on that foray. The city, I found, can be summed up in one simple word: exquisite. There really is no other word that does Russia's northern capital justice. And in three days there, I know I barely scratched the surface of what there is to see and do there.
I arrived in St. Petersburg early on a cold, cloudy Thursday morning. My train pulled into Moscow Station (major train stations in Russia are generally named after the city at the far end of the line they serve, in this case Moscow on the Moscow-St. Petersburg line) a little before seven in the morning. At first, I did not fully understand we were there, and ended up having to dress rather hurriedly after a provodnitsa (train stewardess) started to scold me for not being off the train. But eventually I got my clothes on and scuttled off into the St. Petersburg dawn.
The first thing I needed to do was find a way to get to my hostel, which was situated under an archway leading into Palace Square. With this in mind, I looked for a taxi. Identifying a taxi, even at a train station, poses some difficulty in Russia, because taxis are not all painted yellow, as in New York, and because informal gypsy cabs abound everywhere. But my luck was good, and it turned out I had no need to identify a taxi at all, because several different drivers approached me as I started to walk off the station platform. Taxis seem not to be regulated in Russia (or if they are, the regulations are poorly enforced), and you end up paying for a taxi whatever you and the driver agree upon. Being unsure just how far the station was from my hostel, I was fully prepared to be overcharged.
What I was not prepared for was to be taken for an absolute fool. The first driver who approached me wanted 2000 rubles (around $80) to take me to my hostel. Having paid 4500 rubles for my tickets to and from St. Petersburg, I knew at once this was an outrageous price and flatly refused. I decided to set my maximum at 500 rubles (around $20); I reason that, as this was about enough to get me from LaGuardia into Manhattan, it could almost certainly get me from Moscow Station to the center of St. Petersburg. The driver tried to get me up to 1000 rubles, but I held firm, and in the end, he was forced to agree to the 500 ruble price.
Incidentally, when I left my hostel at the end of my stay and inquired as to the best way to get back to Moscow Station, I was told it was a short ride down St. Petersburg's main thoroughfare of Nevsky Prospekt and that almost any of the busses serving Nevsky could get me there for 20 rubles--a tiny fraction of what I had paid coming from the Station, and a mere one percent of what this cabby wanted. Ah well...at least I will know this if I ever make it to St. Petersburg again.
Once I had reached my hostel and dropped off my bag, I set off for the Hermitage. I had intended to reserve the Hermitage for the final day of my trip, but realizing it was so close to my hostel--through the aforementioned archway and across Palace Square--I thought this might be the ideal way to spend my first day there. The weather was chilly with occasional bouts of rain (in general, the weather in Russia has often made me wonder if I have not somehow ended up in England by mistake), and I thought an indoor activity nearby might be the best choice. And so, off to the Hermitage I set.
I had first to cross Palace Square. A sight more beautiful than Palace Square I believe I have yet to see. On one side, containing and framing the archway above mentioned, is the General Staff Building, a hauntingly lovely neoclassical building in a cool shade of yellow. I honestly believe I could have stood there all day admiring it, had I not been bound for the wonders of the Hermitage. And indeed, had I done so, I doubt I would have had to duck an oncoming car even once. Despite being a congregating place for tour busses going to and from St Petersburg, Palace Square has absolutely none of the hustle and bustle of Red Square--not a single seller of matrushka dolls was to be seen anywhere in or near it--and certainly none of the shameless gaudiness of Times Square. Its sheer quiet and serenity might have prompted me to stay there for hours, but I remembered quickly that 2000 years of Western Art awaited me in the Hermitage Museum, located in the Catherine Palace, which forms the other side of the Square. Remembering this, I snapped a few photos of it, and of the Alexander Column, and headed on.
More on St. Petersburg, and my affliction with the travel bug, tomorrow.
It's hard to say when exactly all of this began. One answer is that's been going on, in a low-level way, for five years, ever since I graduated from college. At the time, I think that, despite my conscious desire to remain in the New York Jewish community I had grown to love, and to which I hope one day to return, part of me had real wanderlust, even then. It took chronic unemployment and financial ruin to give in to it, but looking back now, I realize it had been there for a long time. I just tried to repress it, because I didn't think traveling was a real possibility. I know better than that now.
But the more immediate answer is that the travel bug bit me in a big way a few weeks ago, when I had my last Russian lesson through my school. As part of that lesson, my teacher, a wonderful woman named Ludmilla, brought in a map of the Russian Federation, to help us practice the Russian words for north, south, east, and west. Somehow, looking at that map, it suddenly dawned on me what an enormous country Russia is. I had known this intellectually for some time--every office I've been in here seems to have a map of the country on a wall somewhere, and quite a few have clocks showing the time in various Russian and world cities--but I guess Ludmilla's spreading out that map really made me realize the vastness of Russia in a new way, especially when she pointed out for us the island near Vladivostok where she had been born and raised. Something sort of clicked inside of me, saying, "Stay here, see all of this!"
Then, of course, there was my foray to St. Petersburg. I have promised you more on that foray. The city, I found, can be summed up in one simple word: exquisite. There really is no other word that does Russia's northern capital justice. And in three days there, I know I barely scratched the surface of what there is to see and do there.
I arrived in St. Petersburg early on a cold, cloudy Thursday morning. My train pulled into Moscow Station (major train stations in Russia are generally named after the city at the far end of the line they serve, in this case Moscow on the Moscow-St. Petersburg line) a little before seven in the morning. At first, I did not fully understand we were there, and ended up having to dress rather hurriedly after a provodnitsa (train stewardess) started to scold me for not being off the train. But eventually I got my clothes on and scuttled off into the St. Petersburg dawn.
The first thing I needed to do was find a way to get to my hostel, which was situated under an archway leading into Palace Square. With this in mind, I looked for a taxi. Identifying a taxi, even at a train station, poses some difficulty in Russia, because taxis are not all painted yellow, as in New York, and because informal gypsy cabs abound everywhere. But my luck was good, and it turned out I had no need to identify a taxi at all, because several different drivers approached me as I started to walk off the station platform. Taxis seem not to be regulated in Russia (or if they are, the regulations are poorly enforced), and you end up paying for a taxi whatever you and the driver agree upon. Being unsure just how far the station was from my hostel, I was fully prepared to be overcharged.
What I was not prepared for was to be taken for an absolute fool. The first driver who approached me wanted 2000 rubles (around $80) to take me to my hostel. Having paid 4500 rubles for my tickets to and from St. Petersburg, I knew at once this was an outrageous price and flatly refused. I decided to set my maximum at 500 rubles (around $20); I reason that, as this was about enough to get me from LaGuardia into Manhattan, it could almost certainly get me from Moscow Station to the center of St. Petersburg. The driver tried to get me up to 1000 rubles, but I held firm, and in the end, he was forced to agree to the 500 ruble price.
Incidentally, when I left my hostel at the end of my stay and inquired as to the best way to get back to Moscow Station, I was told it was a short ride down St. Petersburg's main thoroughfare of Nevsky Prospekt and that almost any of the busses serving Nevsky could get me there for 20 rubles--a tiny fraction of what I had paid coming from the Station, and a mere one percent of what this cabby wanted. Ah well...at least I will know this if I ever make it to St. Petersburg again.
Once I had reached my hostel and dropped off my bag, I set off for the Hermitage. I had intended to reserve the Hermitage for the final day of my trip, but realizing it was so close to my hostel--through the aforementioned archway and across Palace Square--I thought this might be the ideal way to spend my first day there. The weather was chilly with occasional bouts of rain (in general, the weather in Russia has often made me wonder if I have not somehow ended up in England by mistake), and I thought an indoor activity nearby might be the best choice. And so, off to the Hermitage I set.
I had first to cross Palace Square. A sight more beautiful than Palace Square I believe I have yet to see. On one side, containing and framing the archway above mentioned, is the General Staff Building, a hauntingly lovely neoclassical building in a cool shade of yellow. I honestly believe I could have stood there all day admiring it, had I not been bound for the wonders of the Hermitage. And indeed, had I done so, I doubt I would have had to duck an oncoming car even once. Despite being a congregating place for tour busses going to and from St Petersburg, Palace Square has absolutely none of the hustle and bustle of Red Square--not a single seller of matrushka dolls was to be seen anywhere in or near it--and certainly none of the shameless gaudiness of Times Square. Its sheer quiet and serenity might have prompted me to stay there for hours, but I remembered quickly that 2000 years of Western Art awaited me in the Hermitage Museum, located in the Catherine Palace, which forms the other side of the Square. Remembering this, I snapped a few photos of it, and of the Alexander Column, and headed on.
More on St. Petersburg, and my affliction with the travel bug, tomorrow.
11 September 2008
The Estates of the Union
Business English, I am finding, presents a few special challenges to the EFL teacher. One is the apathetic nature of many of the students. Particularly when they reach what we call the Intermediate Slump--the point at which they have had most of the grammatical structures of the language and turn to work that can often feel like fine-tuning--motivation tends to decrease. But the heavier weights pulling down on business students' motivation, I find, are lack of time and lack of what a psychology professor at my university called the "sunk-cost effect" (basically, what happens when you decide you need to go to the gym more to justify money spent on the membership that you can't get back). Business students are seldom paying for the course themselves and can sometimes take a very lackadaisical attitude toward class attendance, homework, or anything else the course requiring commitments of time.
It is because of these factors that I find Volodya such a joy to teach. From the first time I met him, I knew things would be different with him. He told me he had asked for me as his teacher after seeing my resume and realizing I had a legal background and therefore some knowledge of legal English (and if he needs someone to explain promissory estoppel to him, I am probably one of the few EFL teachers in Russia able to do it). He is conscientious about doing his homework; in two months of working together, he has failed to do his homework only once, just before he went on holiday to South Africa. Only rarely does he interrupt our sessions together to take a phone call or do anything else directly related to his work.
While I like teaching Volodya very much, he does present a few challenges--the biggest one being that his reasons for wanting to improve his English are different from those of most other Business English students. Sometime next year, the company for which Volodya works will be shifted to an English-only e-mail policy, and this is Volodya's biggest reason for needing to upgrade his English skills. For other business students, the focus is on speaking for travel and communication with clients abroad. But Volodya is unlikely to have to communicate with clients abroad, since his work focuses largely on the domestic end of his company's business.
For me, all of this creates a major challenge. Finding materials that have any direct bearing on his work is difficult. I have given him some Supreme Court cases to read up on, but as my knowledge of taxation and tax law is virtually non-existent, it's hard to give him the kind of materials he probably needs most. Today, however, I managed to overcome that challenge, for a short time.
At our class on Tuesday, I decided to give him, for homework, the Wikipedia article on the estate tax in the United States. For my non-American readers (who seem to be rapidly multiplying), the estate tax meant to prevent extremely wealthy individuals from passing money on to their children in ways that would create a permanent aristocracy. This at least is what political liberals say it is; conservatives say it is abomination and indignantly insist on calling it the "death tax". My personal view is that there is nothing immoral about such a tax, but that, as matters currently stand in America, it tends to serve more as a subsidy for the life insurance industry than as a viable means of limiting wealth accumulation.
My point in giving this reading was to get Volodya to understand and talk about the difference between the words "estate tax" and "death tax" and thereby get him into the whole concept of loaded language. It took a while to get him to understand how the terms are really used in America, but eventually he got it. In the process, he gave me some interesting ideas on why we have such a tax. The first is that the estate tax exists because it is somehow easier for the government to know the exact value of estates than to know your income. The second is that America does not want wealthy families accumulating too much political power and becoming essentially states within the state (this is partly true, but not the main rationale behind the estate tax). But he was just as puzzled as I am, and as most Americans are, as to why the estate tax will likely disappear in 2010, only to reappear a year later (the result of squabbles over it in Congress).
Nonetheless, the exercise seems to have worked, and in the process, I got to learn a bit about the Russian tax system. In many ways, the system would look very familiar to Americans rushing to fill out their 1040s in April. Like Americans, Russians deal with withholdings and deductions (Volodya knew these terms without my having to teach them). Also like Americans, they get a credit for each child they have and regarding the taxman with a mix of hostility, hatred, and loathing.
Unlike Americans, however, Russians have a relatively regressive tax system; everyone pays 13 percent, far lower than in other industrialized countries. From what I gather, little effort is made to make the rich pay more (I suspect the Soviet Union has given Russians a distate for efforts at income redistribution). And even stranger, you can pay many of your taxes in cash.
It is because of these factors that I find Volodya such a joy to teach. From the first time I met him, I knew things would be different with him. He told me he had asked for me as his teacher after seeing my resume and realizing I had a legal background and therefore some knowledge of legal English (and if he needs someone to explain promissory estoppel to him, I am probably one of the few EFL teachers in Russia able to do it). He is conscientious about doing his homework; in two months of working together, he has failed to do his homework only once, just before he went on holiday to South Africa. Only rarely does he interrupt our sessions together to take a phone call or do anything else directly related to his work.
While I like teaching Volodya very much, he does present a few challenges--the biggest one being that his reasons for wanting to improve his English are different from those of most other Business English students. Sometime next year, the company for which Volodya works will be shifted to an English-only e-mail policy, and this is Volodya's biggest reason for needing to upgrade his English skills. For other business students, the focus is on speaking for travel and communication with clients abroad. But Volodya is unlikely to have to communicate with clients abroad, since his work focuses largely on the domestic end of his company's business.
For me, all of this creates a major challenge. Finding materials that have any direct bearing on his work is difficult. I have given him some Supreme Court cases to read up on, but as my knowledge of taxation and tax law is virtually non-existent, it's hard to give him the kind of materials he probably needs most. Today, however, I managed to overcome that challenge, for a short time.
At our class on Tuesday, I decided to give him, for homework, the Wikipedia article on the estate tax in the United States. For my non-American readers (who seem to be rapidly multiplying), the estate tax meant to prevent extremely wealthy individuals from passing money on to their children in ways that would create a permanent aristocracy. This at least is what political liberals say it is; conservatives say it is abomination and indignantly insist on calling it the "death tax". My personal view is that there is nothing immoral about such a tax, but that, as matters currently stand in America, it tends to serve more as a subsidy for the life insurance industry than as a viable means of limiting wealth accumulation.
My point in giving this reading was to get Volodya to understand and talk about the difference between the words "estate tax" and "death tax" and thereby get him into the whole concept of loaded language. It took a while to get him to understand how the terms are really used in America, but eventually he got it. In the process, he gave me some interesting ideas on why we have such a tax. The first is that the estate tax exists because it is somehow easier for the government to know the exact value of estates than to know your income. The second is that America does not want wealthy families accumulating too much political power and becoming essentially states within the state (this is partly true, but not the main rationale behind the estate tax). But he was just as puzzled as I am, and as most Americans are, as to why the estate tax will likely disappear in 2010, only to reappear a year later (the result of squabbles over it in Congress).
Nonetheless, the exercise seems to have worked, and in the process, I got to learn a bit about the Russian tax system. In many ways, the system would look very familiar to Americans rushing to fill out their 1040s in April. Like Americans, Russians deal with withholdings and deductions (Volodya knew these terms without my having to teach them). Also like Americans, they get a credit for each child they have and regarding the taxman with a mix of hostility, hatred, and loathing.
Unlike Americans, however, Russians have a relatively regressive tax system; everyone pays 13 percent, far lower than in other industrialized countries. From what I gather, little effort is made to make the rich pay more (I suspect the Soviet Union has given Russians a distate for efforts at income redistribution). And even stranger, you can pay many of your taxes in cash.
04 September 2008
Parties Are Advised to Chill
As far as my students go, I really consider myself blessed. There is not, at the moment, a single student I do not like. But of all of my students, probably my favorite is Volodya, the mild-mannered tax attorney to whom I have referred in previous posts.
For two weeks in August, Volodya was on vacation in South Africa and Zambia, but when he returned, he regaled me not merely with photos of Victoria Falls and of exotic African wildlife, but with a story of having been nearly eaten by a lion while he was staying at a lodge near the Zambia-South Africa border. Like virtually every EFL student I have ever met or heard about, he feels the occasional strong need to tell me how poor his English is, but when he is able to tell such stories, I feel hard-pressed to find anything in his English to criticize.
Nonetheless, Volodya has chosen me as a teacher because he needs a heavy dose of legal and business English, and this I do my best to supply him with, even if my knowledge of Russian tax law is non-existent. One major benefit of working with him is that I end up learning a lot about the differences between the American and Russian legal systems.
Today, I had a lesson plan for Volodya built around the case of Mattel v. Aqua. Briefly, this case involved a song made by the Danish group Aqua that not only poked fun at Barbie but even depicted the doll in sexual situations (as you would guess, Mattel ultimately lost the case on free speech grounds). I had planned the lesson as a way of teaching concepts like trademark, copyright, and infringement, and had hoped that the song, which was all but inescapable around the time I was sixteen, would be new and fresh for him. No such luck; as soon as he heard the song, he recognized it, and said he had heard it in discos about the time I used to hear it non-stop on Z-107.7 in St. Louis.
This is one of my few disappointments in being an EFL teacher--the sheer difficulty of finding songs, films, or television programs that my students will not have seen already. When I studied French in high school, and now that I am studying Russian, one of the joys of learning the language was the chance to hear real songs and see real films in the language of study (I can still sing a bawdy French song called Fernande that my high school French teacher had us listen to one Friday afternoon in language lab). Now that English is becoming so much a world language, however, and now that American and British films and television programs are so widely shown abroad--I recall reading at one point that something like 80 percent of the entertainment programming on Dutch television consisted of dubbed or even non-dubbed versions of American and British comedy and drama series--it's hard to find any genuinely new material. For me, the only solution is to look back into the deep past; the Andrews Sisters and Bobby Darin may be old hat in America, but I can at least depend on my students' not having heard them.
The other reason I gave Volodya the Mattel case was because of a much-quoted line from it. Apparently, after Mattel sued Aqua for trademark infringement, Aqua turned around and countersued for defamation. Somehow, the two cases became combined, and the judge in the case ruled against both complainants. In issuing his ruling, he said these immortal words:
Parties are advised to chill.
This was a good way to talk a little more about degrees of formality in English. Volodya has a good grasp of the difference between slang, casual English, and formal or official English, but this was an opportunity to review some of that and extend it a little bit further.
Perhaps second only to "we hold that, in the sphere of education, separate but equal has no place," this has got to be one of my favorite lines from any legal case. After the case was decided, I remember reading "parties are advised to chill" and thinking, "Man, this is just the kind of man we need to be a judge." How many legal cases are there where the judge should say that, in exactly those words?
Apparently, in Russia, not very many. The topic got us onto the concepts of vexatious litigants and frivolous suits. I actually had to explain to Volodya that, in America, there are people who will file lawsuits they know are without merit, with the sole aim of forcing the other side to incur the legal expenses of defending the suit. Volodya was appalled; somewhere in the Russian legal code, he said, there is a law against using the law for "illegal purposes," and this is the kind of activity which the code sought to enjoin. I have not yet gotten to teach him about the $3 million coffee spill (which, it turns out, was actually far from a frivolous suit), but I imagine he will be as stunned by that verdict as many Americans were.
For two weeks in August, Volodya was on vacation in South Africa and Zambia, but when he returned, he regaled me not merely with photos of Victoria Falls and of exotic African wildlife, but with a story of having been nearly eaten by a lion while he was staying at a lodge near the Zambia-South Africa border. Like virtually every EFL student I have ever met or heard about, he feels the occasional strong need to tell me how poor his English is, but when he is able to tell such stories, I feel hard-pressed to find anything in his English to criticize.
Nonetheless, Volodya has chosen me as a teacher because he needs a heavy dose of legal and business English, and this I do my best to supply him with, even if my knowledge of Russian tax law is non-existent. One major benefit of working with him is that I end up learning a lot about the differences between the American and Russian legal systems.
Today, I had a lesson plan for Volodya built around the case of Mattel v. Aqua. Briefly, this case involved a song made by the Danish group Aqua that not only poked fun at Barbie but even depicted the doll in sexual situations (as you would guess, Mattel ultimately lost the case on free speech grounds). I had planned the lesson as a way of teaching concepts like trademark, copyright, and infringement, and had hoped that the song, which was all but inescapable around the time I was sixteen, would be new and fresh for him. No such luck; as soon as he heard the song, he recognized it, and said he had heard it in discos about the time I used to hear it non-stop on Z-107.7 in St. Louis.
This is one of my few disappointments in being an EFL teacher--the sheer difficulty of finding songs, films, or television programs that my students will not have seen already. When I studied French in high school, and now that I am studying Russian, one of the joys of learning the language was the chance to hear real songs and see real films in the language of study (I can still sing a bawdy French song called Fernande that my high school French teacher had us listen to one Friday afternoon in language lab). Now that English is becoming so much a world language, however, and now that American and British films and television programs are so widely shown abroad--I recall reading at one point that something like 80 percent of the entertainment programming on Dutch television consisted of dubbed or even non-dubbed versions of American and British comedy and drama series--it's hard to find any genuinely new material. For me, the only solution is to look back into the deep past; the Andrews Sisters and Bobby Darin may be old hat in America, but I can at least depend on my students' not having heard them.
The other reason I gave Volodya the Mattel case was because of a much-quoted line from it. Apparently, after Mattel sued Aqua for trademark infringement, Aqua turned around and countersued for defamation. Somehow, the two cases became combined, and the judge in the case ruled against both complainants. In issuing his ruling, he said these immortal words:
Parties are advised to chill.
This was a good way to talk a little more about degrees of formality in English. Volodya has a good grasp of the difference between slang, casual English, and formal or official English, but this was an opportunity to review some of that and extend it a little bit further.
Perhaps second only to "we hold that, in the sphere of education, separate but equal has no place," this has got to be one of my favorite lines from any legal case. After the case was decided, I remember reading "parties are advised to chill" and thinking, "Man, this is just the kind of man we need to be a judge." How many legal cases are there where the judge should say that, in exactly those words?
Apparently, in Russia, not very many. The topic got us onto the concepts of vexatious litigants and frivolous suits. I actually had to explain to Volodya that, in America, there are people who will file lawsuits they know are without merit, with the sole aim of forcing the other side to incur the legal expenses of defending the suit. Volodya was appalled; somewhere in the Russian legal code, he said, there is a law against using the law for "illegal purposes," and this is the kind of activity which the code sought to enjoin. I have not yet gotten to teach him about the $3 million coffee spill (which, it turns out, was actually far from a frivolous suit), but I imagine he will be as stunned by that verdict as many Americans were.
01 September 2008
The Tsar's Thumb
I had a truly amazing time in St. Petersburg. More on that (possibly with photos) in a later post. But first, an anecdote. And then, an anecdote following that anecdote.
For more than a century and a half in Russia, a curious fact existed concerning the railroad line linking Moscow and St. Petersburg. The line linking the two cities was completely straight except for a tiny stretch near St. Petersburg, where it curved and then became straight again. A legend emerged to explain this curve, which ran as follows:
When the engineers came to the tsar to discuss the creation of the rail link between Russia's former and current capitals, a line was drawn on the map, but during the drawing of the line, the tsar had his thumb on the map, causing a small curve in the line. When the engineers later had to build the line, they were unsure whether to point out this error to the tsar, or not. And so the line was built with the curve where the tsar's thumb had been.
Judging by the experience I had today, trying to find my passport after losing it on my return journey home, I suspect that the competence of people working for the Russian railroad system has not improved much since tsarist times. After several hours, I was, fortunately, able to find my passport--to my great relief, since losing my passport and visa would have necessitated a trip home, a new passport application, a new Letter of Invitation from my school, and a new application at the Russian embassy. Probably all on my nickel. I consider retrieving my passport to be a small miracle, perhaps even a sign that, for some reason, God wants me in Russia for the time being. But before I turn to theology, the story of how I lost my passport, my mind, and my innocence where Russian bureaucracy is concerned, all in one day.
My train from St. Petersburg arrived at Leningrad Station about 6:00 in the morning. Dawn had not yet completely broken in Moscow, and I was forced to dress hurriedly--I knew this because, on my arrival in St. Petersburg three days previous, the provodnitsa had scolded me for not getting off the train quickly enough--and in dim light. It was absolutely essential that I change shirts, however, because I needed to go straight from the train station to my first class, and the shirt I was wearing had gotten a stain on it the night before.
During the night, I had kept my passport in my shirt pocket. In the act of changing shirts, I removed my passprt and placed it on my train compartment's table--and apparently, never picked it up again. So I discovered an hour later when, sitting in Leningrad Station, I put something else in my pocket and realized my passport was not there.
In a tizzy, I ransacked my bag to see if by chance I had left the passport in the dirty shirt from the day before. No such luck; I knew I had left it on the train.
Near panic at this point, I went in search of the information desk. I soon discovered there is no information desk as such in Leningrad Station--there is a sign marked "information", but it leads only to a display of train arrivals and departures--but I did find a window marked "administrator". The administrator on duty sent me to a second office which she said would be able to tell me how to retrieve my passport. The second office send me to a third office, where a lady behind a desk shouted at me a mile a minute in Russian, before realizing that trying to communicate with me was hopeless and found a colleague who spoke halting English.
Her colleague told me that there is no lost and found department as such in Moscow, or at least, not one that serves the train I had taken. I was told I had two choices. I could go and try to find the train I had arrived on in a train yard, or I could come back at night, when the train was next to leave for St. Petersburg, and try to get a hold of someone then who could locate my passport.
Without hesitation, I chose to go off in search of my passport then. I was told my train was now in a place call Kyookovo, which could be reached by an elektrishka (the Russian equivalent of a commuter rail line). After finding a phone and placing a call to my school to cancel my morning class, I bought a ticket for the elektrishka and set off for Kyookovo.
I reached Kyookovo over an hour later and explained my situation in halting Russian to a rail worker there. He contacted someone via walkie-talkie and then took me off in search of my train. It turned out, however, that my train was not in Kyookovo; the woman at the third counter in Leningrad Station had give me the details for train number 63, not my train, which was number sixty-five. No doubt she was looking at the wrong line on a computer system of some kind. The rail worker called someone on his mobile phone and was able to establish that my train was at the next stop on the line, going toward Moscow. He told me to go the Kyookovo's first platform and wait for the next train, which was to arrive five minutes later.
After twenty-five minutes on the platform, and seeing three trains pass by on the middle of the station's three platforms, I began to suspect I had been directed to the wrong place. My suspicion was confirmed when I heard a station announcement that a Moscow-bound train would be leaving from that middle platform in twelve minutes. I went to the ticket window and inquired where the next train going to my destination would leave from, and was told to go to the middle platform. So I had clearly been given the wrong platform.
Once the Moscow-bound elektrishka arrived--half an hour later--I took it where I had been directed. My faith in directions was wearing thin at this point, and I resolved that, if it turned out I had been misdirected yet again, to give up the search and return to Moscow.
Luck, however, at last intervened. The woman behind the ticket window at this station told me to go out of the station, turn right, and then keep walking straight. Eventually I would see a place where trains were kept between runs. I did so and found a train that looked like my train. I told a railroad worker my tale of woe. He took me, in turn, to a train he said was number 65, just in from St. Petersburg. He knocked on the door of the first compartment, and a cleaning woman opened it.
I told my story once more to the cleaning woman, who asked me for the number of my compartment and berth. These I gave to her. She said the providnitsa for my car was asleep, but that she would do what she could to get my passport back for me and directed me to walk until I found the car I had taken on my return journey from St. Petersburg. I was to wait there while she scoured the train.
About fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the appointed car, and after about twenty, the door to the car swung open, to reveal the cleaning woman. In her hands was, by some miracle, my passport. I thanked her profusely--or at least as profusely as my limited Russian made possible--and headed back to where I could take the elektrishka back into Moscow.
Intellectually, I know I ought to be very grateful to have retrieved my passport, despite all the problems and misidrectins I encountered. And on one level, I am. But I am also stunned that, in the course of looking for it, I was misdirected not once, but five times, and I am very much aware that these misdirections might well have prevented my getting the passport back in the end.
I was also astounded to find out there was no railroad lost-and-found department serving a place as large and important as Moscow. Another teacher at my school has noted in Russians a general lack of foresight, and my discovery that Leningrad Station had no lost-and-found pretty much confirmed what he told me. It is foreseeable that people will lose things--even valuable and important things--on trains. It completely flabbergasted me to realize there was nowhere I could go and fill out a form to declare I had lost something and have someone contact me in case it was found--that my only recourse was to hope I could find the actual train I had come in on.
The tsars themselves may be gone, but the kind of thinking that created a railroad bend out of the tsar's thumb seems to thrive in Russia.
For more than a century and a half in Russia, a curious fact existed concerning the railroad line linking Moscow and St. Petersburg. The line linking the two cities was completely straight except for a tiny stretch near St. Petersburg, where it curved and then became straight again. A legend emerged to explain this curve, which ran as follows:
When the engineers came to the tsar to discuss the creation of the rail link between Russia's former and current capitals, a line was drawn on the map, but during the drawing of the line, the tsar had his thumb on the map, causing a small curve in the line. When the engineers later had to build the line, they were unsure whether to point out this error to the tsar, or not. And so the line was built with the curve where the tsar's thumb had been.
Judging by the experience I had today, trying to find my passport after losing it on my return journey home, I suspect that the competence of people working for the Russian railroad system has not improved much since tsarist times. After several hours, I was, fortunately, able to find my passport--to my great relief, since losing my passport and visa would have necessitated a trip home, a new passport application, a new Letter of Invitation from my school, and a new application at the Russian embassy. Probably all on my nickel. I consider retrieving my passport to be a small miracle, perhaps even a sign that, for some reason, God wants me in Russia for the time being. But before I turn to theology, the story of how I lost my passport, my mind, and my innocence where Russian bureaucracy is concerned, all in one day.
My train from St. Petersburg arrived at Leningrad Station about 6:00 in the morning. Dawn had not yet completely broken in Moscow, and I was forced to dress hurriedly--I knew this because, on my arrival in St. Petersburg three days previous, the provodnitsa had scolded me for not getting off the train quickly enough--and in dim light. It was absolutely essential that I change shirts, however, because I needed to go straight from the train station to my first class, and the shirt I was wearing had gotten a stain on it the night before.
During the night, I had kept my passport in my shirt pocket. In the act of changing shirts, I removed my passprt and placed it on my train compartment's table--and apparently, never picked it up again. So I discovered an hour later when, sitting in Leningrad Station, I put something else in my pocket and realized my passport was not there.
In a tizzy, I ransacked my bag to see if by chance I had left the passport in the dirty shirt from the day before. No such luck; I knew I had left it on the train.
Near panic at this point, I went in search of the information desk. I soon discovered there is no information desk as such in Leningrad Station--there is a sign marked "information", but it leads only to a display of train arrivals and departures--but I did find a window marked "administrator". The administrator on duty sent me to a second office which she said would be able to tell me how to retrieve my passport. The second office send me to a third office, where a lady behind a desk shouted at me a mile a minute in Russian, before realizing that trying to communicate with me was hopeless and found a colleague who spoke halting English.
Her colleague told me that there is no lost and found department as such in Moscow, or at least, not one that serves the train I had taken. I was told I had two choices. I could go and try to find the train I had arrived on in a train yard, or I could come back at night, when the train was next to leave for St. Petersburg, and try to get a hold of someone then who could locate my passport.
Without hesitation, I chose to go off in search of my passport then. I was told my train was now in a place call Kyookovo, which could be reached by an elektrishka (the Russian equivalent of a commuter rail line). After finding a phone and placing a call to my school to cancel my morning class, I bought a ticket for the elektrishka and set off for Kyookovo.
I reached Kyookovo over an hour later and explained my situation in halting Russian to a rail worker there. He contacted someone via walkie-talkie and then took me off in search of my train. It turned out, however, that my train was not in Kyookovo; the woman at the third counter in Leningrad Station had give me the details for train number 63, not my train, which was number sixty-five. No doubt she was looking at the wrong line on a computer system of some kind. The rail worker called someone on his mobile phone and was able to establish that my train was at the next stop on the line, going toward Moscow. He told me to go the Kyookovo's first platform and wait for the next train, which was to arrive five minutes later.
After twenty-five minutes on the platform, and seeing three trains pass by on the middle of the station's three platforms, I began to suspect I had been directed to the wrong place. My suspicion was confirmed when I heard a station announcement that a Moscow-bound train would be leaving from that middle platform in twelve minutes. I went to the ticket window and inquired where the next train going to my destination would leave from, and was told to go to the middle platform. So I had clearly been given the wrong platform.
Once the Moscow-bound elektrishka arrived--half an hour later--I took it where I had been directed. My faith in directions was wearing thin at this point, and I resolved that, if it turned out I had been misdirected yet again, to give up the search and return to Moscow.
Luck, however, at last intervened. The woman behind the ticket window at this station told me to go out of the station, turn right, and then keep walking straight. Eventually I would see a place where trains were kept between runs. I did so and found a train that looked like my train. I told a railroad worker my tale of woe. He took me, in turn, to a train he said was number 65, just in from St. Petersburg. He knocked on the door of the first compartment, and a cleaning woman opened it.
I told my story once more to the cleaning woman, who asked me for the number of my compartment and berth. These I gave to her. She said the providnitsa for my car was asleep, but that she would do what she could to get my passport back for me and directed me to walk until I found the car I had taken on my return journey from St. Petersburg. I was to wait there while she scoured the train.
About fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the appointed car, and after about twenty, the door to the car swung open, to reveal the cleaning woman. In her hands was, by some miracle, my passport. I thanked her profusely--or at least as profusely as my limited Russian made possible--and headed back to where I could take the elektrishka back into Moscow.
Intellectually, I know I ought to be very grateful to have retrieved my passport, despite all the problems and misidrectins I encountered. And on one level, I am. But I am also stunned that, in the course of looking for it, I was misdirected not once, but five times, and I am very much aware that these misdirections might well have prevented my getting the passport back in the end.
I was also astounded to find out there was no railroad lost-and-found department serving a place as large and important as Moscow. Another teacher at my school has noted in Russians a general lack of foresight, and my discovery that Leningrad Station had no lost-and-found pretty much confirmed what he told me. It is foreseeable that people will lose things--even valuable and important things--on trains. It completely flabbergasted me to realize there was nowhere I could go and fill out a form to declare I had lost something and have someone contact me in case it was found--that my only recourse was to hope I could find the actual train I had come in on.
The tsars themselves may be gone, but the kind of thinking that created a railroad bend out of the tsar's thumb seems to thrive in Russia.
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