Three reasons the Apocalypse impends

1. www.fitflop.com
This is the fitness equivalent of those “work from home in your pj’s, earning $3000/hr” ads.  Except with a really, really slick ad campaign that is taking over Chicago.

2. www.bighappiehair.com
The weird thing is, I always always wanted stick-straight blond hair that hung flat.  The minute I reconcile myself to the craziness of my own hair, this happens.

3. http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/gforce/
“Discover Disney’s G-Force – a comedy adventure about guinea pigs who are secretly government spies.”
Pretty self-explanatory.
Oh, and the music!

Junior Paper, and existential questions

“Criticism of narratives that so resist summarization and aphorism demands careful attention to detail and an unwavering recognition of the sovereignty of the narrative, that is, that the performative qualities of a story or image cannot be sacrificed without also sacrificing some integral element of what it conveys. Corollary to this is the fact that the genre of academic writing can only approximate what the theatrical narrative expresses on its own. One can interpret and respond to narrative only through more narrative. With this recognition in mind, however, we shall embark on an analysis of the most significant features of Myshkin’s narrative in hopes of contextualizing our re-readings of it. The task of criticism in this case is not to elicit the definitive meaning of the narrative, but to enrich future encounters with it.”

Hence:

1. I understand Master of Petersburg better now.

2. Why am I not writing a novel?

3. Why is lit crit useful? (Is it useful?)

unison

Americans tend to be a little creeped out by Russians’ habit of clapping in unison at the end of performances.  If they like the performance a lot they will clap for up to ten minutes (in my experience, though I have heard stories: once Stalin came into an auditorium, and the entire crowd stood up and clapped in unison for half an hour while he stood there silently, until he left the room.  It’s possible there were other motivations there though.)

The other day in a subway transfer, on the long trek from Gostiny Dvor to Nevsky Prospect, I realized that the entire crowd of people was marching in unison through the underground tunnel, except for one woman in stilletoes who seemed to be in a hurry.  Is this a Petersburg phenomenon, or do all subway tunnels create this effect?

do you know the feeling?

I have a little black notebook in which I scribble whatever strikes me as profound during the day. For this reason I would be deeply ashamed if anyone else read it in its entirety. (What I consider profound very rapidly unprofounds when I discover how many other people’s books already said it.) However, the other day I stumbled upon a little entry, undoubtedly written sleepily during midterms or finals or something, that carried me back so quickly to the feeling of Chicago that I thought I would share it with you Chicagoans.

“Reg stacks:

bare concrete ceiling

blowing air duct

sporadic lighting, both nat’l and artificial

firm seats, but all too easy to fall asleep in nonetheless

scribblings on the wall”

or another one, from a boring Russian Lit lecture in the Social Sciences tearoom:

“In the room, on the broad windowsill, there is a large, rather tacky urn in several garish shades of yellow, green, ochre. There is a white animal on it with a skinny waist. It reminds me of those Afghan hunting dogs, elegant.”

Or after catching the Red Line at Garfield:

“scary to stand at the red line stop and watch the highway: too fast.”

Visigoths and kangaroos

I knew before I came here that there was a good deal of animosity in the former USSR between Central Asians and ethnic Russians. I assumed it was the typical “lazy-illegal-immigrants-from-the-south-who-don’t-even-speak-our-language-coming-in-and-taking-all-our-jobs” trope, maybe something to do with the nasty business of nineteenth-century imperialism.

This Medieval Russian stuff changes things a bit. Beginning with the mid-thirteenth century, Old Russian writing and oral poetry attempt to deal with the incredibly traumatic Tatar invasion. All of Old Rus pays substantial taxes to the foreign invaders; villains in epic poetry adopt Turkic-sounding names; monumental architecture (church-building) stops entirely for a full sixty years. This is still a very sore spot for Russians. A Russian historian of Tatar-Russian relations that I recently read says that ever since the 1247 invasion, Russia has been plagued with the “servile Asiatic spirit” and therefore to this day lacks confidence to assert itself in foreign affairs. Hmm.

There’s a very well-known (in Russia) school of historians that argues the Tatar-Mongol invasion was really not as traumatic as it’s been made out to be, that it breathed new life into Russian culture. But in a certain sense what “really happened” doesn’t matter for what I’m talking about; what matters is what people have said about it for the past seven centuries.

This would all be one thing if it were just an ivory-tower academic controversy. It became a little more significant when I realized how deeply the 14^th-century Tatars are associated with modern Central Asians. Take the very popular cartoon about Dobrynya Nikitich, the medieval Russian equivalent of Paul Bunyan, which portrays the Mongols with suspiciously Central-Asian features and accessories. Check out this signpost Dobrynya’s assistant comes upon during his travels:

Rus’ one way, Vragi – enemies – the other.

At least in part, such superficial associations underpin the really horrible neo-Nazi movements in Russian cities. Really, ethnic “Russians” have nearly as much 14^th-century Tatar-Mongol blood as their neighbors in Tatarstan and Uzbekistan; associating Central Asians with the Golden Horde is something akin to hating Western Europeans because they’re really Goths and Visigoths.

Incidentally, I suspect that the way to deal with these things is embedded in the texts and philosophies that formed Old Russian society. (Not that I really know the way myself). But this shallow perspective on the Middle Ages is wreaking havoc in the CIS. Don’t anyone tell me medieval history is esoteric and irrelevant.

on Sudoku and quoting Dostoevsky

I recently finished reading Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, which is absolutely worth checking out for anyone who reads Dostoevsky.

I began reading it on Friday, in between notes on the frescoes of the Church of the Dormition on Volotovo Field near Novgorod (of course, Old Russian). One of those books that suck you in, like Sudoku does some people (Lila F? What thrilled me most as I continued reading the next morning on the trolley was discovering references: Crime and Punishment, Devils, Daniel, Psalms, Revelation; I’m sure if I were less of a fake lit student and had read Brothers K, I would have discovered allusions to that too. I suppose this is really a quiet kind of pretentiousness: how exciting it is to catch these things, to pick out biblical quotations in Old Russian Lit and to recognize allusions to Dostoevsky in Coetzee – so I am drawn in to the text less because I identify with or have compassion for the characters, than because I discover in the book a puzzle I feel uniquely qualified to solve. I’m excited to read for the same reason that some people solve crosswords: I find in the act an opportunity to take control, to organize, and I suppose also to feel knowledgeable.

 

Not all books strike me this way. This is the first real Coetzee I’ve read, and it feels to me unoriginal, not with the negative connotation that word tends to carry nowadays, but in a genuinely neutral sense. Master is really a commentary on Dostoevsky and the Bible, a creatively organized set of glosses (certainly helpful for this reader of devilish Devils!), an interpretation of things that have been said before. And if Master is really, in the platitudes of the Wall Street Journal quote on the cover, “a fascinating study of the dark mysteries of creativity, grief, relationships between fathers and sons, and of the great Russian themes of love and death,” then it is so only because all those are themes that Coetzee saw in Dostoevsky and managed to re-express in a more contemporary form.

No denying, to use the words of a friend’s friend, that C is a “cold fish.” Whoever wrote that review was right to see that C’s approach is essentially academic, a “study”: C sees a puzzle, discovers in the dialogues of Dostoevsky a glorified way of procrastination (from what?), and sets himself the task of discovering the hidden references in all of D’s novels. I am somewhat dismayed to realize that my own approach to C is similar. Perhaps I can plead that Coetzee made me do it, that he encourages that kind of reading?

Anyway, I didn’t set out to write a review of Coetzee (the Wall Street Journal beat me to it). Mostly what I want to bring out is a certain approach to allusion. C drops references where they defend his creative solution of the Dostoevsky puzzle, just as a modern academic would cite a text to prove his point. Coetzee can superimpose his interpretation, like a lens, onto Dostoevsky; as critic (albeit a creative one), he can go from commentary to source. He cannot go the other direction, from source to commentary; D cannot be a lens for C. Dostoevsky is smothered in Coetzee. The biblical quotes become similar museum pieces, artefacts of D’s day and age. The first symptom of the way we look at texts these days is thus this asphyxiation, when quotes from the old serve purposes of the new and never vice versa. If D uses allusions differently from Coetzee, the medieval stuff I’ve been infatuated with lately is even more unusual. More on this later; I hope I haven’t confused you all hopelessly.

I also hope I haven’t grossly misinterpreted Coetzee. I still highly recommend the book, as my puzzle interpretation is really a reduction of a very thought-provoking book. I realize a good deal of what I just said about critics can be found in another form in Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism or Tolkien’s The Monsters and the Critics, if you want to hear it a good deal more eloquently.

on ethics and anthropology

My Theory of Folklore prof here, Marina Vladimirovna, told us about a friend of hers who wanted to study the life of monks, so he acted like he was a pilgrim and lived for several months in a monastery, all the time secretly recording conversations he had with monks and taking notes on everything he saw. When he got out of the monastery, he wrote up a “brilliant” field study that would never have been possible had he told the monks what he was doing.

In connection with this Marina Vladimirovna had us read an article about the ethics of field work, which quoted heavily from Canadian and American ethical codes for doing research among Native Americans. “For every Western anthropologist and linguist,” says the article, “these principles are imperative.” For Russians (who, according to my experience, don’t consider themselves Eastern or Western), the principles are optional. After all, they don’t belong to the culture that produced such ethical codes, so why should they have to submit to its imperialistic demands? If “Western” anthropologists are truly respectful of other cultures, they should recognize that their understanding of the ethics of field work is colored by their own cultural background and grant the Russians a unique voice to construct their own ethical standards.