studying russian at the wrong time

on the train from moscow to kazan with my dad in 1994

the past week or so of russia's agression against ukraine has me pondering my past. i studied russian, mostly literature and quite a lot of russian history. of course i studied the language as well, but i was never a great talent. i could always read it better than i could speak it. but i did ok, and most importantly, i loved it. 

i studied russian at precisely the wrong time to actually get to do anything with it. i began studying in 1989, just as the berlin wall fell. it took a couple more years for the soviet union to dissolve, but dissolve it did. and by the time i finished my bachelor's degree in 1993 and my master's in 1994, academia didn't really know what to do with us russian majors. 

looking back, so many of my professors were former military, harry had been to the defense language institute in monterey and then princeton (possibly not in that order). the head of our department at iowa, ray, was also former military, as was kit, whose last name i don't remember, though polish was his specialty. later, at asu, the head of the russian department was also former military. they were surely all tapping people on the shoulder to join the cia or fbi or nsa. but that tap never came for me. perhaps because of the aforementioned not being a language talent, but i think it had even more to do with timing. i simply studied russian at the wrong time. fellowships dried up. slavic departments shrank and merged with other "minor" languages. i met a nice danish boy and followed him home and love sent me in another direction.

and i believe that today, we're seeing the result of that. putin and his cronies felt humiliated at the dissolution of the soviet union and now he's taking the first steps towards getting it back. and because no one kept studying russian and slavic culture, it seems like the world is rather blindsided by it all. maybe they should have tapped some of us on the shoulder after all, even if we weren't brilliant at russian, but just had a deep and abiding interest in it and the culture. 

as usual, at moments like this, i wish i could still sit across from my dad and ask him what he thinks about it all. 

ten years ago...

i heard on the radio yesterday that it was ten years ago that the columbine tragedy (i was gonna link to it on wiki, but i can't really bring myself to do so) happened. i have a clear memory of standing in a little studio apt. on the north side of chicago, watching oprah talk about it with tears in her eyes. just as it did then, it feels remote from me now. i can't even relate. it's incomprehensible to me and so far from anything i can imagine. i feel for those people, but i cannot even wrap my head around it.

but what it does make me remember is that ten years ago, i was teaching a course in 20th century russian culture at the U of C. i made the mistake of proposing the course together with a fellow graduate student who was taking his exams that quarter. it was a mistake in the sense that taking your Ph.D. exams at the U of C brings you to the brink of a nervous breakdown. and by to the brink, i mean over the brink into a full blown nervous breakdown that you yourself don't notice, but everyone else does. so i ended up teaching alone, which was ok, it just wasn't what i expected.

since i lived in denmark, i also foolishly accepted my fellow graduate student's offer that i could live with him at his place, since it was only 3 months. but living together with someone who has had a nervous breakdown that he doesn't really notice himself is, to describe it lightly, not healthy, so i got my own temporary apartment on campus.

that turned out to be a good thing, because it was in that little bitty apartment, within a block of The Reg, that i learned to make risotto, which is a skill i still enjoy. tho' it took several tries. i had no t.v., which was also wonderful. i also ate a lot of paté on crackers. because that's what i imagined that a graduate student at the U of C should eat. i still haven't decided if that was true or not, but it was decidedly part of my own engagement in bourdieu's cultural capital (attempting to raise mine, undoubtedly).

as for The Reg, i spent so much time there in my study carrel, that i began to glow in the dark. (that's the standard U of C joke, since The Reg was built over the bit where they did the Manhattan Project.) but seriously, being left alone teaching a course (albeit undergraduate) at the U of C, is no small project. luckily, we had modeled it around matei calinescu's five faces of modernity, which meant that we covered modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch (my fave) and postmodernism (my REAL fave, at least at the time), which was an ingenious idea (even if i do say so myself). but my very, very favorite was sneaking in alcoholism, because of its importance in russian culture. vodka is a diminutive of the word for water, which illustrates its importance as a life force in russia and russian culture, because what is language if not the manifestation of culture?

it was both a great time and a stressful time, and i'm sorry that it took columbine to remind me of it, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. i'm grateful for the opportunity to say i taught at the U of C, it's not everybody who has done that. but i did. and so did obama. he's, of course, done a little better than i have, but i'm cool with that.

#2 - not what i thought it was going to be

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

when i was in junior high, at the height of ronald reagan's cold war escalation rhetoric, there was a made for t.v. movie starring jason robards called the day after. (leave it to a B movie actor to use a B movie as a medium for his propaganda.) it was, looking back, prototypical cold war propaganda, and basically showed kansas being nuked off the map by the evil russians. i'd been to kansas and while it wasn't my favorite place in the world, it was a little too much like the flat prairie, amber waves of grain of my home state for comfort. and the movie called attention to the fact that where i was growing up was probably in some danger...within fallout range of strategic air command near omaha, nebraska.

the movie made a big impression on me and for years afterwards, i imagined that somewhere in russia was a girl who looked a whole lot like me and if we could just talk to each other and get to know one another, then all that cold war mumbo jumbo wouldn't really be necessary.

so, years later, when i got the chance to take an evening class in russian at a community college, i jumped at it. i was still idealistically picturing my "sister" in russia as i slaved over the cyrillic alphabet and all those cases...accusative, genitive, dative...i still shudder a bit thinking of those. by then, reagan was in the last stages of his presidency...the bits he didn't really remember anyway, and nancy was running the country together with her astrologer (which in retrospect, wasn't really so bad).

that whole zeitgeist fit nicely with the very spiritual, authentic, red-haired russian woman who was teaching my evening course. i loved her. she loved shirley maclaine's spiritual journey, which was so in vogue at the time, and made dramatic declarations about the future of people in the course. hers for me was that she could feel that i should keep studying russian, that it was my destiny. i was 19 and looking for my destiny, so i thought, "why not?" i was a bit romantic on the notion of russian anyway, so it was as good a destiny as any. within a few short years, i found myself with bachelor's and master's degrees in, you guessed it, russian. self-fulfilling destiny?

i even found myself in the middle of russia, standing at a bus stop together with some friends, waiting to go out to their dacha, when an old man came up and asked me and my friend aida if we were indeed sisters, just as i had suspected all along! i really did have a "sister" in russia and if we just knew one another and could talk, we wouldn't need all that cold war mumbo jumbo.

you may think this story ends there, but i'm not really to that influential person yet.

not long after that, i was in a literary theory course (pursuing yet another master's, i just couldn't seem to get enough). we had to write weekly 1-2 page essays on our reading assignments. being a good marxist (since the only ones left by that time were in american universities), i found a way to weave the evils of capitalism and trickle down economic policies into my reactions to the readings week after week. finally, the professor scrawled in the margin of one essay, "you make me feel old. it's clear that ronald reagan is really the defining president for you."

and that's why that as much as i am loathe to admit it, ronald reagan, B movie actor turned president, is one of my 5 big influences. even if it was an influence borne of loathing, it still significantly guided the direction of my life.

epilogue (or is it actually prologue?): i can still remember when he was shot in 1981, it was semester test time at school and we were about to be dismissed for the day when they made an announcement over the loudspeakers that the president had been shot. i asked a tad too hopefully, "is he dead?" and my teacher, clearly a staunch republican, flew into a rage and made the entire class stay after school because of my disrespectful comment regarding the president. already then, he was effecting my life. at that point, i didn't really imagine just how much.

ponderings on a saturday night...make that sunday morning

"Can we change the world without changing the way we describe, structure and view the world?" asks truth cycles.

i set off last evening, after reading truth cycles' lovely post, to write about time and about memory and about changing the world. but, then life intervened, there were bedtime over-tired tears, a toe stubbed to bleeding, drama, a mosquito buzzing in an almost-asleep ear, more crying, then at last an exhausted little girl fell asleep after a very busy day of saturday activity.

sometimes, it seems that you have all the good intentions of wanting to change the world and how you're living in it and the impact you have on it, but then the real nitty gritties of life get in the way and divert your attention and your time. but then, who is to say that reading a story and comforting my daughter wasn't really a more worthy use of my time than sitting in front of the computer, composing a blog entry?

i studied in russia a number of years ago and during that time, i felt that time had slowed down. i had the strange sense that there was always exactly the amount of time in each day that i needed to do the things i had to and wanted to get done. i've often pondered why that was and never really come up with a satisfactory answer. but, perhaps it's because i was expressing time differently...in another language (in this case, russian). perhaps, as i have been provoked to think by the truth cycles posting, it was a matter of having oriented myself differently to time in another language and another setting. i simply lived with another relationship to time. since i assumed and expressed that i always had enough time to get things done, i in fact DID have that time. and in that, i always had enough time to go for a long walk arm in arm with friends, to drink endless cups of tea from the samovar, to go the opera or ballet every other evening, to do my homework, to attend classes, to journal and to stand in the queue outside the milk store, hoping to get some of that creamy chocolate milk, to look at wind-up watches in "watch world." all of that effortlessly fit into my days and months in kazan.

it was something about russia and perhaps russian because when i returned 3 years later for gabi's honeymoon trip on the volga, i had the same sensation...of time elongating, and being exactly as long as i needed it to be. those glorious golden days in the sunshine on the volga stretching out, the hours spent poking around in the little towns along the way, buying a basket from an old black-clad woman who had made it, taking a fantastic picture of a "dead piano" in a long-neglected manor house, wandering among the golden-cupolas of nizhny novgorod. it was a week, but in memory, it stretches into much longer. perhaps because it was such a relaxing time.

maybe that's why time seems to go so quickly in everyday life. because we're never relaxed. we're always rushing on to the next thing, never taking the time to enjoy and savor the moments as we are in them. so, although i perhaps didn't change the world yesterday, the fact that i took the time to comfort a tired little girl, to read to her, tickle her back and just be with her in that moment, maybe that was enough for that day. maybe it's the kind of thing she will remember one day and she will be happy her mom had time for her. and maybe thereby, one small gesture at a time, we actually do change the world.