din kvite russer's journal

Chickpeas! In Moscow! Practically impossible. But it does happen.
Boiled chickpeas today actually tasted of chicken. So - just a little - does the hummous I tried to make out of them. Wonder how tapioca is going to come out (linguistic intuition suggests, tasting of tape).
Two weeks till real hummous now.
Is there a vegetarian's guide to Moscow? If there isn't, maybe I'd like to write one.

Of the unexplainable.
While on my mission to track down the social characteristics of the Moscow wedding industry as part of a social science research project with an ambiguous name, I was in some sort of drinking establishment with a wedding photographer, drinking mate, second-hand-smoking and listening to amazing tales of homemade Russian tradition (all sorts of flower bouquets thrown, bread salted, candles lit, etc etc). The sound system was playing bearable if not very pleasant '70s or '80s Western pop in deep male voices. Suddenly it turns louder as a brass band comes on (sounds familiar) and for a second I wonder whether my voice recorder is going to be able pick up our voices legibly with this background. And then the verse starts...
Sit on my face and tell me that you love me
I'll sit on your face and tell you I love you, too...
What. I'm glad I've got the little recorder thing to listen for me since keeping a straight face is taking most of my concentration. Besides, this was from a totally different universe. Song finished, stereo goes back to normal volume and the interview goes on.
Life goes on.

Boris, civil liberties, and a dalek

Worth a read. And a wince.

"Our lady members are well educated and cover a whole range of professions such as teachers, doctors, nurses, solicitors, interpreters and secretaries etc. However, they still retain their femininity and give priority to traditional family values. Russian ladies are well renowned for their loyalty, faithfulness and devotion to their husband/family and an age difference of up to 10-15 years is not a problem. Russian ladies value stability of family life, they view marriage as a life long commitment and make perfect wives and excellent mothers.

In spite of the qualities of these ladies many find it difficult or even impossible to meet a good and caring man in Russia. The result is that many Russian ladies now seek a partner abroad. In addition Russian ladies adapt very well to life outside of Russia."

(c) http://www.russian-girls.co.uk/ (emphasis mine)

(The idea behind accumulating ethnographies of wedding industries is generally an optimistic one: creating and mapping happiness. But with texts like this turning up, plus all there is to read on scams, anything I'm likely to come up with on the topic won't be all that happy.)

It's time to change format a bit. That is, if there's anything left to change. I seem to be no good at recounting things in standard life-blog fashion, but maybe I can share stuff.

So here comes... (proof of the social science version of nerdness) I've actually seen Latour talk about this! In an odd pause of discussion at the Tarde/Durkheim conference: "well I'm glad you at least didn't make a Big Pumpkin argument." That scored a laugh, like a lot of his other remarks, in the air of academic authority, charisma and genuine brilliance emanating across the room from the tweed jacket, huge glasses and bushy eyebrows. Well, yesterday, while revising, I found this:

"Have you ever noticed, at sociological conferences, political meetings, and bar palavers, the hand gestures people make when they invoke the 'Big Picture' into which they offer to replace what you have just said so that it 'fits' into such easy-to-grasp entities as 'Late Capitalism', 'the ascent of civilization', 'the West', 'modernity', 'human history', 'Potcolonialism', or 'globalization'? Their hand gesture is never bigger than if they were stroking a pumpkin! I am at last going to show you the real size of the 'social' in all its grandeur: well, it is not that big.  It is only made so by the grand gesture and by the professional tone in which the 'Big Picture' is alluded to. If there is one thing that is not common sense, it would be to take even a reasonably sized pumpkin for the 'whole of society'. Midnight has struck for that sort of social theory and the beautiful carriage has been transformed back into what it should always have remained: a member of the family Cucurbitaceceae."

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (2006)

Term's started. I've missed this place.
Also, in addition to what I've said before, wonderland is not only a state of mind but people, too.
Also also, the latest xkcd is awesome.
Also also also, I've been listening to this (see current music) song far too much lately.

A school in Moscow. Biology classroom. Plaster study aids are on display in a cupboard: apes, anatomy, plants, skulls. And among them, three little plaster heads representing "the human races."
One "African", totally black, chin out, fat lips pursed.
One "Mongoloid", bright yellow, small moustache, pronounced cheekbones.
One "Europeoid", pinkish, blonde.
There are signs of wear and tear by schoolkids; the European has a bit of his nose broken off and plaster grain is visible through the crack. It says "Made in China" in small letters at the bottom of each model (as it also, apparently, does on one of the paws of Venice's famous mascot lion).
Gods, something like this is actually in the biology syllabus here, and noone in the room seemed to find this quite as disturbing as I did.
(Wonder where they fit Native Americans, Australians and Indians in, especially.)

...so yes, I'm back at Cambridge now after a month full of strange and exciting and exhausting things (3 weeks in the Balkans, 2 days at home, a week and a half in the UK in the company of yolanda_), and as usual I'm rubbish at keeping in touch. Once again, sorry.
For the coming term I've already taken on what looks like more than I can possibly cope with, but it's all very interesting and important, or at least I'm trying to convince myself that way. My (anglo-)phone shyness has withered away in the course of past few days as a result of spending hours phoning coach companies, museums, catering and suchlike - organising a daytrip to Cambridge for 2 groups of 30 people each... also amazing and useful experience, I suppose, but mad, especially when trying to write essays at the same time.
Well that was news in brief from the confused world of din kvite russer, see you next millenium for more.

Saw a guy today in a subway crowd wearing a T-shirt with "CIA" written on it in huge white letters. What a disguise it would be for actual CIA people: removes all suspicion! Involuntarily my imagination produced a variety of situations involving secret service stash and logoed merchandise...
Somewhere in an abandoned tube station become laboratory, Q presenting James Bond with the brand new hoodie. Through a accident humorously fatal to a few of Q's silent bespectacled staff, the string round the hood is discovered to contain a machine-gun.
1936, Stalin signing a secret instruction to remove a further 17 dirty Trotskyists from the party and, incidentally, from the T-shirt order.
1933, Goebbels ordering a load of swastika banners, oh and don't forget the bookmarks and the mug coasters.
2007, Litvinenko proudly trying on a new blue-red-white tracksuit; a mystery opponent having a quiet sinister laugh to himself recalling the process of soaking the gear in polonium.
...Ok, I guess I can stop here.

Did I mention I'm back in Moscow, spending half my time as nanny, and the other half with books and TV for company? (May have overdone it on scifi lately, which kind of explains...)

Thanks to someone on discworld I just discovered XKCD. Oh the joys of procrastination...
And by the way I'm in the middle of exams. Psychology tomorrow morning, sociology next week. Feel free to wish me good luck, or, in accordance with a nice Russian tradition, to scold me while I'm writing the exam :)
Life becomes so technical when it's all about exams... Wake up, drink coffee, revise, go write exam, revise some more, take sleep pill, go to sleep, wake up, drink coffee, etc.. I can't even talk to people properly anymore... but it'll end soon enough.

Was just randomly reading (and trying to take part in) BBC site discussions on the recent Russian international politics shebang. Funny thing is, everyone seems to know exactly what's going on. Even I do, in some sense, otherwise I wouldn't automatically clench imaginary fists at some of the comments.
For some people, it's about "the West meddling in Russia's own affairs", about Russia trying to achieve its "former strength on the international arena" and all that. For the others, it's Putin barking at others and being a hypocrite, not far off from Khruschev banging a boot on the table on that famous UN conference some 50 years ago, while Russia's a country of some really rich people and lots of extreme poverty, and too afraid of its own history to remember the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Strangely enough, it's easier for me to argue with the latter position (being a Russian - neither an oligarch nor from anything close to a mud hut - and having been taught about the M-R pact at school). Whereas the former, mostly advocated on the BBC site by Russian expatriates (a bit like me) is hard to stomach. We are Russians, it seems to say, we know what we're talking about and we know what we want. Well, I'm as much of a Russian and I have no idea.
This is the point in all those debates where words take over people. Things like nations, common good, freedoms hover over opinions with unquestionable authority and you'll never prove which of these things - that technically don't exist - is more valuable than the others. As I've said, everyone who talks about it seems to know exactly what's going on, and this in fact means, everyone's subscribed to their own "big words" and decided what matters.
Which is probably the only thing you can expect, seeing as reality is this complicated; you have to find something to hold on to, for sanity's sake.
So going back to where I started, I prefer to assume - for sanity's sake - that making a fuss of, and sacrificing people's lives for, pieces of metal which in turn depict other people sacrificing their lives for something else (whether Soviet domination or defeating Nazism) is rather pointless. As is aspiring to power just for the hell of it, which to me seems to be a leitmotif of a lot of things Russian government does.
Anyway, main point is, all this is very confusing. You try to look at the "bigger picture" and it looks like it's been painted by Jackson Pollock.

To everyone who's plunging into the depths of revision, or a fight with the IB monster -
GOOD LUCK
and remember they're not really real!

Social science seems as interesting as ever (well, parts of it) but my conclusions about particular topics especially such as "can there be end to politics" more and more lean towards "well, you can't really tell". It always depends on what you think is important, on where you draw your borders and what you assume about people. Likewise - the more I find out about the country I'm from the less I think I understand anything about it; people ask "so what's Russia like?" and I have no idea.
It's basically a situation of the more I know the more I know I don't know. "Things just happen. What the hell."

End of term approaching fast - lent term was amazing but I don't seem to have noticed much of it. For now, so the supervision luck goes, it's another essay crisis, three essays due in on Tuesday and I'm done with just one of them.
Another piece of luck, my place on the college room ballot system very very very low in the queue means that I'm going for a room that's one of the cheapest here but comparitively far away from college, and many of my friends are going to be at Newnham, a 20-minute walk away. The plan is then to get a bike and lead a nomadic life next year between my room in T-street, college, Newnham house, Newnham college (a tent in the gardens would be nice), and wherever the lectures will be.

I still sometimes have difficulty distinguishing in speech between short and long vowels in English, hence quote of the day - me:
"Yeah but it's gonna make you mentally EEL..."

This is a very old piece of news (hm, contradiction?) but I still found it striking.

( A US school district banned the IB.. for the following reasons )

"As for the charge of Marxism, this principally stemmed from the International Baccalaureate Organisation's support for the Earth charter, a global set of aims devised in France in 2000, which, Trombetta was most concerned, called for people worldwide to protect the environment, oppose militarism and promote equal distribution of wealth.

And, at that time, Iracki said: "Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we have to be careful about what values our children are taught."

Trombetta, the board member who has received death threats from angry parents, had further complained that the IB tests "were developed in a foreign country"."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1729754,00.html

Would be strange now to write about anything except the sad news.
Rest in peace, Daniel.
I'm sorry, it's a shame I did not know him very well, though took part together in a few things, and lived just a couple of rooms away... but I knew him as an amazing person, all the work he did and enthusiasm he put in things he worked for...
He still stays, strangely, in the Internet on his website and that for Raselas school in Ethiopia, a profile on Facebook, our college CDs he put so much effort in. And, of course, in our memory.
It's hard to write much without pathos or sounding cheesy, but yes. Rest in peace, and stay with us like you do.
http://rememberingdaniel.blogspot.com/

I know I'm very bad at keeping this thing up, three months since last entry. But I'll improve, eventually, - promise!
In the three months lots of things have happened, and I'm not even trying to recall them all here... There was the end of Michaelmas term which I really enjoyed, there was a really lazy and largely pointless (in terms of doing any kind of work) break at home, and now I'm back here in Cambridge. There were the two amazing weeks I've spent with a group of 8 people preparing a theatre project, called the Newton's Cradle, about refugees, the trauma of migration and what they're facing here... It was like nothing I've done before.
And now, back to Earth with a pile of essays to do and paperwork for Easter break arrangements to complete... I've heard there's an agreement between Russia and the EU in discussion currently, proposing that people of academic proffessions have less of a visa barrier confronting them when travelling from one to the other - hope it'll be implemented soon...
So. Back to work. But I promise I'll be better at updating...

I feel very much in accordance with the Pratchett quote in my userinfo: feel like going around wearing a big stupid grin, marveling at everything around. The rain and sun outside... The seagulls that appeared suddenly flashing past my window in a crazy sort of aerobatics... The bikes for two or three people at once... Dr. Runciman, our amazing politics lecturer... Northern Irish accent... My co-years... The UWC people here... Street musicians... Autumn leaves, from violet to faded pink... Emails and postcards... Legends and traditions and stories and fairytales...
It appears, Wonderland is not a place, it's a state of mind.

Yes, I know my English blog has been dragging behind the Russian one for some time, and I should have written an update on Cambridge sooner (because the longer you delay it the harder it gets to write), but well.. here I am. A brand new Cambridge me; I still didn't get to know my new self well enough, one thing I know is she's an early riser (my UWC version surely wouldn't do that!), and tea is the basis of her diet.
So here's a brief list of what she's been doing for the last few days...( Read more... )

Trees in Moscow are just starting to become gold and fiery red; it's the first time I'm witnessing this process in three years! (Those two or three yellow maple trees in Dale do not count.) I brought a bunch of the leaves home, so now they cover most of my desk (that which is not occupied by the laptop and books and mugs and, well, the usual mess). Wonder if they have the same kind of golden autumn at Cambridge; probably not.
So, there's just three days to go. Packing is in progess, hundreds of little but needed things forgotten and remembered and forgotten again, tens of [sometimes unnecessary] goodbyes said... I really am happy to join the student crowd whining about being busy all the time; it may sound strange but I miss having things to do.
At the same time, I'm about to plunge into the unknown again, I can't help being nervous about it, even though there came a few soothing emails from my "college parents" and others. Language is part of my worries, since I haven't spoken English for months now.. I know these worries are irrational; experience shows that most people are OK with me asking them to repeat what they've just said, or with waiting for me to find the right word, and it shouldn't take that long anyway... but still. =S
I'll just rely on the statement, "life is what you make it".
One thing which makes my life a lot better now is.. Monty Python. I started watching the movies to remember what English sounds like, then saw some of the Flying Circus, then got addicted. :) "Not dead, just pining for the fjords"...

PS: I think I promised a picture of my 1-year-old wonderful niece - ( here it is then )