Protestant Polyglot

classic

(From Tan’ka)

“Чайка”, Акунин

Чайка (“The Seagull”)
Борис Акунин (Boris Akunin)
lib.ru
В Сети
Finished: 29 March, 2003.

After reading Akunin’s version of Hamlet, I should have expected something like this when he took on Chekhov’s Seagull. It presents a series of variations on what happens after the end of Chekhov’s famous play. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come out as well as Akunin’s Hamlet, because he doesn’t tie these variations together at the end. The last ending seems somewhat more plausible than the other seven, but all in all I felt like it was a little too contrived. Definitely worth a read, however.

homosexuality, theology, and the law

[Warning for theologically-disinclined readers: the following is a treatment of homosexuality in Christian theology. No evangelizing below, for those who aren’t interested in hearing it, but what I’ve written below concerns our society as a whole. American Christianity is broken is some significant ways, and it’s affecting America at large.]

Andrew Sullivan on sodomy (from Ilya)

An extremely nuanced article by Andrew Sullivan in TNR on sodomy laws, the changing natural law basis for arguments against homosexuals, and the untenable nature of heterosex-only marriage.

It’s been said over and over that one cannot equate a homosexual relationship with promiscuity, that non-procreative sex for heterosexuals is rarely challenged, and that the differences between an ideal heterosexual relationship and an ideal homosexual relationship are much smaller than those between a loving heterosexual relationship and a troubled one. Unfortunately, these truths bear frequent repeating, because few people in the opposition are listening.

My own struggle with these issues has been a long one, too. It’s difficult not to struggle with them when one is raised in an extremely conservative environment, no matter how progressive one’s home life may be. For years I had homosexual friends who were very dear to me, from Ross, a senior at IMSA my sophomore year who went on to dance in Footloose and the first gay man I ever knew personally, to some good friends here at Knox. I loved those friends unconditionally while engaging in some serious doublethink to keep myself from either condemning them or modifying my theology. (I had to engage in similar doublethink to maintain the views against ordination of women that I was taught in the LC-MS.)

In a human sense, well, you can believe whatever you want. I will not argue with someone who maintains, for instance, that everything they experience is of their own fabrication, because doing so is fruitless. But the moment one claims Scripture as a basis for argument, the scope of the argument is limited. Sullivan describes the Thomistic basis for condemning sodomy, as well as more recent developments in natural law, but I find Scripture a much more powerful means of discounting these arguments; I would have seen it earlier had I really read the New Testament, rather than focusing so much on the OT.

The first is a fundamental rejection of divisions and distinctions between people in NT theology: the Jew-Gentile dichotomy is no longer recognized, God treats slaves the same as their masters, and so on. Though gender distinctions are not specifically treated, we must consider the cultural context. God’s true message is clear enough: we’re all the same. Saying anything more explicit may have been too difficult for the people of the times to take. Now, God is a marketing genius; he’s not stupid enough to cross the line when his point has already been made.

If we accept this notion of equality among all the people of the world, it becomes very difficult to maintain, for instance, that women should not be ministers. I think the argument is obvious. Likewise, it is difficult to understand why two men or women should not have a loving relationship which would be celebrated between two people of opposite gender. No one is advocating the acceptance of abusive relationships, child molestation, or prostitution ? what we ought to accept and celebrate are any connections between two people that are characterized by love and mutual respect. Negative relationships as mentioned above should be discouraged no matter what the gender of their participants ? it is telling that hate-filled divorce and serial marriages are sanctioned both by law and popular morals, but positive homosexual relationships are condemned by the fundamentalists and even illegal in some cases.

There are sticking points. Genesis provides the clearest definition of marriage, and it mentions only a man and a woman. There is a weak argument that says God didn’t specifically allow us to drive cars, but no one mentions it in confession. However, a stronger argument is based in the foundations of Christianity and a little elementary history of Western civilization. The whole point of Christianity is that the old law is cast down. We are no longer subject to Leviticus on principle alone; rather, all Christian theology ought to be based on the simple edict “God is love.” The reason we still use the Ten Commandments as a guide to our lives is that they are specific cases of that edict ? the first three pertaining to our love toward God, the remainder pertaining to our love for our fellow humans. If Christ doesn’t explicity mention loving unions between homosexuals in the model of heterosexual marriage, it is because such identifications and experiences were formulated well after his time here. Fundamentalists who ignore this should take a remedial Western civ course.

Thomistic doctrine fails us in considering the question of sexuality because it is based on a lot of erroneous notions of the biology of reproduction, and because it flatly ignores what is truly involved in marriage, or indeed what is truly involved in any person’s interactions with another person. Sullivan does not mention this in his article, but it’s understandable ? his argument concerns not the holy, catholic, and apostolic church, but our American society. The point bears repeating, though, especially to the fundamentalists who are more interested in stigmatizing an already marginalized group and ignoring Romans: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” (Romans 2:1, NIV)

I like Christian Scharen’s closing remarks in his article in this month’s Lutheran:

move

Well, it looks like the move to the new server went alright. Please let me know if you notice anything weird.

this sucks

Wong Admits to Taking Funds

Marc Wong, a Knox alum who was recently elected County Clerk of Knox County, is accused of misappropriating over $14K in campaign funds when he worked as legislative aide to Rep. Don Moffitt.

We elected this guy. He won by a margin of just over 40 votes, and the Knox community came out in overwhelming support of him. We saw (a lot of people in Knox County saw) that he was young, motivated, and extremely intelligent, so we cast our votes for him. I’ve already been feeling betrayed by the politicians we’ve elected to represent us, and now I feel even worse.

polyglut hacked!

Boy was that exciting… I got an email from Dr. Single asking what was up with my website, if I’d changed the index page or been hacked.

Well, it seems my hosting provider was hacked. The hackers put an index file up with pictures of dead people and a text about innocent blood being spilled. The hacked page has been replaced with the correct one.

French Lessons, Kaplan

French Lessons: A Memoir
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press
Chicago, 1994.
Finished: 21 March, 2003.

I ran across this on amazon and bought it on a whim. I’m very glad that I did.

Kaplan explores a great deal in French Lessons?her Jewish identity, her relationship to the French language, and her longing to become French. I’ve felt many of the same things she describes in my own journey in the Russian language. Her treatment of dreaming she’d awoken speaking only French and not understanding English?a dream I think many of us language nerds has had?is absolutely perfect.

It’s not often that I know for certain after reading a book that I will return to it again and again; the last time I felt that was when I read Steiner’s Errata. This is such a book.

forget ideology

Mike, I still think you’re too harsh. But you’re right. I never thought it would come to this.

At this point, all I can do is fight anti-American fires. It’s sad to see so many people around the world (I’m speaking primarily about the Slavic-language press and Slavic-language bloggers, my only sources of information right now) are confusing the American government with the American people.

Members of the United States Armed Forces, I support you. I hope you all return home safely. Be honorable, and show the world the caring side of the American people.

I’ve sent last minute letters to Lane Evens, Durbin, and the President, and the English editor of Pravda, responding to this nonsense (that letter is here. I don’t know what else to do now.

“Голем, русская версия”

Голем, русская версия (Golem, Russian Version)
Андрей Левкин (Andrej Levkin)
Олма-Пресс
М., 2002.
Finished: 18 March, 2002.

Before reviewing the text, a note about the physical book itself. Olma-Press books suffer from two serious problems. (Serious to my mind, in any case.) They have reduced the size of the tirye, which should be equal in length to the English em-dash. Secondly, the table of contents is in the front of the book, where it ought not to be. Both render the book less readable—it took a good deal of searching through the ads in the last several pages before I realized the table of contents wasn’t there, and the diminished tirye looks sickly and thin. The copy of “Comedy / Tragedy” I read earlier was also from Olma-Press, but I didn’t want to diminish those reviews with typographical criticism.

This book, however, doesn’t deserve such special treatment. I constantly found myself asking what the point of the novel was, where Levkin was leading me, and why it required so many philosophical deviations from the plot. Contemporary Russian writing suffers from such tangential nihillistic rants a lot, but writers like Pelevin know how to handle them in the context of a greater work. Levkin doesn’t have this finesse, so by the end of 177 pages, I felt I’d gotten maybe 25 pages of plot and 150 pages of wanking about the political situation, the nature of love, and so on, none of which were particularly compelling.

However, there were some really wonderful moments; I quoted one of them in a previous blog entry. There’s a nice little moment in which the narrator considers the fonts which best fit his characters and certain parts of the story, and also some compelling descriptions of the street on which the whole novel takes place.

To (mis)use the narrator’s own words about the book: “Может быть, пойму, если перечитаю когда-нибудь.” (“Perhaps I’ll understand if I read it again some day.”)

China and “The Onion” all over again

Avva mentions an article in The Chaser (Teen’s dying wish for Cameron Diaz blow job not granted) which has apparently been taken for real news (Rus.) in Russia. There’s even an involved commentary (Rus.) which goes on about the attachments we have to celebrities. (Update: the latter, on inspection, seems to be a satire as well, but the first article is in a serious publication.) See a translation of the commentary below in just a minute.

I’d really like to believe it’s all one tremendous, involved joke…

In the United States of America, a serious scandal is growing. Hollywood star Cameron Diaz refused to give a blowjob to a fifteen year-old boy dying of leukemia.

The boy was called Josh Morten. His father, Mr. Morton, said in the press: “”Josh never asked for much,” his father confided. “He never complained about his illness, or made unrealistic demands. So when he requested fellatio from the star of Charlie’s Angels and There’s Something About Mary we thought, sure, that’s the least we can do for him.” But neither his innate humility, nor his terminal illness softened the heart of Cameron Diaz. Secretaries for the Hollywood star always answered the same way: “Sorry, Ms. Diaz is currently unable to comply with your request.”

Cameron Diaz gave interviews, made films, smiled for cameras, and looked entirely healthy and happy, that’s the way she was. But the fifteen year-old, never in his life knowing praise, wealth, success, the growth of a career, a woman’s touch, or life itself, expired, forgetted and left behind by the happy and successful. Besides Diaz, he was also turned down for a blow job from Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, and Catherine Zeta Jones. At that time, the leukemia ran its course, and Josh died.

The will of a dying person is law. Everyone with a heart should know this and try to do everything they can to ease the suffering of a person with one foot in the grave. Josh had a dream, embodied only in sleep and wet dreams—sex with a Hollywood star. In this dream there was nothing wrong or even shameful. If you think about it, Cameron Diaz and people like her only exist for, and on account of the fact that, fifteen year-old boys constantly want them. If they did not turn the heads of pubescent and post-pubescent youths, their success would be worthless, not one paparazzi would chase after them on a motorcycle, not one tabloid would devote one line to them, not one producer would knock at their door. In this way, Cameron Diaz said no to a customer. Her provider. The person who gave her wealth and fame, celebrity and happiness. She bit the hand that feeds her.

The sorrowful outrage of Mister Morten, the father of the late Josh, is understandable: “Who do they think they are, these women! They earn millions of dollars and swan about at fancy parties, but when they get a simple request to bring a smile to a young boy far less fortunate than them, they turn their back on you. What kind of world do we live in when a dying teenager can no longer get his cock sucked by a celebrity?” End quote.

If Cameron Diaz were a little more sympathetic or even a bit smarter, she would understand that this dying fan, taking a smile from her, would have left for the next world calm and appeased, and there, in Heaven, he would have asked the Lord God to send down to Cameron Diaz yet more millions of dollars, limousines, villas, admirers, nice contracts and generous producers. But Cameron Diaz did not even think of that. She imagined she could get by on her own, and the teenager, suffering from leukemia, could get by on his own. “Go away!” she said to him. “I don’t know you.”

Cameron Diaz acted wrongly in two ways—from a moralistic standpoint, which demands granting the last wish of a dying person, and from the standpoint of her own best interests: take Josh into her mouth, which would do her good in Heaven and on Earth—the tabloids would plaster her face everywhere, sweatshirts with her face would be sold by the millions, she could be on talk shows, coquettishly hiding her tear-streaked face and telling about the last days of her dying lover, it would fill prime-time on all the channels, and the best minds in Hollywood would rush to make a film on a subject that touched all of America. Instead of all this, she received the condemnation of honest citizens. And rightly so.

However, it is easy to forsee Cameron Diaz objecting to all this and making up excuses. She is in no way to blame for the fact that Josh Morten had leukemia. She was very sad when she heard. She prayed to God for the boy’s health, so that He would perform a miracle and cure him. Miss Diaz has even decided to donate a part of her astronomical royalties to a fund for the fight against cancer. But Miss Diaz cannot truly understand how a blowjob can help a child. She understands even less why she should fulfill this wish of a dying

After all, Cameron knows quite well that millions of teenagers all over the world want to put their sprout into her slit, and not only that. But Cameron Diaz is a creative individual, an independent artist, and therefore is not a position to fulfill the wishes of every teenager. Miss Diaz has refrained from commenting on the issue out of respect for the tragedy of the Morten family, but their accusations seem at the least strange to her. In the end, society is built on the certainty of privacy, and infringements on that privacy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances, even if that circumstance happens to be noseless with braids. [Some kind of idiom—I can’t find what it means at the moment. –Trans.]

In that sense, Cameron Diaz is entirely correct. Creative or perhaps not so much, she is still an individual. The tragedy of poor Josh is the fact that he saw in her what he was taught to see—a picture on television, a sack of silicon, the successes of the perfume and cosmetic industries, the result of the work of cameramen and editors, the product of solarium and toning cream, but not an individual. He could not imagine that the girl Cameron someday was, in fact, a girl, fifteen years-old and pimply, shy, with undeveloped breasts and romantic nonsense in her head. And her greatest dream was to give a blowjob to Al Pacino, for instance, or Antonio Banderas. And now, hiding from the stage lights and the flash of cameras in her penthouse and with a glass of dill juice in her hand, breathing air-conditioned air, Cameron Diaz would like to think that she is not a doll, no, she prays for the spirit of young Josh and falls asleep on her crisp bedsheets, so that in the morning she can again manage to smile for the cameras.

Nice

English Sans French (Article in Christian Science Monitor)

On PBS

“We are going to kill a lot of people…”

“War is terrorism.”

“President Bush is right now the greatest danger to world peace.”

“Those who die…will die because President Bush has grandiose ambitions for American power in the world. They will die because of oil, they will die because of politics, they will die because of the need of the United States government to expand its power. Those are not good reasons to die.”

-Howard Zinn

“If there is a war in Iraq, the reason will be Saddam Hussein.”

“The pre-eminent issue for the next twenty years is how many countries will have weapons of mass destruction and how many individuals will be able to get those weapons of mass destruction illegally.”

“The slogan ‘War is not the answer,’ it depends on the question. If the United States backs down we will have sustained…defeat without war.”

-Diane Kunz

“The status quo is not peace in Iraq.”

-Walter Russell Mead

MOVE!

I just got back tonight from four days in Madison, Wisconsin (a great city, by the way) attending the Great Lakes Region American College Dance Festival at UW-Madison.

I’m extremely tired, but it was a very productive few days. I observed a class on Javanese dance, saw a ton of pieces from schools all over the region, and got to learn a little about the Alexander technique. The teacher, Luc Vanier from the U of I, was really good and made a 9am class very enjoyable.

Finally I can enjoy the rest of my spring break, get some reading done (“Голем, русская версия” and Gleb Grigoriev’s translation of The Crying of Lot 49), do my taxes, and finish choreographing my piece for the spring informal concert. It’s good to be home.

BOOKS!

Uh… So… I better forget Schoenhof’s Foreign Books exists. Yeah. I just bought:

• Ucimo srpski 1 Book and Cassette (Let’s Learn Serbian 1)
• Prica o tomici Macanu (The Tale of Tom Kitten)
• Mali princ (The Little Prince)

Which is okay, because I am actually learning this language. But there are too many foreign language books on this site. Very dangerous…

the honors committee is now complete

Don Blaheta has just been offered the job of Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Knox. This is great news!

sem forum

Because there really aren’t any, I created a forum for those considering grad school in theology. This includes people studying for an M.Div. (i.e., professional theological education) or going for S.T.M. degrees, Th.D.’s, Ph.D.’s, and so forth, and it’s open to people from any denomination or faith. I’ve already created sections for Judaism and Islam in addition to the major Christian traditions.

If you know anyone in or considering grad school in theology, please let them know about the site. Also, if you yourself are interested in talking theology in a positive environment, please join in. I’ve never started a forum like this and have no idea how to get it off the ground, but I’m hoping the blogging community can help with some word-of-mouth.

http://www.polyglut.net/semforum/

The Pooh Perplex, Crews

The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook
Frederick C. Crews
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
New York, 1963.
Finished: 10 March, 2003.

I ran across a reference to Postmodern Pooh about a week ago, and I decided to read Crews’ first Pooh satire before reading the latest. What a gas! Crews takes the prevalent methods of literary criticism leading up to the 1960s and apes them with a deft touch. One of my favorite moments was when “C. J. L. Culpepper, D.Litt., Oxon.”, after determining the Christic nature of Eeyore, declares that Christopher Robin is a stand-in for God the Father. He proves this simply: “Christopher Robin” is an anagram for “I HOPE CHRIST BORN. R.” (“I take this to be a decree in the hortatory imperative, dispatched to the Heavenly Host, urging the speedy fulfillment of the Incarnation and signed ‘R’ for REX.”) Even more hilarious is the following short passage:

Italics God’s! Too funny for words.

servicemembers

William Safire’s latest column contains a common error—people always seem to forget Marines when listing members of the armed forces. It’s shameful that a well-known columnist for the New York Times would make such an error.

Speaking of shame, I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present”, linked from Steve’s FAQ page about languages. What trash.

“The relevant Choir here comprises that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs….The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE–10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate.”

It’s nice to know there are people out there trying to save us from expanding out language by verbing nouns and modifying usage norms.

emigrés

Article in the Times Literary Supplement about the Russian diaspora in London

polyglot kids

Basic FAQ about raising multilingual kids (via MorfaBlog)

Article at IMDiversity.com about the same

Finally, an entire website for parents raising multilingual kids

The second site made me happy—it tells of a family whose children were raised to speak German by their father, who learned the language in college. It makes me feel like Sue and I aren’t so crazy in hoping to raise our kids to speak languages that are not ours natively. Anyone else heard stories of Americans gaining fluency in a foreign language and then raising their kids to be “native” speakers of that language?

possessed by Sasha Sokolov

Translating is a strange activity for me, especially when I get really into a work. I start to feel really connected to the text, words from both the source text and my own translation come to me in dreams, fill up my conversational lexicon, take over my writing, scenes from the source text start to become my own memories rather than remaining something I’ve read. I am turning into a novel on my way to becoming a white river lily.

I had the strangest moment a little while ago while translating part of School for Morons. The passage begins, “Dear student so-and-so, I, the author of this book…” There are plenty of conflicting voices in this novel without adding the voice of a translator, but there are a lot of ears in the book, too. As a matter of fact, the edition I bought in Russia had a close-up picture of an ear on the front cover. Being in between the voice of the author and the ear of the central character (both as a voice and an ear), and between the author’s voice and the ear of the reader, is an eerie feeling.

At this point, I’m at a loss even to describe what I’m working on to people. I don’t know if this is a phenomenon most translators experience when working on translations such as this one, but it’s so much more than just rendering a text into English. I know this text (well, the first chapter) more intimately than I know just about any other text I’ve ever read. Even though the end result will just be a text similar to Sokolov’s and readable by speakers of English, I’m hard-pressed to call this “translating,” as it’s a very different process for me as a person.

monolingual America?

Colin Quinn’s new show on Comedy Central, “Tough Crowd”, will discuss the question of a polyglot culture in America when it premieres on Monday at 10:30pm (CST). I think it could be interesting…

UPDATE: I may have misspoken. I’ll post when I find out whether that episode indeed is airing on Monday.

Minor victories

• I was told today that I’ve done about the right amount of work for the translation independent study, and that it is of “the highest kachestvo” (Rus., quality).
• I didn’t do too badly on my Analysis exam last night.
• I can dance.

The best thing is that even though finals are coming up, I’m slowly but surely removing things from my to-do list. My Hungarian final is tonight; after that I have my Analysis final, some dance pieces to perform, and a little Russian to translate, then I’m off to Madison!

Academia

This started off as a response to Naomi Chana’s post today about academia, but it sprawled, so I decided to put it here.

The problem I see is that empassioned, well-meaning people like her only maintain the status quo. I don’t mean that as an indictment; on the contrary, without such people, academia would become completely unbearable. The problem is that to effect the changes she’s after, a whole lot more people in academia need to change.

I guess a lot has changed in recent years—my advisor was talking with UC-Irvine’s Dean of the School of Physical Sciences at our Alumni Achievement Awards banquet the other week, and they recalled, none too fondly, how much more “publish-or-perish” the environment used to be, and how teaching used to be a lower priority. The very idea of a world where teaching was less important terrifies me, and I go to a college considered a teaching-oriented school!

In any case, I’m pretty frustrated with academia. In particular, I’ve met way too many Slavists who get upset when someone below them (an assistant prof if they’re a full professor, a lecturer if they’re on tenure-track, certainly a ugrad if they’re anyone with a Ph.D.) points out a hole in their knowledge. I’ve been lucky to be taught mostly be folks who aren’t like this, but my experiences on mailing lists and in other fora have certainly turned me off to the idea of doing graduate work in Russian. For a while I thought I was judging the profession unfairly based on a few marginal people, but recent experiences with people I’d previously respected and who are fairly well-known in the field have turned me off again—I think I’m headed to seminary. (Granted, this isn’t my only reason for going to sem, but I don’t feel like Russian is even a possibility, again.)

It shouldn’t be like this. In fact, it isn’t like this everywhere. I suppose every field, every university, every department has its share of “blowholes”, as Dorothea puts it. But I’ve been spoiled with too many great teachers to believe that it has to be this way.

I’ll never forget being told by my high school history teacher, Dr. Skinner, all the horrors of graduate school. I was only a junior, and all I could think was that it was the wrong way—stiffling promising research for political reasons, denying people tenure because they’re disliked, and so on. I can only hope that Naomi succeeds and doesn’t end up embittered by the experience. Heaven knows we students need people like her fighting the good fight.

mish-mash

Oulipo! (I wrote a lot more than that, but then I closed my browser. Oops.)

On a related note, Christian Bök’s Eunoia looks really cool. Check out Caterina’s recent post about it, and also join the Oulipo conspiracy. Steve’s doing it, and you should too!

As may be clear from the above, I’m on “C” in my blog roll, trying to catch up on the last several days’ posts. I’m adding another IMSAlum to the blog roll, too. Welcome to the non-LiveJournal world, Kevin. Furthermore, I’m set on starting a Knox 1000 blank white cards deck, which I’d forgotten about until another Caterina post reminded me.

Also on the subject of homemade games, my friend Jonathan, who is studying theology at Cambridge, has been hard at play developing a couple of games—the board game Generica, and the online Catch the Furball.