Mentoring

A colleague asked me what it is that I need from a mentor. I started making a list and discovered that it's probably a psychoanalyst and not a mentor that I need.

Elections in Canada

I've been trying for a while to write a post on the upcoming elections in my country. However, I have to confess that I have been away from Canada for a while now and feel rather out of touch with its political scene. Canada has been impacted by the global financial crisis a lot less than the US*. Housing prices dropped a little for a while, but then started showing signs of growth again. In Quebec, real estate prices were never as inflated as in the US, of course, which made the drop in value of real a state a lot less dramatic. 

In terms of employment, there was a moment when people started getting laid off and finding a new job was difficult. Now, however, things seem to be back to normal. My sister, who lives in Montreal, felt so comfortable about the business of recruiting people that she left a very high-paying position with a well-established company to start her own recruiting company. 

Unlike the American shoppers, the Québécois customers still consume like there is no tomorrow. The last time that I visited Montreal I was (pleasantly) surprised to see that stores, coffee-shops and restaurants were filled with people to the extent where you could hardly get inside. 

Of course, even though Canada got through the crisis with relatively few losses (compared to the US), there are still massive problems in the country. Canadians at large seem to be completely out of sync with the Conservative agenda of Harper's Tories. Canada's conservatives would be considered commie-pinko Liberals in the US. However, their views are still too medieval for the majority of the country's population. Still, Harper and Co managed to stay in power since 2006 because Canadians are sick and tired of the overblown, ridiculously huge federal government and of the endless and unashamed corruption of the Liberals**.  Now that it has become clear that the Tories have no intention (or no wherewithal, as the case may be) to either avoid being as corrupt as the Liberals or to get the unwieldy government apparatus under control, new elections loom on the horizon.

Liberals have promised really fantastic things in their election platform. Huge amounts of money for education, creation of new professorial positions, and daycare services caught my attention. Are these promises enough, however, to attract voters to the Liberals' side? Is there a viable alternative to the Conservatives versus Liberals dichotomy that has plagued the political scene of both the US and Canada?

Please share your thoughts on the future of the best country in the world :-) whether you are Canadian or not.

* Most of my information is based on what is happening in Quebec and partly in Nova Scotia, which might not always be representative of the country at large, of course.

** As in every other post, I express my own views here. People might have a very different interpretation of what is going on in Canadian politics.

On the Bus

A kind older gentleman on the bus: So are you going to school?

Me: Yes.

Gentleman: So what are you trying to become?

Me: I already have become what I wanted. I'm a professor here.

Gentleman: No! Are you?

Me: Yes, sir.

Gentleman (taking off his sunglasses and peering closely at me): You've got to be kidding.

Note to self: don't leave the house without makeup.

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Professor Arrested for Shutting a Student's Laptop

I just read the following story in Inside Higher Ed:

Frank J. Rybicki, assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, shut the laptop of a student who was allegedly web surfing as opposed to taking notes. She filed a complaint (reportedly about a finger or fingers that were hurt when he shut the laptop) and the university's police arrested him on a charge of battery. The Georgia institution suspended his teaching duties there, although not his pay. Reached on the phone, Rybicki confirmed his arrest and suspension, and said that he had been told by the university not to answer questions about the incident. He did say that the article and comments in the student newspaper, The Spectator, were accurate. That article quoted students who saw the incident as saying that Rybicki closed the laptop amid an argument with the student over his view that she had been on websites not related to the course.

In this situation, both the student and the professor acted in a very unintelligent way. The student is obviously an idiot who has no interest in getting an education. There are students who are so behind in class that they have no idea what's going on. They can't participate or contribute anything to the discussions, which makes them feel stupid. In order to save face, they hide behind their cell-phones, laptops and iPods. I have a students like that who always have their iPhones at the ready in case I give out an assignment they cannot complete, or often even understand.

The professor in this situation showed himself to be as unintelligent as the student. What's the point of jeopardizing one's career for the sake of a student who has no interest in learning? You can't force a person to learn against their will. You can take away all their gadgets and chain them to the desk. And they still will not learn. 

In my teaching, I made a decision a long time ago to concentrate on those students who do want to learn and forget about the snoring, web-surfing, texting losers. They are destroying their own chances at getting educated. Why should I care about that or about anything in their sorry lives? I actually prefer that such students sit there with their noses stuck into their laptops and iPhones instead of distracting the entire class with stupid jokes and idiotic comments. I wish that Professor Rybicki had done the same instead of putting his entire career at risk for the sake of a silly hope that a stupid, ignorant student can be redeemed.

The Best Hobby Ever

I have no idea why but I recently remembered this cottage cheese cake with raisins that I loved when I was a child. So I made my own cottage cheese and then baked the cake. It's really light because it only has three tablespoons of flour. And it's really delicious.

Weekends are great because I have the time and energy to make interesting recipes.

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Appreciation of Literature

"Out of all the texts that we have read in our Survey of Spanish literature course, which one did you like the most?" I ask my students.

"The short story by Unamuno," they respond unanimously.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because it has a happy ending!" they say completely seriously.

Now I'm wondering what I have done wrong in this course to get such a result.

Sales Training for Academics

At least once a day, somebody visits my blog to read my posts on how to deal with rejection in academia (you can find them here, here and here.) Failed job searches, rejected articles, book proposals or conference presentations - all that traumatizes academics to the point where many decide to stop trying altogether. One of the most recent searches that led a reader to one of these posts was "heartbroken over article rejection academia." 

All of this made me think that we, the academics, might benefit from the kind of training that people in sales get that helps them immunize themselves against being emotionally ravaged by rejection. These brave people (especially those in telemarketing) get rejected - and often in a very rude form - dozens or even hundreds of times a day. So if they can do it, the we most definitely can find a way to deal with a rejection every couple of months that is more often than not couched in fairly polite terms.

Seriously, if anybody has had any such training, or alternatively, has developed strategies of your own, please share. Many people are in need of this kind of advice.

Where Do Such People Come From?

In my language class there is such a thing as an oral exam. Students go to the lab, record their responses to the activities, save them in an audio-file, and send the file to me by email. For those who don't know how to attach a file to an email (yep, such people do exist), I provide a flash drive where they can record their audio files. 

Last Monday was the last day when students could do the exam. On Tuesday, I went to the lab to collect the flash drive with the exam and discovered that it had mysteriously disappeared together with the midterm oral exams of five students that were recorded on it. 

Of course, when the class started, I asked the students if one of them had taken the flash drive by mistake. Nobody had any idea where the flash drive was. I interrogated people who worked at the lab, they looked everywhere, the flash drive was not to be found. You can imagine how it made me feel to find myself in a situation where five midterms disappeared. Exams are always my responsibility whether they are done in the classroom or in the lab. The five students whose exams were lost also were not enjoying the situation. The lab workers felt horrible. The person supervising the lab workers (and a good friend of mine) felt even more horrible. 

So on Thursday I come back to class and tell the students that, unfortunately, the flash drive hasn't been recovered and their exams are lost. At which point, a student gets up, saunters lazily to my desk, throws the missing flash drive on it and says, "Oh, here it is. I took it home last week." The five students whose exams she dragged home in such a cavalier manner looked at her in angry and mute astonishment. 

I was livid, people. I immediately assigned an activity to the class and left the classroom. I knew that I had to take a walk, have a drink of water, do some breathing exercises before I could return to the classroom and be sure that I would not inflict any harm on this horribly inconsiderate student.

I mean, where do such people even come from? She takes the flash drive home (something which I expressly told students not to do), fails to show up for class next week, and doesn't even write an email to inform me that MY flash drive that contains exams belonging to five OTHER people is in her possession. It later turned out that she recorded an empty file instead of her own exam, so all this was for nothing. 

In the seven minutes that I was away from the classroom trying to get myself together, the students whose exams were on the flash drive must have had a talk with the student who took it home. When I came back, her cavalier attitude was gone, and she was weepy and apologetic. If this doesn't teach her a lesson, then I don't know what will. 

It is mind-boggling how rude and inconsiderate some people are. 

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Clarissa's Sauerkraut Salad: A Recipe

This is a very traditional salad that we make often in my culture. Since good sauerkraut is hard to come around in the area where I live, I make my own. It isn't difficult at all to make it, and if people are interested, I can share how it's done. My country isn't rich in vegetables and vegetarian options do not abound. This is probably the closest we come to a vegetarian and healthy dish. (Here I do need to remind you that Ukrainian cuisine is probably among the most unhealthy in the world. Everything is salted, pickled, and smothered in lard. It is what it is, so I'm just trying to make the best of it.)

What you are going to need:

sauerkraut

potatoes

beets

pickles

scallions

canned green peas

olive oil

Some people also add carrots but I make my sauerkraut with carrots, I don't add any more to the salad to avoid overpowering it with a carroty taste.

I don't put any proportions here because it is really a matter of individual taste. Just keep adding ingredients and stop when you reach the taste profile that makes you happy.

1. Boil some potatoes but make sure they are not overdone. Nothing is worse than a mushy potato in a salad. Potatoes should still remain pleasantly firm inside after you boil them. 

2. Many people boil their beets too, but it's always better to bake them in foil. Beets should also be taken out of the oven before they become mushy inside.

3. While things are boiling and baking, cut up some scallions and pickles and mix them in a big bowl with sauerkraut and green peas. Don't overdo the pickles. Two medium-sized one are more than enough for the bowl of this size.

4. In the absence of a Russian food store in a close physical proximity, these are the pickles that I use for all my recipes because they come very close in taste to the real thing. I don't suggest getting any other brand of pickles because the strong vinegary taste of most North American brands will demolish the taste of all my recipes.

5. Then, when potatoes and beets are ready, dice them and add them to the salad. The smaller you dice them, the better the quality of the salad will be. Then, add a little olive oil (I never add more than a tea spoon, unless the sauerkraut is extremely dry), mix everything, and enjoy.

Badminton Season

Today was the first time this year that we played badminton. Now it really feels like summer.

The neighbors seem used to seeing people play badminton on this block, which is just as well because we will be doing it all summer long.

Compliments to Clarissa's Blog

Look at the nice things people say about me:

Unfortunately, I've never heard the word "philosophy" at school, but I am sure it doesn't deserve hating. With a good teacher, I think we both would be interested. Clarissa at http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/ (VERY recommended blog in general) wrote numerous, fascinating posts about the subject (among her books' reviews). And you love logic, since you like programming. "If A, then B..." doesn't mean A is ever true/false. Ditto RE online discussions, otherwise why blog? There is science and there is junk science, and sometimes real science gets twisted and reported as junk one in newspapers. The less formal field of knowledge is, the easier is to twist it and let general public see a fake as a real thing. F.e. mathematics is very hard to twist, but evolutionary psychology is an easy victim.  In short, we love philosophy (studying how people and society work among other things, based on Clarissa's reviews of books by famous philosophers), logic and online discussions, it's fakes and shouting matches we hate. :)

This was published on a blog that I think is run by somebody from Sweden, which I always considered an enlightened country full of intelligent people. This nice comment was left by a user whose blog you can find here.

It's great to know that anti-Clarissa bloggers are balanced out by such appreciative, nice people. I feel very valued right now and encouraged to blog even more. Especially about philosophy.

Is Spring Finally Here?

I know that everybody must be sick and tired of my not extremely professional (to put it very mildly) photos by now, but this tree that grows next to my house is so beautiful right now that I couldn't help sharing it with people.

Now I really hope that there will be no more snow falling on it.

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Decorating Spaces

Another thing that I bought in New York was this beautiful drawing (ink on canvas.) They are sold by a painter called Yuri who works as an illustrator of fantasy fiction. He makes these drawings in his free time and sells them on weekends at the Union Square. They come in many colors, and I really wanted to buy the purple one (which is my favorite color at this point) but my sister claimed it for my niece's bedroom, and I couldn't say no to that.

For twelve years I led a very nomadic lifestyle. I knew that every place I lived in would be temporary. School, then more school, then graduate school, then a temporary teaching position. The goal was always to have as little material possessions as possible in order to be able to pick everything up and move across the continent at any given time. I learned to live out of a suitcase and not to fret too much when that suitcase was lost. 

Now I am getting used to the idea that I can finally stay put. Hanging a picture on the wall of my house or my office has a great symbolic meaning for me. It is a sign that I can finally truly inhabit the spaces where I live. It will take time, of course, to learn not to look at any new object from the point of view of how hard it will be to pack it and to substitute functionality with aesthetics.

New Page: Reviews

I don't know if everybody has noticed but there is a new page titled "Reviews" that I added yesterday. The page will contain my most popular reviews of books, movies, and, in the future, possibly restaurants. People come to the blog specifically for the reviews very often, so I decided to make things easier for them.

Does anybody have any suggestions for other pages that could be added to make the blog more convenient to use?

El sueño del celta / The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: A Review

In case you found Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine difficult to understand, here is Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel El sueño del celta to explain to you exactly what happened in those novels. Roger Casement, the novel's protagonist, was a British consul who traveled to Congo and the Amazon and wrote scandalous reports about the horrible treatment of the natives of Africa and South America by the colonial forces. Later on, he joined the Irish nationalist movement and militated for the cause of Ireland's independence.

This is not a novel that offers much - or any, I would say - space for the reader to analyze, interpret, imagine, or look for his or her own answers. Everything is spelled out with painstaking attention to detail. As a result, some parts of the novel sound like they were copy-pasted from an encyclopedia. Sources of historical data, short biographical sketches of real-life people who appear in the novel, dates and gigures populate the pages of El sueño del celta. Vargas Llosa seems to have lost his capacity to relinquish control over his text and allow the readers to interact with it on their own. For those who managed to remain unfamiliar with the civilization versus barbarity conflict, Vargas Llosa makes absolutely sure that you will be sick to death of both terms by the end of the novel. And for those who didn't get the message that imperialism is wrong, it will be hammered in on every other page.

Everything I have written so far has probably made you think that I hated the novel. This, however, is not true. El sueño del celta doesn't offer much for analysis but it is surely informative and very well-written. I now know everything I ever wanted to know (and a lot, lot more) about Roger Casement, his travels, struggles, ailments, friends, foes, hopes and dreams. This novel is anything but boring. Vargas Llosa is a great narrator who can turn anything into a great story. I have no doubt that this novel will be quite successful if only for the fact that it is very easy to read.

The enumeration of sufferings inflicted by the colonial forces on the natives of African Congo and the indigenous people of the Amazon becomes painful to read at a certain point. This, of course, is a story that needs to be told and repeated as many times as possible lest we forget that imperialism can never be excused. I have to warn you, however, that an honest piece of writing about colonialism (such as this one) will be so disturbing as to prevent you from sleeping at night.

There are people who insist that Vargas Llosa is a Libertarian. It is a statement that is as silly as claiming that Juan Goytisolo is a Communist. Writers have a tendency to try on political discourses without really knowing what those discourses are about. They don't, however, allow their political triflings influence what and how they write in any way. It's been a while since I have read an indictment of the horrors that free market and wild capitalism inevitably bring along that would be as passionate and convincing as El sueño del celta. Anybody who believes that it would be a good idea to let market forces act freely, without any restraints from the government, should read this novel and hopefully just shut up already. In El sueño del celta,Vargas Llosa condemns the horrifying greed of free market capitalists better than any writer I have read in a while.

Writing Whenever You Can

Yesterday, I read the following suggestion on one of my favorite blogs:

I am lucky that I can open a document of an article or chapter at any time and do five or ten minutes of work on it. Many writers tell themselves they need at least an hour, or at least an entire day, or five hours, or a week without interruption, in order to get work done. Some writers say they need the semester to be over and have the entire summer in front of them before they are able to work. Or they know that significant work will only happen during a sabbatical. The problem, then, is that they don't bother with shorter periods of time at all. Because they have in their minds a minimum period, they will never even see if they can get lucky too.  If you have a minimum like this in your mind, then re-examine it. If you need three hours, see if one hour is enough. If you need a month, try a week. If you need one hour, try twenty minutes. Just try it once as an experiment and see what happens.

Thursdays are days when I teach, advise students, respond to emails and take care of administrative issues. There are several moments during the day when I just sit there in the office for 15, 20 or 25 minutes with nothing to do. So I decided to follow this piece of advice and at least try opening my file with the document I'm writing to see if I can add anything to it in those "empty" stretches of time. 

Today, I opened the file and discovered that it had magically grown by almost 650 words. This happened on a day of the week that I usually just give up on as one which is useless in terms of doing any writing. I have to confess that I had been pretty sure that this method wasn't going to work. I had convinced myself that I can only write if I have long, uninterrupted stretches of time ahead of me. It turns out that I was fooling myself. 

All I can say at this point is a surprised and delighted "Hmm . . ." Let's see if the method continues working for me.

From My Literary Translation

The following is an excerpt from my literary translation. I'm worried that the female protagonist (Klara) is turning out quite unsympathetic, which was definitely not the way she was conceived by the author. It would be great if people could take a look and tell me how they feel about this character based on the following excerpt. Please disregard the horrible punctuation. Somebody will take care of that for me because I'm useless with English punctuation.

Klara was quite sociable but while she was socializing with people and allowing them to socialize with her, she was unwittingly creating a transparent and at the same time impenetrable bubble that surrounded her and separated her from others. She wasn’t doing it on purpose. Rather, her perennially terrified admirers did it for her. It was their own fault, of course, because Klara never asked them to fear her comments and think that she was making fun of people who made fools of themselves. She wasn’t laughing at them (like she cared enough for that) but simply because she felt like laughing.

To give an example, Marik Steinberg, one of the top students in the entire city of Kharkov who was slated to receive a golden medal for his outstanding grades, fell in love with Klara to the point of stuttering. Of course, it is quite possible that he always stuttered, who knows? Finally, he decided to inform Klara of his feelings that were evident not only to her but to everybody else within  a hundred mile radius. She burst out in a bout of compassionate (yes, compassionate, why can’t anybody understand that?) laughter so that her blush turned from pale-pink to aggressively red. In a similarly compassionate tone that suggested she only wanted the best for Marik, she responded, “Marik, have you ever seen yourself in the mirror?”

“Sure I have,” Marik responded. His face was covered with huge beads of sweat that looked like boils.

Klara stopped laughing, looked at him seriously, and concluded, “In that case, your actions are incomprehensible.”

She had nothing else to say, nor did she want to.

Rabbits and Civilization

Civilization is making small inroads into the area where I live. Yesterday I discovered that our grocery store now sells farm-raised frozen rabbits. Rabbit is the first thing I ever learned how to cook and over the years I have honed my rabbit cooking skills to achieve amazing results. In the Midwest, though, people are terrified when I mention that rabbits can be used as food. People around here are decidedly unadventurous in terms of food. I asked my students, and they unanimously agreed that chicken is the best meat ever. Which is kind of sad.

So, of course, I bought the rabbit and I will share my rabbit recipe with my readers over the weekend.

Funny Cartoon to Celebrate April 1st

Of course, it would be a lot funnier if so many people didn't spout this stuff completely seriously.

Happy April Fool's Day!

I was going to celebrate April Fool's Day by telling my readers that this blog was closing down. Then, however, I realized that they might believe it and go away for good.

The reason I like April 1st is not because it's a day you can play practical jokes on people. I think most practical jokes are stupid anyway.

But I love it because it's the first day of the loveliest month of the year. Which, incidentally, is also the month of my Birthday.