I have found my Kryptonite...

...and it is Star Popcorn, specifically the oddly-titled "Cheese Bond" flavor.

I think there's like 24 grams of fat in a hundred gram serving. Which makes it 24% fat. It seems like that can't possibly be true, but would Moldovan ingredient labels lie to me?

I really need to stop eating it, but I can't. One handful is just never enough.

Baked Beans

I was recently rather annoyed by the fact that I don't have anywhere I can go to satisfy my taste for American food in Comrat. The Turkish students here have the Turkish Kitchen and Café Istanbul where they can go whenever they like to have food from their native land. Sadly, due to the lack of Americans here (there are 3 of us), there's no such spot for us Yanks. Then I thought, "I have a kitchen. I am American. My kitchen can be the American Kitchen!"

So when I woke up very late today (11:30), I decided to make a project of cooking some baked beans from my mother's delicious recipe (available upon request). Thankfully, Fourchette, the grocery store here, carries a variety of essential Heinz products such as Worcestershire sauce and barbeque sauce. Everything else is a pretty basic ingredient (assorted canned beans, peppers, ketchup, etc.). So I took a walk in the glorious spring weather down to Fourchette, ran into 3 students (which made me feel happy that I know people in Comrat), picked up all the ingredients, and got cooking.

Here's my BBQ sauce (note the Russian label) and my hot sauce. I am holding the scary, Looney Tunes-esque can opener that I had to fight with to get the cans open. It kind of scratched my hand in the process. I think my tetanus shot is up to date. I'm pretty sure.

Beans simmering on the stove.

Full-on stove shot. I'm very happy that the owners of the apartment left a whole bunch of pots and pans for my cooking enjoyment. You can also see my little fancy ($8) Italian coffee-maker thing on the left. I'm very pleased with it so far.

I can't report on the taste of the finished product yet, but my kitchen smells pretty delicious!

Since this Moldovan cooking experiment has been successful so far, I'm thinking of tackling homemade macaroni and cheese and homemade spaghetti sauce next weekend. I'm tired of being held hostage by the expensive Barilla pasta sauce at Green Hills (one of our other supermarkets)! Four dollars for a jar of bolognese sauce that feeds no more than two people is absurd! I'm gonna cook up a big mess of sauce and then freeze it. Mmm mmm good!

New Apartment Pictures

I just moved into a nice new place on Ulitsa Gavrilova. It's a pretty classy place, fully furnished, and it finally has internet (as of today)!

My wardrobe. (Sorry, no lions or witches.)

It's so nice to have a bookshelf. All my multi-lingual books look pretty. But it reminds me that I haven't read that many books since I've been here. However, I am currently three pages into Tolstoy's Childhood.

My room. The bed's on the left and the desk is on the right.

Just to prove that I really do live here. This is in my living room. Note my Gonzaga t-shirt, worn in honor of the first day of March Madness!

My living room. (Or should I say oturma odası? I recently learned this word in Turkish.) As you can see I have a nice rack for drying my clothes and some comfy chairs and couches. I'm sitting in one of the chairs as I write this.

This is my foyer, complete with coat rack and slippers.

This is my beloved washing machine. Thanks to it, my clothes smell good!

My bathroom. As you can see, the shower is pretty tiny, but it's functional.

Here's my stove and oven. It's gas, which is kinda scary but very fast. Plus, you get to light it with a match and that is cool.

Here is my kitchen. It's a pretty decent sized kitchen by Moldovan standards.

Here's my unfinished dining room. There are two unfinished rooms in the apartment, which is kinda weird, but pretty standard because loan rates are really high so people just build stuff when they have the money. On the left you can see my water heater. I have 24 hour water here, which is great. I'm very lucky. You can't see the regular heater because it is behind the table. Having a dining room is cool because I can have guests over for dinner! Although I have yet to do this, but I am planning on it soon. Everyone should come and visit me.

Ridiculous Fun with Hundred Dollar Bills

The other day my former landlady asked me to exchange the hundred dollar bill I had given her for rent money last week. Apparently, her bank rejected it because of a tiny tear (approximately an eighth of an inch) on the lower left corner. Other than that the bill was pristine.

I found this frankly hilarious and rather annoying at the same time. I went back to the bank where I exchanged the money and the clerk happily exchanged the bill for another one.
I went and gave the new bill to my landlady. She told me that the people at the exchange place were trying to cheat me. I tried to explain to her that I used to work at a bank and we accepted money in basically any condition.

“But this is a lot of money!” she said to me.

I didn’t have the heart to explain that I easily went through $25,000 in cash—the majority of it in hundreds—on a payday Friday at Marisol Federal Credit Union.

Life Goals (Or, How I Went to Moldova and Learned to Sing Like Elliot Smith)

I have always identified strongly with Rob, the record store owner played by John Cusak in High Fidelity. Rob spends a great deal of time obsessing about popular music (like me) and kicking out thieving hoodlums from his record store (uh...not like me). By accident he realizes that two of those hoodlums are actually talented musicians and ends up producing their record. His girlfriend Laura tells him that he’s come full circle by actually becoming a part of the music-making process instead of just being a music consumer.

Those of you who follow Facebook probably saw the video of me and two students from the university singing “Hear You Me” for a school concert. I hadn’t sung in front of people in nine years (since I played Madam Mysteria in the ninth grade play, to be exact), but my church choir training at St. Bridget’s all came back to me with some help. It was really cool to actually make music again.

The guys from the band invited me to sing with them anytime I wanted and I was more than happy to take them up on the offer. Tragically, I haven’t been able to track down a cello for rent in Comrat, so I’ve been sticking with singing, although guitar lessons have been promised soon.

We have no gigs yet—there’s only three of us so we can’t exactly do full sets now—but we are getting a repertoire together. Thus far we have worked on:

“Viva la Vida” — Coldplay

“Say Yes” — Elliot Smith

“Lovers in Japan” — Coldplay

“Wonderwall” — Oasis

“Miss Misery” — Elliot Smith

“Twilight” — Elliot Smith

“The Middle” — Jimmy Eat World

“Cemeteries of London” — Coldplay

“Waltz #2” — Elliot Smith

We’ve tried to add some Regina Spektor songs, but they’re really hard to sing! Her voice is just too intense for my limited powers. We’ve been leaning pretty heavily on the Elliot Smith. When I was playing classical music, I always loved pieces a lot more once I’d played them. I’ve discovered that the same thing is true for Elliot Smith’s music. His songs are even more fantastic when you’ve learned them inside and out. (I know it’s sacrilege, but I have to admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of Either/Or until I started singing songs from it.) His songs aren’t that hard to sing and they grow on you tremendously. His voice is in a totally different register than mine so I end up sounding pretty manly on “Say Yes,” but I’m hoping that the more I sing it, the less weird the low notes will sound.

I’ve also discovered the amazing power of YouTube for listening to new stuff by artists you like. I found a sweet video of Elliot Smith performing in the Stinkweeds on Apache (RIP) in Tempe from 1996. It made me extremely nostalgic for Tempe. Oh, to have an Eastside Records in Comrat! Or a Hoodlums! Or a Milano’s Music! I could go on forever. We don’t realize how good we have it music-wise in America.

I can also recommend Sad Kermit singing “Needle in the Hay” in a bizarre homage to Wes Anderson. It’s definitely worth a watch to hear a Muppet singing about drug abuse.

My recent switch from a music consumer to a music maker has inspired me to add another life goal to my list. So far we have:

1. Visit every former Soviet country. (5 down, 10 to go!)
2. Read War and Peace in Russian. (1 volume down, 3 to go!)
3. Learn to play and sing the entire Weakerthans discography. (0 down, at least 50 to go!)

I need more life goals!

Pre-Kiev Post

On the eve of my departure for Kiev, I realized that it’s been a pathetic 23 days since my last post. I figured I ought to remedy that before heading into Ukraine.

There are three things that generally inhibit me from posting:

1. A wish to avoid talking about people here on the Internet
2. A desire to avoid being constantly whiny about certain things
3. Work

All three factors have colluded in the past few weeks.

The last three weeks have been busy and quite fun. I no longer spend all evenings holed up in my room like an Internet junkie! I have engaged in many semi-scandalous activities such as drinking coffee illicitly and dancing at the disco. The last two weeks were the start of classes, and I had 11 pairs per week to prep for, which is no joke. At any rate, this semester I have a much lighter courseload than last year, thank God. Here’s what I’m teaching:

Development of Conversational Speech

Linguistic Analysis of Artistic Texts

History of English-Speaking Peoples

You gotta love the convoluted course titles! The conversation class is the most fun because I get to teach my students extremely practical things and just talk with them. Today I showed them a bunch of videos of people with Valley girl accents. Then I pretended to be a waitress at a restaurant. Everyone wanted strawberry shortcake. I forgot Alyona’s Coke...sorry, Alyona! For those who are interested this website has pretty awesome, realistic colloquial English lesson materials.

The main frustrations have been getting back into the post-Soviet work culture. Enough said. I am leaving for a training in Kiev with my fellow Moldovan, Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani ETA’s tomorrow, which I hope will recharge my tolerance for bureaucracy and give me a plethora of lesson planning ideas. I’m excited in the extreme because the Regional English Language Officer will be conducting the training and he is extraordinarily cool.

To change the subject abruptly, I have found myself getting weirdly obsessed with the Hold Steady and Bruce Springsteen. In particular, the song “Atlantic City.” I went on a fairly long tangent about popular perceptions of New Jersey in my literature class today. It was pretty uncalled for. I’m already getting as nuts as the professors I knew in the States.

I think this has to do with the fact that both the Hold Steady and the Boss are what Russian speakers would call спесифический. That is to say, they reflect the character of a certain place (Minneapolis and Jersey, respectively). I mean, you probably couldn’t even translate Hold Steady lyrics because they just wouldn’t make sense outside of an American context. (Although the chorus of “Party Pit”--“I’m going to walk around and drink some more”--is pretty much the most Russian thing I’ve ever heard.)

They are both essentially trying to tell the stories of people who live in a certain time and place without a whole lot of judgment, which is pretty unusual in popular music. Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady, writes about people like a college girl who gets mixed up with a townie murder and a teenage boy who gets kicked out of his own prom for being high. Bruce tells us about a man moving to Atlantic City to become a contract killer--and trying to convince his girlfriend to come with. It makes for some pretty good listening.

The Hold Steady also adds an interesting element of religion, alternating between blasphemy and piety. Craig Finn says, “I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers / I feel Judas in the long odd of the rackets on the corner.” Nevertheless, he seems pretty pleased that a past girlfriend was “a really good kisser and wasn’t all that strict of a Christian.”

I’m not sure if I’m obsessed because of nostalgia or the good music, but I can say that buying Boys and Girls in America at Hoodlums while I was on break was probably the best $5.99 I’ve spent in quite a while.

With that, I’m going to pack. Here I come, Kievan Rus!

Anna Karenina vs. The Museum of Innocence: Tolstoy/Pamuk Mash-up

While home on vacation, I was watching “Charlie Rose,” which is always a good idea. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the guest was Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate from Turkey, was talking about his new book, The Museum of Innocence. I started reading Pamuk’s books in 2007 when I was traveling in Turkey. I have to say that I don’t actually think his novels are all that good--after I finished both Snow and My Name is Red, I had the feeling that I had read a long, strange book about basically nothing. I’m a pretty big fan of his memoir Istanbul: Memories of the City, however, and through that book have come to appreciate his writing style, which is sentimental and self-aware of being sentimental at the same time. Istanbul is all about Pamuk finding himself through wandering through the old neighborhoods of Istanbul. After reading it, I often fancied myself to be Tempe’s Orhan Pamuk while riding my bike through Tempe’s more dilapidated neighborhoods!

In the interview, Charlie Rose asked Pamuk what he thought was the greatest novel of all time, and Pamuk answered “Anna Karenina” without any hesitation. This interested me, since people usually pick War and Peace for the greatest novel of all time if they are into Tolstoy. To explain his love of Tolstoy, Pamuk retold an anecdote about Nabokov, who once explained Tolstoy’s writing style by simply opening a window in a dark classroom. His point: Tolstoy has a way of lighting up the entire room for you in every scene. He also talked about his new novel The Museum of Innocence, which I fortuitously received for Christmas. I just finished it a few days ago and was struck by the similarities to Anna Karenina. Both Anna Karenina and The Museum of Innocence are explorations of unhappy people in unhappy relationships and how they got that way.

So, I decided to try my hand at a little literary analysis. I haven’t read Anna Karenina in about three years, but I think I can pull it off. You can take the girl out of AP English, but you can’t take the AP English out of the girl!

Both The Museum of Innocence and Anna Karenina are essentially about women who rebel against restrictive social codes in 1860s Russia and 1970s Turkey, respectively. Anna, a married woman, has an affair with Vronsky, and Füsun, the heroine of The Museum of Innocence, has premarital sex with her distant relative Kemal (the narrator). These violations eventually earn them the scorn of society and a great deal of unhappiness. At the end, both choose death by machine: Anna throws herself under a train and Füsun drives a car into a tree. Their deaths symbolize the fact that their decision to violate sexual mores was essentially choosing to throw themselves into the gears of an unfeeling social machine. The endings of these novels are both tragic and arguably misogynist. Are the authors lamenting the restrictive social codes that destroy Anna and Füsun, or are they “punishing” these heroines for their transgressions? Are they saying that women who break sexual codes destroy their potential happiness? The gendered element of these stories is what makes them so compelling.

The settings are also quite interesting. Both Pamuk and Tolstoy see themselves as chroniclers of a particular socio-historical moment. Tolstoy captures the time of Tsar Alexander II, the “Tsar-Liberator,” which was an era of modernization in Russia. The serfs had been freed, but society still was remained traditional in many ways. You had to get permission from the tsar to get a divorce! Pamuk sets his story in 1970s Istanbul, during a time of terrorism and political upheaval in Turkey. Pamuk lovingly records the details of the historical moment down the brands of soda and the movie posters. In fact, the preservation and reification of these quotidian details is one of the main themes of The Museum of Innocence.

Both authors record the glittery and cruel workings of an élite, Westernized social class that is alienated from the main mass of society. Tolstoy’s aristocrats may at least speak Russian (unlike their forebears in War and Peace, who mainly speak French), but they can’t relate to the peasant class. When Levin tries to show his belief in equality by working with the ex-serfs on his estate, he knows he is making a fool of himself in front of them and his social peers. Try as he might, an aristocrat isn’t the same as a muzhik and they both know it. Likewise, the rich Istanbul élite described in Pamuk’s novel are educated abroad and have partially absorbed Western values. This only seems to make them more frustrated as they attempt to live Western sexual mores in a society that remains traditional. Pamuk constantly contrasts the Western, sometimes hedonistic values of Kemal and the conservative, religious values of his driver Çetin. At the same time, neither of these two aristocracies has succeeded in fully digesting the European culture they mimic. They are still peripherally Western cultures with more than a whiff of the East about them. Not quite authentically Russian or Turkish, not quite Western, they are caught in an uncomfortable limbo.

Both of these books succeed because they present complex characters in complex societies. You can definitely feel Tolstoy’s influence in Pamuk’s writing: a strong sense of character and tragedy, a desire to tell a compelling story rather than moralize. Pamuk is definitely striving to deserve his Nobel laurels, trying to capture the obsessions and ennui of his own people for history. Overall, I would highly recommend both of these books to anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of reading them. Both novels are stimulating, readable, and quite rewarding!

Well, how did I do? Any comments from the Russian literature fans/Orientalists/English teachers out there?

PS--Coincidentally, as I post this I am listening to "One for the Cutters" by the Hold Steady, which has the similar theme of a woman who violates social mores and class boundaries!

Analogy: The Hold Steady : Minneapolis :: Tolstoy : Russia?