Tom's Thoughts and Ideas

I am not really sure why I want to start this. It just came to me as an interesting thing to do. I enjoy writing and think that keeping a personal journal is not quite my style, but I think that it is valuable to let one’s ideas into the grand blackness of the internet if it proves to be even a bit therapeutic. This is not to say that I believe that I have something special or even interesting to say. It is fun to write in a strictly non-academic sense as well. And perhaps if I am feeling daring this could be a platform for me to put out some of my personal work. It would certainly beat having to email or show it to everyone I want to see it.

At present I am sitting in my room alone, with only a small amount of work to do before I go to sleep, and listening to some really good Russian music from a band named Кино (Kino in English). The song that is playing presently is called “Звезда по имени Солнце” (A star called the sun). It is one of many songs from the 1980s that is about people dying in Afghanistan, which makes for a somewhat jarring listening experience sometimes. This is due to the fact that the lyrics are about fairly brutal things, war being a cure for youth (one of the best lines) and such. But on the other hand it is just a really really good song and is easy to sing along with. This is true for most of the bands work since they are probably the best Russian (Soviet technically) rock group and oftentimes the best band makes the best music, though I personally think that Ю-Питер is a moderately close second.

One humorous thing that I have found in my time learning Russian is that since I started the language I have been listening to Russian music, both for exposure and because it is good. And as I have gotten better and better the amount of songs lyrics that I can listen to and understand has increased. In my mind along with the A’s I get on tests (I got one back today and I am pleased with myself) a marker of my linguistic success is my being able to understand more lyrics. I have gone from not really being able to understand much outside of a few words, to now being able to understand a decent amount of what is going on. In a year I am sure that I will be even more competent, but that is a joy for Tom a year from now.

I get a lot of joy from learning Russian, more so than other languages that I have learned in my life. I am not sure why this is the case, but it certainly is. I wake up every morning excited to learn more and to further engage with my current knowledge. In previous parts of my life I have learned other languages and been somewhat adept at them, but they were never a part of my day that I looked forward to. Like many, I learned Spanish and French in high school and middle school respectively, and while they were not bad by any means, I somewhat lamented actually going to class and having to learn the language. Initially I thought that it was superior teachers, but I think that is unfair. As much as I love my Russian teacher, it is unfair to call my other language teachers bad. I liked them and they were good at their jobs. With that option out, it may be different curricula, thus the teaching is less important since if what they are teaching is a bad way to learn the language they are not at fault. I think that while this is certainly a factor, it is far from the whole story. My Russian curriculum is somewhat odd, given that my teacher created it herself because she found that the ones that existed elsewhere were inadequate. Compared to my other classes which used standard language learning books. I have no full answer to give, but it is something that I have been musing on for a while. I think that it may just come down to a passion, which is hard to really quantify, but that is okay sometimes. I do not personally believe that I need to know what draws me to Russian so heavily, so long as I keep enjoying it.

Another thing that has taken up a lot of my time, without my joy to be sure, is a book that I am reading for a class that I am not a fan of. This week my teacher in my Literature of the American West class, that I am not really a fan of for reasons that will come later most likely, gave us two days to read the book All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I know that he is a classic Americana writer who has had a major impact on American writing, but I did not like this book at all. it truly did nothing for me and in some ways made me want to read fewer books of the genre rather than more, which seems antithetical to the goal of a literature class. The first 80 or so pages can be summed up as follows: “Guy does not like where he lives in Texas, goes to Mexico with his friend. Meets a guy, does random cowboy things.” It is beautifully written sure, but that does not save the utter boredom that I felt while reading it. Nothing really happens. There are only so many ways one can describe the Mexican desert before you want to put your head through a wall. That was a poor intro to the book to be sure, and it was around a third of the total length. Plot does technically happen, but I was only kept by my duty to do my work, which is not a strong hook sometimes. Mexico?? I do not know. The call of the wild I suppose. Not quite a universally applicable message.

The closest I have come to loving the cowboy genre are the books of the beatniks. Kerouac is a compelling character, but his mythos is one of rebellion and changing society rather than leaving it and escaping. The beatniks are not trying to disappear into the plains, but they want to move and travel and explore. That is a far easier thought to share for me. The desire for freedom is different to me. Kerouac feels more like his goal is to push the boundaries of society forward rather than to run towards a lack of society. Also he is a more engaging writer to be sure.

The book also was horribly dull in its characters, they were mostly stock and lacked real roundness, or even enjoyable dullness. A lot of characters in surreal literature are dull on purpose in order to further the goal of the author, and that is at least an interesting concept. The faceless cowboy, the loyal best friend, the beautiful young girl, the mean grandmother, the cruel capitalist father, etc. These are not new or interesting concepts for a story. They are literary LEGO pieces that can be put together in order to make a book. It really rubbed me the wrong way. The main characters end up in a Mexican jail two thirds of the way through, there are no stakes at all. Of course they survive and get out, that is a given. But there are totally ways that one can make this more interesting. It is 40 or so pages of “Mexican jail sucks majorly” and they then just get out and the plot resumes. There is nothing here that really attracts me. I suspect that this indifference towards the jail sequence comes in part from the fact that I am reading a Russian author’s (Varlam Shalamov) semi fictional account of his decades in a Soviet gulag, and his stories are far worse in every way than this fairly chill Mexican jail. Those stories are both more brutal and more emotionally powerful by a large margin. I went looking for emotion in McCarthy and did not find it. The whole book has a distinct lack of emotion that really gets me as well.

In any case, I think that this is a good place to stop since writing about a book I do not like for so long can not be amazingly fun to read. I promise to write about more entertaining things in the future.