promised pics

Dinner at our place after seeing the live broadcast of the National Theatre production of The Collaborators.Catherine and Keziah after 'decorating' K's car... imagine loud Christmas music accompaniment.

The tree described in the earlier post.

exercise

This is what I am doing on Tuesday and Thursday evenings these days. Torturous fun. More pics of other things coming shortly. Trying to be a more visually interesting blogger...

On Speaking Russian

"To speak Russian involves a contortion of any English-speaking person’s mouth. We must make ourselves conscious of what have become reflexive actions. We can feel the errors of our mouths as surely as we can see the lack of precision in our drawing. We hear the wobbling, sloppy pronunciation as surely as we see our shaky imprecise hand when we sketch a work of art at the museum. That vowel that one of my Russian tutors called "61" (an idea that helped me with my handwriting of it — forget about the loops! Write a miniature 61 and you’ll have the Russian vowel pronounced from the back of the throat and with pursed lips: “ih” [ы]). I don’t have the vocabulary or oral-agility to spew Russian, so I must slow down the way I would were I relearning a baseball swing or basketball jump-shot. My mouth can handle the move this way and that, but certainly not in and out and over there. And so I study Dina’s mouth — she has good teeth; I peer into Albina’s — she’s wearing lipstick today!; I notice Katya’s wearing dangly earrings! I watch and I imitate, even though I can’t see my own mouth. I feel it.

"Say something in Russian," my friend Jose told me when I got back from a trip to Russia. I am accustomed to speaking Spanish to Jose’s wife, but as I wound up and twisted my mouth into the delivery of an easy Russian phrase, Jose laughed. 'Everybody, look at Bob’s mouth!'"

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/12/13/essay-role-mouth-watching-learning-foreign-language#ixzz1gRd3izng
Inside Higher Ed

the personal side

A few tips.

1) do not have microdermabrasion on your face right before hugely stressful and important meeting. The first time I had it I was CALM and my face just glowed. Today, i looked a little like a burn victim. Maybe outside mimicking inside?

2) don't trust your dreams. I woke this morning buoyed up by a dream in which I had been fearlessly interacting with a very large cobra. I naturally read cobra as curmudgeon faculty and felt a little more confident.

3) don't think a klonipin will 'take the edge off". When the edge is that precipitous, probably only heroin will do, and I don't think becoming a drug addict will actually solve any problems.

update on motto

oh my can they interrupt! We had our meeting today to unveil the Language Center and the troglodytes were out in full force. I think most painful was the admonition that "this proposal could have garnered support but we were never consulted." And I sat there making a mental list of the things on which we have consulted over the last four and a half years and the consul tees' miserable track record:

1) requiring study abroad: discuss, discuss, discuss, vote in favor..... and then REJECT in practice.

2) curriculum meetings: attend, atte... oh, not so much; why would we need to discuss that?

3) departmental governance bylaws: draft, draft, draft, discuss, discuss, --- oh, did I mention that we are still only discussing the introductory paragraph... (big raspberry noise)

4) graduate studies brought in line with national best practices.... oh, please, do we have to? we want to be insular and mediocre.

5) required departmental courses: sure, ok... do I have to teach them, oh, ok.... do our students really have to take them? oh, 'required'? but, well they aren't really useful, are they....?

Stay tuned for the part where I take my sabbatical next year and then transfer to the Linguistics Department....

Change is painful

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it!

This is my motto -- we are creating the language center here at the U and detractors, step aside!

"It looked better on the lot."

"It looked better on the lot." That was Ellen's comment this morning when I asked her how their tree looked once they had got it home and up. Ah, so we were not alone. I suffer from bouts of romanticism especially in December and had gotten it into my head that instead of buying a tree at the grocery store which we normally do, we would cut one down our very own selves. What I was really after was the back-country experience where, having secured a permit from the forestry service, we would tromp into the woods with a saw and a flask of hot cocoa. We would emerge later with rosy cheeks dragging a big, freshly cut tree.

I got on line and discovered that other people want to do this too and they are more organized. All permits had been sold by mid October. Plan B. I investigated Christmas tree farms. Once again, these seemed to cater to the early bird and most were open one weekend only, the one right after Thanksgiving. But I found one that was also open this past Saturday and agreed with Ellen that we would both head up there with children to pick out our trees. Sam, who had initially liked the tree cutting idea, backed right away when the word "farm" was added to the outing. Not adventurous enough for him. Craig, who until he met me, had always had a fake tree, looked at me indulgently and firmly and did not even pretend to be momentarily interested. So, it was me and Catherine. We drove and drove and finally after about an hour ended up in what was pretty much a subdivision with large lots. The "farm" owners had obviously decided to turn their tract of land over to xmas trees at some point. We piled out of our two cars at the end of a cul de sac and tromped into the wild forests of spruce around their otherwise manicured suburban lawn. The trees were pretty picked over but I was determined and Catherine was generous, trying very hard to find something acceptable about each strange tree we considered. Finally we found one that seemed good (or less "not good") and we cut it down, heaved it onto the roof of the car, tied it down, and headed for home.

The next day after it had overnighted in the garage, a temperature controlled way station, we brought it inside and the trouble began. What had looked charmingly erratic in the field, now refused to conform to the tree stand. We managed to get it in, but it promptly fell over. Too heavy? Too bushy? Too something. But I was determined and told the children in my most jolly tone that this was a problem that a bucket and bricks could surely fix. Their grandfather, I told them, had never owned a tree stand and every year the tree stood up, a triumph of pieces of broken brick and my father's determination to make do with what was at hand. They looked dubious. We found a bucket and some bricks and I kept telling them how fantastic this was going to be. Catherine, who cares very much about Christmas and nice decorating, looked appalled at the empty cat litter pail. I assured her that we would drape some nice red and green fabric over it the feat of engineering would be our little secret. Except the bucket didn't work either and the tree just fell over more loudly. Even I began to feel defeated and we left it lying across the living room floor hoping Craig would have an idea when he got home.

Bless him. For a man who is more humbug than ho ho (partly to do with suffering his entire childhood with a Christmas Eve birthday), he set to work. First he announced that another few inches of the trunk needed to be sawed off. This to deal with the first of the trunk's several deviations from the straight and narrow. Once that was accomplished we got it into the stand and now the lowest whorl of branches was sitting right on the edge of the opening, providing just that extra needed support. We stepped away gingerly and it stood. Catherine came back and moaned in dismay, "But it's not straight." Which, to be honest it wasn't. Craig, retorted that, what it was doing was all you could expect from a tree with scoliosis. In addition to it not being straight, it also has a curious yellowish cast to its long extremely prickly needles. We looked for the Christmas lights and Catherine finally remembered she had lent them out to a friend for some school club event so 24 hours later, the yellow giant still lurches naked in the corner of the living room. It drinks a lot of water.