And now try to guess where I am now.

The meal is surprisingly good. This fish and chips is better than the one I tasted in London at Garfunkel’s. I will never forget that horrible chain.

I know you are jealous. 🙂

And it’s 15 degrees cooler than in Illinois!

This is my last day of watching Russian TV, and I think it’s a good thing because the pre-Olympic coverage has started and it is driving me nuts. I often have to stop watching and check my calendar because all of the news segments sound like they were taped back in 1980.

The commentators insist that there is some world-wide conspiracy that prevents Russian athletes from getting every medal at the Olympics. The judges hate Russians and act unfairly towards them, the Russian athletes are sabotaged by mysterious forces, the other teams steal their strategies, and so on. If a Russian athlete has been caught using forbidden substances, this means that the evil foreign agents doctored their food and beverages. No explanation is offered as to why everybody supposedly hates and sabotages the Russian athletes, but not the Chinese, the British, or the Americans.

In his great novel The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn ridiculed the way in which Stalin’s media reported on the sporting events. “Whenever our team loses,” the novel’s protagonist Innokenti Volodin says, “it’s reported as an unexpected and suspicious loss. Another team’s win is always discussed as having shocked the public. Only our teams deserve to win, while everybody else’s wins are deemed incomprehensible.”

The Russian athletes will get 100,000 euro for the gold, 60,000 for the silver, and 40,000 for the bronze during the 2012 Olympic Games. Other than this, nothing much has changed in the 63 years since the events described in Solzhenitsyn’s novel.

Reader el asks me to write about my approach to artists who do horrible things in RL. As we have all probably noticed, I’m very self- righteous, moralizing, and judgmental. This is why I don’t find it hard to stop consuming an artist’s work if I discover that s/he did things I consider horrible. It isn’t really something I do on purpose. I simply lose all interest in any artistic production coming from somebody who does things I find disgusting.

Mind you, I’m talking specifically about things one does, not what one says. To give an example, one of my favorite writers, Juan Goytisolo, writes very violent texts where he performs acts of verbal aggression against women and children. But as long as it’s part of his art and not of his life, I don’t have a problem with it. I even sought out a famous literary critic who knows Goytisolo well in person and questioned him about the artist’s life.

“Don’t be fooled by his texts,” the scholar told me. “In real life, he is as inoffensive as a butterfly.”

I don’t practice moral relativism, so I apply the same criteria to artists who lived centuries ago. I don’t find the belief that “society was different and we can’t apply today’s moral criteria to what happened in the past” acceptable. Take Cervantes, for example. In the midst of an anti-Muslim frenzy, he wrote about the plight of the Spanish Muslims with so much compassion that you can’t fail to admire him. We also have to keep in mind that, among all of the contemporary writers and thinkers who foamed at the mouth insulting the Muslims, Cervantes was one person who’d actually suffered at the hands of Muslims. He lost an arm in battle, was enslaved. Yet he managed to preserve the lucidity and the compassion that allowed him to see that the Muslims who were being expelled from Spain were not to blame for his personal suffering.

This just goes to show that, in any epoch, you have jerks and you have good, normal people. So if you rape, abuse, torture, then you can stick your art deep into your anal cavity. I have no use for it. There is more beautiful art in the world that one can admire in 100 lifetimes, so why should I waste my time on the work of somebody I find disgusting?

A great writer is somebody who can take a completely ordinary, unremarkable character and make her memorable. Anthony Trollope is just such a writer. I recently finished his novel The Small House at Allington and I can say that it made me realize that there is a lot more to Trollope than I ever knew.

Lily Dale, the novel’s female protagonist, is a vapid, boring creature with nothing that can be even remotely interesting about her. She tries to fill the void she has in place of a personality by adopting the persona of what “the perfect woman” is supposed to be like according to the trashy novels she reads. She convinces herself that she is in love with the first passerby and starts persecuting him with her exalted monologues of how she will serve his every whim and lay her life at his feet.

Understandably, the poor guy soon runs away.

This makes Lily very happy since she can now play the role of a victim and lord it over people around her. She becomes the perfect family tyrant who generates the feelings of intense guilt in family members (for the most part, her weak and miserable mother) and exploit those feelings to feel good about herself.

Mind you, this is not the reading of the novel that you will find anywhere. In every review of the book that I have read, Lily Dale is the embodiment of true unwavering love instead of a hysterical, mean-spirited damsel with no substance to her whatsoever. That’s the beauty of good literature: it speaks differently to each of us.

So I’m snoozing on the beach, right? And I hear a man’s voice that says in Russian, “Come on, girls, stop climbing the railing. What will people think? That everybody walks on the footpath like normal people, and only the Russians have to act all weird? Remember that people see us as representatives of our country abroad.”

Obviously, I was eager to see this defender of the image of Russians, so I opened my eyes. I saw a family: a man, a woman, and two precious little girls who were, indeed, trying to climb the railing. The man was a huge, burly Russian in minuscule shiny speedos that were smaller than even those worn by aging Italian gentlemen. He was also wearing a gold chain that was as thick as my finger. I have very small, dainty fingers, but still just imagine a chain like that.

Hanging from this chain there was a huge gold gymnast. A gymnast is a big golden cross that the Russian nouveau riche used to wear to show off their recently acquired wealth. A gymnast was a status symbol. the Russian bandits competed as to who could afford the biggest gymnast. I thought that this habit was a thing of the past but here was this Russian with a gymnast that was literally bigger than my head. Seriously, it was a humongous thing that looked especially bizarre against the background of his naked chest and tiny speedos.

I’m sure you can all guess why this golden cross is called “a gymnast”, right?

I think we can all agree that the slogan of Obama’s presidential campaign, Betting on America, is very unfortunate. Let’s gamble some more, really? After the debacle of 2008? The slogan sounds like the President isn’t taking us all very seriously and thinks it is all just a game.

This made me start remembering all of the unfortunate political slogans I have seen over the years. In the late nineties, Yeltsin ran his campaign under the slogan “Vote with your heart!” Which sounded like an admission that if one turned on one’s brain, one wouldn’t vote for this candidate.

The Russian semi-fascist party famously ran under the slogan of “We are for the Russians, we are for the poor.” The suggestion was, obviously, that this was not a party of those vile rich Jews. The fact that the party’s leader is Jewish made the whole thing even more hilarious.

The coalition of the right-wing parties in Russia (where the right-wingers are the good guys) ran a very expensive and a very unsuccessful campaign called “You are right!” That was such a heavy-handed pun that nobody took it – and the coalition – seriously.

I’ve been asked to write about language learning, so I’m honoring that request.

Back in Ukraine, one of my professors of English shared with us the story of his recent trip to the UK. (This was in 1995, and people were starting to travel.) Professor Sergueyev had 18 years of experience teaching English at the university level. He was a published scholar who was considered one of the best professors of English linguistics at our prestigious university.

“I was alone at the hotel,” Professor Sergueyev told us, “and I decided to go out for a pack of cigarettes. But I didn’t manage to make the purchase. At the store, I had no idea what to say, and I didn’t understand a word of what was being said to me. There has to be something wrong with the way we teach languages around here.” He looked very sad and almost broken as he was saying that.

The method that was used exclusively to teach foreign languages in the USSR is known as “the grammar-translation method.” The way it works is as follows:
the teacher lectures students about the grammar of the target language, the students memorize grammar rules, and then translate separate sentences into the target language. We spent a lot of time talking about the language, but never speaking the language itself. As a result, our vocabulary was completely passive, and our knowledge of the idiomatic expressions was non-existent. The difference between “go out”, “go by”, “go without”, “go against”, “go after”, for instance, was unknown to us.

When I started my methodology of foreign language teaching workshop in Canada, I discovered that languages were taught in a completely different way in North America. The instruction was conducted on the basis of the communicative method. Its central tenets are the following:

– only the target language is spoken in the classroom from Day 1.

– the teacher doesn’t lecture but, rather, let’s the students speak.

– the time dedicated to explaining the grammar is reduced as much as possible. You learn the grammar AFTER you learn to speak, not before.

– the teacher needs to spend as little time as possible pontificating behind the lectern. Instead, s/he approaches the students who work in small groups and speaks to them individually (in the target language.)

– a language doesn’t exist outside of a culture. This means that the instruction materials should be as culture-specific as possible.

– at least 80% of class time should consist of students communicating in the target language.

The methodology seminar was a little like a sex workshop. “You’ve got to learn to relinquish control,” the instructor kept saying. “Stop trying to control everything, just let it go. Don’t keep correcting the students all the time, relax, have fun, it will only start working when you stop worrying whether it will work.”

All of this sounded completely unbelievable to me.

“No,” I said to my methodology professor. “No, no, no, no, no. I will feel like a total idiot, marching into the classroom and speaking nothing but Spanish to the students who don’t know a word of the language.”

“Just give it a try,” the prof said with a kind smile.

I tried the method even though I was convinced it would be a disaster. The results shocked me: by the end of the semester, my students spoke the language. Of course, their speaking skills were quite basic but even the worst students would have no trouble making purchases in a Spanish-speaking country. After just 4 months, they were more comfortable with the language than my professors of English back in Ukraine.

If you want to learn a foreign language, I have the perfect recipe for you: speak and read. Use every opportunity you have to communicate with people in the language. And try to read something in it every day. Put on music in the language as much as possible. If you have a TV channel that broadcasts in the language, leave it on in the background.

And remember: speaking a language is like achieving an orgasm. You have to lose the fear and relinquish control. Forget how it will make you look, forget about making a mistake, just enjoy the process.