vilde khaye

The domination and taming of childhood nightmares? A grown-up fetish? I haven’t read Dave Eggers' The Wild Things yet, nor have I made it to the recent Eggers'/Spike Jonze film collaboration… but Janet Potter's review in the current issue of Open Letters Monthly supports a suspicion I developed whilst spending several minutes in a bookstore last week stroking the luxury edition, which has a furry cover with creepy eyes: We may have an inkling as to where the wild things are, but we'll never know what they are. But we do have an idea about Max. Max is a kid, like us. With demons. A terrified kid who temporarily triumphs over his monsters, becomes one with them, tames them. And his dark world can also be hauntingly beautiful.


A current exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco presents Maurice Sendak's art with an eye to his East European Jewish origins. In a compellingly candid interview with Bill Moyers, Sendak, whose mother called him Wild Beast ("Vilde Khaye") in Yiddish, admits that the wild things were modeled on his relatives, hairy immigrants who spoke poor English, would eat anything, and terrified the young, American children. "They have to know it is possible things are bad... but they are surrounded by people who love them." Of his 2003 collaboration with Tony Kushner, a retelling of the Holocaust opera, Brundibar, Sendak (his life partner was a psychoanalyst, after all) said, "you can't get rid of evil". To Catherine Keener, who plays Max's mother in Jonze's film, Sendak said, "Make it your own and don't pander to children. Be honest."

if you let me keep my google books i promise to stop talking about it

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, published a good Op. Ed on the Google Books project in the New York Times today. I thought I'd take advantage of this forum to post my own letter to the editor, which appeared this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education (to view the complete discussion, you will need a Chronicle Account):

Anxiety about Google's library-digitization project has ranged from concern that it will rob authors of income to concern it will turn libraries into a capitalist enterprise. The U.S. Copyright Office fears that the settlement "alters the property interests of millions of rights-holders of out-of-print works without any Congressional oversight, and has the capacity to create diplomatic stress for the United States." Geoffrey Nunberg, in his recent essay ("Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,"The Chronicle Review,online edition, August 31), has suggested that Google's hasty, and monopolistic, digitization of books will yield a faulty catalog.
These fears must not bury an important breakthrough in offering old and rare books in an increasing number of languages and alphabets to those who cannot easily view them. The Copyright Office must take a stronger leadership role in making literary and scholarly work more, rather than less, visible in a virtual marketplace dominated by advertisements and instant publication. And the academic community must seek ways of helping Google to address our needs without undermining its efforts to adapt time-honored texts to a digital era.
For those who, like me, measure rooms in square feet of not floor space but wall space, Google Books helps to navigate an existing library. My own buying habits have increased with the online visibility of books' content. Since Google's Library Project was initiated in 2004, I have spent full evenings browsing new releases without leaving my living room. Intrigued by a new title? Left a book in my office and need a page number? Choosing what to assign next quarter? Check Google Books. Occasionally I find myself searching for an elusive page in a book that is sitting next to me.Published books are all too often eclipsed by unmediated, ephemeral, online literature; this is, unfortunately, apparent in the college literature classes I teach. Enabling Google's access to published material (and yes, in all editions) will ensure the relevance of the libraries of the past to the libraries of the future. Library digitization promotes intellectual engagement, even on a topic, or in a language, enjoyed by a minority. Just as I am able to browse early editions of 19th-century Russian literature, future readers may view my work long after its expected print life.
Like all teachers, I am wary of the dangers of misinformation, plagiarism, and perpetual distraction—dangers that the digital age did not invent, but that it hasn't eliminated either. In what some might call a reactionary gesture, I ban laptops in my classroom and require students to bring hard copies of their books to class and take notes by hand. The goal is to demonstrate the beauty of discussing literature across a table, of corresponding with writers of the past in the margins of their books while thinking slower than one can click.The libraries that have joined forces with Google have had the foresight to use paperless technology to reinforce a long literary tradition. Not only have they opened their holdings to a readership that could not otherwise reach them, they are stocking the world's virtual bookshelves with time-tested sources. When students leave my classroom, restart their computers, and curiously type a word into a search engine, they will retrieve not only encyclopedic definitions of dubious origin, but volumes that have been written and carefully edited since Gutenberg's remarkable 15th-century invention.Virtual media represents a new intervention, which brings with it new anxieties about the spread of text. But digital libraries spread texts worth reading.

manuscripts don't burn

My sabbatical is officially over. In a few days I will leave Harvard and its colossal Widener library, and return to San Diego, to my own books with my own handwriting in their margins, and to UCSD's Geisel library, a building named after Dr. Suess and made famous by Steven Spielberg, who inventively cast it as an alien spaceship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". UCSD's Slavic holdings are decent, and inter-UC loans are relatively fast, but they have nothing on Widener's Slavic collection, including the largest Ukrainian holdings outside Kyiv.

Happily, I get to take a lot of Harvard's library with me. And a lot of Stanford's, Michigan's and New York's libraries with me. And I can search their contents. In multiple languages. My greatest use of Google's digital library project over the past several months, as I have prepared my own manuscript for publication, has been checking page numbers and citations in older editions. A year or two ago this would have involved several trips to different libraries. Books that once would have taken weeks to arrive through interlibrary loan I can now download through "Полный просмотр". I have also used Google Books for hours of browsing (which inevitably leads to buying).

Some of my colleagues would question my optimism about Google, a company that, doomsayers warn us, threatens to track our whereabouts and digitize our daydreams. But Google's aspiration toward omniscience and creative experimentation with organizational algorithms promises to make literary texts accessible to a vast population of readers in the United States and abroad.

In a few weeks a "fairness hearing" will assess the settlement Google Books has reached to ensure publishers and authors adequate compensation. I will be relieved when this date has passed and I am assured continued access to Google's digitized treasures. In the mean time, I will return to my office in San Diego and unpack my own library. And in the process I will unearth the old xeroxed copy of Walter Benjamin's 1931 "Unpacking my Library" I once absentmindedly stuck between a couple of volumes while in college, and which has remained a kind of inside joke with Benjamin as I have packed and unpacked it with my books ever since. "I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order." (Benjamin, "Selected Writings, V. 2," Cambridge, MA: 1999, 486)

(I am not yet home with my boxes and shelves, and therefore have yet to unpack my old copy of this essay; I looked this passage up on Google Books.)

Update: For a collective discussion of this issue, see my and others' notes to the editor in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

thoughts on the eve of a new school year

This summer I had the weird sensation of watching debates about University budget cuts and furlough plans from the other side of a looking-glass. In Petersburg, conversations about my state (California) and its economy (bankrupt) with Russian colleagues left me with a mixture of sheepishness and foreboding. Who am I to complain about an 8% salary cut when I still travel, have benefits, food and clothing without taking a second or third job? On the other hand, the measly resources allocated to a once thriving Russian academy might serve as a cautionary tale. The collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago held enormous potential for new forms of intellectual engagement. But education has been lost in the shuffle of a tumultuous market. Academics have seen travel and research budgets disappear. A Petersburg mathematician remarked to me, “Neighbors used to respect teachers and scholars. They were curious about what we did, what books we had. Now that they make ten times our salary they pity us and we envy them.” While no self-respecting academic would expect the deference of their neighbors, the fact that educators are now viewed not only as idiosyncratic, but even as foolish, reflects a changing cultural priority. Many Russian professors conduct their research at home, traveling to campus only to give lectures because public universities cannot afford office space or staff. Their most famous colleagues have gone overseas and their brightest students are tempted away by far more profitable, far less thoughtful or intellectual, careers. A growing number of college students did not score in the top percentile of the applicant pool but were accepted based on their ability to pay higher tuition.

Education is not a luxury. It is our right to live in a literate state among citizens who adapt easily to new technology and are inspired to enter medical and research fields. It is our right to live among people who think critically and creatively. It is our right to be curious about world history, politics and culture. Today each UC student, parent and employee might be prepared to absorb what has been called a “shared sacrifice”, but the entire state will feel the total loss of educational resources. We don't need a sharing of sacrifices but a readjustment of priorities. California must do everything it can to raise its educational standards. It is too easy to grow accustomed to lowering them.

Sergei Mikhalkov, z"l

Sergei Mikhalkov died last week, at 96. My friend Sasha Senderovich told me that when he (Mikhalkov, that is) got to heaven, he presented St. Peter with a copy of an anthem he’d composed for the occasion. “I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake,” said St. Peter, who put the lyricist on an elevator and sent him down several floors. Soon Mikhalkov started to feel the fires of Hell, so he quickly took out his pen, and made a few adjustments. (Sasha found the anecdote here.)

In 1943 Mikhalkov completed lyrics for the heart-warming National Anthem of the Soviet Union. Lines like “splotila naveki velikaia Russ” [Great Rus’ united forever] mixed references to Leninist ideology with nationalist messianism, hinting at the transition from an idealistic worker’s state to a dictatorship that would readily manipulate old Imperial rhetoric. And, in fact, the anthem replaced the “International” as the Soviet hymn. Years after Krushchev had disclosed Stalin’s atrocities, Mikhalkov conceived a new version, which was institutionalized in 1977, where things like “Nas vyrastil Stalin na vernost’ narodu” [Stalin has raised us on devotion to the people] had been replaced by “Na pravoe delo on podnial narody” [He (Lenin) lifted the nations to do the right thing].

For a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union there was no real Russian national anthem. There was some kind of hard-to-remember tune that no one really liked, and many complained that they missed the minor chords and strong chorus of their Soviet anthem, even if they didn’t like what it had said. (True, this is more to the credit of the composer, Aleksander Aleksandrov, than the lyricist.) But then one December morning in 2000 I awoke at 6 am sharp, Moscow time, in a run-down hotel to a wordless "Soiuz ne rushimyi" being blasted from a scratchy Soviet-era radio. I had arrived the night before for a conference, and had been dreaming I was back in California, and for a minute or so, could not figure out where, or when, I was. Was I still dreaming? Had I died and landed in some bizarre Slavicist limbo? Had a second Bolshevik Revolution taken place overnight? As I slowly came to and listened to the broadcast I learned that a few days earlier Putin had ordered a return of the old anthem. For a little while it remained wordless, but in 2001 Mikhalkov came to the rescue again, emerging from retirement at the age of 88 with a new ballad for a new Russia, complete with lines like “Khranimaia Bogom rodnaia zemlia” [Kept by God our native land].

Now Mikhalkov, may his memory live on, has left us. What will Russia do if there is another Revolution? Who will slip Lenin and God in and out of these verses, all the while maintaining the powerful refrain, “slavsia otechestvo nashe svobodnoe” [praised be our free fatherland]? I do not know. But I will admit that every single version of this anthem gives me chills, a fact that terrifies and disgusts me and also makes me fear the logic-crushing power of music. This video is my favorite, with its fabulous hair and glasses, its we-are-the-world united-front recording-studio feel and its Lenin-spelling birds. I love how it just goes on and on and on, far longer than a parody requires, so that after a while you start to suspect they’re not reveling in their mischief, but in the song.