Reineke's SLA Notebook

[reineke]

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[reineke]

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[DaveBee]

Blaurebell set herself a reading challenge to read books with an association for every province of a country, in her case Argentina.

Argentinian Spanish intensive reading SC - this will be so much fun!
Literary road-trip through Argentina - one book for every province of Argentina. Since the country is very centralised, Argentinian literature is often set in Buenos Aires city or province. I want to get to know more regional literature and do a little literary road trip through the different provinces. I still dream of a proper road trip, but this is a good substitute for now.
De viaje (literario) por España - I actually got the idea for my Argentinian literary road trip from this list and might as well follow the original list, when I'm through my Argentinian literature reading list.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 120#p70120

[reineke]

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[MorkTheFiddle]

Hardware: Two computers hooked to 2 TVs, a 400 DVD changer, one 1TB external hard disk drive, media players, wireless earphones. I'd like to hear from others regarding their use of hardware in language learning. Hopefully I will not prove that fancy gadgets do not a language learner make. Edit: Powerful stuff. In 2007.

Like a message from a bottle I pick up your request about hardware ten years later and hereby answer.
I use a Windows 10 desktop (used to use a Mac and a Linux box, but I have no real preference for any except a bit of a preference for Windows based on software that is available).
I have a laptop. I rarely use it for language study or anything else. Sometimes too many hours on the desktop induce carpal tunnel syndrome, so I switch back and forth to the laptop.
On very rare occasions I use an iPod, chiefly for dictionary look-ups. When my first Kindle went kaput, I used the iPod's Kindle app, but the screen is too small, so I bought a new Kindle.
My Kindle is used for very brief but quite frequent readings, especially in my "better" languages, French and Spanish.
I don't have a smartphone or a TV or any other electronic communications gadget.

[Xmmm]

Ellen Chances, Professor of Russian Literature, Princeton University

The question, in my mind, is meaningless. One of the worrisome tendencies of contemporary society is its impulse to rank. Who is better? Who is Number One? The question should not be, “Who is the greater novelist?,” but rather, “What do I learn from reading the books of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or of anyone else?

Why does everything have to be a race? Why does everything have to be competitive? This implies that there is a winner and a loser. Why does the reading of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or of anyone else have to be part of a “success” or “failure” story? Framing the question, “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: Who’s the better novelist?,” in this way does a disservice, it seems to me, to the act of contemplating the meaning of these writers’ books.

Asking the question is equivalent to asking, “Which is the greater food, milk or orange juice? Which is the greater food, blueberries or strawberries? Which is better, the sky or the grass, night or day?”

Andrew Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy and Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Virginia

All mediocre novelists are alike; every great novelist is great in his own way. Which is why the choice between nineteenth-century Russia’s two supreme prose writers ultimately boils down to the question of which kind of greatness resonates with a particular reader. My own sympathies are with Tolstoy, and even my criteria for judging a work of fiction, I admit, are relentlessly Tolstoyan.

Gary Saul Morson, Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University

A Soviet anecdote has it that Stalin once asked the Central Committee: which deviation is worse, the right or the left? Some fearfully ventured “the left,” others hesitantly offered, “the right.” The Great Helmsman then gave the right answer: “Both are worse.” I answer the question, “Who is the greater novelist, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”: Both are better.

Dostoevsky spoke to the twentieth century. He was unique in foreseeing that it would not be an era of sweetness and light, but the bloodiest on record. With uncanny accuracy, The Demons predicted, in detail, what totalitarianism would be.

Tolstoy speaks more to the 21st century. His novels’ key concept was contingency. At every moment, however small and ordinary, something happens that cannot entirely be accounted for by previous moments. Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy also denied the possibility of a social science, which must always wind up resembling the “science of warfare” preached by the generals in War and Peace. Like macroeconomists today, these “scientists” are immune to counter-evidence. To use Tolstoy’s word, social science is mere “superstition.”

If social scientists understood people as well as Tolstoy, they would have been able to depict a human being as believable as Tolstoy’s characters, but of course none has come close.

If we once acknowledge that we will never have a social science, then we will, like General Kutuzov, learn to make decisions differently. We intellectuals would be more cautious, more modest, and ready to correct our errors by constant tinkering.

If we have left the age of ideologies behind, we may need Dostoevsky’s warnings less than Tolstoy’s wisdom.

https://themillions.com/2012/04/tolstoy ... eater.html

This signifies absolutely nothing to me. Experts make odd choices when they hand out the Nobel prize, too. Sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for cluelessness. It's almost comical to go through the list of great novels that didn't win, and compare them to what actually did win in a given year.

I feel a little bit like Mr. Tagomi in The Man in the High Castle when he wanders around San Francisco in a distracted state of mind. For people who haven't read it, I won't say why I feel that way.

I will drop out now. Some people like Tolstoy. Some people like Justin Bieber. Maybe they are the same people, but I don't know any of them.

Here's my Круглый impersonation for today: На вкус и цвет, товарищей нет.

[Xmmm]

One additional thought.

I was in an English lit Ph.D program at a top 30 university back in the day.

We were reading something by some deconstructionist. It was not Foucault or Derrida, it was some German guy ... I forget his name but he was a big wheel in the 1980s (I have a vague feeling he was discredited somehow later?). And in the text he'd written "in an almost Kierkegaardian repetition."

Now, I have to say that I wasted my youth and one of the ways I wasted it was by reading pretty much everything Kierkegaard wrote. And I had read Repetition.

So I objected in class. "He says this is almost Kierkegaardian repetition, but it's the opposite of Kierkegaardian repetition. Kierkegaard said when winter comes 50 times, each experience deepens our understanding of what Winter is, but this guy is saying it's just the same dumb thing over and over again, pointlessly. Which is like, normal everyday repetition."

And the professor said (moral to the story, and I've never forgotten it): "That's an interesting point and would make a good paper. He probably just threw that in there because it sounded impressive and he knew no one would call him on it because no one reads Kierkegaard anymore."

I also know a Marxist professor married to a fabulously wealthy lawyer and living in the absolute best part of town (with kids in private schools, the right cars, the right clothes -- the works), who is still "with the people".

So I don't assign a lot of weight to the thinking of literature professors ... and people who want to read actual good literature should take their recommendations with caution, imo.

[reineke]

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[Xmmm]

De gustibus etc but you suggested a different pecking order of greatness and asked what Russians thought. I obliged. A couple of the lists I mentioned reflect the opinions of American and international authors.

Fair enough. You've clearly demonstrated by use of facts that a new dark age is upon us.

Let's play the game a different way. The experts have declared Tolstoy is the best.

1. Have you read Anna Karenina or War and Peace? All the way to the end?
2. If you have read one or both, would you agree with this mighty consensus of experts that Tolstoy is the greatest author of all time?
3. If you haven't read one or both, why not? Seeing as how he is the best, why procrastinate?


If you choose not to answer, I will have to assume that either:

a) You were afraid to read either of them because you were worried with good cause that they might be terminally boring
b) You did try to read one of them but gave up a third of the way through.


Honestly (and I'm not trying to get political here as I already have a warning), I think that in literary circles it's hard to say you're pro-Dostoevsky or pro-Solzhenitsyn. Because they both have an authoritarian streak. Whereas Tolstoy was a fat happy 1%er who talked a good liberal game (I can see him spending a couple hours a month with his sleeves rolled up helping his peasants with manual labor before he went back in the mansion for lemonade right now). Try to tell me that has zero influence on either lit professors or authors who run in literary circles.

Anyway, this is your blog ... thanks for putting up with the rant and I'll desist now.

[reineke]

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