It's difficult to generalize about such a broad topic as fashion, but it is worth noting that people do dress differently here. So this will mostly be a somewhat random set of observations about Latvian and, by extension, European dress.
In general, I would say that there is more dressing up in Latvia. Not that you can judge this by my students, who dress pretty much like college students anywhere, in very comfortable, casual clothes. But the faculty and administrators are often very smart and polished. My dean is always in a very tailored suit or jacket and skirt; some of the male faculty are in a jacket and tie every day, as is my colleague and French professor Sergejis. My own colleagues on the English faculty are a little more casual, often showing up in jeans and comfortable blouses, suggesting perhaps that dealing with literature is a messy business that requires rolling up one's sleeves. I took my cues from them and sometimes wear jeans with natty print shirts in an attempt to look a bit more professional than my students.
There are also more occasions to dress up in Latvia, I think. I love seeing high schoolers out on the town. The young men are often in suits that sometimes come in very cool colors: royal blue, green, burgundy -- and bow ties, which are catching on in a big way here in the Baltics. Young women are often in long, floor-length skirts with dressy blouses. You see this more often than you might expect, and I think that they are often going to a concert or a dance or something. The fact that cultural events are far easier to afford in Latvia might be a contributing factor, and I expect that it is. Here, there is a real sense that an occasion demands proper dress, a sense that I think young people in the United States don't observe quite as much. Or maybe I just live in Maine, where the weather dictates fashion more than anything.
Incomes are not as high in Latvia as they are in the Unites States, but this fact certainly doesn't stop people from indulging in good clothes or, more accurately, good looks. I am impressed with and sort of overwhelmed by the number of secondhand stores in Daugavpils, and they have very good stuff in them. If one is willing to go through lots of racks of things with patience and a practiced eye, looking for the right piece -- and many Latvians clearly are willing, judging by the customers that I see in the stores -- one can easily put together very fashionable, very well turned-out ensembles. I am constantly surprised to see a woman wearing just the right boots striding confidently, a man with just the right scarf knotted just so, the neatly pressed shirt, the perfect pin on the perfect lapel. People here devote some time to looking good, and it shows.
There's also a certain number of men who go out in public in their athletic track suits. Adidas seems to be the brand of choice. You American readers have seen these guys in malls all across America, and they generally look sloppy. For some reason, as casual as this outfit is, Latvian men do not look nearly as slovenly as many American men do. In part this is because Latvian men are generally trim; obesity is not nearly as great an issue as it is in overfed America.
I am sort of surprised that I am paying attention to women's clothes because this is something that I normally don't care a lot about. This winter, I was totally smitten with women's winter coats. This is truly a first for me, and it is because in Latvia they come in wonderful, delicious, ice cream sherbet colors. They are also cut in very flattering ways, as are women's dresses. You see a lot of cuts that are right out of a 1950s department store like B. Altman; the Mad Men look for women is alive and well in Latvia. There are also plenty of floral prints that are really pretty wonderful. Of course, you can find these anywhere; I just noticed them more here because they seem so prevalent. I might go so far as to generalize that dressing in a traditionally feminine way is very much the norm in Latvia. This is not a criticism of my women friends who don't care for feminine clothing for any number of reasons; one can dress to please oneself and always look good. But femininity seems to sell here, it sells well, and it looks great.
One thing that I have noticed on young men, as well as some older men who perhaps should know better, is the very tight, pegged jeans look. This, I believe, is a Euro-style: jeans that are tight in the waist, loose in the back, and very tight down the legs all the way to the ankles. Some jeans actually look like tights, and I can only assume that they are part stretch fabric; it's the only way one could actually get them on. A couple of decades ago in the States, Levi Strauss, recognizing that American men were getting wider and wider, created a line of jeans that has, as the company put it, a little more "skoosh" in the fit. Baggier jeans have been the norm since, at least outside of urban areas, in recognition that we eat too much. But not here; tight, tight jeans are de rigeur for the average Russian teenager. If you don't have several pair, you are not allowed to live here.
If one doesn't wear tight jeans, one wears what I would call over-engineered jeans. They can't just have a pocket in back; there must be a smaller pocket sewn on the bigger pocket. Or the legs are gathered into an elastic band like you find on sweatshirts at the ankle. Or they are carefully bleached on the front of the legs, the back, and at the knee to give them that worn look. Or they have fancy stitching somewhere in a place where nothing is clearly being stitched together. Plain jeans that are just, well, jeans are maybe illegal.
Latvia is the world capital of truly fashionable eyewear. I have had the same kind of glasses for decades now, with one brief foray into 1950s-type Elvis Costello glasses which my optometrist stopped carrying in a size that fit my face. (I am still bitter about this.) But I feel positively dowdy in Latvia, where everybody who wears glasses has something retro, futuristic, or otherwise totally rockin'.
I really like the fact that at the pool, there is simply none of the obsessive body image issues that we see too much in the States. I am sure that there are Latvians obsessed with how they look, as the gyms here are full of people working out, and at least one of them is devoted to serious bodybuilders. But at my community pool, who cares? Lovely old women show up in flowered swim caps and ancient swimsuits. Men wear their Soviet-era trunks that have seen better days, or more to the point, better decades. Everybody goes to the sauna to relax, and who cares what we look like? We are here to swim. There seems to be less body consciousness in Latvia, which is a good thing, I think -- a recognition that people properly come in all shapes and sizes, and that's the way it's supposed to be.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Triviana Latviana 5
Having taken the train back and forth to Rīga a number of times -- about a 3 1/2-hour trip -- I can say with authority that Latvians love their garden plots. Every town of any size is surrounded by tiny garden plots where citizens who live in big blocks of flats can grow rhubarb, tomatoes, and cucumbers for pickles. Very often there will be a small hut, a "summer house," where the family might well live all summer, treating it as a kind of second living room. And equally as often there will be a greenhouse, sometimes obviously built from whatever the owner could lay his hands on and other times a little more professional looking. These plots probably fed people seriously well in Soviet times, and even now Latvians need to dig in the soil and grow things to eat, pickle, can, freeze, and otherwise process. This is not unlike many hipster Americans who, like me, are rediscovering all those things that our grandparents did and are now doing them as well.
Speaking of, the little plots between the buildings of flats and the parking lots surrounding them are tiny, but that will not stop Latvians from planting them intensely with flowers. I do not know who is responsible for which plot, or if residents just adopt them randomly. (I can say that the one in front of my flat has a fine crop of overgrown dandelions.) I see sweet old women tending their plots with an intensity normally reserved for grand master chess players. The parade of flowers has been endless since the weather started getting warm: peonies, lilies of the valley, marigolds (already!), bachelor buttons, grape hyacinths, lilacs. It's lovely to see people softening the harsh outlines of the Soviet flats with -- what else? -- endless flowers.
In public flower beds, the city workers have been digging and planting and redigging, putting flowers in and making sure that the floral displays are pretty much ongoing and endless. It is surprising how many workers there are to plant and weed flower beds. When the beds in front of Vienības Nams were first planted, there were at least ten workers who were carefully plotting the beds and putting in flowers. No random English-style gardens here, where flowers just sort of grow in a haphazard way wherever the seeds fall. (It's my preferred style, which speaks either to my haphazard gardening habits or my laziness.) No, sir: here gardens are laid out with Prussian precision and discipline. They are very beautiful; I love how the floral colors make patterns, but it's a heck of a lot more work than I would ever bother with in my own flower beds. I expect that when the tulips start to droop, they are quickly and efficiently replaced in the middle of the night with something that's on the verge of blooming. We shall see.
I don't know how the business cycle works in Latvia, but a slew of new businesses are opening in Daugavpils. Three new restaurants/kafejnīcas have opened in the past two weeks; a small hotel (viesnīca) is about to open, and two others that had been closed have reopened, one with yet another restaurant attached. I wonder if there is some kind of cycle in which business loans are doled out because it seems that a lot of businesses are popping up all of a sudden. They might be seasonal, but Daugavpils doesn't get that many visitors, even though it is working very hard on increasing the number of people coming to this part of Latvia. You can always tell a new business has opened because of the endless balloons that are hung over the door for the first few days, often in the colors of the Latvian flag (burgundy and white). This is Key.
I'll have more to say about fashion in a later post, but one fashion statement of sorts that I have noticed in Latvia is man capris. That is, capri pants, sort of, on men. They are not really capris, or at least not what Mary Tyler Moore wore on The Dick Van Dyke Show. They are more like pants that cut off just below the knee and sometimes fitted tight to the leg. And sometimes not; Adidas makes a version of these that are basically warm-up tracksuit capris. They seem pretty sensible and comfortable, actually, but they aren't really a thing in the United States. However, man capris were sort of a trend a few years back among the Must-Be-Closest-to-the-Latest, which generally means somewhere urban and other than Maine.
I was in Rīga this weekend because my guy Lee has arrived in Latvia for a couple weeks. We met up with my fellow Fulbrighter Justine Koontz and have now seen two of the oddest sculptures I can imagine. Odd Sculpture (O.S.) #2 is Glittersnail: an eight-foot-tall snail whose body is fiberglass and whose body is covered with mirrored tiles of the kind that you find on a disco ball. Here it is, surrounded by Justine and me:
O.S. #1, though, and clear winner for sheer strangeness goes to Spacemonkey (or, if you prefer, Astrochimp). Spacemonkey is apparently a salute to the animals that were sent into orbit in the early space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was a plaque in front of this sculpture that explains this, but it currently not there, so the sculpture has no context. Well, other than seeing a 30-foot tall monkey in a spacesuit, which for me was not nearly enough context. You can imagine seeing this in a lovely park in Rīga and saying to yourself, "What in God's name is that?" (Which is pretty much what I did.) That said, you have to sort of dig something so very weird.
Windows in Latvia -- well, Europe in general -- are very smart. Newer thermal windows in buildings both open from the top, leaning downward slightly into the room so that you get a crack of air at the top, and from the side, opening wide into the room so you get a full breeze. This is vastly superior to American sash windows, which open up only halfway by sliding up the frame. On the other hand, European windows never have screens, and I have noticed just as many bugs here in Latvia as I have at home. How did the Latvians miss that?
My school term is not ending; it's sort of dribbling away. My master's candidate courses ended in mid-May, and she has turned in her final essays. She is now taking exams of some sort. My second-year students end next week when their essays are due, and my adult students end in mid-May when their class ends, for whatever reason. I am still extremely unclear how the schedule works here. At times it has felt as if the administration was just making it all up as we went along. This contrasts sharply with the American system, in which I could tell you my final exam period dates for the year 2019 already because they have already been set. One system isn't better or worse; I simply am blissfully unaware of what exactly is going on, and I decided early on -- wisely, in retrospect -- to not let this bother me. And so it doesn't.
Speaking of, the little plots between the buildings of flats and the parking lots surrounding them are tiny, but that will not stop Latvians from planting them intensely with flowers. I do not know who is responsible for which plot, or if residents just adopt them randomly. (I can say that the one in front of my flat has a fine crop of overgrown dandelions.) I see sweet old women tending their plots with an intensity normally reserved for grand master chess players. The parade of flowers has been endless since the weather started getting warm: peonies, lilies of the valley, marigolds (already!), bachelor buttons, grape hyacinths, lilacs. It's lovely to see people softening the harsh outlines of the Soviet flats with -- what else? -- endless flowers.
In public flower beds, the city workers have been digging and planting and redigging, putting flowers in and making sure that the floral displays are pretty much ongoing and endless. It is surprising how many workers there are to plant and weed flower beds. When the beds in front of Vienības Nams were first planted, there were at least ten workers who were carefully plotting the beds and putting in flowers. No random English-style gardens here, where flowers just sort of grow in a haphazard way wherever the seeds fall. (It's my preferred style, which speaks either to my haphazard gardening habits or my laziness.) No, sir: here gardens are laid out with Prussian precision and discipline. They are very beautiful; I love how the floral colors make patterns, but it's a heck of a lot more work than I would ever bother with in my own flower beds. I expect that when the tulips start to droop, they are quickly and efficiently replaced in the middle of the night with something that's on the verge of blooming. We shall see.
I don't know how the business cycle works in Latvia, but a slew of new businesses are opening in Daugavpils. Three new restaurants/kafejnīcas have opened in the past two weeks; a small hotel (viesnīca) is about to open, and two others that had been closed have reopened, one with yet another restaurant attached. I wonder if there is some kind of cycle in which business loans are doled out because it seems that a lot of businesses are popping up all of a sudden. They might be seasonal, but Daugavpils doesn't get that many visitors, even though it is working very hard on increasing the number of people coming to this part of Latvia. You can always tell a new business has opened because of the endless balloons that are hung over the door for the first few days, often in the colors of the Latvian flag (burgundy and white). This is Key.
I'll have more to say about fashion in a later post, but one fashion statement of sorts that I have noticed in Latvia is man capris. That is, capri pants, sort of, on men. They are not really capris, or at least not what Mary Tyler Moore wore on The Dick Van Dyke Show. They are more like pants that cut off just below the knee and sometimes fitted tight to the leg. And sometimes not; Adidas makes a version of these that are basically warm-up tracksuit capris. They seem pretty sensible and comfortable, actually, but they aren't really a thing in the United States. However, man capris were sort of a trend a few years back among the Must-Be-Closest-to-the-Latest, which generally means somewhere urban and other than Maine.
I was in Rīga this weekend because my guy Lee has arrived in Latvia for a couple weeks. We met up with my fellow Fulbrighter Justine Koontz and have now seen two of the oddest sculptures I can imagine. Odd Sculpture (O.S.) #2 is Glittersnail: an eight-foot-tall snail whose body is fiberglass and whose body is covered with mirrored tiles of the kind that you find on a disco ball. Here it is, surrounded by Justine and me:
O.S. #1, though, and clear winner for sheer strangeness goes to Spacemonkey (or, if you prefer, Astrochimp). Spacemonkey is apparently a salute to the animals that were sent into orbit in the early space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was a plaque in front of this sculpture that explains this, but it currently not there, so the sculpture has no context. Well, other than seeing a 30-foot tall monkey in a spacesuit, which for me was not nearly enough context. You can imagine seeing this in a lovely park in Rīga and saying to yourself, "What in God's name is that?" (Which is pretty much what I did.) That said, you have to sort of dig something so very weird.
Windows in Latvia -- well, Europe in general -- are very smart. Newer thermal windows in buildings both open from the top, leaning downward slightly into the room so that you get a crack of air at the top, and from the side, opening wide into the room so you get a full breeze. This is vastly superior to American sash windows, which open up only halfway by sliding up the frame. On the other hand, European windows never have screens, and I have noticed just as many bugs here in Latvia as I have at home. How did the Latvians miss that?
My school term is not ending; it's sort of dribbling away. My master's candidate courses ended in mid-May, and she has turned in her final essays. She is now taking exams of some sort. My second-year students end next week when their essays are due, and my adult students end in mid-May when their class ends, for whatever reason. I am still extremely unclear how the schedule works here. At times it has felt as if the administration was just making it all up as we went along. This contrasts sharply with the American system, in which I could tell you my final exam period dates for the year 2019 already because they have already been set. One system isn't better or worse; I simply am blissfully unaware of what exactly is going on, and I decided early on -- wisely, in retrospect -- to not let this bother me. And so it doesn't.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Homesick
I am surprised that it has taken this long for homesickness to hit me. It's not severe at all, and I am still certainly enjoying myself, but I am also getting wistful for being back in my own home and puttering about in my garden and drinking coffee out of my own coffee mug.
When I first arrived, I was moderately bewildered by all the new stuff I had to navigate not to mention classes to prepare, so I had no time to even think about home. I also wisely got involved in making presentations early on -- I was in front of a high school class my fourth day in Daugavpils -- and being busy helped immensely. If I could give one piece of advice to a new Fulbrighter, it would be to get involved in your new community immediately.
As I settled in, though, I got to the point where Daugavpils started feeling like a place I lived and not just a temporary way station where I existed. It is of course both: I've been here now for four months and am now looking at the final month or so I have left before I leave. I have noticed that when I walk on the pedestrian mall or along the Daugava River, or when I relax in the sauna following a swim at the university pool, that I see people I know, and I greet them and have light conversation. I have a network of acquaintances, a community of sorts.
That said, I'm in the community but not entirely of the community. Not having either language spoken here means that I can't engage much further than light conversation, and that is something that I am missing. Conversations in English here are massively rewarding with Latvians, but they are also a considerable amount of work. They're often stilted and one-sided as my friends struggle to find the way to say what they want to say. Thankfully, they don't worry about grammar much with me, or at least not as much as they used to, so conversations don't devolve into grammar lessons.
I miss the English language -- both hearing it and reading it -- in a lot of ways. In particular, I miss being able to read a newspaper, or at least read one when I'm not sitting at my laptop. I haven't been able to take part in all the political action in the States that is the Resistance because it's harder to do from here. Putting my name on online petitions is easy, but making international phone calls to legislators is not, with the time difference and cost ($5 to $7 a call, generally). Rallies and meetings are mostly impossible. I have been mostly content to watch the endless battles and mess of the Trump administration from afar, but now I am feeling as if I want to put on some battle gear myself and jump into the fray.
On further reflection, it may be that homesickness hits precisely when you feel settled because you know that settled feeling is going to be temporary once you pack up and head home. My fellow Fulbrighter Justine has been here since September, so she has had a full nine months here. She mentioned in one of our conversations that maybe the five-month stint that I have is a better model because it's hard to get that settled and then have to give it all up. She is concerned about re-entering the American mode of life because she is now so used to doing things the Latvian way. I suspect that I will not have this problem -- or at least not acutely -- but I will be interested in seeing how my return to the States plays out in the long run.
What I am sure of, though, is that I will have the same experience that one of my favorite English writers, Rumer Godden, had about her childhood. She and her family moved from London at the outbreak of the First World War to India, where her father had business, and she returned to England when she was a pre-teen to attend boarding school. For the rest of her life, she went back and forth between the two countries, probably staying in England more in the long run, but always feeling homesick for one country or the other. I expect that I will have the same experience. My first week home, I will not be able to get salāti grieku at my local supermarket. I will no longer find harčo among the soups on a restaurant menu. I will no longer see people walking around with flowers in their arms because they someone they know has a birthday or name day. And, invariably, I will say, "I wish I were in Latvia."
When I first arrived, I was moderately bewildered by all the new stuff I had to navigate not to mention classes to prepare, so I had no time to even think about home. I also wisely got involved in making presentations early on -- I was in front of a high school class my fourth day in Daugavpils -- and being busy helped immensely. If I could give one piece of advice to a new Fulbrighter, it would be to get involved in your new community immediately.
As I settled in, though, I got to the point where Daugavpils started feeling like a place I lived and not just a temporary way station where I existed. It is of course both: I've been here now for four months and am now looking at the final month or so I have left before I leave. I have noticed that when I walk on the pedestrian mall or along the Daugava River, or when I relax in the sauna following a swim at the university pool, that I see people I know, and I greet them and have light conversation. I have a network of acquaintances, a community of sorts.
That said, I'm in the community but not entirely of the community. Not having either language spoken here means that I can't engage much further than light conversation, and that is something that I am missing. Conversations in English here are massively rewarding with Latvians, but they are also a considerable amount of work. They're often stilted and one-sided as my friends struggle to find the way to say what they want to say. Thankfully, they don't worry about grammar much with me, or at least not as much as they used to, so conversations don't devolve into grammar lessons.
I miss the English language -- both hearing it and reading it -- in a lot of ways. In particular, I miss being able to read a newspaper, or at least read one when I'm not sitting at my laptop. I haven't been able to take part in all the political action in the States that is the Resistance because it's harder to do from here. Putting my name on online petitions is easy, but making international phone calls to legislators is not, with the time difference and cost ($5 to $7 a call, generally). Rallies and meetings are mostly impossible. I have been mostly content to watch the endless battles and mess of the Trump administration from afar, but now I am feeling as if I want to put on some battle gear myself and jump into the fray.
On further reflection, it may be that homesickness hits precisely when you feel settled because you know that settled feeling is going to be temporary once you pack up and head home. My fellow Fulbrighter Justine has been here since September, so she has had a full nine months here. She mentioned in one of our conversations that maybe the five-month stint that I have is a better model because it's hard to get that settled and then have to give it all up. She is concerned about re-entering the American mode of life because she is now so used to doing things the Latvian way. I suspect that I will not have this problem -- or at least not acutely -- but I will be interested in seeing how my return to the States plays out in the long run.
What I am sure of, though, is that I will have the same experience that one of my favorite English writers, Rumer Godden, had about her childhood. She and her family moved from London at the outbreak of the First World War to India, where her father had business, and she returned to England when she was a pre-teen to attend boarding school. For the rest of her life, she went back and forth between the two countries, probably staying in England more in the long run, but always feeling homesick for one country or the other. I expect that I will have the same experience. My first week home, I will not be able to get salāti grieku at my local supermarket. I will no longer find harčo among the soups on a restaurant menu. I will no longer see people walking around with flowers in their arms because they someone they know has a birthday or name day. And, invariably, I will say, "I wish I were in Latvia."
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Vienibas Nams
Vienības Nams ("VEE-eh-nee-bus nams"; "Unity House" in English) is the serious cultural center of Daugavpils. Here is the theater, the concert hall, the public library, the Latvian cultural center, the tourist information office, the souvenir shop, and the USA Information Center, all in one building on the city center square. Oh, and there's a Swedbank with handy cash machines and a museum devoted to Latgale's very own moonshine šmākovkas ("SHMOCK-uv-kuss") for good measure. And the library doubles as a rotating art gallery for local artists. Talk about one-stop shopping!
Built in the 1930s in what I call the Balt Deco style, I think that Vienības Nams was part of the trend at the time to give all Latvian cities a place to put Latvian culture out there for Latvian citizens. This was certainly tied to the nation defining itself culturally. Having existed only since 1918 as an independent state (the Soviets didn't move in until 1940), Latvia worked hard at extolling its Latvian identity. Daugavpils was the second largest city in Latvia, a status which it retains to this day, and the feeling was that it needed a worthy center of cultural activities way out here in the boonies, far from Rīga. It certainly got one.
The theater is somewhat amazing in the number of productions in mounts. It's the only theater in the country where Russian and Latvian actors work side by side, and occasionally productions will be in Latgalian, the old language of Latgale, as well as in Russian and Latvian. There is a production at least once a week and sometimes more often. Generally a show will play one night, and then, I assume, move somewhere else in the country. This means that the average Daugavpilian could see 30 to 40 professional productions a year (assuming that the theater is quieter in the summer). Most American cities ten times the size of Daugavpils could not match that output, and certainly not by the work of a single theater. The range and frequency of shows is remarkable. Comedies, tragedies, classics -- Chekhov to Shakespeare to domestic farces to stand-up one-woman shows -- you name it, Daugavpils Teātris presents it.
I haven't taken in a lot of theater since I've been here -- not having the language is a severe handicap in this regard -- but I have spent a fair amount of time in the koncertzāle ("KON-sert-zah-luh"), or concert hall. To give you sense of the range of events that happen here, it's worth noting that in the course of ten days, I watched the Belorussian Theater and Dance Company from Minsk perform Swan Lake in the theater, heard the United State Army Band (Europe) perform in the concert hall, and the day after that heard a group of jazz musicians jamming all night in the open space that had cabaret seating set up (and a bar conveniently located next door) as part of Daugavpils' month-long jazz festival. This sort of endless, wildly varied programming is typical. Here are a couple of photos from those last two concerts.
That signage above reads "Fifteenth International Jazz Festival," in case you were wondering, and this jam session was totally cool. Musicians just wandered in and out of the sextet, rotating constantly, and playing whatever struck their fancy. At any time, I am guessing that five nations were represented in each sextet at any given time. In case you didn't know, Poland has a huge jazz culture, and apparently Belarus is not far behind. The U.S. Army band is about as crackerjack an ensemble as you can imagine. Most if not all of the musicians are professional caliber, and they are really disciplined; they are, after all, in the Army.
Ticket prices would make an American green with envy. The full-length ballet was 3 euros (about $3.25). The band concert was free. The cover for the jazz concert was 2 euros ($2.15). The most I have ever paid for a concert here is 6 euros, and that involved a well-known Latvian folk singer and his many musician friends. All 45 of them. I don't know how the ticket prices are set up other than to say that they must be subsidized somehow. A surprising number of concerts are free. If you don't see a ticket price on the poster, you assume that it is.
The nicest thing is that concerts are often scheduled early in the evening. They typically start at 18:00 (6:00 pm) or 18:30 (6:30), so that you're home at a decent hour and your workday tomorrow isn't shot. It also means that it's really easy to bring kids to a concert, and everybody does. Training children from an early age to attend public events like this is an excellent idea in that they learn early on how to behave in such events, and they also learn to support community events like the arts. Latvians get this right, and it shows.
Built in the 1930s in what I call the Balt Deco style, I think that Vienības Nams was part of the trend at the time to give all Latvian cities a place to put Latvian culture out there for Latvian citizens. This was certainly tied to the nation defining itself culturally. Having existed only since 1918 as an independent state (the Soviets didn't move in until 1940), Latvia worked hard at extolling its Latvian identity. Daugavpils was the second largest city in Latvia, a status which it retains to this day, and the feeling was that it needed a worthy center of cultural activities way out here in the boonies, far from Rīga. It certainly got one.
The theater is somewhat amazing in the number of productions in mounts. It's the only theater in the country where Russian and Latvian actors work side by side, and occasionally productions will be in Latgalian, the old language of Latgale, as well as in Russian and Latvian. There is a production at least once a week and sometimes more often. Generally a show will play one night, and then, I assume, move somewhere else in the country. This means that the average Daugavpilian could see 30 to 40 professional productions a year (assuming that the theater is quieter in the summer). Most American cities ten times the size of Daugavpils could not match that output, and certainly not by the work of a single theater. The range and frequency of shows is remarkable. Comedies, tragedies, classics -- Chekhov to Shakespeare to domestic farces to stand-up one-woman shows -- you name it, Daugavpils Teātris presents it.
I haven't taken in a lot of theater since I've been here -- not having the language is a severe handicap in this regard -- but I have spent a fair amount of time in the koncertzāle ("KON-sert-zah-luh"), or concert hall. To give you sense of the range of events that happen here, it's worth noting that in the course of ten days, I watched the Belorussian Theater and Dance Company from Minsk perform Swan Lake in the theater, heard the United State Army Band (Europe) perform in the concert hall, and the day after that heard a group of jazz musicians jamming all night in the open space that had cabaret seating set up (and a bar conveniently located next door) as part of Daugavpils' month-long jazz festival. This sort of endless, wildly varied programming is typical. Here are a couple of photos from those last two concerts.
That signage above reads "Fifteenth International Jazz Festival," in case you were wondering, and this jam session was totally cool. Musicians just wandered in and out of the sextet, rotating constantly, and playing whatever struck their fancy. At any time, I am guessing that five nations were represented in each sextet at any given time. In case you didn't know, Poland has a huge jazz culture, and apparently Belarus is not far behind. The U.S. Army band is about as crackerjack an ensemble as you can imagine. Most if not all of the musicians are professional caliber, and they are really disciplined; they are, after all, in the Army.
Ticket prices would make an American green with envy. The full-length ballet was 3 euros (about $3.25). The band concert was free. The cover for the jazz concert was 2 euros ($2.15). The most I have ever paid for a concert here is 6 euros, and that involved a well-known Latvian folk singer and his many musician friends. All 45 of them. I don't know how the ticket prices are set up other than to say that they must be subsidized somehow. A surprising number of concerts are free. If you don't see a ticket price on the poster, you assume that it is.
The nicest thing is that concerts are often scheduled early in the evening. They typically start at 18:00 (6:00 pm) or 18:30 (6:30), so that you're home at a decent hour and your workday tomorrow isn't shot. It also means that it's really easy to bring kids to a concert, and everybody does. Training children from an early age to attend public events like this is an excellent idea in that they learn early on how to behave in such events, and they also learn to support community events like the arts. Latvians get this right, and it shows.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Multicultural
I spent Wednesday afternoon with fellow Fulbrighter and musciologist Justine Koontz here in Daugavpils at the Polish Cultural Center. Justine has been researching Latvia's choral traditions, which are sort of astonishing, and a side interest has the been the existence of the many cultural centers in virtually every town or city in Latvia that help support choral activities. A town's cultural center, to put it simply, is where the town's citizens make art. They sing, they dance, they paint, they write poetry -- whatever their creative passion might be. These centers have played a huge role in preserving Latvia's folk culture. I may be wrong, but I think that they were set up by the Soviets, no doubt to help acculturate comrades to the greater glories of socialism. Even so, if I am correct, this is one thing that the Soviets actually got right, even if their motives were ideologically grounded in the usual communism-for-the-Motherland.
My student Krzysztof accompanied us. He is a Polish Erasmus student studying Russian at Daugavpils University, so he's fluent in Polish, and I figured -- correctly, as it turned out -- that we might need a translator. Krzysztof was nervous about this, though he shouldn't have been. His English is very solid and his Polish superb, and he did a wonderful job acting as our intermediary with Svetlana, one of the lovely staff members at the Center. (For those of you who don't know, Erasmus is an exchange program for students and faculty within the European Union nations.)
What impressed us, first, was the range of activities in the Polish Cultural Center. There are choirs and dance troupes, of course, but also a sizeable lending library of Polish books, an art gallery, a children's center, a kitchen, and exhibits of Polish costumes and cultural artifacts; the place was buzzing with activity as we wandered about. Svetlana told us that Daugavpils is about 15% Polish, so that the linguistic and cultural map of the place is even more complicated than the usual Latvian/Russian paradigm. In fact, Daugavpils was part of Poland at one time, but then it's been part of every neighbor that it has, being a border city in a place with endlessly shifting borders.
What impressed Justine, second, is the fact that there isn't the kind of cultural purity that she sees in Rīga. In other words, cultural centers in Rīga are very concerned with preserving specifically Latvian culture. In Daugavpils, the Polish choir sings works in Polish but also in Latvian, which would not be done in Rīga. Certainly Rīga's status as the capital and hence the center of all things Latviana has something to do with this; one would expect Latvian culture to be the center of discourse. But Rīga's cultural centers -- choirs, dance troupes, what have you -- could acknowledge that Latvia is actually more culturally complex than it first appears. Apparently it chooses not to.
Daugavpils does, though. There is also Russian and a Belorussian cultural centers in town, and to my knowledge none of them is particularly concerned with the kind of cultural purity that is seen in other parts of the country. I've noticed this first hand; I have heard Russian choirs singing in Latvian as well as in Russian. On a more practical level, restaurant menus are always printed in two languages, Latvian and Russian and often three, with English thrown in for good measure. I have not seen Polish on a menu, though I have seen it in other print venues. Justine, whose ear for Slavic languages is far better than mine, said that she heard Polish on the street more than she expected in Daugavpils, which is saying something as well.
It is common knowledge that Daugavpils is the most culturally diverse city in Latvia. It's also common knowledge that it's the city that most Latvians don't like very much, even if they have never been there, and Daugavpilians have a self-effacing attitude about living there themselves, as if they are supposed to apologize for being from Daugavpils. As someone who was born and raised in Flint, Michigan -- another aging industrial town that Michiganians love to hate -- I can say with authority that I understand this attitude only too well. I totally get Latvia's concern with preserving its own culture, and it also seems to me that the kind if multiculturalism that Daugavpils has is seen at some level as a mild threat to Latvian-ness. I am not singling out Latvia for criticism here. As the United States grows ever more diverse, there is more and more pushback against the "other," as we have seen with the election of a president whose entire platform was based on "America first," America being defined as straight, Christian, white men who have determined that their endless privileges are under threat from everybody. (It might be fairer to say that the American pie should be divided more equitably, and that doing so would be a good thing.)
Daugavpils could be and should be the model for Latvia and the Baltics about how to make multiculturalism work. There are certainly tensions here about identity, but they are not overwhelming, and I hope that Daugavpils sees its diversity as a genuine asset and not a liability. I would be putting this kind of information about various cultures living here on the tourist brochures, and Daugavpils University has already started capitalizing on this: it advertises that one can study Russian in the most Russian city located in the EU, and many students from all over the world do just that. The Polish Cultural Center's work in seriously preserving Polish culture while acknowledging that this Polish culture is infused with other cultures seems to be a model for this. As Justine put it, "When you never know who your neighbors are going to be in ten years, it's a good idea to get along with them." Exactly.
My student Krzysztof accompanied us. He is a Polish Erasmus student studying Russian at Daugavpils University, so he's fluent in Polish, and I figured -- correctly, as it turned out -- that we might need a translator. Krzysztof was nervous about this, though he shouldn't have been. His English is very solid and his Polish superb, and he did a wonderful job acting as our intermediary with Svetlana, one of the lovely staff members at the Center. (For those of you who don't know, Erasmus is an exchange program for students and faculty within the European Union nations.)
What impressed us, first, was the range of activities in the Polish Cultural Center. There are choirs and dance troupes, of course, but also a sizeable lending library of Polish books, an art gallery, a children's center, a kitchen, and exhibits of Polish costumes and cultural artifacts; the place was buzzing with activity as we wandered about. Svetlana told us that Daugavpils is about 15% Polish, so that the linguistic and cultural map of the place is even more complicated than the usual Latvian/Russian paradigm. In fact, Daugavpils was part of Poland at one time, but then it's been part of every neighbor that it has, being a border city in a place with endlessly shifting borders.
What impressed Justine, second, is the fact that there isn't the kind of cultural purity that she sees in Rīga. In other words, cultural centers in Rīga are very concerned with preserving specifically Latvian culture. In Daugavpils, the Polish choir sings works in Polish but also in Latvian, which would not be done in Rīga. Certainly Rīga's status as the capital and hence the center of all things Latviana has something to do with this; one would expect Latvian culture to be the center of discourse. But Rīga's cultural centers -- choirs, dance troupes, what have you -- could acknowledge that Latvia is actually more culturally complex than it first appears. Apparently it chooses not to.
Daugavpils does, though. There is also Russian and a Belorussian cultural centers in town, and to my knowledge none of them is particularly concerned with the kind of cultural purity that is seen in other parts of the country. I've noticed this first hand; I have heard Russian choirs singing in Latvian as well as in Russian. On a more practical level, restaurant menus are always printed in two languages, Latvian and Russian and often three, with English thrown in for good measure. I have not seen Polish on a menu, though I have seen it in other print venues. Justine, whose ear for Slavic languages is far better than mine, said that she heard Polish on the street more than she expected in Daugavpils, which is saying something as well.
It is common knowledge that Daugavpils is the most culturally diverse city in Latvia. It's also common knowledge that it's the city that most Latvians don't like very much, even if they have never been there, and Daugavpilians have a self-effacing attitude about living there themselves, as if they are supposed to apologize for being from Daugavpils. As someone who was born and raised in Flint, Michigan -- another aging industrial town that Michiganians love to hate -- I can say with authority that I understand this attitude only too well. I totally get Latvia's concern with preserving its own culture, and it also seems to me that the kind if multiculturalism that Daugavpils has is seen at some level as a mild threat to Latvian-ness. I am not singling out Latvia for criticism here. As the United States grows ever more diverse, there is more and more pushback against the "other," as we have seen with the election of a president whose entire platform was based on "America first," America being defined as straight, Christian, white men who have determined that their endless privileges are under threat from everybody. (It might be fairer to say that the American pie should be divided more equitably, and that doing so would be a good thing.)
Daugavpils could be and should be the model for Latvia and the Baltics about how to make multiculturalism work. There are certainly tensions here about identity, but they are not overwhelming, and I hope that Daugavpils sees its diversity as a genuine asset and not a liability. I would be putting this kind of information about various cultures living here on the tourist brochures, and Daugavpils University has already started capitalizing on this: it advertises that one can study Russian in the most Russian city located in the EU, and many students from all over the world do just that. The Polish Cultural Center's work in seriously preserving Polish culture while acknowledging that this Polish culture is infused with other cultures seems to be a model for this. As Justine put it, "When you never know who your neighbors are going to be in ten years, it's a good idea to get along with them." Exactly.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Vilnius 2
Vilnius is a city I wandered around more than took photos of. It is eminently suitable for wandering; its Old Town is large, and the street layout is as bewildering as Rīga's is. Here are some of the few photos that I took. This first is, to my mind, the ubiquitous Vilnius shot. Wherever you look, there is always a church tower or steeple peering out over all the other buildings. I like the contrast of colors here, how the setting sun captures different shades of stone.
Vilnius is lucky to have a little river running through town (as well as a big one). This is the river Vilnia, which is really more of a stream. It loops around Old Town, and in one of its loops sits the groovy neighborhood Užupis. You have to cross little bridges to get to Užupis, which adds to its sense of being set apart from the rest of Old Town. Here's one of the bridges with one of the Orthodox churches in the background. You can see that spring is getting seriously started in Lithuania. By the way, an interior design feature that I saw consistently in the Orthodox churches in Vilnius was the use of marquee lights. Seriously. The Greek letters for "Christ" were spelled out in one church over the icon screen in marquee lights, as if Ethel Merman were going to show up to belt out some Russian chant.
Here's a panorama from the top of tower in the Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which is one of the former palaces. There's a castle on a hill nearby where I'm sure the view is even better, but that would required climbing the hill. Kathy Knapp, my fellow Fulbrighter, has run up there on one of her morning sprints, and we agreed that sitting down and having lunch in an outdoor café was a far better plan. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do justice to the view. One of the pleasures of the Vilnius skyline is seeing it punctuated in all directions by Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox church spires.
And this is just a typical street scene, here snapped from the portal of St. Anne's Catholic Church, a little gem of a church and dripping in Gothic-style brickwork. This seems to me to be another ubiquitous snapshot of Vilnius -- churches in the foreground, churches in the background, and cobblestones galore.
Having said all that, it's also worth noting that Vilnius may look like a museum set but it isn't one. There are loads of tourists, yes, but once you get into the regular neighborhoods, like the one where my hotel was located, you can see that this is very much a working town, filled with ordinary people doing their laundry, walking their kids in strollers, going to their yoga classes, and chatting with their friends in outdoor cafés. You can tell that winter is long in the Baltics because once the outdoor cafés open, they are simply flooded with people who have been cooped up too long in overheated apartments. Daugavpils, three hours to the north, has opened up its outdoor cafés with a vengeance. Every restaurant that can have one does have one. Spring has come, the voice of the turtle is in the land, and the beer is flowing.
Friday, May 12, 2017
Triviana Latviana 4
I have now joined the ranks of the Latvians, having taken flowers to my dean for her name day. (See previous post.) This extremely Latvian behavior involves both the giving of flowers and the recognition of a name day. You just can't get more Latvian than that. In her office, there were already bouquets galore, a nice spread of salmon on bruschetta, Lithuanian cream cake (of course), Latvian sausages, sweet cheese, crab salad, cookies, and coffee. You have to give it to the Baltics: they celebrate at the drop of a hat, and the celebrations involve great food. And lots of it.
Last week there were three holidays in Latvia. 1 May is Workers' Day, May Day elsewhere in the world. I am unsure if this is a legacy of Soviet times -- I do know that in Moscow, this was a day for a big parade that showed off military hardware -- but here it seems that it is theoretically about workers. I didn't see a lot of celebrating for this, but this might be analagous to the United States' Labor Day, which is really an excuse for a three-day weekend. For non-American readers, Labor Day is always the first Monday in September, and it (un)officially marks the end of summer.
The second holiday, 4 May, is Independence Day, though I am not sure that it's called that. I don't exactly know what the official name is, which is mildly confusing because Latvia has two independence days, as near as I can tell. The first one in 18 November, which marks the birth of the Latvian nation in 1918 (100 years next year! Bring on the cake and coffee!). Every city in the country has a 18 Novembra iela (18 November Street), which tells you that this is an important day. The May holiday marks the independence from the Soviet Union, which for Latvians is an equally important day. There was considerable fuss on this day; the Latvian flag was hung everywhere (all buildings have flagpoles attached to them for this purpose), there was singing and dancing in the city square, there were special concerts, there was a craft fair. It's a big deal.
The third, 9 May, celebrates the end of the World War II, and this one is celebrated primarily by Russians in Latvia; at the time, after all, Latvia was still a Soviet republic. It is difficult for an American to fully comprehend the colossal devastation and loss of life that the Soviet Union endured for the five years of war. Estimates are about 27 million deaths, though nobody honestly knows. There were a number of very old men and women with their medals on their jackets. They are perhaps the children of war veterans because the actual veterans would now be in their late 80s and 90s. Everybody else wore ribbons in orange and black, which gave the whole affair a Hallowe'en air, though I am sure that was not the intent. The color of the ribbons must mean something, though I am not sure what. There were enormous numbers of flowers laid at the WWII memorial in the park adjacent to my flat, and there were fireworks that evening. I know this because they started outside my window within thirty seconds of my going to bed. I of course got up and watched them, figuring that I would be a little fuzzy in my 8:00 morning class the next day, and indeed I was.
One of the pleasures of being in Latvia is drinking the endless beers that are available here. You haven't heard of any of them. My new favorite is a light beer, perfect for summer, brewed in nearby Kraslava ("KRAHSS-lah-vuh") and called, logically enough, Kraslava. There's also a dark beer that I need to try. Valmiermuīža ("VOLL-meer-mwee-zhuh") is another superb beer, recommended by former Fulbrighter Steven Vickers. It is dark and foamy; you sort of eat it rather than drink it. I think I've mentioned Lielvārdes ("LEEL-var-des," just like it's spelled) already as well. Latvia is not a wine-producing country so much, though I am told that the northernmost winery in Europe is actually in Latvia. But you can get great wine here from all over Europe. French and Italian wines would be the obvious choices, but I have discovered table wines from Moldova. Moldova is one of the great wine nations of the world, and you probably didn't know this. Some wine experts say that the best wines in the world come from Moldova, but they are totally unknown because it was another Soviet republic that never exported its goods. Others among you may not even be aware that there is such a country as Moldova, but there is. Consult a European map. That is, consult a recent European map.
Though I have not explored them much, there are lots and lots of vodkas from Russia that you have never heard of if you're American. My take is that if the label is in Cyrillic, then it's a real Russian vodka and maybe not exported at all. The range of vodkas is remarkable, as is the Russian capacity for drinking it. My Russian comrades are more than happy to share their expertise in this burgeoning field.
Spring is slowly springing in Latvia, and one of the manifestations of this is that daylight hours are extremely long. Latvia is pretty far north, as you see if you look at a map of Europe. Maine, by contrast, is at the same latitude as southern France, which usually surprises Mainers because the weather sure isn't comparable. This means that here in Latvia dusk occurs later and later and later. Currently it's at about 10:30 pm, which is very disorienting to me. Darkness at home is a visual signal that it's time to go to bed, but it just doesn't get dark here. And we are still a month away from the summer solstice, which is a huge celebration in Latvia. Daybreak is about 5:00. My biological clock will be permanently altered by the time I go home.
For the record, Latvia, like most of Europe, uses what Americans call military time. 10:30 pm is actually 22:30 -- that is, the twenty-second hour of the day. 3:00 pm is 15:00, 6:15 pm is 18:15, and so on. This takes some getting used to. It took me a month to figure out that all you do is subtract 12 from the number that looks odd, and you get American time. I am a bit slow, but now I manage it fine.
My phone company, LMT, has given all of its customers free internet all week on their smartphones. To what do we owe this corporate benevolence? Why, the world hockey championships, of course. LMT wants to assure all Latvians that they will not miss a minute of the Latvian national team beating all the other European teams -- which so far they have done. I don't know what to make of this corporate policy other than to find it delightful. Today Latvia is playing the United States. I have prudently chosen to not take sides, a fact that bewildered my adult English class. As you can imagine, they have taken sides.
Last week there were three holidays in Latvia. 1 May is Workers' Day, May Day elsewhere in the world. I am unsure if this is a legacy of Soviet times -- I do know that in Moscow, this was a day for a big parade that showed off military hardware -- but here it seems that it is theoretically about workers. I didn't see a lot of celebrating for this, but this might be analagous to the United States' Labor Day, which is really an excuse for a three-day weekend. For non-American readers, Labor Day is always the first Monday in September, and it (un)officially marks the end of summer.
The second holiday, 4 May, is Independence Day, though I am not sure that it's called that. I don't exactly know what the official name is, which is mildly confusing because Latvia has two independence days, as near as I can tell. The first one in 18 November, which marks the birth of the Latvian nation in 1918 (100 years next year! Bring on the cake and coffee!). Every city in the country has a 18 Novembra iela (18 November Street), which tells you that this is an important day. The May holiday marks the independence from the Soviet Union, which for Latvians is an equally important day. There was considerable fuss on this day; the Latvian flag was hung everywhere (all buildings have flagpoles attached to them for this purpose), there was singing and dancing in the city square, there were special concerts, there was a craft fair. It's a big deal.
The third, 9 May, celebrates the end of the World War II, and this one is celebrated primarily by Russians in Latvia; at the time, after all, Latvia was still a Soviet republic. It is difficult for an American to fully comprehend the colossal devastation and loss of life that the Soviet Union endured for the five years of war. Estimates are about 27 million deaths, though nobody honestly knows. There were a number of very old men and women with their medals on their jackets. They are perhaps the children of war veterans because the actual veterans would now be in their late 80s and 90s. Everybody else wore ribbons in orange and black, which gave the whole affair a Hallowe'en air, though I am sure that was not the intent. The color of the ribbons must mean something, though I am not sure what. There were enormous numbers of flowers laid at the WWII memorial in the park adjacent to my flat, and there were fireworks that evening. I know this because they started outside my window within thirty seconds of my going to bed. I of course got up and watched them, figuring that I would be a little fuzzy in my 8:00 morning class the next day, and indeed I was.
One of the pleasures of being in Latvia is drinking the endless beers that are available here. You haven't heard of any of them. My new favorite is a light beer, perfect for summer, brewed in nearby Kraslava ("KRAHSS-lah-vuh") and called, logically enough, Kraslava. There's also a dark beer that I need to try. Valmiermuīža ("VOLL-meer-mwee-zhuh") is another superb beer, recommended by former Fulbrighter Steven Vickers. It is dark and foamy; you sort of eat it rather than drink it. I think I've mentioned Lielvārdes ("LEEL-var-des," just like it's spelled) already as well. Latvia is not a wine-producing country so much, though I am told that the northernmost winery in Europe is actually in Latvia. But you can get great wine here from all over Europe. French and Italian wines would be the obvious choices, but I have discovered table wines from Moldova. Moldova is one of the great wine nations of the world, and you probably didn't know this. Some wine experts say that the best wines in the world come from Moldova, but they are totally unknown because it was another Soviet republic that never exported its goods. Others among you may not even be aware that there is such a country as Moldova, but there is. Consult a European map. That is, consult a recent European map.
Though I have not explored them much, there are lots and lots of vodkas from Russia that you have never heard of if you're American. My take is that if the label is in Cyrillic, then it's a real Russian vodka and maybe not exported at all. The range of vodkas is remarkable, as is the Russian capacity for drinking it. My Russian comrades are more than happy to share their expertise in this burgeoning field.
Spring is slowly springing in Latvia, and one of the manifestations of this is that daylight hours are extremely long. Latvia is pretty far north, as you see if you look at a map of Europe. Maine, by contrast, is at the same latitude as southern France, which usually surprises Mainers because the weather sure isn't comparable. This means that here in Latvia dusk occurs later and later and later. Currently it's at about 10:30 pm, which is very disorienting to me. Darkness at home is a visual signal that it's time to go to bed, but it just doesn't get dark here. And we are still a month away from the summer solstice, which is a huge celebration in Latvia. Daybreak is about 5:00. My biological clock will be permanently altered by the time I go home.
For the record, Latvia, like most of Europe, uses what Americans call military time. 10:30 pm is actually 22:30 -- that is, the twenty-second hour of the day. 3:00 pm is 15:00, 6:15 pm is 18:15, and so on. This takes some getting used to. It took me a month to figure out that all you do is subtract 12 from the number that looks odd, and you get American time. I am a bit slow, but now I manage it fine.
My phone company, LMT, has given all of its customers free internet all week on their smartphones. To what do we owe this corporate benevolence? Why, the world hockey championships, of course. LMT wants to assure all Latvians that they will not miss a minute of the Latvian national team beating all the other European teams -- which so far they have done. I don't know what to make of this corporate policy other than to find it delightful. Today Latvia is playing the United States. I have prudently chosen to not take sides, a fact that bewildered my adult English class. As you can imagine, they have taken sides.
Vilnius
I wasn't in Lithuania long enough to really write very intelligently about it, nor even in the capital Vilnius to really do it justice. I had a three days' holiday there on our spring break, where I met up with Kathy Knapp of the University of Connecticut -- another Fulbrighter who is teaching at Vilnius University this term. We met at the Fulbright orientation meeting last summer in Washington, D.C., and made plans to meet some time. So here we are! That's St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in the background. What this photo does not capture is the hordes of European tourists everywhere. The Baltics are not on most North Americans' itineraries (yet), but Europeans sure have discovered them.
Vilnius is a lovely city built on hills so that there are lots of interesting vistas. Its Old Town is one of the largest in Europe and mostly beautifully restored. In particular, there are Baroque Catholic churches. Lithuania is a very Catholic country compared to Latvia and Estonia, and the churches apparently came into money in the Baroque period with the rise of the Grand Ducky of Lithuania, which ruled over a considerable chunk of central northern Europe. So most of the churches are dripping with statuary and fancy drippings, all designed to send you into celestial orbit. But my favorite was this little gem, St. Anne's, which has some Baroque features but never lost its essential Gothic vibe.
I mostly walked around the city, which is compact, dense, and very walkable. The fact that there is a cafe every ten meters helped, where you could get your morning, afternoon, and/or evening kava. Lithuanian is closely related to Latvian, but they are not mutually intelligible. So just when I felt I was getting the hang on one language, I had to deal with yet another one. Probably more people spoke English in Lithuania, though, which was helpful.
It is a museum city, as is fitting for a capital. It does have some rivalry, though, with Kaunas, about 90 kilometers to the west, which sees itself as the cultural capital and Lithuanian heart of the country. That said, the Lithuanian Picture Gallery is sort of the national gallery, and it seems to be housed in what was a house in the city's core. You feel as if you are wandering around someone's private space, someone with good taste and a lot of blank walls. The Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was kind of a wash, on the other hand. It has lots of good stuff but not much in terms of explaining why the stuff is important. You start in the foundations of what was the castle, and the ruins are marked as, well, ruins. "Here is the rubble from when a wall fell in the fourteenth century." And sure enough, that's rubble in front of you. That sort of thing. Here is a pot. Here are a bunch of bombard balls from the sixteenth century (sort of a precursor to cannon balls). Yeah, yeah, but what's the story behind all this? I was glad that Kathy was with me for this museum. Cracking jokes about all this stuff made it quite fun.
The best part of Vilnius is Užupis, a little neighborhood tucked in the bend of the Vilna River. This is where the hipsters live, so much so that the neighborhood has adopted its own constitution which is posted on one of the street walls in 25 different languages. Among its provisions:
Vilnius is a lovely city built on hills so that there are lots of interesting vistas. Its Old Town is one of the largest in Europe and mostly beautifully restored. In particular, there are Baroque Catholic churches. Lithuania is a very Catholic country compared to Latvia and Estonia, and the churches apparently came into money in the Baroque period with the rise of the Grand Ducky of Lithuania, which ruled over a considerable chunk of central northern Europe. So most of the churches are dripping with statuary and fancy drippings, all designed to send you into celestial orbit. But my favorite was this little gem, St. Anne's, which has some Baroque features but never lost its essential Gothic vibe.
I mostly walked around the city, which is compact, dense, and very walkable. The fact that there is a cafe every ten meters helped, where you could get your morning, afternoon, and/or evening kava. Lithuanian is closely related to Latvian, but they are not mutually intelligible. So just when I felt I was getting the hang on one language, I had to deal with yet another one. Probably more people spoke English in Lithuania, though, which was helpful.
It is a museum city, as is fitting for a capital. It does have some rivalry, though, with Kaunas, about 90 kilometers to the west, which sees itself as the cultural capital and Lithuanian heart of the country. That said, the Lithuanian Picture Gallery is sort of the national gallery, and it seems to be housed in what was a house in the city's core. You feel as if you are wandering around someone's private space, someone with good taste and a lot of blank walls. The Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was kind of a wash, on the other hand. It has lots of good stuff but not much in terms of explaining why the stuff is important. You start in the foundations of what was the castle, and the ruins are marked as, well, ruins. "Here is the rubble from when a wall fell in the fourteenth century." And sure enough, that's rubble in front of you. That sort of thing. Here is a pot. Here are a bunch of bombard balls from the sixteenth century (sort of a precursor to cannon balls). Yeah, yeah, but what's the story behind all this? I was glad that Kathy was with me for this museum. Cracking jokes about all this stuff made it quite fun.
The best part of Vilnius is Užupis, a little neighborhood tucked in the bend of the Vilna River. This is where the hipsters live, so much so that the neighborhood has adopted its own constitution which is posted on one of the street walls in 25 different languages. Among its provisions:
- Everybody has the right to be sad.
- Everybody has the right to celebrate or not celebrate their birthday.
- Every dog has the right to be a dog.
- A cat is not obligated to love its owner, but it must help out if help is needed.
Friday, May 5, 2017
Cisneros in Latvia
Each year, the U.S.A. Information Center in Daugavpils (an outreach branch of the U.S. Embassy in Latvia) hosts a literary event in one of the area high schools, this year at the Russian Lyceum. The event consists of a group of educators choosing a book that speaks to the American experience. High schoolers and high school teachers from all over the city read it and then meet to discuss it. It's like a book club, though on a rather grander scale.
This year the committee that organizes this event chose the book that I suggested: Sandra Cisneros's coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street. I suggested it for a number of reasons: 1) it's short, which is no small consideration with readers for whom English is not their first language; 2) it's also very poetic, so it would present some challenge to these very skilled English readers; 3) it's taught everywhere from elementary schools to graduate schools in different contexts, so it's an easy teach; and 4) it offers a Latino prism on American culture that would likely be unfamiliar to Latvians. If you haven't read it, go do so, and you may thank me later for the recommendation.
Here are some photos of the day, which took place on April 18. First, me and the teachers, followed by one of the lead organizers Irīna Bučinska. Then there's the auditorium at the Russian lyceum itself, which I sort of dig with its Balt Deco styling.
The most important participants of the day, however, were the diligent students, who gathered, discussed, and presented on Cisneros's prose-poetry novel. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Cisneros has been taught in Latvia. I hope it won't be the last.
There are more photos on the Info Center's Facebook page, and lots more information about its many programs. As always, thanks to coordinator extraordinaire Natalija Oševerova for making all of this happen. The event concluded with more free books for these readers from the Embassy and, of course, chocolate for everybody.
This year the committee that organizes this event chose the book that I suggested: Sandra Cisneros's coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street. I suggested it for a number of reasons: 1) it's short, which is no small consideration with readers for whom English is not their first language; 2) it's also very poetic, so it would present some challenge to these very skilled English readers; 3) it's taught everywhere from elementary schools to graduate schools in different contexts, so it's an easy teach; and 4) it offers a Latino prism on American culture that would likely be unfamiliar to Latvians. If you haven't read it, go do so, and you may thank me later for the recommendation.
Here are some photos of the day, which took place on April 18. First, me and the teachers, followed by one of the lead organizers Irīna Bučinska. Then there's the auditorium at the Russian lyceum itself, which I sort of dig with its Balt Deco styling.
The most important participants of the day, however, were the diligent students, who gathered, discussed, and presented on Cisneros's prose-poetry novel. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Cisneros has been taught in Latvia. I hope it won't be the last.
There are more photos on the Info Center's Facebook page, and lots more information about its many programs. As always, thanks to coordinator extraordinaire Natalija Oševerova for making all of this happen. The event concluded with more free books for these readers from the Embassy and, of course, chocolate for everybody.
Thursday, May 4, 2017
Soviet 2
A few weeks ago, I spent a rainy day at the Latvian National Museum of Art. It's a wonderful museum in a Beaux Arts building, and I mean no disrespect to Latvia when I say it's not very big. There's plenty of Latvian art, but you don't feel overwhelmed by it the way the V&A in London or the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York just give you too much art. You can manage Latvia's national art museum, thank you very much.
When in the museum, you realize that Latvia has always been in touch with the rest of Europe in terms of art. (It's located there, after all, so this can't come as a total surprise.) Latvian Impressionism was closely in touch with Russian Impressionism, for example, and if you didn't know that there was a school of Russian Impressionism, you have some research to do. But though I feel that I'm not supposed to say this, honestly, my favorite gallery was the one that contained all the Soviet art.
Not that it was all great art, but that a gallery full of it existed at all. Soviet art was of course meant to be ideological: "national in form, socialist in content" is the key phrase. It meant that artists (not just visual artists, but writers, composers, sculptors, you name it) had severe constraints placed on them to express the glories of the socialist paradise being built right now before all of humankind! (Never mind those gulags and death camps and dissidents being tortured in psychiatric wards.) As you might imagine, at it worst this produced clunky, ideological schlock. At its best, though, it could produce art that really did inspire people.
That's the statement that I feel I am not supposed to make because, well, you know -- it's the Soviet Union again. And one painting in particular, with the clunky title "Masters of the Land," is a sort of cubist rendering of sturdy harvesters on a collective farm, taming the vast fields to bring humankind all the closer to a socialist Mecca. It's sort of dopey, frankly. But another painting of Latvian fishermen -- I forget the title -- is great. It's realistic, which socialist realism tended to be, which is one strike against it. We all know that great twentieth-century art is supposed to be inaccessible and abstract. This is just a great painting of a fishing competition that captures a moment like a snapshot would. I know that theoretically I'm not supposed to like it, but I do.
In its discussion of the entire gallery, the museum's appraisal of this hard-to-talk-about school, if we can even call it that, is unusually intelligent. While acknowledging that this era of art is highly problematic for all sorts of ideological reasons, it also assesses how artists worked, or didn't, within the highly politicized structure that they were forced to, how that created art, and what kind it created. I didn't like everything I saw, but I did like some of it, and I'm still sorting out how I feel about that. I think that a good test might be to take a work from this gallery and hang it somewhere else -- maybe in a show of early twentieth-century neo-realism like the work of, say, Thomas Hart Benton, and into which some of this Soviet art would fit nicely.. In a different context, devoid of its ideological underpinnings, would we appreciate it differently? I bet that we would. I very much appreciate the Latvian National Museum of Art's decision to collect this art and engage its visitors with it.
That said, there are two more works of Soviet art in Rīga worth mentioning. One is the truly clunky Academy of Sciences building, a Stalinist "wedding cake" of the type that Stalin was so fond of bestowing on cities in the Eastern bloc, whether they wanted them or not. (I would guess that they generally didn't, but when a dictator presents you with a building, it's in your best interest to accept it graciously.) It's a building that looks like, well, a wedding cake, with "layers" of stories that get increasingly smaller the higher it goes. But it doesn't go high enough; that is, it's so short and squat that it has no vertical thrust the way the Empire State Building does, so it looks as if someone took what was supposed to be a skyscraper and sat on it. The neo-Gothic decoration does not help matters any, either. If you think it's bad, try an even bigger and worse version of the "wedding cake" building, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Varsovians are fond of saying that the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the Palace of Culture because it's the one place in Warsaw where you don't have to look at the Palace of Culture.
The other is the World War II monument in a park on the west side of the Daugava River. I know that this huge set of statues is supposed to engage one with the immense sacrifice the Soviet Union made in WWII. And it was colossal -- an estimated 27 million dead, though nobody has an exact figure. So is the monument colossal. It is so colossal, in fact, that it crosses the line into kitsch, as far as I'm concerned. The statue of the Mother, I am guessing (as in Motherland, Rodina in Russian) reaches 150 feet into the sky, straining to grasp something. It is not clear why. When I first saw her, I thought she was trying to get something from the top shelf. Her cape (cape?) billowing out behind her. But because it's in bronze, it too heavy to have any energy. It just looks heavy and rather silly. On the other side of the monument, there are a group of soldiers who stylistically seem unrelated to Mother, as if they wandered in from another monument. They are engaged in what looks like a rugby scrum. In the middle of the monument is a narrow, vertical plinth of five very tall columns, each with a star at the top for the five years of the war. In short, the whole thing is a very large muddle, a memorial as executed by committee.
I know that this monument in all its glorious colossal-ness is meant to inspire awe. But it's so over the top that it just doesn't, can't work for me. Art shouldn't have to pummel you over the head to be inspiring. This is why Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. is everything a war memorial should be, and Rīga's is everything it shouldn't. Her simple gash in the ground inscribed with the names of all those who died in that war allows the participant to engage with the memorial in any way she or he sees fit. The Soviet monument sees fit to interpret the war for you; it's as if it refuses to trust your feelings about the Great Patriotic War and insists on imposing on you the feelings that it thinks you're supposed to have. That said, it is worth seeing, as art is, good or bad. It's only in evaluating a wide range that we can see how it all fits together, and even bad art has a place in helping us define what possibilities there are for good art.
When in the museum, you realize that Latvia has always been in touch with the rest of Europe in terms of art. (It's located there, after all, so this can't come as a total surprise.) Latvian Impressionism was closely in touch with Russian Impressionism, for example, and if you didn't know that there was a school of Russian Impressionism, you have some research to do. But though I feel that I'm not supposed to say this, honestly, my favorite gallery was the one that contained all the Soviet art.
Not that it was all great art, but that a gallery full of it existed at all. Soviet art was of course meant to be ideological: "national in form, socialist in content" is the key phrase. It meant that artists (not just visual artists, but writers, composers, sculptors, you name it) had severe constraints placed on them to express the glories of the socialist paradise being built right now before all of humankind! (Never mind those gulags and death camps and dissidents being tortured in psychiatric wards.) As you might imagine, at it worst this produced clunky, ideological schlock. At its best, though, it could produce art that really did inspire people.
That's the statement that I feel I am not supposed to make because, well, you know -- it's the Soviet Union again. And one painting in particular, with the clunky title "Masters of the Land," is a sort of cubist rendering of sturdy harvesters on a collective farm, taming the vast fields to bring humankind all the closer to a socialist Mecca. It's sort of dopey, frankly. But another painting of Latvian fishermen -- I forget the title -- is great. It's realistic, which socialist realism tended to be, which is one strike against it. We all know that great twentieth-century art is supposed to be inaccessible and abstract. This is just a great painting of a fishing competition that captures a moment like a snapshot would. I know that theoretically I'm not supposed to like it, but I do.
In its discussion of the entire gallery, the museum's appraisal of this hard-to-talk-about school, if we can even call it that, is unusually intelligent. While acknowledging that this era of art is highly problematic for all sorts of ideological reasons, it also assesses how artists worked, or didn't, within the highly politicized structure that they were forced to, how that created art, and what kind it created. I didn't like everything I saw, but I did like some of it, and I'm still sorting out how I feel about that. I think that a good test might be to take a work from this gallery and hang it somewhere else -- maybe in a show of early twentieth-century neo-realism like the work of, say, Thomas Hart Benton, and into which some of this Soviet art would fit nicely.. In a different context, devoid of its ideological underpinnings, would we appreciate it differently? I bet that we would. I very much appreciate the Latvian National Museum of Art's decision to collect this art and engage its visitors with it.
That said, there are two more works of Soviet art in Rīga worth mentioning. One is the truly clunky Academy of Sciences building, a Stalinist "wedding cake" of the type that Stalin was so fond of bestowing on cities in the Eastern bloc, whether they wanted them or not. (I would guess that they generally didn't, but when a dictator presents you with a building, it's in your best interest to accept it graciously.) It's a building that looks like, well, a wedding cake, with "layers" of stories that get increasingly smaller the higher it goes. But it doesn't go high enough; that is, it's so short and squat that it has no vertical thrust the way the Empire State Building does, so it looks as if someone took what was supposed to be a skyscraper and sat on it. The neo-Gothic decoration does not help matters any, either. If you think it's bad, try an even bigger and worse version of the "wedding cake" building, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Varsovians are fond of saying that the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the Palace of Culture because it's the one place in Warsaw where you don't have to look at the Palace of Culture.
The other is the World War II monument in a park on the west side of the Daugava River. I know that this huge set of statues is supposed to engage one with the immense sacrifice the Soviet Union made in WWII. And it was colossal -- an estimated 27 million dead, though nobody has an exact figure. So is the monument colossal. It is so colossal, in fact, that it crosses the line into kitsch, as far as I'm concerned. The statue of the Mother, I am guessing (as in Motherland, Rodina in Russian) reaches 150 feet into the sky, straining to grasp something. It is not clear why. When I first saw her, I thought she was trying to get something from the top shelf. Her cape (cape?) billowing out behind her. But because it's in bronze, it too heavy to have any energy. It just looks heavy and rather silly. On the other side of the monument, there are a group of soldiers who stylistically seem unrelated to Mother, as if they wandered in from another monument. They are engaged in what looks like a rugby scrum. In the middle of the monument is a narrow, vertical plinth of five very tall columns, each with a star at the top for the five years of the war. In short, the whole thing is a very large muddle, a memorial as executed by committee.
I know that this monument in all its glorious colossal-ness is meant to inspire awe. But it's so over the top that it just doesn't, can't work for me. Art shouldn't have to pummel you over the head to be inspiring. This is why Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. is everything a war memorial should be, and Rīga's is everything it shouldn't. Her simple gash in the ground inscribed with the names of all those who died in that war allows the participant to engage with the memorial in any way she or he sees fit. The Soviet monument sees fit to interpret the war for you; it's as if it refuses to trust your feelings about the Great Patriotic War and insists on imposing on you the feelings that it thinks you're supposed to have. That said, it is worth seeing, as art is, good or bad. It's only in evaluating a wide range that we can see how it all fits together, and even bad art has a place in helping us define what possibilities there are for good art.
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