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Sometimes the story is not in the act that takes place – it’s in that moment of decision when action is decided upon. It’s in that moment when you take your heart in your hands and offer it unto the world in hope that it’s enough, because you have nothing else to give.

Discourse and Interaction – Take 1

Katya listening to Bucknell colleagues speak

RSUH students and Bucknell students at first videoconference

From left – Alysa, Marina, and Anya listen to colleagues at Bucknell speak

On Tuesday, February 24, something very small and monumental took place.  At 8 a.m. EST students at Bucknell University went to class.  At 4 p.m. Moscow time, students from RSUH went to class.  These students were all having class together.

Indeed, the first realization of this World Classroom Project took place.  After a minor technological setback (which consisted of the RSUH tech guy disappearing), Professor Hunter’s and my Postmodernity classes were linked live via videoconference.

Our discussion addressed the film “Russian Ark”.  Students from Bucknell posed very thoughtful questions to their Russian peers, and I was proud to say that those peers came up with some very interesting answers.  For an hour we went back and forth, until we ran out of time and we had to get on to the next class, the next day, the next phase of our lives.

But it was a beautiful thing that took place.  It’s one that could happen a lot more often in different universities, should they ever decide to take the steps to make it happen.

Rereading, rewriting, and readdressing old thoughts

Should anyone else decide they want to try to teach an ESL class on Postmodernity, I suggest you talk to me first before committing to the task.

In my Rotary proposal, I tried to write a bit about unexpected problems that I was sure would arise in the carrying out of this class.  Because I didn’t know what those problems were, I didn’t have a lot to say except that I would meet those challenges head-on with all my heart.

In the three weeks I have had my class going so far, I really couldn’t ask for anything better.  My students are wonderful, engaged, and interested in the class.  Their questions are great, our discussion interesting, and our first videoconference with Bucknell was very successful.  I am loving being able to finally settle in and bury my head in the teaching, reading, and preparation for the project.  It is beautiful to see a dream come true.

But it is also a lot of work, so much preparation to be a teacher!!  (all you teachers reading this blog are probably nodding and smiling now).  My first challenge was getting all the texts for my class – this involved a special Berlin delivery from Katy and Jack of all my Postmodernity materials, a special ordering from books on Amazon, and last-minute frantic e-mails to John saying, “Ahh!  Can you e-mail me this?”

Once I had all the material, I had to read it over very carefully.  Humanities 450, my partner class at Bucknell, is a senior seminar that asks a lot of reading, writing, and reflection of its students.  Because my course is an English language elective (spetzcourse), and my students have 25 hours of class per week on top of the three they have given to me, I am hesitant to overload them with work.  So I try to shorten and cut out whatever material, even whatever extra words, I think we can do without.

What I don’t cut, more often than not, has to be entirely reworked and rephrased.  After all, much of what we read is highly academic articles with very specific language – articles I have to read twice to understand.  The abridging process is a slow process of retyping every single article that we will use, and then trying to simplify idioms, find synonyms for complicated words, and sometimes saying just point-blank what the author is trying to say.

I have some worries about this whole process.  For one, my act of editing means that a lot of material never passes the eyes of my students.  I also worry that I cut too much – so much as to replace the author’s intention with what I am trying to morph her into saying.

But I try to be as reflective and careful as possible, and I console myself that the choices I am making are those of any professor trying to put together a class, any editor going through a writer’s work, heck, even the choice of the writer itself.  There are a million stories one can tell about Postmodernism, and I am trying to only pick out a few to share with my students.

It’s a long process.  I spend hours in my room reading, rereading, that which I have read before.  I spend hours at my computer simply typing everything back up, and then distributing it to my students.

But it’s a pleasure too – I didn’t realize how much I missed my studies in Humanities before I somehow this year found myself back in them.  It’s February in Moscow, but my room is warm and  I have a comfy chair.  To my left are stacks of articles and books – Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, Chernetsky, DJ Spooky.  Strangely enough, there is nowhere I’d rather be.

Is that a camel at the All-Russia Exhibition Center?

yes.

Moscow in Winter

It looks cold, and it is.

Pigeons on a bridge overlooking the Moscow River

Julie, my new friend from Italy, in the snow

View of Moscow from Sparrow Hills

Red Square and the Kremlin

Kremlin Changing of the Guard

Lenin and VDNKh in the snow

Kremlin and history museum from St. Basils

Space Obelisk at VDNKh

“Abraham Lincoln – His Life and Legacy”

“Taylor Lynn Chase – Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar” – my conference name tag

The American Ambassador to Russia, speaking at the conference

Nick preparing to present paper

Reneta, World Classroom Student, presenting at the conference

Taylor presenting paper

Audience listening to round table discussion

Listening to Round Table Discussion 1

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the 16th president’s birth, the Russian American Academic Center at RSUH organized an international conference on February 18 and 19.  Scholars came from the United States and Russia to present papers on this president and his impact on the history of the world.  Speeches were heard from such esteemed scholars as the RSUH Rector, the American Ambassador, my friend Nick, and myself ).

It was my first academic conference of this kind, and after two days of listening to papers in both English and Russian, I was pretty wiped.  But the Center did a beautiful job putting on the event, and I was very happy that I could help out and take part in it.

Two Tall Skinny Guys from Illinois

For those of you interested in reading the paper I presented at the Abraham Lincoln conference, it follows below:

            “Having come to Moscow to study at the beginning of September, I admit I was too caught up with formulating instrumental plural case endings and memorizing dative constructions to closely follow the last weeks of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.  But between brief forays onto the New York Times website and the occasional downloaded “Daily Show” episode, I did notice as the rhetoric surrounding our recently-inaugurated president grew loftier with each passing day.  This Barack Obama, the news outlets were saying, he’s more than Bill Clinton.  He’s the next John F. Kennedy.  The next Martin Luther King, Jr.  He’s the return of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he’s all these great men in one.  Obama’s even . . . he’s even Abraham Lincoln, back to lead our land again. 

            Wow Barack, I thought (by the way, you may notice that in casual conversation, the majority of Americans age twenty-five and under are on a first-name basis with the President).  President Obama, you have some big shoes, some long pants, and a tall hat to fill.   

I am no expert on either one man or the other, but I do know that Lincoln, his life and legacy, is a lot for Obama to live up to.  So I decided to take the opportunity this conference presented and, on the 200^th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, have a fun foray into this talk and these comparisons, into the mainstream media’s articles and analyses of the two men, and seek out some historical foundations used to validate their comparisons between the United States’ 16^th and 44^th presidents. 

            Like any college student at the beginning of the 21^st century, I began my investigation with a trip to Google.  A preliminary search of “Obama and Lincoln” brought me more pages of articles from Newsweek, CNN, and other news outlets, than I would ever care to read.  Each article (except for those in the National Review) began by confidently reassuring me that these two men had much more in common than just being two tall skinny guys from Illinois.  Oh good, I thought.  I’ll have lots to write about.

            Both men were lawyers, Evan Thomas and Richard Wolff told me in a Newsweek article.  Both men were relative newcomers to Washington, and therefore were better able to keep their distance from the ploys and politics that so often congest the capital[1].

            Okay, I thought.  But Obama and Lincoln are not the only two presidents to come to Washington on the outsider ticket (for two recent examples see Bush, George and Clinton, Bill).   Not to mention, twenty-five US presidents have been lawyers[2].  If being a lawyer is so pivotal for being a great leader why then, when speaking of Obama, is no one also summoning the name of Rutherford B. Hays?

            The esteem President Obama holds for Lincoln was another oft-mentioned characteristic that supposedly bound the two.  “For Obama, Lincoln was a model president,” proclaimed one article on CNN[3].  As Lincoln is often ranked the #1 president in U.S. history[4], this revelation definitely shows us that Obama has good taste.  But then again, he is not the first president to think of Lincoln in such admiring terms.  “All presidents walk the corridor and think about Lincoln,” says Rice University’s Professor Douglas Brinkley[5].  “They stare at his portrait.” 

            This admiration, by the way, is not limited to those in the executive office on Capitol Hill.  Other notable politicians, such as Newt Gingrich[6], have held Lincoln in similar esteem.  And no one is hailing Gingrich as Lincoln’s reincarnate, nor is anyone calling Obama “The Next Newt”.

               Numerous journalists went on to elucidate more intangible qualities shared by Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.  In hailing Obama as a “Lincolnesque” leader, Thomas and Wolff applaud Obama’s ability to be “confident enough to be humble, to not feel the need to bluster or dominate, but to be sufficiently sure of [his] own judgment and self-worth to really listen and not be threatened by contrary advice.”[7]  The article went on to describe Obama’s selection of Cabinet members – Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, Robert Gates for Defense, and Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff – as a “team of rivals”.  This is, of course, in reference to William Seward and the other strongly-minded advisors Lincoln surrounded himself with in 1861.  While Obama’s selections show he is not a man afraid to keep smart people close, I have to agree with Geoff Johnson who notes that using clever Cabinet appointments to equate Obama to Abe is, to say the least, “odd”[8].  It tells us more about some disappointing character traits of our past leaders than it does about our current one.

            One of the biggest points of comparison lauded in the press was the powerful rhetoric both men employ in their speeches.  Brinkley spoke admirably of Lincoln’s and Obama’s abilities to “rally the country together behind words,”[9] and I’m sure many of us in this room can attest to that.  Furthermore, more than one reporter noticed when Obama, in his acceptance speech, appealed to the country to remember that “we are not enemies, but friends”[10], using the words employed by Lincoln in his inaugural address. 

            It’s interesting to learn which heroes our heroes look to when seeking inspiration.  An article by Jon Meacham talks about Lincoln himself, sitting down to pen this first inaugural address.  As the story goes, Lincoln asked his friend, William Herndon, to bring him a few texts to aid the writing process.  The documents were Daniel Webster’s “‘Liberty and Union, now and forever!’ oration, a copy of the constitution, Henry Clay’s Speech on the Compromise of 1850 – and the text to Andrew Jackson’s Proclamation to the People of South Carolina.”[11] 

            Jackson’s speech had been made in response to attempts by rebellious Carolinians in Charleston to hold onto their rights to reject federal laws they did not agree with.  According to the story, upon hearing of this delinquency, Jackson slammed his fist on a table, “invoked the God of heaven”, and “swore to crush any rebellion.”  In the speech Jackson warned the people, “Disunion by armed force is treason . . . are you really ready to incur its guilt?”¹¹  Maybe it’s just me, but this matter of speaking sounds a lot more like the “either you’re with us or against us” rhetoric we commonly associate with a more recent president, not the current one.

            Lawyers, outsiders, good morals, good speeches.  From what I could tell, these qualities are definitely held in common between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, but not enough that was concrete enough for me to get started on this paper.  I fooled around on Google some more, playing with search terms and following different links.  The only other thing I found was that the two men both hand-wrote (and write) their own speeches, which is actually something the three of us share.

            Needless to say, the end of my search left me pretty much were I started – with trying to figure out what, exactly, beyond some surface-level similarities also shared by past presidents, former politicians, and current American grad students at RSUH, what exactly binds in history these two skinny guys from Illinois.  I don’t know why I had such trouble.  Maybe it was because of the Google, maybe it was because of my search terms.  Or maybe it’s easier to write a paper about historical legacy after history takes place, and in the case of Barack Obama, his has only begun.

            Don’t get me wrong – I am excited and proud to have Barack Obama as my president.  And I’m not trying to say that Obama is not the next Kennedy, the next King, the next Roosevelt, or even the next Lincoln. Rather, I’m saying that the rhetoric comparing President Obama to these lofty leaders doesn’t in fact tell us a lot about Obama, yet. 

It does, however, tell us a lot about who Americans are, and what we are looking for, and longing for, at the beginning of the 21^st century.  For many of us, you could say it’s been a long eight years, or maybe sixteen years, or maybe twenty or twenty-eight years or more.  The past decades have left us with a lot of disillusionment, disappointment, and cynicism towards the office of the presidency.  For those of us in the Rock-the-Vote, under-twenty-five generation, well, that’s our lives.  That’s pretty much the only sentiment we’ve ever associated with the position. 

Then all of a sudden, in 2008 enter stage left, a figure who represents something so different from the American presidents and American politics we grew up with. 

We don’t know exactly what to call Obama.  It’s been so long since the word “great” has been associated with an American president – never in my lifetime – and I think on some level there’s some hesitancy to bring this word back as a referent to the guy who’s in charge of the executive office.  So in the media they call him Kennedy, King, Roosevelt, Lincoln, mostly in an effort increase viewers and have something to talk about twenty-four hours a day, but also so that people like me, in this generation, people who have never known such leaders, understand that really, what Obama represents, is something so central to the American story. 

We’ve learned about that story in our history books.  We heard about it carried out in the past.  But not until January 20, 2009, did we ever see it acted out before our eyes.     

What binds Lincoln and Obama today is not necessarily their pasts, their policies, or even the Bible on which they swore the Oath of Office.  What binds them is their conveyance of an image, their representation of – dare I say it – belief, their representation of belief and conveyance of inspiration that the United States of America can be a country that is – dare I say it – respectable, noble, something . . . to look up to, something to be proud of, at home and overseas.  That we as a people as part of this nation can grab those bootstraps time forgot and say yes, we are better than we were yesterday and no, not as good as we will be tomorrow. 

All of these sentiments are bound up in the names of both Obama and Lincoln today.  This is not “Change we can believe in!” but belief itself, that change is possible, and can bring us closer to becoming something we always hoped and thought we could be.

That, and I bet, had Obama and Lincoln been contemporaries, they would have been killer in basketball two-on-two.

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[1] Thomas and Wolfe, p 1.

[2]  “How Many American Presidents Have Been Lawyers?”

[3] Hornick, p.1

[4] Such as Kelly, p. 1

[5] Interview with Hirschkorn, CBS.

[6] Thomas and Wolfe, p. 2

[7] Thomas and Wolff, p. 1

[8] Johnson, “Bad History and Obama’s Team of Rivals”. 

[9] Interview with Brinkley, CBS

[10] Huffington Post, “Obama Victory Speech”

[11]Meacham, 1″

‘Ray Bucknell! Part 3

Taylor and Nick teaching PoMo

Bucknell University Russian Language and Comparative Humanities double -majors, unite!!

All two of them, that is.

I hadn’t seen my friend Nick Kupensky since I graduated from Bucknell in 2005, but the fact that we both had the same unique course of study at our PA university is a connection neither time nor distance could take away.  Nick is currently studying to receive his PhD in Slavic studies at Yale, but he was in Moscow this past week for the RSUH Russian-American Academic Center’s conference on “Abraham Lincoln – His Life and Legacy”.  What does Abraham Lincoln have to do with Slavic studies, you ask?  I don’t know, exactly, but going through the Comparative Humanities Program at Bucknell gave us the tools to figure something out, and we both presented papers at the conference.

In addition, I got to invite Nick to my Postmodernity Class to give a special guest lecture on some of the ways Postmodernism has manifested itself in Russian.  Having a tag-team Comp Hum duo at the head of the class meant that we were able to well carry on the lessons taught to us by our mentors in Lewisburg.  Not to mention, having the Russian major duo in Moscow meant we were able to go out and have a beer or more afterwards, and do this city right.

So zdorovoe to my fellow Growler Scholar, and thanks for an awesome week.  ‘Ray Bucknell, the connections continue!

Here’s something you don’t see every day

Lenin and Stalin at Okhotny Ryad

Follow our progress

For those of you who are interested in Reality, Identity, Postmodernity, and the World Classroom Project, I encourage you to read our course blog at http://pomo2009.wordpress.com.   I will be posting some photos and videos from the project on this site, but a lot of it will go up on the other one too.