Medieval Russia: Kiev to Rublev

I've continued on in my reading into medieval Russia, roughly following the MIT Open Courseware syllabus. Of course, if I were really taking an MIT class I would have flunked out long ago at this snail's pace. Nevertheless I press on.

Just a few highlights here from what I'm reading. At the height of Kievan Rus, the city of Kiev must have been something to see. It was a major European capital, being at the crossroads of the east-west Silk Road and the north-south trade between Scandinavia and Byzantium. Of course, most of the people did not live in glittering capitals, but in small villages; it's a sad fact of the medieval nut that we never find out nearly enough about these people as we'd like. In fact, we know very little about Rus at all, owing to a major event that decimated the brilliant jewel that was Kiev: the conquering Mongol "Golden Horde."

It is in the 15th century, as the Russian princes began to re-assert themselves, particularly the Muscovite princes, that Russian culture peaks once again. The summit on this peak might be thought of as the iconography of the monk Andrei Rublev. You may be familiar with his masterpiece, that silent vortex of prayer, the icon of the Trinity:


My textbook contrasts Rublev's iconography to the "crude" icons that came before him, slavishly copying the traditional work. While taking nothing away from Rublev, who himself was attentive to the tradition, I don't share the essayists' criticisms at all. The earlier icons shown in my text (Reinterpreting Russian History- an excellent survey) are not in any manner crude. Their simplicity is a tribute, not a detraction. In what sense may, for instance, the Vladimir Theotokos be called crude?

Even less exalted icons than this have their beauties. The writer's comments no doubt stem from his greater interest in artistic matters than in spiritual ones. There are too few historians who are both intimately familiar with and sympathetic to the life of the church and yet dedicated craftsmen of the discipline. At least, I have a hard time finding these people, and rejoice when I do (Jaroslav Pelikan, Regine Pernoud).

Coptic church in Seattle burns

I periodically google for Coptic news and was sad to read of the extensive fire damage to a Coptic Orthodox church, still under construction but nearly complete, in the Seattle area. The fire was sparked by a worker's blowtorch.

"Last week's fire inside the distinctive dome of St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church rendered the two-year-old building uninhabitable. Firefighters had to peel away a 30- by 10-foot section of the church's distinctive copper dome to fully douse the May 22 fire. Then the sprinkler system malfunctioned, causing extensive water damage to the elaborate interior.

If the dome is structurally damaged, replacement costs could reach $1 million, said Bruce Pulver, a Snohomish County deputy fire marshal. Water damage will carry an exorbitant repair cost, he said.

The dome's underside, arching high above the church sanctuary and altar, bears a mural of Jesus that was painted over a six-month period by an Egyptian artist based in California. While the fire didn't break through, firefighters bashed one gaping hole at Jesus' right elbow...

'We can pray at home, but to pray at church is completely different. This is the house of God. This is more important than our homes,' said Medhat Said, a doctor who moved his family to Lynnwood from Cairo nearly two years ago...'This is our life. We consider everything in the church our life,' said Father Arsanios Shaker. 'The Coptic people, we depend upon the church. This is God's house.'

...For now, they are meeting in the parking lot — facing east, toward their unseen altar, because Jesus is prophesied to return from that direction... At Friday's three-hour service, conducted in a mix of Coptic, Arabic and English, Shaker preached an optimistic sermon. He was protected from the sun by a small tent, decorated with paintings of Jesus. 'He was saying, "All things work for the good,"' said Youstina Gorgy, 21. For instance, she said, the congregation has wanted to finish construction in the basement, where services may move. 'Now we're motivated.'

Shaker later said he's in no hurry to get back inside. 'We believe this is God's house, so God will preserve everything,' he said, gesturing toward his elegant church. 'Even if it remains like this, it is still beautiful.' "

Congress-Bundestag '87-88

Twenty years ago this summer (could it really be that long?!), I set out with much trepidation and excitement for a year of homestay and student exchange in Germany with the Congress-Bundestag scholarship program. It was a life-changing experience. I still keep in touch with my host family, who were also the ones who introduced me to Turkey.

If there are any CB alumni out there, you can find other people from your year at the CBYX website. Hardly a peep from my own alumni group has been in, but hopefully others will come around. It would be great to have a 20-year reunion, even if just a virtual one!

*will post a pic later* :)

The Suburban Peasant

I'm excited about this little group blog I'm starting up. If you think you could and would like to be a contributor, by all means let me know. I know there are other (sub)urban peasants out there with valuable input to offer, and I want to hear from you! Heather from Rural Suburbia (with a blog name like that, of course!!!) is my genius collaborator.

Here's the description I posted there today:

Welcome! My name is Gina and I had the idea for a group blog by and for people who are walking anachronisms. We gladly let things pass us by on the information superhighway and other frenetic pathways. We honor the sensibility of time-tested wisdom, and sometimes feel like exiles in our prefab apartments and four-door sedans. Here you might find a recipe for a peasant dish or a tip on where to buy grandma food in various locales, some old-fashioned housekeeping or DIY advice, or reminders of nearly-extinct folkways and arts. The things your grandparents might have taught you, but didn’t think you wanted to know.

I grew up on a dairy farm in extremely rural northern Pennsylvania, a culture that’s been compared to Appalachia. For much of my adult life, I have lived in some of the world’s largest megacities, and now I find myself in that paragon of suburbia, Silicon Valley. The more strip malls, freeways, and beige prefab buildings I see, the more I yearn for quieter, greener, older, and nobler things. Unless and until we can buy a little patch of dirt somewhere, however, I have to reach for those things in small doses and in as many ways as I can.

I’m 35 and recently married to a wonderful guy and into a wonderful family of Slovakian-Californians- look for Eastern European peasant food to make a prominent appearance here! I work the typical Silicon Valley office job and we live in a small apartment in a neighborhood which used to be populated by orchards, then by programmers and financial analysts, and now chiefly by working-class families. We are Christians in the Coptic Orthodox Church, a good place for the appreciation old ways (look also for Middle Eastern grandma food).

We hope to hear from other (sub)urban peasants- your feedback, ideas, and if you would like to be a regular or guest contributor. In any event, enjoy and come back again soon!

ACL Recovery: Six Weeks

Disclaimer: Again, I post these updates for the benefit of someone considering ACL reconstruction or for the interest of those who've had it, whom I assume are the only ones who would be interested. I also assume that my average reader is intelligent enough not to confuse a blog post with his own doctor's advice. With all that said...

***

As my doctor reminded me, the six-week mark is a critical time for ACL reco. As she put it, beginning around this time until weeks 10-12 post-op, the body takes the graft apart and puts it back together again with its own blood supply. [This actually makes me feel better about the ghoulish notion of having a piece of a dead person in my body. She's miiiine now!] This means the graft is at its weakest right about now. Right about when you're so sick of it all, you could toss your fabulously expensive Donjoy brace right out the window. Here are some notable features of the 6-week mark:

Screw Pain

As lascivious as this sounds, it refers to the fact that the graft is secured to the tibia (lower leg bone) and femur (upper bone) by bio-absorbable screws. I actually thought this would be a lot more painful than it is. However, the screws do make themselves felt, and especially right now while all that blood work is being done down there. The femur screw just aches when I stand too much. The tibia feels like someone is occasionally sticking a needle- thankfully, a small needle- into the front of my shin, like someone has a Gina voodoo doll out there.

You'll Thank Me Later

In the "you'll thank me later" category comes the infamous scar massage. I would find physical therapy somewhat enjoyable but for this. It's usually the point in PT where you find grown men crying for their mothers. What the PT is trying to do is break up scar tissue that may have formed, which later on can create a stiff joint. My advice is, keep doing those boring exercises they give you to do at home, every single day. Kneelift kneelift kneelift kneelift kneebend kneebend kneebend kneebend... As the saying goes, "motion is lotion," and the exercises will help prevent scar tissue from adhering and make your time on the rack... er, the PT table... more like a massage and less like an ordeal. You'll thank you later.


The good news is, getting some muscle strength back (and being off antibiotics, for me) aids a lot in feeling like a normal person rather than a scarecrow in a straitjacket. Ice is still my best friend, and the office desk chair my worst enemy, unless it be the wide aisles of the supermarket. It is still frustrating how long normal tasks and little errands take me, but as a friend reminded me the other day, this has its up side. How often am I going to have this good an excuse to lay back with my feet up?

Another reason not to like Whole Foods

There are the obvious reasons, known to anyone who's gone in "just for a couple things" and unloaded a wad of cash. They come by their nickname "Whole Paycheck" honestly. Then, the produce is disappointing. I know that organic food doesn't have the shelf life of items pumped full of chemicals, but to me that just means you have to keep the selection smaller, more local, and when you sell out you sell out. The other reason I don't like them is just subjective. It feels like the New Age Emporium to me- big, impersonal and weird.

To me, they're running on the wrong business model. You can't take organic too big without losing the values you want to tap into. Trader Joe's has it right, in my opinion, and may Joe's tribe increase (but not too much).

As it turns out, Whole Foods may never have had old-fashioned values in its company plan. According to this Denver Post article, CEO John Mackey plays both dirty and greedy:

"Mackey posted more than 1,000 comments boasting about his company and running down Wild Oats on a Yahoo Finance chat board between 1999 and 2006...

Whole Foods said in an e-mailed statement that Mackey's comments did not run afoul of any laws or corporate policies...

If the SEC finds that Mackey violated the law, he could be fined and even barred from serving as an officer of a public company, Turner said.

'I suspect that the SEC will be able to look at the website and if they see that he was just being obnoxious and a pain in the butt - being stupid, quite frankly - I suspect they won't do anything,' Turner said...

The Federal Trade Commission, which is opposed to Whole Foods' proposed $700 million cash-and-debt acquisition of Wild Oats, revealed the postings in a document unsealed this week.

In the postings, Mackey called himself 'rahodeb,' an anagram of the name of his wife, Deborah. The messages came to the FTC's attention when the company provided the agency with documents that contained references to the postings...

'It sort of suggests that the CEO is a little bit strange,' he said. 'People get biased against someone like that.'

In one March 2006 post, Mackey wrote 'the end game is now underway for (Wild) Oats ... Whole Foods is systematically destroying their viability as a business.'

Company leaders have previously been taken to task for lambasting their competitors on the Internet..."

I am sorry that there are no Wild Oats stores in our area yet. This article makes me want to run out and patronize them.

The psychology of Orthodox conversions

It must have been a masochistic impulse, but in a few spare moments I googled "why evangelicals convert to Orthodoxy"- out of curiosity to read, not the converts' own stories (of which I have heard many), but speculations from others about why we convert. The reasons offered can be divided into two categories: psychological and theological.

Even among theological examinations, almost all of them remark some version of: "... because they're attracted to the beautiful worship, the smells and bells."

While this undoubtedly has truth to it, I find it not only irritatingly condescending (with the implications of shallowness), it also falls flat on several other scores:

1. It fails to explain the many converts out of seminaries, clergy and missionary ranks, people who've not only invested a great deal in evangelicalism, but who are both capable of a sober, informed decision and also likely to make the decision in such a way.

2. It reduces the beauty of the Divine Liturgy to only its sensory appeal. Many converts do cite the power and reverence of Orthodox worship as compelling, but part of the appeal is precisely the "evangelicalism" of the liturgy. It is so permeated with Scripture that it almost seems more evangelical than evangelical worship; and in fact, the very model of the DL is from Scripture, ie from the picture of heavenly worship seen in Revelation.

3. Even if true, so what? The right belief that God is concerned mostly with the heart of worshippers is conflated to a judgment that He therefore must be unconcerned with anything else regarding how we worship.

4. Again, even if true, one has still only touched the psychology of conversion and not the underlying truth claims. (For this point I'm indebted to a comment by Perry Robinson responding to just such a charge.)

5. I personally don't fit the bill, as: a) I find the DL too long and sometimes repetitive to suit my taste; b) incense makes me sneeze and when I first saw a censer in an Anglican church, I wanted to laugh for some reason; c) I was creeped out by icons until well after my conversion. Most of my appreciation for the Orthodox aesthetic has come after conversion rather than prior to it. One large exception is the impression that Hagia Sophia made on me, although it was only standing in it while I was already pondering Orthodoxy that I made that connection.

6. Finally, isn't it a tacit admission that their own worship is, in their estimation, ugly and boring? Is that supposed to be held up as a virtue?

Whereas the "smells and bells" dismissal comes most often from Protestants, the corresponding Catholic dismissal seems to be that converts to Orthodoxy have a "problem with authority," ie with the Pope. I'll leave that for others or for another day, but I deem it just as ridden with holes as the other.

I plead with people analyzing to avoid this argument, or at least to thoroughly qualify it. In return, I also will try to keep in mind that seriously professing Christians in evangelicalism and Catholicism have good reasons in their own minds for being there.

Recorded books

I'll put a plug in for Recorded Books LLC, the company whose CD's accompanied me during recovery from surgery (when I was too groggy to read much) and have since accompanied me on my commute. The CD's I listened to were from the library, but I decided to look at their website since our local library only has a small selection. They offer 30-day rentals with free return shipping. Rental prices run from around $10 for classic titles to $25-$30 for contemporary books. That is not cheap, however if you're a person who's often on the road, they also have an "unlimited" option for $35 a month. I'll consider rentals for future road trips.

In the meantime, I plan to mine the library, as I've never enjoyed my commute so much. Regular radio is a wasteland. There is that emblem of cultural fatuousnessness called the morning call-in show. Have physicists looked into the dangers of all that empty chatter about even emptier TV reality shows? Mightn't it create a black hole in space? Contribute to global warming? Cause wasting brain diseases and mysterious stomach ailments in listeners? I occasionally listen to NPR, but you can only listen to it so much, and it can be depressing, as with today's reports on the congressional pajama party (see questions above regarding the potential natural consequences of so much empty hot air).

Certainly there are vacuous books on the market, too, but I still think the odds are better with the books.

The modesty movement

I don't know quite how to take what Newsweek proclaims as a fashion trend towards modesty. When modesty and decency need websites and blogs, the barbarians are already at the gates.

Of course, I suppose it's easy for me- when all your clothes come from JC Penney and Land's End, modesty comes as a matter of course. Some readers may also recall that I did think I might have to resort to buying a wedding dress from a Mormon website. So I suppose the collusion of Mormons, Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and moderate Muslims on the subject is a positive development- pulling together, we ought to be able to put the brakes on public sexualization of girls and women. The really interesting question is if the feminists will join us in doing so.

Turkey and the quest for "moderate Islam"

I rarely, as in almost never, post about politics, but if you take an interest in affairs in the Muslim world, I commend a US News and World Report article on current turmoil in Turkey in the run-up to its national elections. The ruling Islamist party is being contested by secularists (who can be rabid in their own right in Turkey), but will probably win because the opposition is so fractured. The struggle between "mosque and state," as the article calls it, has interesting parallels to our own culture's difficulty with coming to grips with the political dimensions of religious belief, however there is nothing in the American consciousness like the identity crisis Turks still experience decades after their "secular revolution."

A good place to learn about the conundra of Turkish politics and culture is The White Path. The USNWR article mentions Mustafa Akyol, who is one of those "voices of moderate Islam" that seem drowned out by their more shrill kin. His blog is worth a read for the cross-cultural commentary even if you don't follow events in the region. Reading his essays, I have that unsettling feeling that conservative and thoughtful Muslims have more in common with conservative and thoughtful Christians than such Christians have with their own liberal compatriots.

If you're like me and would rather be reading about the historical Middle East than the current one, there is the Patrick O'Brian novel that I've been listening to on CD in the car lately, The Hundred Days. You may know Patrick O'Brian's work, if not through his many books, by the film Master and Commander (one of my favorites) which is an amalgam of several of his stories in the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series.

The title refers to Napoleon's attempt to come back from exile for a replay of his revolution. Much of it takes place in the Adriatic and in Algiers. Napoleon tried more than once in his long career to enlist Muslim forces, going so far as to praise Islam and arousing speculation that he had actually become a Muslim. Here the HMS Surprise is sent out to oppose this effort.

O'Brian is a master at both spinning a yarn and at period detail. Besides being a good seafaring tale (against which there can be no law), there is the intrigue of Dr. Maturin's spy efforts in old Algiers and his adventures in naturalism and medicine. The best feature in O'Brian's novels has got to be the rich old language, however, which reader Patrick Tull brings to life on these CD's in an impressive array of accents and inflections. In print it must also be great fun.

ACL recovery

I came across an Australian message board where people recovering from ACL reconstruction (or "reco" as they call it- the Aussies always have such charming nicknames) were discussing their experiences and comparing notes. It was both interesting and a relief, as I'm sure my co-workers and longsuffering husband are tired of hearing about incisions, flexion and extension and the like, but these were kindred spirits.

One person noted that recovery is such an absorbing mental and physical process that it's hard to focus on much else, which I certainly find to be the case. I try not to indulge the notion to discuss it much here, uninteresting and specialized a subject as it is, but maybe there is someone else who has had or will have a "reco" who would think otherwise and like to compare notes.

Generally things have gone well, though I had a setback when the knee got infected, probably due to one of the incisions popping open at my first PT appointment. At the PT office it was just bleeding, but afterwards my in-laws wanted to treat me to lunch and in the restaurant it popped wide open. Gruesome, I know. If I could go back, I would have asked the waitress for a first aid kit and would have swabbed the wound with alcohol and covered it right away. Instead, I waited til I got home, didn't clean it (it hurt, people), and just popped a Band Aid on it. Live and learn!

About a week after this I started noticing that when I had the ice off, the knee was glowing hot, like a little oven, and looked like it had a bad sunburn. I Googled "heat around a wound" and found it was symptom of a bacterial infection, so I hustled into the doc's office. I think it shocked her a bit, and she said she hadn't seen an infection yet in a surgery like this. A strong course of antibiotics has KO'ed the bugs over the past couple weeks. The incision is still being stubborn about healing, but dressing it with hydrogen peroxide and saline has helped. Meanwhile, I've got complete extension and pretty good flexion back, around 120 degrees.

At four weeks, the main difficulty is how wobbly and weak I am. I was off PT for a week with the infection, and my muscles have turned to goo. They do this anyway, I'm told. The muscles, such as quad and hamstring, basically shut down after surgery like this. How I miss Pilates... the hamster wheel, aka the elliptical, not so much. However, I am hoping the surgery will eventually be my liberation from the hamster wheel and allow Tae Bo and other more active things. I definitely have some weight to knock off. Going back to work (at 2 weeks, which is early but I had no more sick time left) was miserable at first, especially when I started the antibiotics. By the end of the day my calf is swollen from edema. On my off hours, I have to make myself stay down and keep the leg elevated and iced 20 minutes out of every hour- my house is durrrty and household duties beckon from very corner- but it makes a 100% difference to have it elevated most of the time.

As the Aussies reminded me, one key with ACL reco is patience, especially as the surgery is usually done on active people who only want to get back to their activities, and the repetitive and restrained motions of PT don't exactly satisfy. The real healing in this type of surgery happens at 6-12 weeks, when the graft finally starts to get populated with blood cells. I am told that you can get all sorts of strange pains and twinges at this stage. It is also called the "danger phase" because the graft is at its weakest and most susceptible to re-rupture. At around three months, things start to normalize, although I will be in my brace at least part time for the next 6 months. For anyone considering the surgery, be prepared: I had always heard about the long recovery period, but it went in one ear and out the other. I'm optimistic that it will be worth it in the end, but it turns life upside down for a good long while.