hey guess what

I'm going to Moscow for sure.

It's a sure thing.

I'm pretty dang excited. A Russian guy named Alexander Abashkin came in to talk to the few of us in the study abroad about the program. It'll be at the Academy of National Economy in Moscow. That's this place:



Language learning=tons of fun. How can I explain it? It's like playing a game. Except it's a gnarly game with difficult rules that you have to learn all the intricacies of and so forth. Then all of a sudden you can communicate with 200 million more people than you could before. Pretty cool, huh?

Hey guess what? I went to see this band called Red and the Rovers Saturday night. Their front-man is named Chris Bennion. He is talented and is destined to be famous. Remember that name. All of you. Chris Bennion.

On Sunday I spent a lot of time reading and finishing a book called A Life of Her Own by Emilie Carles. This book:



The author was a French peasant-turned-school teacher who lived for most of her life in the Alps--the book's her autobiography. Funny thing is that never once did I question whether or not she was somebody worth reading about, or whether I cared learning about her life. She was born in 1900 and lost loved ones as a result of both world wars. Even more interesting, however, was her dedication to education. She also ended up becoming a die-hard atheist and anarchist.

I learned a little thing about anarchists, though. Not all of them spray-paint those sloppy A's in the middle of a circle and just riot their way into recognition. Some of them, like this lady Emilie Carles, just think that life doesn't need to be governed by anybody else. She just lived in her beautiful, isolated valley and scratched at the dirt with her own hands and appreciated the simplicity of that rustic world. Was she ignorant or naive? No. Far from it. She came to her ideas through her reading and education--and through her experience with crazy peasants, alcoholism, the insanity of both world wars, and dealing with the seemingly senseless deaths of her mother, her brothers and sisters, and a daughter.

It's a really good book. I understand a lot better now why a lot of Europeans couldn't care less about religion and so forth, 'cuz I understand the road that Emilie Carles took to reach that way of thinking. Read it if you want. I would back it up.

Oh yeah, and formalist interpretation of poetry is cool for about ten seconds, until you finish saying what the rhythm and rhyme scheme is and so forth. Then it just gets restricting.

Sorry that this blog post was not very coherent. You can't win 'em all.

Fictionist this Friday at the Velour. You want to be there.