The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 8 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 123 posts.

The busiest day of the year was January 17th with 152 views. The most popular post that day was “Inhabited Island 2″ no “Star Wars” after all.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were siberianlight.net, en.wordpress.com, alecluhn.com, poemless.wordpress.com, and russiannewsonline.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ded moroz, saratov, khokhol, the motherland calls, and admiral film.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

“Inhabited Island 2″ no “Star Wars” after all May 2009
4 comments

Even as “Admiral” sinks, it points to interesting trend October 2008
12 comments

Volga Boatman Episode 2: Nizhny Novgorod October 2008
4 comments

Worshipping Chuck Norris, destroying emo sites: Olbanian language and Upyachka.ru, part one of many (?) March 2009
21 comments

Volga Boatman Episode 5: Saratov October 2008
2 comments

A dark, crowded, humid and now flipping hot subway–only a tick could love that.

“Paris, 2030.  A tourist asks a man in a turban:
- I can’t by any means track down the Eiffel Tower …
- Look, there it is showing through the minarets …”

xxx: How is it possible to sit at home in such weather?

yyy:  How is it possible to be outside with such Internet?

Woman: Answer me honestly, yes or no, okay?
Man: Ask away.
Woman: Why do men make fun of blondes?
Man: Yes!

But the sailors who took us were funny, they seemed that way to me then…. But then they blurred together with hundreds of the exact same, in the sense that they were dressed in exactly the same way…. But these ones I remembered… so funny.  (Here it is better to show pictures or photographs of sailors or depict what types they come in and what they do).

Imagine you wake up one morning and you’re a hussar.  That is, a real hussar.  You have that kind of special hat – a shako, with this kind of long thing.  You have this pelisse with an absurd amount of buttons and little braids, breeches, boots, spurs…, and here – a saber, and a horse.  This kind of large animal, this horse.  And moreover, you already know everything: how to ride a horse, how to cut with a saber, how everything is set up, to what regiment you’re assigned, what rank you have, and, even scarier, – you remember past battles and daring raids…. But at the same time you are surprised at all this.  Because you just woke up and there are these kinds of things going on…. And almost every morning for all three years, I thought this way, and the longer I served, the stronger I thought: “I’m a sailor!  A real one!  The kind like in the movies, and in fact even more real.  Just a sailor on a ship, just like that…”

This can’t be!  This is impossible!

Yeaaaah.. but….

But Russia is a land of extremes, and Russians show a strong tendency to overindulge, on average.  They consume approximately 4.75 gallons of pure alcohol per person each year, over twice what the WHO considers a health danger.

The Russian government is showing signs of an impending crackdown that would ban beer sales at kiosks.  Besides ruining the beautiful culture of strolling along river banks and boulevards with a cold beer (rather than sinking ever lower under the eardrum-splitting pressure of blasting Europop at a bar filled with lipsticked, pig-faced women and bald, head-butting men), this would fail to address an alcohol problem based on vodka.

In a related example of stupidity, Russian TV is running exaggerated scare-tactic ads such as the following:

Text:  “When alcohol enters the blood, red blood cells clot.  Clots appear in the bloodstream that lethally block capillaries.  Capillaries expand and burst.  With the use of 100 grams of vodka up to 8,000 brain cells die.  For every drinking session, 10,000 brain cells flow out in your urine the next day.  Protect yourself!”

Reducing the alcohol-induced problems of premature death, reduced productivity and population decline is a matter of regulating distillers who make unregulated brand-name knock-offs and taxing vodka more heavily.  Fear-mongering TV ads are about as effective as oars on a motorcycle.

His lecture was an incredibly interdisciplinary and gleefully stimulating—albeit only loosely coherent—bit of waxing philosophical on the meaning of Russian literature and its history and future. It was simultaneously a poetic take on linguistics, an allegorical take on political science, a mystical literary study, and a manically thematic and anachronous history. Nonetheless, it ended on a rather effete, New-Agey and possibly even Pentecostal note with Shishkin’s assertion that literature should be a road “to a place where all of us are loved and awaited to be saved,” a statement that was indeed meant in the religious sense these words imply.

Shishkin for the most part ruminated on three themes: the use of language, the situation of the modern Russian writer, and the religious-mystical meaning of literature.

“Words are guards that do not allow meaning and emotion to enter … and still, the verbal path is the only way to understanding.” In Shishkin’s view, language is at the root of both obstructions to divine love (no one loves as purely as mother and babe when they do so “sub-verbally”) and problems of intellectual and moral flaccidity in current literature. Thus, revamping commercially corrupted literature, and thereby alleviating the modern condition, centers on a reinvigoration of the language.

Shishkin obviously troubles himself over knowing the fundamentals of the written word, and avoiding them as such. “For me, the only way to create my own road is to write incorrectly … to say something correctly means to say nothing,” he said.

On the second theme, Shishkin laid out a history of Russian literature as the receptacle of “non-totalitarian consciousness” amid state-enforced conformity. To his mind, the totalitarian consciousness can be atomized into the state’s commands and the people’s prayers (mat swear words are the “living prayers spoken in the imprisoned country”). The “prison reality of the state gave its people a prison mentality” that “created a (Russian) language with an unprecedented power to humiliate.” When literary language arrived from the West in the 18^th century, bringing along with it a respect for human dignity, Russian literature—in the hands of “colonists” like Dostoevksy and Chekhov—sought to “squeeze itself into the space between the insult and the groan.”

Russian writers never depended on the interest of readers, writing only for themselves or the Party, but were nonetheless accorded respect (see the old adage, “A poet in Russia is more than just a poet.”) After the fall, “Literature was left for those who cannot live without writing. Then the dollar came.” Shishkin, who wrote his first novel in teh 1980s, said that the new dependence on print run in the ‘90s was no better than previous dependence on the Soviet regime’s approval.

Shishkin accurately describes the current situation in which literature, its decline marked by the ascension of pop authors like Oksana Robski, is so marginal and meaningless as a product for profit, it can paradoxically exist freely in Russia for the first time. But he sounds a tad curmudgeonly and simplistic in his rote condemnation of the downsides of the market economy.

For his third theme, Shishkin totters out onto a metaphysical limb and gets all mystical: The Russian author—Shishkin suddenly adopts the guise of a parenting help guru—loves his hero unconditionally, as Gogol does Akaki Akakievich. In this he touches the sacred, since in the beginning there was only a “clump of love, or, rather, the need for it,” which prompted God to create “his own child in order to love him.”

What follows is a bit of metaphorical logic stretched to the breaking point: “If the author loves Akaki Akakievich, who does not deserve to be loved, then the reader knows that God exists and loves him.” Thus, the author’s task is to combine words into “verbal chain” that culminates in God. The additional duty of the Russian author, it would seem, is to fight the totalitarian consciousness intrinsic to the Russian nation and the humiliation reflex intrinsic to the Russian language.

Shishkin claims it is impossible to offer a universal prescription as to how to achieve this, then proceeds to do exactly that, speaking from his own experience: To create his own “Russian arc,” the Russian writer must become hermit, i.e. leave, physically or metaphorically, bringing only his own experience and “ten centuries of the Cyrillic language.”

Although by the end I was worried Shishkin was trying to surreptitiously convert the audience to Scientology, I will admit the lecture was the most inimitable and far-reaching analysis of Russian literature that I have yet heard.

A few more chestnuts:

“Russian literature suffers from high blood pressure.”

“The letters I wrote at home had a completely different density abroad.” (Shishkin lives in Switzerland).

“Not writing is part of writing.”

“If the Russian border were closed, Russian literature would never have happened.”

To be successful in the current Russian book market, writers must write a lot, appear everywhere, and “try to create as many scandals as possible.”

The Russian reader is still looking for a book “whose author does not consider him an idiot looking for entertainment.”