The Lull

For about a week, my life here in Novosibirsk was drifting in the doldrums, both socially and at work. I had made a few friends, but they were all busy for reasons that seemed not to affect my schedule. Apparently, grad students and administrative staff have a lot more to do than a junior/guest teacher during the first week of term at SibAGS.

There are a desk and computer in the international office to which I have priority, if not exclusive, rights of use. Unfortunately, with only a vague idea of what subjects I would be teaching over the next few months, and an even vaguer idea of my students’ likely level of advancement, knowledge, and so on, I could only outline tentative syllabuses (syllabi?) and look for material on the internet that might or might not be useable in my classes. I could also answer the phone, listen politely to the callers’ questions, ask them to excuse my utter uselessness, and assure them that a real office employee with the competence to help them would be back soon; could I pass something along? Almost all of these luckless supplicants just said they would call back… as much as I doubted my own ability to relay a semantically accurate version of their message, I’m guessing they had even less confidence in me. I couldn’t blame them.

I don’t usually care too much about my level of output on a given day. But it’s one thing to be a bum in blissful solitude, away from the world’s judging eyes, and another thing to be the only stuck cog when everyone around you is working at a furious pace. The week from the 7^th to the 14^th of September, Lena and Julia were preparing for some kind of conference being hosted by SibAGS, and had to juggle the responsibilities related to that along with the usual beginning-of-the-year process of registering foreign students’ passports. The atmosphere in the office was tense, and I had the distinct feeling that my totally unproductive presence there was only exacerbating the general stress. I know from experience that it’s sometimes difficult, when you’re swamped, not to resent any able-bodied person nearby who evidently has too much time on his hands. Of course, Julia and Lena knew that with my limited Russian and total ignorance of visa rules, I wasn’t in much of a position to lighten their burdens, so it might just have been me, but I couldn’t get over feeling like an encumbrance for those few days.

Paul

Luckily, Irina gave me some news that would quickly lead to a way out of this predicament… She told me that another American would be arriving soon, a Fulbright scholar and public relations specialist about the same age as my dad (discretion and etiquette forbid me from being any more explicit on this point). In the U.S., he worked as a professor of PR at UNC-Ashville. He’d also worked at the URALs academy in Yekaterinburg and had lately been doing his thang in Moscow on Fulbright money.

While he was in Novosibirsk, there just weren’t enough hours in the day, which was a nice change from waiting for something to teach and feeling like a total waste of space. I led Paul around to events he was expected to attend as a visiting scholar, most of them making up part of the conference that had been pushing Lean to the edge of a nervous breakdown for the past week. It was called…

«Интерра»

The Interra Forum, as it turned out, was a Big Meeting being hosted by Novosibirsk this year to discuss possibilities for advancement and innovation in Russian industry and technology, particularly in the context of the crisis. SibAGS has had some role in hosting the proceedings, and Lena and Julia were juggling more “international connections” that you would ever want to handle. All I knew about this event was that its logo looked like a rainbow wad of rubber bands, but in my capacity as guide and interpreter for Paul, I learned about it in more depth over the next few days.

Paul and I were each given tickets to two “Interra” events, one at the Opera and Ballet Theater and one at the Globe (Globus) Youth Theater. At first I wasn’t too impressed. Showing up at the first one at nine-thirty, we were treated to an hour of bromidic speeches by regional and local politicians, and prefab comments delivered by 20-year-old baby yups from some kind of G8-junior: one each from Great Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, the United States, France, and Russia. This was followed by readings of equally banal letters of encouragement from Medvedev and Putin (whose gigantic, Mao-like portraits were projected onto big screens while their letters were being read).

The comments and readings were accompanied by swirling multicolored spotlights (the same colors as the rubber bands on the logo), and interspersed with snatches of heavy, percussive music that sounded like a cross between a Prodigy set and the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” theme. The buzzword of the event was “innovatzia,” and, as far as I could tell, none of the “respectable participants” to whom the speakers kept appealing had any more specific goals to suggest. What we need is innovation. Innovation. Sure, that sounds good to me.

It might have just been my lowered expectations, but I was a lot more impressed with the substance of the next event, at the Globus Youth Theatre. Two panels of experts gave their opinions (one expert at a time), on where the best opportunities for innovation lay in Russia. After the triteness of the first event, it was refreshing to see people having civil but heartfelt disagreements with one another, offering and their own in-depth opinions and contesting others’. One was saying we (oops, I mean, Russians) need to bear Russia’s comparative advantage in mind, another saying there needed to be more interaction between corporations and engineering schools… I don’t know, a lot of it went over my head in Russian.*

*(Paul can’t speak or understand Russian, and both of us got headsets that let us listen to simultaneous interpretation in English, but I felt like that was cheating, so I took mine off after a while.)

But anyway, my general impression was that all of them had good points to make; none of them insisted on a particular agenda, and none seemed interested in harping on the same old strings...

I don’t think Paul knew this before he came, but the presentations he was planning to give were billed as part of this forum. Unfortunately, I had to miss them. He gave a short lecture to a conference hall full of well-dressed students from SibAGS (and, I believe, a few other places) and was apparently, a big hit, but I had to leave before he started talking to go to a Russian lesson.

And that brings me to… (see next post)