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Entry tags:
Winter pleasures
I am currently wearing a ridiculous number of layers (thermal vest, heavy brushed-cotton shirt, thin jumper, sleeveless hand-knitted tank top, heavy roll-neck Aran pure wool jumper given to me after it had shrunk in the wash from XL to S, silk scarf under the roll-neck to keep the neck of the jumper clean, fluffy novelty scarf wound many times over it -- and a similar arrangement on my lower half, including three pairs of socks worn inside and outside thermal longjohns and culminating in knee-length leather-soled slipper socks with a brushed-fur lining, in lieu of shoes (or valenki!) And, as an afterthought, in order to conserve my extremities, my 'writing gloves' (fingerless, used for indoor work) and Ivor Novello Hat :-)
This is a token gesture as it doesn't protect my ears, but I feel a bit silly sitting around indoors with a woolly bobble hat on :-p However, for the moment I am beautifully warm, with the exception of the ears which are... not chilly, but perceptibly colder!
The heating should come on reasonably soon, at which point I may have to start stripping layers off; I spent most of the day unrepentantly in bed with my nightcap still on and a woollen shawl around my neck and shoulders, having spent the small hours translating lyrics and then been woken at 9am by an alarm for a meeting that is not in fact happening until next week. Upon which I went back to bed and slept blissfully until 2pm in glorious warmth underneath three blankets, an eiderdown and a bedspread, this being my full winter complement of bedding.
Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)
After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) But these are the moments when I actually feel gratified that all the 'work' (in very inverted commas) that I have been putting into trying to understand Russian over the past year is actually paying off in practical results; I managed to get a long way into the interview before even realising that there weren't subtitles, and managed to watch, enjoy, and pretty much understand the entire programme as it stood without any external assistance, other than a bit of rewinding for a second take on what had just been said. (There were a couple of words that I would have used a dictionary on if I'd had one within reach, being clear enough and apparently pivotal enough to be worth looking up, but I really didn't want to venture out into the cold for such a trival matter, and of course at this juncture I no longer have the faintest idea what they were or even in what part of the programme I heard them.)
Naturally I didn't understand the whole thing, but I could follow just about all the subjects of conversation, immeasurably assisted of course by the fact that the subject matter and associated names and vocabulary was largely familiar: the lead actress breaking her leg, for example, while filming the jaw-dropping Romanian/Soviet/French musical "Mama"† (which I spent a lot of time watching in its multiple language variants this autumn, but apparently never blogged about), or Boyarsky imitating his imitation of Brezhnev which got him into hot water with the authorities, a story I'd read in Smekhov's memoir "When I was Athos" -- it was fun to hear him doing it 'live' ;-)
And there are some surprisingly useful overlaps in vocabulary acquired by different means: рукопашная (hand-to-hand combat -- рука='hand'), for example, which I learnt from translating The Little Cabin Boy, turns out, once known, to crop up in Project Zomboid, whilst the words 'musket' and 'sword', acquired courtesy of the Soviet Musketeers, come in useful for pirate ballads! And after having just been listening to -- *barely* grasping in outline, bar the gaming terms drawn directly from English -- a quickfire Russian voiceover commentary on a Project Zomboid run, even Boyarsky's energetically rapid speech patterns, with which I generally struggle, felt relatively 'normal' and accessible in contrast :-)
I did manage to learn something I'd never heard of before, which was that he'd apparently appeared playing a Paul McCartney-style bass in a group called "The Wild Guitars" -- this turns out to feature in a 'New Year's Film', The Adventures of Masha and Vita. (In fact I *had* come across it, but didn't know I had: this was the full-body costume role of 'the Cat Matvei' that I'd seen cited as a precursor to his Mick Jagger-esque Wolf in "Mama". The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)
† "Mama"....
At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)
Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!
This is a token gesture as it doesn't protect my ears, but I feel a bit silly sitting around indoors with a woolly bobble hat on :-p However, for the moment I am beautifully warm, with the exception of the ears which are... not chilly, but perceptibly colder!
The heating should come on reasonably soon, at which point I may have to start stripping layers off; I spent most of the day unrepentantly in bed with my nightcap still on and a woollen shawl around my neck and shoulders, having spent the small hours translating lyrics and then been woken at 9am by an alarm for a meeting that is not in fact happening until next week. Upon which I went back to bed and slept blissfully until 2pm in glorious warmth underneath three blankets, an eiderdown and a bedspread, this being my full winter complement of bedding.
Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)
After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) But these are the moments when I actually feel gratified that all the 'work' (in very inverted commas) that I have been putting into trying to understand Russian over the past year is actually paying off in practical results; I managed to get a long way into the interview before even realising that there weren't subtitles, and managed to watch, enjoy, and pretty much understand the entire programme as it stood without any external assistance, other than a bit of rewinding for a second take on what had just been said. (There were a couple of words that I would have used a dictionary on if I'd had one within reach, being clear enough and apparently pivotal enough to be worth looking up, but I really didn't want to venture out into the cold for such a trival matter, and of course at this juncture I no longer have the faintest idea what they were or even in what part of the programme I heard them.)
Naturally I didn't understand the whole thing, but I could follow just about all the subjects of conversation, immeasurably assisted of course by the fact that the subject matter and associated names and vocabulary was largely familiar: the lead actress breaking her leg, for example, while filming the jaw-dropping Romanian/Soviet/French musical "Mama"† (which I spent a lot of time watching in its multiple language variants this autumn, but apparently never blogged about), or Boyarsky imitating his imitation of Brezhnev which got him into hot water with the authorities, a story I'd read in Smekhov's memoir "When I was Athos" -- it was fun to hear him doing it 'live' ;-)
And there are some surprisingly useful overlaps in vocabulary acquired by different means: рукопашная (hand-to-hand combat -- рука='hand'), for example, which I learnt from translating The Little Cabin Boy, turns out, once known, to crop up in Project Zomboid, whilst the words 'musket' and 'sword', acquired courtesy of the Soviet Musketeers, come in useful for pirate ballads! And after having just been listening to -- *barely* grasping in outline, bar the gaming terms drawn directly from English -- a quickfire Russian voiceover commentary on a Project Zomboid run, even Boyarsky's energetically rapid speech patterns, with which I generally struggle, felt relatively 'normal' and accessible in contrast :-)
I did manage to learn something I'd never heard of before, which was that he'd apparently appeared playing a Paul McCartney-style bass in a group called "The Wild Guitars" -- this turns out to feature in a 'New Year's Film', The Adventures of Masha and Vita. (In fact I *had* come across it, but didn't know I had: this was the full-body costume role of 'the Cat Matvei' that I'd seen cited as a precursor to his Mick Jagger-esque Wolf in "Mama". The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)
† "Mama"....
At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)
Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!