I found this cool thing I need to share with Buffistas. I'm not sure if it really applies to literary, but it certainly has a literary quality, and would also apply to teachers and/or students of foreign language or people that like cool stuff (i.e., us).
I'm on a mailing list with Mimi Lipson, and she shared this recently:
My father wrote a Russian language textbook, considered a sort of cult classic in the rarefied world of out-of-print language textbooks.
Anyhow, the book contains all these amazing little stories--translation exercises, but also literary gems in their own right. They range from Gogolesque fairy tales to bathetic agitprop to lampoons of boilerplate textbook dialogues ("The American Tourist and the Soviet Citizen")... and beyond...
Here's a link to a flicr page of the transcripts.
They're so funny and interesting!
But there's this other cool thing that I really loved: The Ritual...
Here she describes The Ritual. Those classes must have been so fun and funny! It's like some fantastic combination of Nabokov and Tom Stoppard.
*************
Another feature of the textbook was the "ritual". This was a
patterned response (or dialogue) that students were to learn by heart
and automatically call up whenever the appropriate situation arose in
class or the first line was said by the teacher. Quoting from the
book: "To be effective, a ritual sentence must be an automatic
response to the preceding sentence; e.g., "Excuse me!" might be your
automatic response to "Ouch! You stepped on my toe!"
The idea, I think, was to keep the flow going in class, and sometimes
to avoid embarrassment when a student was caught short without an
answer, etc. They also were illustrations of upcoming grammatical
details—so examples would be internalized before the rule was
encountered--but I suspect conversational flow and ease was the main
point. I could see the rituals as little subscript comics running
along the bottom of other stories, the way Krazy Kat did at first.
(And I think Tony Millionaire does this too.) Or just as little
independent black-out sketches between longer stories.
This one was learned in the first day or so of class:
Ritual 1
[when you make a mistake in class]
-- Of course not!
-- Akh, forgive me, dear teacher!
-- Why? What have you done?
-- I've made a terrible /coarse, vulgar/ error.
-- [tenderly] That's all right /nothing/.
And I really like the "How to avoid answering a question" series,
which gave you a number of options:
Ritual 9
Four ways to avoid answering a question:
-- What does the word 'doktor' end in?
(1) -- Repeat the last question, please.
-- "the last question, please".
-- Ha-ha-ha!
(2) -- I don't know.
-- And if you knew?
-- Even of I knew, then I wouldn't tell!
-- I'm very insulted!
(3) -- Hmm.
-- Louder, please.
-- HMMM
-- And what does that mean?
-- That means that I forgot the last question.
(4) – such {banal, naïve, uninteresting} questions do not interest me.
Or even better:
Ritual 23
How to avoid answering a question:
ADVANCED LEVEL
-- Mr. Jones (Miss Jones)! What's the difference between the
preposition v and the preposition na?
-- Generally speaking, one might say, that, as a rule, it's more or
less… What did you ask?
-- In a word, Mr. Jones (Miss Jones), you don't remember.
-- It's not that I don't remember, but that I forgot.
-- Enough! I'll ask somebody else.
-- [coldly] As you wish.
(There was also the option of "turning the ritual around," whereby the
student could initiate the ritual and the teacher would have to
complete it.)
The full textbook is here: [link]
It's got all kinds of odd little line drawings in it -- much better than just the English translation!
amych, were you familiar with this work before?
I didn't use it when I was studying Russian, but you're right that it's legendary -- a lot of Russian teachers I know are still grumbling that there hasn't been a decent textbook published since. He influenced a lot of teachers' pedagogy, too, aside from just writing the textbooks.
My French classes in middle school had similar sorts of ritual things. There are still a bunch of French phrases where I'll just automatically jump in with the response, even when it's totally inappropriate for the situation. We learned that way -- through learning vocab and phrases and sentences and conversations, with no formal grammar at all -- for seventh grade and the beginning of eighth grade, and then the end of eighth grade was a combination of that stuff and some basic grammar, with a whole lot of memorizing French poems and essays thrown in. Our seventh grade teacher was absolutely nuts, but we did learn a lot of French that way.
PC - where on that website is that information?
I'm trying to get into it - I sent the link to friends who are fans but I'm not finding the announcement at all and I'm having a great deal of difficulty getting on the page and when I do - I don't see the announcement.
Huh, you're right, it's not loading. Probably getting way too many hits. It was a blog post by someone close to him, I think, who'd been posting about him.
Here's a report.
Thanks - I'll send that link too.
