Now, while the iron is cold...

Lee was late getting back to the house yesterday, so I ended up eating another salad sprinkled with veggies and artificial crab meat...I just seem to have lost any ambition in the cooking department over the past few days.

I got into the first few chapters of Robert B. Parker's new Spenser book, Potshot, while I was waiting for Lee to return. The story looks like it may turn into an interesting variation of The Seven Samurai, where Spenser goes and recruits the toughest hombres he's run across over the past dozen or so novels to help defend a small Arizona town against bandits.

On another level, what pleases me is how clean and direct Parker's writing is; it resembles a sequence of new variations on his well-established Spenserian themes. It reminds me, in fact, a little of Barber's Adagio for Strings in the way it keeps bobbing and weaving, and only slowly moving toward a climax.

When Lee returned, I put aside the book and we went shopping, both for us and for Sasha.

Lee is taken with the idea of buying organic dog food, if for no other reason than to avoid the kind of stuff that sometimes makes it, according to a recent report on TV, into "ordinary" dog food (you don't want to know the details). Given that state of affairs, I can only support her effort to find and feed her dog only good, wholesome food.

We returned home and put The Legend of Bagger Vance on the VCR. Lee had been afraid that this would be a "golf" movie, but to think of this film like that overlooks the big picture. In the final analysis, Lee enjoyed the movie, and so did I, especially as I was extending Bagger's advice past golf to all manner of human action, including interpretation and writing.

Cheers...

Late day at work...

I had a couple of items to translate into Russian today. Surprisingly, I did fairly well with them, and though my abilities in written Russian still fall far short of my skill in English, the daily exposure and the typing practice are beginning to pay off.

I have always been what I call a "physical" learner. That is, I have to know what it feels like to do something in order to learn how to do it. (I know that sounds off the wall, but it works.)

I remember learning to touch-type in Russian in college, on an old manual typewriter. My prof (who was also chairman of the department) was smitten with the idea of building a world-class Slavic Cultural Center in Port Jefferson, NY, and to that end he had invested his life's savings to purchase an old Moose lodge and had enlisted a small group of students to help out in the project.

The typewriter came in handy for typing the several hundred letters that he sent out asking for people to purchase memberships in the Center. As we were trying to make everything look as professional as possible, no photocopies were allowed, so each letter had to be typed individually.

I soon understood that hunt-and-peck was just not going to work; I had to produce more than a letter every hour, so I spent a lot of time learning to touch-type on a Cyrillic keyboard. (Well, calling what I was after "touch-typing" may be stretching it a bit. While I touch-type today, in both English and Russian, in those heady days, my typing - in English - was about 30-wpm using two fingers on each hand and a thumb on the spacebar. My goal was to achieve the same facility with the Russian machine, but I digress...)

I found the key to learning the keyboard was to be deliberate about it and to alternate between looking at the keyboard for the pesky keys ("Where'd they put the hard sign?") and then not looking and concentrating on having the muscles find the keys I did know.

In the end, I actually did learn to touch-type in Russian (fingers on the home keys, etc...the whole bit), but without much conviction. My speed was dismal, but better than one word per minute, which is about what I had started out with. (The one good result of the whole exercise was that touch-typing in Russian eventually led me to follow suit in English, long after I'd graduated and stopped/forgotten how to type in Russian.)

After many years away from the Cyrillic keyboard, I again started to learn to type in Russian when it became practical to do so on computers several years ago. It was hellish, as everyone and his kid sister who used Windows seemed to have adopted a so-called "phonetic" layout that was implemented by installing widely pirated third-party software (surprisingly enough, the Microsoft keyboard layout that I soon unearthed was not phonetic, but "standard," if you don't mind a handful of departures from what most people have come to expect from Russian typewriters, but again, I wander...) Once I had a standard - more or less - keyboard installed on my computer, I had to relearn the whole process.

It was easier this time, and I'd restored my former abilities in no time at all, but I'd gotten lots better with the English keyboard, since college. Today, when I type in English, I literally don't think about what my hands are doing. My fingers form the words I am thinking (albeit sometimes, they get confused, and I have to make corrections).

I am getting there, though with the Russian. Every day, it gets easier. Will it ever become as easy as typing in English? If reading is any indicator, no. After years of effort, I don't think I'll ever read as "fluently" in Russian as I do in English; but I get by.

That's all one can ask for, though. Isn't it?

Cheers...