I will, however, remind readers that it doesn’t matter what you think of Paleckis as a person or of his ideas. He was tried under a terrible law and deserved our support.

News has broken over the past week about the uncertain fate of Algirdas Paleckis, the head of the Socialist People’s Front, a party in Lithuania. Speaking on the radio in November of last year, he talked about what are known as the “January Events,” which include the shooting of protestors by the TV Tower in Vilnius. Paleckis asked about who was actually at the tower and then said, “saviškiai šaudė į savus”—“our own were shooting at our own” or “like was shooting at like.”

For this comment, he has been charged under 170-2 of the Lithuanian Penal Code—a clause enacted in 2010 which makes it a crime to “publicly endorse,” “deny,” or “coarsely belittle” both Soviet and Nazi German crimes as well as the the aggressions of 1990–1991.

Last week, however, the government put off their decision on the matter, allegedly because of documents that were not translated from Russian in time. These documents, pertaining to the January Events, may vindicate what Paleckis said. His party, however, suggests that the government is eager to bury their decision—due 30 December—under news regarding the holidays, especially now that it has gotten a bit of international play.

Even if you use the same words to describe Paleckis as you did his grandfather—”Moscow’s ass-licker,” Russian agent, buffoon whose vanity is flattered by the KGB to provoke the Lithuanian state—his fate is a troubling one for three reasons.

1. The law sucks

I’m still enough into the Enlightenment to be in favor of free speech laws, but even past that, the law Paleckis is accused of breaking is a complete disaster of jurisprudence. First, it codifies explicitly the legal equivalence of Soviet and Nazi German crimes. I’ve written enough about that in the past. Second, the language describing the events of 1990–1991 is completely mealymouthed. I’m scared to even attempt a translation.

Finally, this fancy law obfuscates the existence of the Holocaust. It only alludes to it first as a “genocide” that has been recognized as such by the EU and then again as a “genocide” against “inhabitants of the Lithuanian Republic.” This isn’t euphemism; this is an offensive game of playing equivalences, the far right fantasy of “Dual Genocide”: the Holocaust, the argument is read by me, doesn’t need to be mentioned since it wasn’t the only genocide in Lithuania. The Lithuanians also suffered!

If you aren’t convinced by my arguments, Dovid Katz makes a more liberal (even invoking Voltaire) case for defending Paleckis’s right to free speech, regardless of its contents. Katz also links to Leonidas Donskis, who writes about “concept inflation” in terms of “genocide” and Lithuania’s eagerness to “criminalise discussion,” which is wholly anti-democratic. Donskis even calls out Western European  democracies who have similar speech laws regarding denying the Holocaust, so this isn’t a case of simply piling on poor, little Lithuania.

Simply put, if you believe in free speech, you believe that Paleckis should have his charges dropped—not potentially spend a year in prison (after having his sentence suspended for two years, effectively silencing him).

2. Paleckis did not “deny” the shootings

This is more of a delicate matter, and for it, I rely on the phrase that has rung out and is repeated in the press: “like was shooting at like.”¹ This statement is empirically correct even if we accept the official version of the events. For example, the case could be made that everyone present was still a Soviet citizen—this is surely the position Moscow took, in warning Lithuanians of the “bourgeois dictatorship” that would follow independence.² Soviet citizens (soldiers of the Red Army / KGB forces) fired upon Soviet citizens of the Lithuanian SSR.

Even more foolishly: human beings shot at human beings.

This isn’t lawerly slipperiness. This is a point about ontology. The only way “like was shooting at like” can be considered a “denial” is if we consider that the difference between the shooters and the victims is so stark that they are different ontological entities, sharing nearly no commonality between them. Opfer vs. Täter, in the most childish manichean game of cops and robbers (or partisans and communists, as we used to play as kids) imaginable.

Paleckis had language specialists come in to prove that he was merely expressing his opinion, and not denying anything. In my opinion, it does not even come down to that. The parts quoted in the press are philosophically not a denial, and it would require the mentality of a playground bully to see it otherwise.³

3. Can there be a non-nationalist history of Lithuania?

What Paleckis is after, per his provocation, is a reckoning and inquiry into the January Events. It is absolutely the case that at the time, Moscow denied opening fire on the protestors. It is also absolutely the case that eyewitness reports and testimony gathered at the time—which is, I imagine, what these documents requiring translation are—conflict with the state’s version of events. As Balsas printed, in discussing the Paleckis case, some Sąjūdis members felt that bloodshed was needed to unify the movement. Others present at the tower or watching from nearby testified at having seen gun flashes from rooftops, where there were no Soviet soldiers. And apparently the ballistics findings of the bodies suggest that it was not (entirely) Soviets shooting, as they include weapons from the start of the 20th Century.

So it’s unclear. Even as the 20th anniversary of the events creeps up, the state has shown a lack of interest in pursuing these uncertainties. Paleckis’s father, an MEP, in scolding his son for saying what he did, says that discussion of the events should be left to witnesses to discuss “openly, in detail, and objectively, and not the new generation, supported by the tales of others.” That’s exactly the kind of discussion that the current law has made impossible. Who will stand up and say “I saw Lithuanians open fire,” if they know they could be hauled off to jail just for saying it? Paleckis’s brother, a journalist, brags about his own closeness to the action, as he was “already working as a journalist.” The “insanities” Paleckis is repeating, he continues, already bubbled up during the bloody night itself, told by “overthrowers” like Soviet soldiers. In other words, even by his own admission, the events on the ground were immediately uncertain, but, in his opinion, no inquiry is required because those providing uncertainty are, conveniently, all unreliable.

And this is the problem here. Revising the state history requires taking seriously people the state has already deemed unfit to bear witness, holders of unreliable testimony. The fact that the state (and especially the long shadow of Sąjūdis which is cast over the entire political apparatus) benefits from the state’s version of events is never—and now can never—be questioned.

I have no idea what happened that night 20 years ago. I was at home, probably doing homework or whatever it is that studious freshmen in high school do on Saturday evenings. Shortly after the events—maybe even the next day—I recall participating in a protest, probably at the USSR consulate in New York City, where each of the 14 people who was killed that night was memorialized. The sign youthful, nationalist me carried, ironically, read “Литовская Свиня,” as a sort of resistance and recuperation of the belittling of Lithuanians at the hands of the Soviet state.

And yet now, the Lithuanian government is acting like the swine from the sign I carried, greedily gobbling up all claims on historical legitimacy and silencing dissent.

Lithuania is afraid of looking back at its history. That’s shameful, but expected. No state likes to roll out its darkest moments and parade them about. But Lithuania does a state like the US one better; it criminalizes the efforts of others to see what hides in those darkest moments.

1. Though the law does not cover simply denials, in the media he is accused of “denial,” so I’ll focus on that.
2. Moscow’s prescience is for a different post.
3. It may, of course, be the case that he said more on the radio, and I’ll get to that, but so perhaps newspapers were disinclined to reprint it, fearing their own scalps. See how stupid this is?

At the outset he claims to have gone “all out” with not eating meat, like me. I would hardly consider myself “all out.” First, I’m not a vegan, despite having been a vegan for a few stretches of a few months. Second, I’m generally a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”-type of vegetarian. At restaurants, I’ll avoid food that I can nearly guarantee has meat in it (nearly every soup unless it says otherwise), and if there’s a large doubt, I’ll ask. But I won’t push the issue to demand separate cooking spaces, etc. There are people who do that, and I respect their decision, but though I’m against meat contamination, the main thrust of my not eating meat has to do with reducing consumption.¹

The first question Aras asks is about the ethics of throwing away already owned meat instead of eating it. Everyone approaches this differently. When I stopped eating meat, there was still tons of meat in my mom’s house, and none of it got thrown away. In fact, there still manages to be a ton of meat in her house that doesn’t get thrown away. If Aras included his whole family in his scheme, then it was simply a peculiar scheme, that I’ll return to below.²

The next question has to do with eating at a formal event. Basically, Arai, it does suck. That’s the life of being a vegetarian in the Western (or, in the case of Vilnius, wannabe Western) world. You are nearly always an inconvenience, especially to extended family members who keep forgetting your dietary restrictions. Before any big dinner function (wedding reception, say), I’ve gotten into a habit of eating a meal on my own, since I know that the bread and salad at the table won’t be able to compete with the night’s drinking afterward. I have fond memories of sitting in a parking lot in Rosemont, IL, eating a stuffed spinach pizza from Edwardo’s by myself to prepare for a Šokių Šventė banketas.³

Airlines are getting better about serving vegetarian food, by offering it as one of the main choices, instead of as a special dish, though there are certain limitations.⁴ Banquet halls are also getting better, but we’re still a far ways away from being normative. When Medieval Times offers a vegetarian meal that isn’t steamed vegetables with a cup of melted butter, I’ll know things are ok.⁵

This bends into Aro next question, of “if real vegetarians are ever caught so off guard.” No, we aren’t, since we understand that we live lives that are, despite increasing visibility, outside of the mainstream. I know to eat before a wedding reception. I know to bring snacks aboard an airplane. It’s like having a game or something ready with which to occupy your child when you’re about to embark on something that will test her patience. You anticipate and prepare, two verbs that are central to any adult’s vocabulary. And you enjoy being surprised when you’ve overprepared.

And sometimes it means not being a part of a certain social circle, or understanding that you can never fully be a part of a certain social event. For example, I love my friends, but I’m sick of going to barbecues at their houses. No matter how many delicious “sides” there are and how full I can get off them, we can’t escape the fact that the centerpiece of the event, and what the host usually prides him or herself with the most, is a giant slab of carefully, lovingly prepared meat. Similarly, my friends in Chicago go to a rodízio every year. I simply decline the invitation, since $40 for an all you can eat salad bar (and it is a good one!) is an obscenity.

But, considering how scarce meat was in the western world until about a century ago, and how scarce it continues to be throughout much of the world, an all you can eat meat buffet (as well as a night devoted to pushing the limits of said buffet) is its own obscenity.

Finally Aras brings the issue to Vilnius and about being a vegetarian there. I’m not as much of an expert on this topic as Ed (who eats fish) or my friend Veronika, who has been a militant vegetarian for the near decade she’s lived in Vilnius, but I do know a few things.

First off, there are certain cuisines/restaurants one simply avoids. The rodízio is one example. German restaurants and French bistros are another. These culinary cultures are simply not accepting of vegetarian lifestyles, and one anticipates this in advance. When I go to a French restaurant in Paris, I know that I will either be eating some kind of omelette or a pair of measly “entrées” (sides) while my friends go to work on half a pig. It’s funny that Aras specifically mentions Bravaria, since it was another German restaurant in Vilnius I was planning to go to over the summer until my suspicions (there won’t be anything there I can eat) were confirmed by the menu on the web.

Next, one learns of places that do have decent vegetarian meals, without having to resort to going to Balti drambliai all the time. Briusly and Beirut (while it stays open!) both offer multiple vegetarian dishes of astonishingly good quality. Sue’s has an even more expansive (and expensive) menu. Even my over-maligned Tres mexicanos serves its vegetarian clients multiple dishes (I think there are five things on their menu one can order without meat without ordering it specially).

But even local Lithuanian cuisine, based as it is on farmers who were too poor for meat, has greasy, starchy, non-meat alternatives, making places like Čili kaimas or Amatininkų užeiga perfectly fine dining options. Furthermore, the crêpe/blini/blynai culture of Eastern Europe gives both sweet and savory options that never even come near meat. One won’t convince me that Теремок in Moscow has a tastier thing on the menu than their “Блин ‘E-mail.’” So it’s not the case that because Vilnius lacks “vegetarian restaurants,” it’s difficult for a vegetarian out there. In fact, I never felt particularly without a place to eat, unlike in Paris, where one can get sick of cheese omelettes. Furthermore, Vilnius is much more amenable to drinking and dining than the US is, where usually if I’m out drinking with friends, I’m limited to pub food (read: nachos, french fries, or something else deep-fried).

So what’s the crux of my response to Aro post? Something about how being a vegetarian is not personally terribly difficult, but it does still have a non-trivial social cost, one that Aras felt in passing, remarked upon, and then abandoned, since, for him, this was merely a one-month experiment. I, for example, and Aras has witnessed this personally, try by all means to weasel out of dinner parties, knowing that I’m, simply put, a pain in the ass. Most people I know are not used to preparing vegetarian dishes (or considering the extremely wide array of non-meat dishes outside of omelettes and pasta), so I know I’m a burden when they invite me over. Some families, like Aro, I’ve learned are up for the task. But I can’t hold it against my stepfamily for not being similarly adventurous.

I have friends who abandon their vegetarianism when it’s polite to do so. I certainly do many, many things out of politeness only, and I used to eat shellfish this way. It took my mom about three Christmas dinners before she remembered I don’t even eat shellfish anymore, so I politely ate the stuff, especially since I saw how proud she was of the effort she went through to make a dish just for me. But these days, I would simply refuse, as I simply can’t eat shellfish anymore. It grosses me out, as does all animal flesh. When I tackled vegetarianism here last, I wrote that going back to meat is simply not an option anymore. This isn’t an experiment; it’s a way of life.

This whole post I have avoided trying to compare the social cost of not eating meat with the social cost of being a recovering alcoholic. There are obviously vital differences I can’t even begin to imagine. Yet I find it slightly instructive that it’s the example I kept wanting to return to. You’re a person who, for whatever reason, is cut off from what remains a vital social component of your cultural life. And you also know that there is no going back–no returning to that cultural life. All you can do is wait for everyone to join you, pretty much, to wait for culture to change. It’s not worth it (or even the case, for me) to feel sorry for yourself about the differences. You just anticipate and prepare, over and over.

1. On the other hand, I generally don’t “eat around meat,” which Aras did during his experiment.
2. On a side note, I would certainly not choose a winter month for an experiment in vegetarianism, unless it’s an experiment on “how bad can things get?” The variety of food available in the wintertime is much lower, and that’s felt acutely by vegetarians. I’m glad I’m not yet sick of potato leek soup.
3. Friends were jealous when I later told them what I ate for dinner, when they compared it to their rubber chicken. Of course, I also paid the $50 or whatever for food I didn’t eat. Thinking about functions in that way is an exercise in madness. If I considered a banquet ticket to include the price of the food, I’d never go to another banquet again.
4. This truly is tragic. American Airlines used to offer a vegan meal, a vegetarian meal, and a Hindu meal. Despite how impossible it is to get in a special meal request with them, the Hindu meal was always fantastically aromatic in comparison to the steak and potatoes everyone else would eat. AA apparently drew some Venn diagrams, however, and collapsed all three into a simple vegan meal that I’ve never found particularly exciting. Too bad!
5. The fact that during the epoch the restaurant celebrates pretty much no one on Earth ate meat with any regularity causes the vegetarian option to serve as a complete insult.

1. On Mikutavičius, not singing “Trys milijonai,” and cultural patrimony discusses the mini-scandal that emerged when Marijonas Mikutavičius elected not to sing his sports anthem, “Trys milijonai,” at the huge public reception for the bronze medal–winning Lithuanian basketball team last week. In his written defense, Mikutavičius provocatively claimed that the song belongs to “the nation,” and I wonder what may come of that.
2. “Dual Genocide” condemned in UK paper; paper subsequently condemned returns to a far too frequent theme on Lithchat: a resistance to Lithuanian political inclination toward treating the Holocaust and the terrors of the Soviet regime as generically similar events that can be classified as a “dual genocide.” A journalist from The Guardian traveled to Lithuania to see how the nation commemorates both the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation and finds that the desire to transcend comparison, inherent in the theory of “dual genocide” does not end up being the case in fact. The columnist is subsequently denounced by popular English-Lithuanian blogger Andrius Užkalnis (in Lithuanian), and I respond to him.
3. Cardinal directions in Lithuanian culture addresses a funny set of experiences I had while in Vilnius regarding disinterest/ignorance when it came to knowing where north is at any given moment. It’s me playing awful anthropologist, but I found the experience interesting. I also answer, in a footnote, a question I’ve had about the MBTA for decades.

H N A PA

Then I immediately got up and was confused about this letter stream. Read out in French, this would be:

/aʃ/ /ɛn/ /a/ (or /ɑ/) /pa/

or:

/aʃ/ en a pas

So it’s a bit clear what’s going on here beyond the English pun of “pa.” But if one were to pronounce the “A” in English, as /eɪ/, we now get:

/aʃ/ en ai pas

This is really close to “j’en ai pas”—a colloquial way of saying “I don’t have one.” But that sentence would look something like:

/ʒɛneɪ/ /pa/

So what to do about that /aʃ/? Well, as it turns out, that sounds a whole lot like /əʃ/, or “aš,” the first person singular pronoun in Lithuanian. Kind of a mess, especially when I think what one would write in the form there would be, simply, “inconnu.” But still a neat way for me to start the morning.

1. The form part is clear, as I have a daunting form on my desk from the French government that I’m putting off filling out. As for the functionally illiterate person who doesn’t know his dad, I’m sure you can guess what show I watched a few episodes of before going to bed last night.

Citroën DS at Café de Paris. (click to enlarge)

This might get a bit weepy or whiny in places, but I promise there’s a bigger point to it.

I’m writing this post from Café de Paris, which is more or less exactly what it sounds like, except that it’s in Vilnius. I’ve spent a lot of time here over the two months I’ve been in Lithuania, and it’s not entirely because I pursue a Parisian lifestyle here. What I do here (drink espressos and play on my computer) would bankrupt me in a Parisian setting, where the coffee is about three times more expensive.

But being here has been part of a set of actions that has made me start to miss Paris rather terribly, which I find bizarre in the extreme. Remember, I’m the person who left for Paris with absolutely no sort of romantic illusions or fantasies about the city–it hadn’t even been a city I particularly wanted to visit, much less live in. A couple other things have helped push this missing along. First, I was reading, at the same time, two books: David Harvey’s Paris: Capital of Modernity, which I found not as great as I hoped it would be, though the last chapter, on the Commune, is a must-read; and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I had found in a Russian edition for students of English (so there were Russian glosses of idioms and historical personages and places; love it).¹ Further, watching L’Armée du crime last night (prompted by this review) also upped a bit of the emotional longing. This emotional longing is weird, because while I absolutely adore living in Paris, I certainly don’t think I’ve developed, a posteriori, the sorts of fantasies about the city that many arrive with.

So there must be something else I miss, and I think what that thing could be is named, variously, “structure” or “work.” When I first explained to friends that I would be spending two months in Vilnius this summer, most were convinced that I would drown in a giant ocean of debt, settling into my usual Vilnius routine of two meals at restaurants every day and six hour shifts at nightclubs every night. No, I kept reassuring them. This would not be a vacation. I had a writing deadline to meet and money to not spend. I would finally experience Vilnius not as a partying tourist, but as something even resembling a local; I even bought more than one bus ticket at a time, knowing there would be multiple future trips on Vilnius public transportation!

The first month felt like that of a local: I stayed in the apartment as much as I could and read, took notes, and even wrote. A couple friends blew through, but usually I would only go out to watch a World Cup match and then go to a club afterward for a drink or two. But the deadline came and went, and my writing—which sketches out a theory of the realist novel that is scale-less, historico-geographically materialist yet non-transcendental, non-humanist, pre-cognitively affect-based, and counter-factual—was submitted.

Suddenly, I was again a bit adrift what concerns the dissertation. I felt entitled to a mini-vacation because of the amount of focus I had expended the previous seven or so weeks putting together the theory (much was based on stuff I had just read in the past few weeks!). But by that point, I only had about three weeks left in my trip, and all my earlier desires to establish some level of permanence out here (I even considered starting up a early 20th c. short story reading group!) started being framed in the sense of “you’re leaving in three weeks. Don’t tie yourself down.”

And so I’ve been drifting. I’ve worked a bit on the chapter revision I need to do, but mostly, I’ve sat in the apartment and watched downloaded television and movies. I don’t really leave the apartment except to buy food, and it all seems like a bit of a waste of my time out here.² I can’t wait to get back to Paris, I keep telling myself, even though my day-to-day life in France is not terribly different from what I’ve settled into here; I tend to spend most of my time there in my apartment reading and sometimes leave only to get food from Carrefour.

But in Paris, I have a job. I’m required, four times a week, to travel the 20 minutes by bike to the Paris Center and spend a handful of hours there helping students and faculty with their computer troubles.³ So I feel rather plugged into some kind of community, even if it’s made up of co-workers and student-clients. Here, I don’t really have many friends, and the friends I have are pretty much always busy and not willing or able to alter their schedule to fit my idiosyncracies. So I drift into a solitary bubble. Further, because I’m a transient (leaving in less than a week!), I’m very disinclined to go out and meet new people or try to enrich already existing acquaintances (into friendships).

It’s funny what work does, right? I watched Toy Story 3 this morning, and I finally understood Aaron’s point about its relationship to labor. I feel a bit like the toys. Without a structured job, I feel useless, adrift. This is why I don’t like vacations in general, and I certainly don’t like vacations that last more than a week. After a while they become grossly indulgent.⁴ Of course, it helps that my job is not a grind and that I enjoy it and that it provides me with piles of flexibility and freedom. I appreciate all that, and I don’t look badly at people who need to simply escape from their wage slavery for a while and rebuild themselves.

But it’s not for me. These past few weeks have been a sort of murky hell of indecision, sloth, and basically an endless open mic night for my worst self-indulgences.

So where this gets complicated is when I think beyond my post in Paris, when I will, hopefully, have a diss-writing fellowship so that I can get the hell out of grad school with a finished dissertation. If I’ve only had my dissertation to work on for the past three weeks and felt like a floating cloud of scum that has gotten little to nothing done, what will I do if I’m lucky enough to win a fellowship, so that I will be paid only to write and will be prevented from having a “job” by the terms of the award? I’m terrified that this Vilnius muck will return.

Of course, I could take Brian Croxall’s advice and treat grad school like a job, finding some little never-before-used reservoir of discipline in my body and do something like go to the library for 9–5 every day. Furthermore, I suspect that my fellowship year will be chock full of various writing deadlines. Finally, I won’t be a couch-surfing transient for that year. I’ll have my computer, my workspace, and the rest.

So I’ve got that going for me.

1. It’s been kind of the Summer of Harvey here, as I spent much of June fighting through a close-read of the ontology he develops in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, and then I followed up in July reading newer essays by him and about him and about how he’s old-fashioned and Marxism is over, and so on.
2. Granted, some of the disinclination to do stuff has been related to by slicing the hell out of my toes from stepping on broken glass, an injury that has taken over two weeks to heal and has left my eagerness to walk a lot (a Vilnius must) wanting.
3. There are other things I have in Paris that I don’t have in Vilnius, including a sense of permanence about my living quarters. Here I have been moving every few weeks between two apartments depending on the visiting schedules of others. Furthermore, in Paris I have my normal computer, which provides a much more pleasant reading / writing / creating environment than my little netbook.
4. Part of this, though I don’t know how much, is related to the fact that I do not like the fact that I am only spending money now and not earning any. Weirdly (or maybe not), I get very, very anxious when I’m not earning money.

The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in.

The second post is a 3000-word monster that looks at the fate of songs with political messages in recent Eurovision contests, Eurovision as a whole, InCulto’s song in comparison to the Lithuanian entry in 2006 (which coincidentally beat out InCulto’s offering that year), and the song’s relationship to funk and punk. Then I shift into high gear and talk about miscegenation, economic inequality and the egalitarian fantasy of democratic equality. Then I close with some complaints on the ghetto, particularized punk of Gogol Bordello. Oh, and there’s like four embedded videos and links to who knows how many other songs on YouTube.

The third post is a quick roundup of recent press on the song, which includes news that the European Broadcasting Union, the people behind Eurovision, is investigating InCulto’s song for the possible political content of the lyrics.

If you want to skip me as a middleman and just read Verini’s article, here it is.

Academic. It’s valuable to study dying languages simply because it’s valuable to learn about the kinds of different ways humans have collectively developed means of communication. This has all sorts of wide-reaching applications, from seeing on the one hand what language systems hold in common (to help pursue something echt human), or to see how wildly they differ in order to account for that. The academic case is a really easy one for me to accept, since I find any sort of academic inquiry inherently worthwhile, even while others jump on a bandwagon to disagree.

Moral/Ethical. This is the centerpiece of The Linguists, because they point out that people would love to keep speaking their “true” native tongues (they don’t say “true,” but I need to indicate that it’s a iffy term), but that external forces coerce them into speaking other languages. Peer pressure and mockery from the Russian majority kept the Chulym from speaking their language, for example, or the promise of economic advancement with English knowledge leads parents to let their children abandon their Sora aptitude in India. This situation is especially true in colonial circumstances, and it’s amazing to consider the languages US expansionist policies wiped out. I’m very sympathetic to this viewpoint, but can’t go all in, since it starts making assumptions about the original speakers. That is, documenting Chulym so that the Chulym youth can learn it because it’s their cultural patrimony that was taken away from them is a borderline problematic proposition because…

Essentialist/Sentimental. …it starts blurring the line between oppression and making essentialist claims. If I had to guess, I wouldn’t think Anderson and Harrison believe the strong version of this, and perhaps their views were emphasized in the editing room, since the movie is not narrated chronologically at all. However, we do know that one of the directors, Seth Kramer, was inspired in part by a heritage trip he took to Vilnius, where he could not read the Yiddish inscriptions that had been legible to his ancestors. And it’s fine to want to study Yiddish in order to understand the language your ancestors spoke, for whatever reason. But when Yiddish becomes a person’s “history,” it starts getting a bit messier. Obviously, it’s incomprehensible, because we all reach a point where the language of our ancestors is irretrievable, so to assume a sort of permanent foundation of an identity based on language (which, obviously, is anything but permanent) is sort of, well, nuts if you think it through.

I’ve already pounced on the folly of essentialist ideas of cultural identity (based on language and other things) over on Lithchat, so I won’t do it again. But I did want to clarify these points from the earlier post this week.

It’s not that the language is forced (though perhaps it is simplistic). It’s that the topic and the consequences of the sex and so on are so… not sexy. Amazing. I don’t know. Maybe Lithuanians 100 years ago (or whenever) were really wound up by this sort of thing.

In brief, it’s an amusing (yet touching, without being saccharine) first-person narration of a 20 year-old community college dropout who decides on a whim (well, after a drug deal goes bad) to follow an older woman he just met to Lithuania. There follow the usual hijinks involving copious amounts of alcohol, pretty women, fisticuffs, and swearing in Russian, but this should not be confused with the lazy wannabe farce that was the Lithuanian scenes from The Corrections.

Instead, Finding the Moon in Sugar is more like a response to the “brainy protagonist goes to Eastern Europe to find himself” genre we’ve seen in, say, Everything is Illuminated. And I value it highly because of that. Andy Nowak’s the type who seldom has his story told, and I wonder if that’s not a problem. There are ways in which the novel reminds me more of a minor literature–parts of Finding feel like something by Piri Thomas, say, if he lived in Berwyn.

So the novel isn’t to the printed word what Natalie Portman would have you think the Shins are to music, but it’s a fun read all the same. Check out the review on Lithchat, or just buy the thing.

For traveling abroad, I count up 4 ways of spending money:

1. Riding your ATM or credit card.
2. Bringing USD to the other country and converting there.
3. Converting to the other currency in the US.
4. Opening up a bank account in the foreign country, and going from there.

At first glance, it seems like these are ordered from “most wasteful” to “least wasteful.” What I’ve found out, however, is that it’s not quite so simple. But before moving on, I’m going to use two conversions from today:

€1 = $1.5838
$1 = 2.1687 Lt

And I’m going to assume that I’ll blow through $1000 over the course of the trip.

So another way of asking this question that this post answers, then, is, how can I turn $1000 into 2168.70 Lt (or more)?

1. ATMs and credit cards

Obviously your bank will vary (so call them for details!), but I use Citibank. I have a regular checking account, so every time I use an ATM abroad, I get a 2% fee tacked on. A gold account would have been 1%. Plus, the bank would not give me a conversion rate to litai over the phone. So considering the litas is pegged to the euro, I asked for the rate in euro. “1.6891,” the woman told me. So…

$1000 – 2% = $980

$980/1.6891 = €580.19

3.4528(€580.19) = 2003.28 Lt

Using your ATM card, then, loses you 165.42 Lt for every $1000 you spend. That’s just over $76, or 7.6% of the total.

The main bottlenecks here are, of course, the 2% fee and the intensely unfavorable exchange rate with the euro. I have no reason to suspect the rate with the litas would be more favorable, and the 3.4528 is, of course, the rate at which the litas was pegged to the euro.

Incidentally, between Chase, Bank of America, and WaMu, I was only able to find out a competing rate from one of them (online). Bank of America sells euro at 1.676. Not as terrible as Citibank, but still heavily influenced by massive drugs.

2. Converting in Lithuania

I was always told not to handle my conversions in this manner. The currency exchanges rob you, etc. It is probably true that an airport exchange will rob you blind between their fees and unfavorable rates. Banks, however, are a different story. Banks are also all over the place in central Vilnius, and exchanging a sum of cash every morning proved to be no big deal for me last summer. I went to Hansa bankas last year, but here I’ll try to make a matrix for three banks in Lithuania.

(Part of how you know that this is an intelligent way of exchanging money is that these banks typically list the exchange rates right on the front of their websites. Citibank does no such thing.)

Hansa buys dollars at 2.1551. Their fee is 1 Lt for transactions under 400 Lt

Snoras buys dollars at 2.153, and transactions “shall include the fee not larger than the fee for exchange operations set by the Bank of Lithuania.”

Finally, DnB NORD buys dollars at 2.1500 and charges a fee of 1 Lt.

As you can see, they all have very similar exchange rates, and I imagine the Snoras fee is around 1 Lt. So since I’m partial to Hansa bank (and they have the best rate), let’s calculate using it:

(2.1551)$1000 = 2155.10 Lt

Here you lose 13.6 Lt per $1000 spent, or $6.27. That’s just over .6%.

3. Converting in the US

To me, this seemed like the brilliant thing to do. So brilliant, in fact, that it’s precisely what I did do last month in preparation. Citibank offers a service called World Wallet.

They take money from your account and give you currency. That way you can land in a foreign country with money in hand, ready to go. Exchanging less than $1000 lands one a $5 fee (I thought it was higher, but I was probably wrong). But what’s the rate? I called 1-800-756-7050 and was quoted the same exact rate as for ATM purchases. Further, the phone looked at me funny when I asked about the litas, so we’ll use the euro as the baseline again.

$1000/1.6891 = €592.03

3.4528(€592.03) = 2044.16 Lt

The loss is 124.53 Lt for every $1000 spent, or over $57. That’s a 5.7% loss. That percentage is better than using the ATM, of course, but that’s because it doesn’t include the 2% ATM fee.

I’m not going to lie. This absolutely floored me when I found this out. Furthermore, because the conversion was done to euro, not Litai, I lose even more money, because these euros I now have in my pocket need to be converted again.

Converting at Hansa, which buys at 3.442, makes my total litas count out to be 2037.76 Lt, so it’s closer to a 6% total loss.

My only saving grace is that I converted when the euro was at $1.67 (according to Citibank), so the euro in my pocket have gained in value since I put them in there.

4. Opening up an account

A glance at Hansa’s conversion table shows that there are favorable rates for transferring in money as a deposit, instead of as a cash operation. Hansa furthermore has no minimum balance or monthly fee associated with accounts with debit cards. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be able to open an account with a US passport, however. But I plan on doing this when I arrive in Lithuania.

2.1562($1000) = 2156.20 Lt

This is a 12.5 Lt loss for every $1000 deposited, or $5.76. Notable is that it’s not even $1 saved against just converting the money in cash at the bank, so the opportunity cost of having to open an account, wait for the debit card, etc., may not make this a worthwhile investment.

Having a Lithuanian bank account, however, will permit you to top-up your Labas cell phone online while you’re not in Lithuania to keep the number alive. And though that’s not a huge thing, it’s not nothing.

Conclusion

Always go to Lithuania with as many US dollars as you feel comfortable bringing. Once you’re there, if you convert to Litai via cash or via a bank account at a Lithuanian bank is up to you–the bank account saves you not even $1 per $1000 in exchange versus cash, making the hassle of opening an account potentially not worth it. And though you’ll lose money emptying out the account back into dollars to bring back home (assuming you did not spend it all), the rate the bank will give you will still be in the vicinity of 2% off the real rate. That means that even still you lose less money converting from USD > LTL > USD at Hansa Bank than you do converting USD (> EUR) > LTL at Citibank in your neighborhood.

• UŽUPIO RESPUBLIKA (Lithuanian)
• ЗАРАЧАНСКАЯ РЭСПУБЛІКА (Belarusian)
• רעפּובליק פון זאַרעטשע (Yiddish)
• РЕСПУБЛИКА ЗАРЕЧЬЕ (Russian)
• REPUBLIKA ZARZECZA (Polish)

Here we have four different grammatical ways of expressing “Republic of Užupis.” The Lithuanian and Polish take two nouns and create a relationship via putting the name, “Užupis” and “Zarzecze,” in the genitive case. Imagine something like “Užupis’s Republic.” The Yiddish works like it would in English, joining the two nouns with a preposition. The Belarusian creates an adjectival form of Užupis, so it’s something like “Užupish Republic.” But the Russian completely confused the hell out of me at first. The ending “-е” is seen in many cases for nouns, but not in the genitive. Not ever. I wondered if maybe the word used for Užupis was in some kind of dialect. But my Russian teacher said, no, it was a regular nominative.

What’s interesting here is that I was completely stumped at this point—I was so completely convinced that the Russian would follow the pattern of the Lithuanian or Polish with a genitive, that I could not imagine “Заречье” as a nominative. Only the next day, after sleeping on it, did it dawn on me how on earth two nominatives in a row could make sense: the Russian form was using, simply, an appositive.

We see appositives (or adnominal genitives, as my Russian teacher called it) and things like them all the time in English, where we string nouns together like we were crazy. Today, when I was at the Regenstein Library, I walked past a computer lab. These constructions are all over our political language, and the language of government. I’m still waiting, for example, for my income tax refund from the Internal Revenue Service. The government is criticized for the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and the trailer cities FEMA built.

So where we had “Užupis’s Republic,” “Republic of Užupis,” and “Užupish Republic,” with the other four languages, the Russian phrase was just the very basic “Užupis Republic.” Yet for me, it was incomprehensible, since I never would have suspected that a synthetic language would use an appositive like that. Of course, in making my wild generalization, I had completely forgotten that I only knew about appositives because of the examples from Latin, including the famous “urbs Roma” (literally, “The City Rome”).

What the play is, essentially, is a telling of the story of Vytautas the Great, who is the “boss” (as the play frequently calls him) of Lithuania during the back 20-odd years of the 14th century into the first 15 years of the fifteenth century. Vytautas, like just about any head of state during that time, is involved in a series of intrigues and shifting allegiances, mostly concerning the crusading Teutonic Knights and his cousin, Jogaila, who weds the 13-year old queen Jadwyga of Poland, making himself both Christian and the King of Poland while starting Poland’s much-beloved Jagiellonian Dynasty. Additionally, Vytautas has to contend with a Russia that is slowly growing in strength (Vytauto uncle, Algirdas, rather famously, and maybe apocryphally, marched to the gates of Moscow eight times and was bought off each time, though he did end up with a Russian wife), in part because it can maintain control of its state with a church that is an appendage of the state. The Lithuania Vytautas controls stretches from the Baltic to the Black Seas and is a multi-cultural entity with no specific state religion. Vytauto father Kęstutis was a pagan of the old school, and that rubbed off on Vytautas. The Teutonic Knights, as well as the neighboring Poles, want Lithuania to turn towards Rome (well, in theory–plunder, land, and power were all also motives for the Knights). But within Lithuania’s borders are Jews, Karaims, Orthodox Slavs, and Mongols and other Turkic people. Naturally, a single state religion is not possible. During the course of the play, Vytautas is repeatedly betrayed, betrays others, converts to Christianity, tries to bring the Orthodox faiths back into the fold of Rome, defeats the Knights once and for all at the battle of Tannenberg with a rag-tag army made up of mercenaries of every imaginable eastern ethnicity, and waits for a crown from Rome to finally be placed on his head, making him King of Lithuania, not just Grand Duke.

Now, upon this ripe history, the playwright, director, and star Kęstutis Nekas (an associate professor at Roosevelt University) adds meditations on ethnicity’s role in a multi-cultural society, familial obligation, naming, time, and stereotyping. To push the ideas along, Nekas uses both absurd dream sequences as well as an entire library of post-modern theatric devices, including breaking the fourth wall, disrespecting unity of time, and anachronism (Jogaila and Vytautas fly around on a plane together for much of the play, alluding to a pair of 20th Century Lithuanian heroes, Darius and Girėnas).

Additionally, Nekas has his characters (a cast of 11 play between them about 50 characters) peform highly-allusive lines in a set of couplets whose rhyming seems to drift in and out. What results is something appealing to the audience persistently along multiple levels of meaning. For example, at Tannenberg, there is a young Polonius ready to fight. He explains that after he’s done, he’ll finally have earned his degree. However, the summer heat is cooking him within his own armor, so he starts getting whiny. It’s funny listening him complain (as the Germans call him “the little Dane”), and finally, once he’s had enough, it’s maybe even funnier to see him run off the stage, shouting something along the lines of, “I’m going to be true to myself and not fight in this heat!” At another time, during a dream sequence about the redeclaration of independence of Lithuania in 1990, a cast member asserts that freedom will come to the Lithuanians with “bombs bursting in the air and Nightline‘s red glare.”

Where the play starts to veer off course, however, is about three quarters of the way through. During a dream sequence about Lithuania’s annexation by the Soviet Union, the very real questions of genocide and collaboration come up. Nekas shows some of the complications of the situation by having two characters spar over crimes committed by both pro-Soviet and pro-Nazi groups. Yet the sequence ends with Nekas’s Vytautas denying that any genocide will happen in his future, capping it with the line “genocide is easy; comedy is hard.” While true, it sets the play off in a direction that does not seem to settle itself well. Plus, the line seems to brush off the relationship between Jews and Lithuanians during World War II, instead presenting in hagiographic terms a Vytautas firmly committed to freedom for all religions as a solution to the thousands dead in the wake of both Stalin and Hitler’s megalomania. It seems a bit of a cop out, and that’s pretty sad, as Nekas handles the tragedies within Vytauto life rather well, culminating with turning his back on his parentage and family by murdering his pagan wizard and wife simultaneously with a dagger fashioned from a crucifix.

And maybe that’s the underlying theme of the play. Vytautas is presented throughout as a “sole operator” (to use Nekas’s term used during the Q&A afterward), and at one point he presages the Sun King himself, proclaiming that he is the state. Without his egoism, there would be no history to speak of, and maybe no Lithuania, either. He created (in the realm of the play) a state unattached to a fundamental religion or ethnicity–he created, in other words, a postmodern state (or America). Yet he could not have done this without his own bourgeois sense of individuality and destiny (yet another anachronism, natch). Yet given that individuality is formed by the interaction of a series of group identities, Vytautas turns the tables on that by denying each group of which he is a member the benefit of having him as a constant member. He betrays everyone and every group, leaving only the positive, self-actualised self who dies at the end of the play, without family or heir. His legacy is a land that is quickly swallowed by those he tried forever to keep at bay (Polish assimilationsts led by the first series of branches of the Jagiellonian sapling).

Going into the play, I was worried that it might be too bogged down by in-jokes to be much of a treat to people who haven’t been indoctrinated since birth by why Vytautas deserves the distinguisher “the Great.” And there were a lot of gags tossed the way of that demographic, but not so many as to derail the enjoyment the play can give anyone with a decent sense of humour. Hell, there’s a plane in the fourteenth century! Even kids would laugh at that. Plus, as mentioned above, the madcap stream of allusion and counter aristotelian pranking works regardless of whether one understands the dozen or so Lithuanian words thrown into the play (the meaning of most is very clear from context, anyway). In fact, this play may work especially for people who aren’t Lithuanian but know one, as then, afterward, they will be able to say to themselves, “yup. They are all like that. I knew it!” Because, in fact, we all are, and we learned it from Vytautas.