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Month: August 2012

July and August News

As you gathered from previous post, I can now blog from my mobile phone. Don’t be surprised: in all 6 years I blogged from PCs, notebooks, and netbooks, sometimes even at the Internet cafes, but never from a mobile phone. One thing I should sadly mention is that the mobile version of Blogger doesn’t have an option to add a hyperlink. It also suggests I type in the names of Labels, which is not at all convenient. I suppose I can do formatting myself, but it’s not ideal for blogging on the go. At least, now the Blogger team has feedback 😉

It was hard to keep up with the blogging tempo I had last year, but there’re plenty of great things I can share. Last year I translated a book from English into Russian on the subject of children’s puberty. This year it was finally published and is already sold in Moscow bookstores. Not only am I a published author now, I’ve got a translated book under my belt, too.

Next, wherever you are in the world, interested in Russia but not wanting to be spoon-fed any kind of propaganda about this country, welcome to Russia-InfoCentre. Since 2001 this English-language e-zine, produced entirely by Russian citizens, has been serving the global audience who wanted to learn more about Russian culture, business, arts, travel opportunities, etc. There are also two sections on the site that provide encyclopaedic articles about Russian famous people and cities and regions of the country. When I decided to stay in Moscow for a period of time, I began to look for opportunities to tell people about Russia as it really is, behind the headlines, official sources, misconceptions, and the Cold War era propaganda. Russia-IC and I found each other, and I’ve been a part of their team since May 2011. It gives me a great pleasure to invite you to subscribe to their news and article RSS feeds and to follow them on Facebook or Google Plus.

I’ve moved my personal information to http://avidadollars.org/, where people can also contact me and which I am updating with my news.

Back to mobile blogging, I will now be able to share Moscow photos straight to LCJ, although I’ll probably have to add FourSquare and Qype recommendations manually on PC.

By the way, many thanks to Qype Team who commended my review of the Old Trafford Stadium last month. In August I contributed several more Moscow landmarks, their reviews and photos, and even became a champion of a few hotspots! As a matter of fact, some reviews and photos have gone places, like this review of the Beacon of Hope in Manchester’s Sackville Gardens. I’m very pleased to have been Qype’s contributor since 2010.

After a quick visit to Manchester in February this year I’ve not travelled anywhere – and then went first to Kaluga Region in early August, then to Pskov Region in late August, and spent the most wonderful evening enjoying the famous Gorky Park. I’ve painstakingly documented all these trips in my hand-written diary, in addition to taking photos. And I’m already planning the next trip, which, if I make it happen, should become a long-relished cherry on the cake.

What else should I say? I wrote this on Facebook and I can only repeat again: this August I deeply felt how happy and lucky I was with all close friends, family members who back me and support me, with great friends I’ve made through social networks or with whom I maintain contact via the same networks. I’m grateful to them for bearing with me 🙂 and for being what they are.

After all is really said and done… welcome to September!

walking-in-rain-in-moscow
Walking in the rain in Moscow (Credit: Julia Shuvalova 2012)

 

Thoughts on Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange

I think the “good” film adaptations are mainly those of Shakespeare’s work. I didn’t analyse yet as to what exactly makes them good, i.e. faithful and accurate, but I announced my impression.

I read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess when I was still in Russia. I didn’t then plan to go to Britian, and I didn’t even imagine I’d end up living in Burgess’s native Manchester. Having lived there for a number of years, seeing the notorious yobs and hearing crime reports, I certainly would envisage a different kind of screen adaptation. But even if Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971) is fascinating as far as cinematography is concerned, as a kind of “translation” it is incomplete – and this is now I explained on Reddit the other day.

“Re: A Clockwork Orange – don’t judge the film before you read the book. For all the visual beauty, the film is incomplete. Also, it’s an adaptation, hence it’s a kind of cinematic translation. Burgess, having come from Manchester, must’ve known well the kind of lads he was writing about – and they still inhabit Manchester, even though Burgess had gone. I lived in Manchester and Salford in 2000s, there are still gangs of youngsters who speak their own language and are ready to knife, rob and rape anyone they like. Sad but true. What happens in the novel, though, is that after all his tribulations Alex returns home where he’s not wanted and at some point realises that he no longer wants to be in a gang. He wants to have a place, a home, a family, a boy… who will probably end up making the same mistakes – because he’ll be from the same background as Alex. He doesn’t merely find the golden middle, he realises that the values and actions he thought had belonged to him are in fact completely alien to him. And it’s this latter part that Kubrick didn’t bring to screen, and it’s for this reason I think the adaptation is incomplete. It’s like if you translate a book and think “hang on, I’m not going to translate this because I think it will make a wrong impression” – and so you lose an integral part of the author’s plot“.

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