Several days after watching Frank's videos, (here and here) I was still under impression. There was some strange aesthetic quality in them, which reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky's movies. The same long shots of silent movements that fascinate me in Tarkovsky's masterpieces and some other viewers. And then there is Frank reading his own poem!

I am starting a new series of posts called "microtrends", in which I am going to blog about the small forces behind tomorrow's big changes. Or not so big.

On Saturdays RTVi shows old Soviet movies which I enjoy a lot. By watching them one can learn Soviet mythology and see why it was so powerful -- because it was intermixed with the USSR troubled history, and real people's life, real heroism, real love.

Some of these movies are available for download (copyright issues aside), and they could promote a deeper understanding of what communism really was, but how is Western audience supposed to understand them if there are no subtitles? That's where .srt files come handy in all their glory.

It's a brilliant concept, if you think about it. .srt files are simple text files that contain subtitles, they work with .avi video files and they can be edited (I tried). Which means subtitles writing can now be a community effort, a-la Joel Spolsky's translation project.

I read somewhere that it takes about ten hours to translate a movie. So... Translators of the world, unite!

Impeccable LanguageHat dug out etymology of the word "canola". Etymology of the word "canola" says that the word "canola" is derived from "Canadian oil." Therefore the expression "canola oil" means "Canadian oil oil." And I always thought "canola" is some kind of oily plant!

Another quote from John Brady's The Craft of Interviewing. This time we are presented with dark humor of the craft.

People are always asking me why I don't give more interviews," says actress Ava Gardner. "The answer is simple; I'm tired of all the lies that have been written about me. The last time I trusted an interviewer, Rex Reed, he crucified me." "Did she say I misquoted her?" Reed asks. "No. She merely said I crucified her, which, in my opinion, I did not. I have no defense or explanation to make. The Ava Gardner piece stands on its own. Every word of it is true and it was written in as flattering a way as it is possible to write something when the subject will not let you ask questions, take notes or give any semblance of a dignified interview. Also, she was completely drunk."

I just finished The Craft of Interviewing by John Brady, and as it often happens, it's not the practical advices that are most interesting, but the spirit, the philosophy of the vocation.

We Americans like interview so much that we create them. Daniel Boorstin has called the interview a "pseudo-event," artificial news, in which things happen not of their own volition -- as do fires, floods, acts of God and rage -- but of our volition. ...

"Sometimes I think it's another sign of the sad necessity of our crowded, lonely lives," suggests George Garrett, "an urgent, hopeless reaching out to touch something real, a deep hunger for something authentic when everything else seem false, a desire to believe at least in the possibility of the naked truth."

Interviewing is, above all, the unexpected. Its joy is not unlike what Gloria Steinem once said of writing in general: "It's the only thing that passes the three tests of métier: 1) When I am doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead; 2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and 3) it's frightening."

I wrote in Online mind reading entry, "Neither facial expressions nor intonations are universal among cultures, or, rather, only most basic are, while subtleties are lost on newcomers." The next day reading George Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" I was pleased to stumble across the following statement:

In research spanning more than two decades, Paul Ekman and his associates studied in detail the physiological correlates of emotions [...]. In a major crosscultural study of facial gestures expressing emotions, Ekman and his associates discovered that there were basic emotions that seem to correlate universally with facial gestures: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and interest. Of all the subtle emotions that people feel and have words and concepts for around he world, only these have consistent correlates in facial expressions across cultures.

It's always a joy to find out that there is some scientific research that proves your sudden insights, if even later it will turn out you both were wrong. :)

Back to facial gestures expressing emotions. Besides different ways to express emotions, there seem to be different defaults on what emotions and how much of them to express. I found my Japanese friend's emotions particularly difficult to read: there was nothing on her face that would provide a clue. Is this how the notion of "Inscrutable Oriental" was born? On contrast, American prosodies sounded exhagerrated and unnatural to my ear, especially when performed by females, making me to think about my interlocutors as insincere. Now I think about them more as "efforts saving" rather then "insincere".

This morning I received The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist book that I ordered on a recommendation of a precious dervish of Blogostan the LanguageLog. On the cover there is a quote from the book's opening pages:

The hook intro: The greatest secret factor in American fiction in the past half-century has been the fiction editor, and, by a huge margin, his history has been one of opportunity either lost or actively destroyed.

The straight intro: This book is about the fiction editor's job -- what he can and cannot be expected to do, and what abilities and training he needs to do it.

The upbeat intro: The fiction editor who has the needed talent and skills can be a combination doctor, teacher, coach, and conscience who could benefit any writer who ever lived.

I read about twenty pages so far, and I am frantic. Its effect, like an effect of any really good book, can be compared to a mind-altering drug -- the world starts look different and unfamiliar.

On the twenty first page I realized that while reading I think on background to whom of my friends I can recommend it. Next I realized that I *always* go that when I read a book I like. And if I really, really like a book, I think to whom of my friends I can send a copy, which is the next best thing I can do to persuade to read it after tying them to a three and holding a book in front of them. "Finished? Next page?"

Why I am doing this? The more I think about it, the more natural it seems. A book without a reader is incomplete, deficient, waiting, like a spy without a mission. And if to think properly, it doesn't even exist.

Annie Murphy Paul reports in October's issue of "Psychology Today" on psychologist William Ickes of the University of Texas at Arlington, research in mind reading. Even though I learnt from my beloved Language bloggers that a journalist can accurately report scientific research only by accident, there is still a lot of food for thought.

It's astonishing that we can peer into each other's minds at all -- but in truth we generally don't do it all that well. Strangers (who are videotaped and later report their second-by-second thoughts and feelings, as well as their assessments of their counterpart's thoughts and feelings) read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20 percent. Close friends and married couples nudge that up to 35 percent. And "almost no one ever scores higher that 60 percent," reports psychologist William Ickes, the father of emphatic accuracy, who is based at the University of Texas at Arlington.

She then names most important components of mindreading: meaning of the words being spoken, facial expressions and body language, the tone of voice and the cadence of speech.

Reading body language is a core component of mind reading. it can reveal a person's most basic emotions. Researchers have shown that when watching a body's movement reduced to points of light on a screen, observers can still read sadness, anger, joy, disgust, fear, and romantic love. We're primed to read emotion into movement -- even when there's very little to go on.

We know even more about someone's mind from the way the components of conversation fit together -- someone's words, gestures, and pitch of voice may seem either aligned or incongruous. But despite all we glean from body language and voice tone, Ickes finds, it's the content of speech that contributes most to our success at mind reading. Words matter.

Among other findings are the facts that women aren't better mind readers than men, and more sensitive people are not either. "Neither are professional listeners: A study of psychics found that they were no better at mind reading that the rest of us. Psychoterapists proved no more accurate than laypeople in making inferences based on facial expressions; however, they're significantly more accurate in making inferences based on language."

And the conclusion:

So what does matter to effective mind reading? Advanced education, hight intelligence (especially verbal intelligence), open-mindness, and good mental healt abet emphathic accuracy.

What does all this have to do with online communication?

I often hear complains from my fellow JavaRanch moderators that it's hard to discern somebody's emotions from their posts. I agree, partly, yet I always felt uneasy about their complains. Here is why: after several years of living in this country, these are my online friends I feel really close to and care most about. How is it possible?

Body language and facial expressions, as well as the tone of voice and the cadence of speech work well only if you share the cultural code, and if you are an immigrant, you do not. Neither facial expressions nor intonations are universal among cultures, or, rather, only most basic are, while subtleties are lost on newcomers. I didn't realize that I tend to dismiss my interlocutors gestes, facial expressions and intonations until I became better in interpreting them.

With online communication, I do not feel inferior because we all are equally lost.

On the other hand, to compensate for lost modes of input I worked hard to develop positive attitude, patience and unconditional love for fellow online communicators. Does all this compensate for lack of clues available in normal communication? I can say that I don't miss them.

A famous Russian expatriate writer said: "America doesn't smell" (a literal translation would be "America doesn't smell nothing.") This reminded me my first years in the US, when I was puzzled over similar experience. I tried to smell something, just something, when walking along sterile American streets, and there was nothing, just nothing to please, or at least upset, my desperate nose.

Then there is a popular Russian song about a fellow emigrant, who smelled "dust of foreign roads, where flowers don't smell and the moon doesn't shine."

Then my Colombian friend complained that American food is terrible. Tasteless. She had to cook everything from scratch. I was certainly able to empathize, because my experience was the same. I knew the food I was eating was damn good, but somehow I couldn't feel much of its taste.

I spent a lot of time contemplating this problem, and finally hacked out a theory. According to my theory, our experience in a new country is overwhelming. It's too much for our brain to process, so our brain shoots down certain modes of perceptions as a mean of self-defense. The most important modes of perceptions, sight and hearing, are left intact and less important, smell and taste, are sacrificed.

Only after several years of expatriate living my long-suffering senses started to return to me.

As for my home country, it doesn't smell as much as it stinks. :)

In today's entry indispensable LanguageHat writes about Elizabeth Little, a language aficionado, whose book Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic will be published by Melville House in November. Simply reading the title of her New York Times' article "Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive" made my heart beat faster.

SOMETIMES we turn to ritual to find peace in the solemnity of routine, in the comfort of regular practice. But occasionally we turn to ritual for another reason: because our favorite activities are just too embarrassing to do in public. My obsession, reading textbooks on foreign languages and memorizing obscure grammatical detail, is ritual of the latter persuasion.
...
When you first meet me, I seem like a pretty normal kind of girl. I drink beer, I follow baseball, I watch “The Daily Show.” I grew up in the Midwest, so I’m pretty nice and well adjusted, but for the last seven years I’ve lived on the East Coast, so I’m not too nice or well adjusted. I like puppies, world peace and George Clooney. All in all, I’m an excellent example of run-of-the-mill.

Until you take a look at my bookshelves, that is.

To which I say: Ate¹ Elizabeth!

I remember a rainy day in Portland, which I devoted to my usual pilgrimage to Powell's bookstore. I went to the Red Room on the second floor, to the linguistic section, to check if there is anything new.

After going through two bookcases of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker I hunted down a book on Korean grammar I haven't seen before. It wasn't "Teach yourself Korean" kind of book, intended for people who want to learn Korean, it was a rigorous yet accessible overview of all main features of Korean language. I started to read and soon the text absorbed me completely, like a prey absorbs a young hungry wolf. I raised my head only after I was done with the book.

This was the first time I realized that something is wrong with me.

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1) "Older sister" in Tagalog.