A propos my previous post, and via the Arbitrary Aardvark, here is an example of Adolf Hitler's work. It doesn't look impressive. Does it improve upon personal viewing?

UPDATE:

Amber Taylor supplies more links to Hitler's art (here) and other Nazi art (here). None of it sets me on fire.

I live in a conservative Kazakh village. Women may wear those thin polyester summer blouses that reveal their bra patterns, but many would never wear a skirt that did not cover their knees. Summer and winter, they walk the streets and head to the bazaar in socks, sandals, and bright patterned clothes that zip up the front; it is only because they are acceptable outside the house that I know they are dresses and not robes. There’s one store—a casino over near the train station—with a neon light. There are no stop lights. I had culture shock after going to Shymkent this weekend.

When I walk around Shymkent, it’s clear I’m not a local. I ask the marshutka to stop at the Tsoom department store, and ask again for the stop to be announced by name. I stare in amazement at the shop windows advertising clothes I actually want but can’t afford. I look at women on the street to tell by their dress what’s fashionable; two part, flat soled mud boots and ten year old maroon coats are out. Women over age of 18 show their knees. I double-take at seeing young Kazakh couples hanging around outside the universities, arm-in-arm, embracing, and even kissing. That doesn’t happen on the streets in my neck of the woods. The only affectionate couples I’ve seen are the handful of Russians, and they haven’t been so demonstrative.

Shymkent has a lot that’s big and speaks of money and disposable incomes and life’s daily luxuries, made convenient. The downtown heart of the town, where I was, isn’t about just trying to get by, but about the freedom to make choices, and maybe a desire to consider emulating another model. Some locals have become quite rich since the fall of the Soviet Union, and I suspect the Gini index shows increasing inequality. For those who can afford it, there are modern Bosch washing machines and steam carpet vacuums; for those who’ve picked up the foreign habit of exercise, one store sells exercise equipment, stationary bikes and weight machines. I had Turkish coffee and crepes with strawberry ice cream in a cafe with wicker patio furniture and neutral wall paintings. It felt like a successful cafe in America, which I suppose was its aim, because the menu was in both Russian and English, and included helpful photos of the food. Westerners come to Shymkent because it’s an oil town, the self-proclaimed Dallas of Kazakhstan, and they come bringing their tastes and their Western salaries. 54% of Shymkent oblast’s taxes are paid by PetroKazakhstan, the oil company that if it’s not British owned, at least has a British management and many Commonwealth workers (taxes, of course, are not paid on the black-market).

My friend and I took a tour of town the easy way: hop on a city bus and stay on has it makes its loop; if it hadn’t been growing dark, we might have repeated on an different route, for it’s a great way to learn the lay of a city. Head north out of the center of town, and you quickly come upon suburban sprawl. It’s marked first by a bright blue building, in the style of Wal-Mart, that’s Gross Supermarket, an Almaty chain. On the left side of the road, the high side, are local McMansions. They are being thrown up in high-walled compounds with wide driveways and no trees. On the right side of the road, the ground level plunges about as many feet as a two-story building is tall. It makes the road feel like an old levee. The right side contains far less new construction. Most of the buildings look like houses in any regular gridded Kazakhstani neighborhood, but interspersed among them are a few of the large castles. Further out of town, near a sad-looking bazaar that doubles as some sort of secondary transportation hub, is the Full Gospel Church It’s not a mega-church yet, but certainly nothing small and storefront. The brick building has a fairly staid modern architecture, so it could pass for a church on any Jefferson Highway in any of the many American cities with land for some sprawl and large parking lots. Back closer to the center of town, there’s a new brewery, less than a month old, opened by a fellow who came here two years ago from Bavaria for just that purpose. I had last had a white beer at the Brickskeller in DC, during the staging when all the volunteers gathered together before flying out to Kazakhstan.

But I didn’t go to the brewery because it had good beer, although I’d go back for that. I went because the owner is active in the local English club. It meets on Friday nights, generally at a less impressive cafe, but that night, the Bavarian had invited the club to come to his new place, and to join him on a brewery tour. The club has about sixty members, and maybe two-thirds of them were there this past Friday. Most are locals, university students and English teachers, who come to practice their conversational English. The others are a motley group of native speakers, speakers of the Queen’s English and the city’s Peace Corps volunteers, and fluent ex-pats from elsewhere, including the French and Germans from the business incubator NGO. A British gentleman from PetroKazakhstan runs the club,

And that British gent from PetroKazakhstan also found the site for the South Kazakhstan volunteers’ Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday night. He wrangled us an invitation to reheat our dishes and serve the food at his boss’s home, a gracious mansion. There were about fifteen volunteers and twelve others, local friends and other ex-pats and a few more of their coworkers. If you have to spend holidays away from home and family, Thanksgiving’s one of the easier major ones to spend in another company of people, so it was a cheerful celebration. The food was wonderful, but for me, the best was what the hosts cooked: a pork roast and a turkey and sausage gumbo. He’s from South Carolina and she from Lake Charles, Louisiana. The Peace Corps regional manager complained that she had trouble understanding their accents, but I felt like I was back at home, except for the rest of the culture shock.

I doubt our hosts expected some of the comments they heard, like the ones fawning over the grass as we first walked in the door. They have a thick green lawn with a discrete irrigation system running through it. I’ve been excited over the few patches of thin grass that have just come with the rainy season, but this was clearly a lawn that did not disappear for most of the year. Now I understand why people want to landscape Arizona. For the first time in country, I had ice cubes made with safe water, to drop in the iced tea and bottled water. Here, the host urged that there was another large bag in the freezer, don’t be afraid to take a few more cubes. I’m not sure if he heard the word being passed around, go the bathroom before you leave, you have to use the soft toilet paper.

And there’s also the shock of talking with ex-pats and Americans, and feeling like this could be a gathering at home. It felt like a holiday party of chemistry department faculty, spouses, and graduate students: a partially international crowd, few if any people are native to the city, some people know each other but many introductions are needed, and many people work together, but enough don’t that it would be out of place to talk work-related gossip and research or plans. I was chatting with a couple from Wales when we realized that we’d all read the same Economist article about Welsh settlers from Patagonia coming back to Wales to perform at cultural festivals. All the volunteers have Newsweek, and books and magazines get passed around pretty efficiently, but this was the first time I’ve read the same article as someone from outside that loop. It felt like home because I could effortlessly sit around and find common ground with strangers, which is easier in a place where everyone’s away from home to some degree, and no one is the one non-local or the newest in-law at a family reunion. I hear Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club are the biggest culture shockers for returned volunteers, but I’m not sure about that. I wonder if finally fitting in again in a crowd might not be it.

New Haven, Conn. -- Rita Dove, the first African-American poet to serve as the nation's Poet Laureate, will read from her poetry on November 30, 4 p.m., at Yale's Battell Chapel, corner of College and Elm streets.

I like the way the British pronounce "t"'s in words borrowed from French. There's something at once comforting and defiant about it. "Claret", the word for Red Bordeaux, or "fillet", for instance. While re-rereading The Return of the King last night, I found again one of my favorites - the word "puissant", referring to Aragorn, now the King Elessar. Wonderful stuff.

Via Carey Cuprisin I see that Toby Stern, Jeremy Blachman, Ambivalent Imbroglio, Buffalo Wings & Vodka and Anthony Rickey have posted their suggestions (5 apiece) about how to improve legal education.

First off, let me note that several of their suggestions have already been implemented by some law schools, namely mine. [Classes of ~16 students in the first year, transcripts that provide little informative information about grades, diversity of paths among elite students, focus on transnational law, a pass/fail first semester, (unintentional) elimination of some classroom wireless access (like, unfortunately, in Torts today), cookies during class (sometimes), and a strong push toward judicial clerkships.] I don't mean this to brag-- I don't think all of these things are a good idea at all, I just mention them to emphasize that none of them are hard changes to make.

Speaking of bad ideas, the bloggerss, between their good ideas, have several I'd like to take issue with:

Ambimb suggests that we should "Drown professors in fines and peer opprobrium when they encourage students to become evil - even or especially when such encouragement is only implicit." From Ambimb's explanation I presume (hope) that "evil" is limited to cheating, stealing, killing, etc. Then again, Ambimb also names lying, which is definitely bad in a lot of circumstances, but which other people are more hesitant about condemning across the board. Anyway, encouraging folks in a discipline already heavily charged with morality, politics, and moral opprobrium to fine one another for being "evil" sounds like a recipe for derrogation of the fundamental ideals of a great university.

Buffalo Wings and Vodka suggests, "Make Legal Research & Writing a Real Class:" My experience is limited, but it suggests the exact opposite. Here, LR&W isn't a class at all; writing a memo, several drafts of a brief, a bunch of research assignments, and giving an oral argument are simply necessary components of a normal 1-L class. (In my case, Con Law.) The result is a writing project that isn't completely divorced from anything else one has been learning, professors and T.A.s who are intelligent and excited about the material, and not some weird sense that "Legal Writing" is this arcane process unrelated to the other arcanities we learn here. My judgment here is partially contingent-- the Legal Writing classes I've heard reports of most places have been abject failures, maybe because Legal Writing isn't a serious discipline of academic study in the way that, say, Torts or Contracts or Con Law or Procedure are.

Also from BW&V:

4. Get Rid of Open-Book Exams:

In law school as we know it today, everyone has a friend that it's in an older class, and every friend knows someone who took every class, and at least one of those people is going to have an outline that is of publishable quality. So we all walk into exams with these massive binders that are tabbed and indexed and have charts and graphs and pop-up pages and advertising in them, and it's just ridiculous.

Go back to closed-book exams. Go back to a system where I'm only responsible for as much as I can cram into my head. As things stand now, I'm carrying so much into an exam with me that I can barely get through the door, let alone get it all on paper.