In that previous post, I provided a brief history of this blog.
In this post here, I will tell about myself and about my interest in writing such a blog.
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At the University of Oregon in the early 1970s I majored in Slavic Languages and Literature, which was managed by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages. I never had been interested in literature; I was interested mostly in the history and politics of the Communist countries. If I wanted to get a degree in that major, however, then I had to complete a lot literature courses.
In order to get my Masters Degree, I had to complete one seminar in Slavic or Germanic literature. The only seminar that fit into my schedule was on the subject of Germanic playwrights (e.g. Georg Büchner, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg).
I had practically no interest in this subject, but this seminar ultimately influenced me more than any other class that I took at the university. The seminar's novelty for me was that all my classmates there were graduate students who majored in literature and who discussed literature enthusiastically and intelligently. This was the first time in my life when I felt captivated and challenged by discussions about literature.
Before then, I had viewed literature majors rather contemptuously, but now I recognized their intelligence and value.
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After my university studies, I joined the US Air Force, where I served 14 years. During that time, I primarily interviewed emigrants from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. I myself interviewed emigrants, and eventually I supervised other people who interviewed emigrants.
Most of those emigrants whom I myself interviewed were Russian Jews. (I was able to interview people in Russian, Czech, Polish and German.) Because of those interviews, I became rather interested in Jewish history and culture.
After the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact fell apart in 1991, I decided to leave the military. For the following ten years, I worked as a contract translator, translating historical documents about the Holocaust for the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations. That office investigated, prosecuted and deported Slavs who had collaborated with Nazi Germany to persecute Jews and who later immigrated fraudulently to the United States after World War Two.
That translating work ended for me in the early 2000s. Since then I have worked in the administration of a home-health-care agency that was founded by Russian immigrants.
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I watched the movie Dirty Dancing during its opening weekend in August 1987. At that time I was divorced from my first wife and was courting the woman who would become my second wife. During that interval between marriages, I became newly interested in social dancing.
I liked the movie very much, not only for its dancing, but also for its Jewish subtext.
My second marriage ended in divorce too, and I married a third woman. In the fall of 2008, she and I were in a video store selecting a DVD to watch, and she selected Dirty Dancing. I watched not only the movie but also all the voice-over commentaries included in the DVD's extra features.
That experience prompted me to begin writing this blog.
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About twenty years ago, I began to study classic English literature -- such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Milton.
Before that beginning, I never had read any such works -- in particular, Shakespeare's plays. Now I have read most of his plays. When I study a play, I read it carefully at least three times, along with scholarly commentaries.
I study literature this way now because of how I was profoundly influenced by that seminar in Germanic playwrights that I attended more than four decades ago. I want to develop an intellectual understanding of classic literary works. I aspire to measure up belatedly to the literature majors who profoundly impressed me in that graduate-level seminar.
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I write this blog about the movie Dirty Dancing because I want to share my enthusiasm for studying literary works. Most people who happen onto this blog perceive me to be a kook wasting my time. They browse through my blog for a short while and then go away to other, more interesting places in the Internet.
I think that I have perhaps only about a dozen regular readers at any given time. These regular readers keep reading my blog for at least a few months. As one such reader eventually abandons my blog, he is replaced by another new regular reader. Thus the number of regular readers remains at about a dozen.
If I feel that a dozen people are reading me regularly, then I feel that my effort is worthwhile. After all, even Jesus Christ had only twelve disciples.
I am 65 years old, I have no biological children, and in a few years I will die broke. I hope that my long blog about this one movie might challenge some young people to devote themselves to literary studies at a highly intellectual level. Within the concept of "literary studies", I include written literature, music, visual arts, theater, cinema and so forth.
Study the classics. Master the study of one genre or of one artist or of just one work. Then share your enthusiastic, expert understanding with other people. These are worthwhile activities that might make you happy with your own life -- a life of appreciating the liberal arts.
That's why I keep writing this blog.
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| Looking into the future pensively |
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The right margin of this blog had some opinion polls about abortion and about possible sequels to the movie. The Blogger developers eliminated all opinion polls, without warning, at the beginning of June.
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I welcome suggestions for articles, and I welcome submitted articles. If you want to submit an article, I prefer (but do not require) that you submit it as plain text (I will format it).
I welcome comments. If you want to make a general comment about the blog, then this post here is a good place to do so.
If you want to contact me outside of a comment, send me an e-mail at MikeSylwester@gmail.com
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