On vanishing and Peckinpah

[icarus]

Sorry to vanish for a little bit. School starts tomorrow at 9:30 sharp and I've been running around doing all the things I should have been doing during this break, heh.

I've just skimmed my Sanskrit textbook. It looks like it's a (relatively) new approach that doesn't assume you're a linguist. It also looks like it takes an entire year of study to master the complexities of the grammar. (Excuse me while I panic: holy hell.) They do have you speak it, though. Sanskrit isn't a "living" language as it's not used in conversation by any people, but it's not a "dead" language in that it's still spoken in several spiritual traditions (Buddhism included).

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No one can do Peckinpah.

I'm watching a movie compared to Peckinpah, and it isn't. It's just gratuitous violence. The film maker enjoyed the violence, made it gory for no apparent reason.

Pekinpah's never gratitous.

You see, underneath the violence in Peckinpah is honesty. He never lets you forget for one moment that war is cruel, and brutal, and senseless, and unfair. Bravery exists, but it exists in spite of violence, not because of it.

Peckinpah takes your illusions about heroism and throws them away as he grabs the back of your head and shoves your face into reality. In Cross of Iron, as the hero bravely returns to battle, Peckinpah doesn't give you glory -- the camera instead zooms in on a body flattened into the dirt as their vehicle rolls over it. And stays there. After each gun battle in The Wild Bunch the action stops for a series of funerals. There's a cost to the violence, and mourning.

A Buddhist friend of mine thought Peckinpah was very compassionate, and I agree. I respect someone who tells me the truth.

Comments

[mad_maudlin]

Hey, look at it like this: at Truman, it takes a year to get all the grammar of Latin and Russian, more than a year for Greek, and we never made it more than halfway through my Hebrew book (though not for lack of trying). And note that Russian, at least, goes at breakneck speed. It just comes with the territory of having a synthetic morphology. Chin up! ::waves pompoms::

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

But- but... it takes a year to get a simplified grammar of Sanskrit down. You don't even really start building a vocabulary until your second year. Even in Japanese (not an easy language) you can divide your time between building vocabulary and grammar.

Latin and Russian are good comparisons: they both have complex systems of declensions. The good news is that once I've done Sanskrit for a while, Tibetan is going to seem so gratifyingly easy.

I admit, though, this has me wondering if I can do this. Even the textbook, at some of the harder sections, has the words "Don't panic" written in large friendly letters.

Icarus

[greenling.livejournal.com]

If it helps, it could really be worse.

I'm in the first half of second-year Greek. We started with thirty people at the beginning of the first year, and now we have five. None of us remembered anything beyond the basic indicative verb forms and some of the noun declensions. There was maybe a handful of vocabulary terms, enough to write "the man is leading the cow".

There is a person in my Greek class, a good friend, who has been taking about seven classes a semester. He takes multiple 400-level Latin and English classes and 300-level German and math and so forth at the same time, and had a 4.0.

"Had", as in for about two years, until first-year Greek killed it.

You can handle Sanskrit. Obey the large friendly letters. :D

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

My degree requires two years of an Asian language. Because of my interest in Buddhism and Tibetan language (which borrows heavily from Sanskrit and uses many Sanskrit mantras and terms) I've opted for Sanskrit. In Buddhism the study of Sanskrit is considered a spiritual practice which accumulates merit.

I've deliberately kept the quarter rather light -- my other two classes are Creative Writing and Ethnomusicology (watch the Music class turn out to be the hard one) -- and doing NaNoWriMo might be a pipe dream this November, I dunno.

Nonetheless, I'm terrified. I am not one of those people who are "gifted with language." In English and writing I'm good, yes, but foreign languages I've been a consistent B/B+ student since first grade.

The good news is my teacher is a specialist in Buddhism, so I'm thrilled just to meet and talk to her.

I'm going to recite the Sanskrit declensions and I'm going to subvocalize as I write them. Hopefully that will help.

Icarus