Y2/D356...
Mar. 7th, 2022 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAh the countdown to Y3 begins, which I'm not doing. So this daily log is ending at Y/D365. After D365, we're going back to our previously scheduled programming on this journal - which is basically me posting whenever and whatever I please. It could be anything really. It's not all that different than what I'm doing now - just not necessarily every day.
Good news? BYT approved my vacation day for Wednesday. So, I get my birthday off at least. Also got the Addendum out. (I had to fight to get the thing out - with BB and BYT's help. We were having fun with charts today - we work for a state agency and they are not only very bureaucratic, but also insanely disorganized, with poor tracking systems, and constant charts tracking things...which no one can make heads or tails of. This in a nutshell is why pure socialism is a bad idea. If you think the government is better at running things than corporations? You'd be wrong. It's kind of a toss-up honestly, I'm not sure which is worse half the time.)
[Mother felt the need to tell me that my brother came down into the city on Sunday to visit friends - it was a party of sorts, and the restaurant was more crowded than they anticipated - although the vaccine requirement was in effect. They stayed the night in a hotel - and went home the next morning. I'm very glad I can experience NYC without spending money on a hotel. Hotel's are bloody expensive in this city. Mother likes to gossip.]
***
We discussed West Side Story at work today. Mel agreed with me, and was very pleased that I had the same take on the film that she and her husband did (he's Latino). Which was the 1961 film was the better adaptation.
Waiting to get Gabe's take.
**
Chidi had mixed feelings about Batman. He told me I might like it better than he did and should see it in the theater - since it's beautifully shot. I decided to wait for it to come out on HBO Max - it's too violent, and I'd rather not watch a dark, violent action movie at the moment on a big screen. My first movie theater post-Omnicron is calling to be Doctor Strange and the Multi-Verse of Madness, I think.
***
Plodding away on my revisions of my 800 page novel. We'll see where it goes. Or if I continue. The scarf that I'm knitting doesn't look too bad. Although I think my counting got off somewhere in there.
***
I looked at the news, it's depressing. Wales feels the need to keep me apprised of the nastiness in the news. She's worse than my mother, who has actually gotten better now that my father is in the long-term facility more or less permanently. (Alzhiemer's is a horrible disease, there is no cure, and all you can do is make the person as comfortable as possible. Mother can't take care of him - hence the long-care facility.)
Regarding the Ukraine. I live in NYC, we have a lot of Ukrainian immigrants in NYC. At the company that I worked for prior to crazy org - aka the video game company, I was seated next to a woman who had immigrated from the Ukraine. She was lovely and kind, and we had long conversations about her homeland - and why she left. Also how Russia had destroyed it prior to the Ukraine finally claiming its independence - this was in the early 00s.
Anyhow...Crazy Org asked for medical supplies - but it was the agency in Manhattan that was requesting them (Transit), so I couldn't do anything.
Here's an interesting article I found via Twitter on the Ilya Kaminisky on Ukrainan, Russian, and the Language of War
A crowd, including local media, was gathered around Boris as he spoke out against the bombings, against yet another fake humanitarian aid campaign of Putin’s. Some clapped; others shook their heads in disapproval. A few months later, the doors, floors, and windows of Boris’s apartment were blown up.
There are many stories like this. They’re often shared in short, hurried sentences, and then the subject is changed abruptly.
“Truthful war books,” Orwell wrote, “are never acceptable to non-combatants.”
When Americans ask about recent events in Ukraine, I think of these lines from Boris’s poem:
people carry explosives around the city
in plastic shopping bags and little suitcases.
****
Over the last twenty years, Ukraine has been governed by both the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West. The government periodically uses “the language issue” to incite conflict and violence, an effective distraction from the real problems at hand. The most recent conflict arose in response to the inadequate policies of President Yanukovych, who has since escaped to Russia. Yanukovych was universally acknowledged as the most corrupt president the country has ever known (he’d been charged with rape and assault, among other things, all the way back to Soviet times). However, these days, Ukraine’s new government continues to include oligarchs and professional politicians with shrewd pedigrees and questionable motivations.
When the standoff between the Yanukovych government and crowds of protesters first began in 2013, and the embattled President left the country shortly thereafter, Putin sent his troops into Crimea, a Ukrainian territory, under the pretext of passionately protecting the Russian-speaking population. Soon, the territory was annexed. In a few months, under the pretext of humanitarian aid, more Russian military forces were sent into another Ukrainian territory, Donbas, where a proxy war has began.
All along the protection of Russian language was continually cited as the sole reason for the annexation and hostilities.
Does the Russian language in Ukraine need this protection? In response to Putin’s occupation, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians chose to stand with their Ukrainian- speaking neighbors, rather than against them. When the conflict began to ramp up, I received this e-mail:
I, Boris Khersonsky, work at Odessa National University where I have directed the department of clinical psychology since 1996. All that time I have been teaching in Russian, and no one has ever reprimanded me for “ignoring” the official Ukrainian language of the state. I am more or less proficient in the Ukrainian language, but most of my students prefer lectures in Russian, and so I lecture in that language.
I am a Russian language poet; my books have been published mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. My scholarly work has been published there as well.
Never (do you hear me—NEVER!) did anyone go after me for being a Russian poet and for teaching in Russian language in Ukraine. Everywhere I read my poems in RUSSIAN and never did I encounter any complications.
However, tomorrow I will read my lectures in the state language—Ukrainian. This won’t be merely a lecture—it will be a protest action in solidarity with the Ukrainian state. I call for my colleagues to join me in this action.
A Russian-language poet refuses to lecture in Russian as an act of solidarity with occupied Ukraine. As time passed, other such emails began to arrive from poets and friends. My cousin Peter wrote from Odessa:
Our souls are worried, and we are frightened, but the city is safe. Once in a while some idiots rise up and announce that they are for Russia. But we in Odessa never told anyone that we are against Russia. Let Russians do whatever they want in their Moscow and let them love our Odessa as much as they want—but not with this circus of soldiers and tanks!
Another friend, the Russian-speaking poet Anastasia Afanasieva, wrote from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv about Putin’s “humanitarian aid” campaign to protect her language:
In the past five years, I visited the Ukrainian-speaking Western Ukraine six times. I have never felt discriminated against because I spoke the Russian language. Those are myths. In all the cities of Western Ukraine I have visited, I spoke with everyone in Russian—in stores, in trains, in cafes. I have found new friends. Far from feeling aggression, everyone instead treated me with respect. I beg you, do not listen to the propaganda. Its purpose is to separate us. We are already very different, let’s not become opposite, let’s not create a war on the territory where we all live together. The military invasion which is taking place right now is the catastrophe for us all. Let’s not lose our minds, let’s not be afraid of non-existent threats, when there is a real threat: the Russian army’s invasion.
As I read the letter after letter I couldn’t stop thinking about Boris’s refusal to speak his own language as an act of protest against the military invasion. What does it mean for a poet to refuse to speak his own language?
Is language a place you can leave? Is language a wall you can cross? What is on the other side of that wall?
4.
Every poet refuses the onslaught of language. This refusal manifests itself in silence illuminated by the meanings of poetic lexis—the meanings not of what the word says, but of what it withholds. As Maurice Blanchot wrote, “To write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely.”
The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us.
Ukraine today is a place where statements like this one are put to the test. Another writer, John Berger, says this about the relationship of a person to one’s language: “One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home.” He insisted that it was “the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man . . . One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god.” But what happens when a poet refuses his language as a form of protest?
Or, to put this question in broader terms: what happens to language in wartime? Abstractions very quickly attain physical attributes. This is how the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska sees her own body watching the war around her: Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in. The poet Kateryna Kalytko’s war is also a physical body: War often comes along and lies down between you like a child / afraid to be left alone.
The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us: the poet Anastasia Afanasieva writes using the first-person plural “we,” showing us how the occupation of a country affects all its citizens, no matter which language they speak:
when a four-wheeler with a mortar
passed down the street
we didn’t ask who are you
whose side are you on
we fell down on the floor and lay there.
5.
On another visit to Ukraine, I saw a former neighbor of mine, now crippled by war, holding his hand out on the street. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. As I hurried by, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me, I was suddenly brought up short by his empty hand. As if he were handing me his war.
As I walked away from him, I had an eerie feeling of recognition. How similar his voice, the voices of the Ukrainian poets I’ve been speaking with, to the voices of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose houses my own tax money has destroyed.
*****
Thunderstorm. Lightening. Hard rain. Wind. And the smell of the tropics.
Yet, it is winter in NYC. However, it smells like Florida at the moment.
I like the smell of rain, particularly warm rain.
Been quick to tears of late. Very weepy. Not sure why. Most likely menopause.
NYC has decided to lift the vaccine and mask mandates in restaurants, and indoor establishments - dammit. Just when I was getting up the courage to see a movie or a Broadway show, or go out to eat. The Mayor thinks this will encourage a return to normalcy and more people will go out to eat, etc. (Uhm no.)
Mother tells me that my brother feels the same way that I do. That he doesn't want to travel either.
Me: And yet he is.
Mother: Well, yes and no. He is coming down to help me, and he did travel into the city by train to see friends, and they'll go out in June to pick up their daughter from the UK, but no plans to do anything over there.
Me: Meanwhile I've not been anywhere but my workplace and back, and well Hilton Head in December, and Valatie, NY in July, but not sure that counts.
The worst bit? Mother is scared to go to church. It has no restrictions, no vaccine mandates, no masks, people can do whatever they want. And she can't afford to get COVID or get sick for that matter - she has teeth and knee surgery coming up, plus is visiting my father. Getting sick in December - scared her. And she got sick because of her stupid church. It scared both of us. [Bad Catholics. Bad.]
I've decided her Catholic Church is being very bad. (I was raised Catholic even though I am Unitarian Universalist). It's not being a good Christian or Catholic denomination. It's selfish. Instead of putting public health, the health of the community, the elderly, and others first - it's putting its own greed and convenience first.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Universe aka God would still "smite" bad people and organizations? Like in the old testament stories? You don't wear masks and don't get vaccinated and infect someone with COVID? SMITE! SMITE! Or you preach Putin was right to go to war with the Ukraine? SMITE! SMITE! Or you allow idiots to wander about your church without masks or vaccination? SMITE! SMITE!
Of course we'd probably all be dead, but still.
[Note I don't believe that God ever smited things, or any of that biblical stuff, I'm joking. I think the Bible is mostly a work of fiction or mythology. I don't take it that seriously. ]
**
Eh, here...have a picture:
Good news? BYT approved my vacation day for Wednesday. So, I get my birthday off at least. Also got the Addendum out. (I had to fight to get the thing out - with BB and BYT's help. We were having fun with charts today - we work for a state agency and they are not only very bureaucratic, but also insanely disorganized, with poor tracking systems, and constant charts tracking things...which no one can make heads or tails of. This in a nutshell is why pure socialism is a bad idea. If you think the government is better at running things than corporations? You'd be wrong. It's kind of a toss-up honestly, I'm not sure which is worse half the time.)
[Mother felt the need to tell me that my brother came down into the city on Sunday to visit friends - it was a party of sorts, and the restaurant was more crowded than they anticipated - although the vaccine requirement was in effect. They stayed the night in a hotel - and went home the next morning. I'm very glad I can experience NYC without spending money on a hotel. Hotel's are bloody expensive in this city. Mother likes to gossip.]
***
We discussed West Side Story at work today. Mel agreed with me, and was very pleased that I had the same take on the film that she and her husband did (he's Latino). Which was the 1961 film was the better adaptation.
Waiting to get Gabe's take.
**
Chidi had mixed feelings about Batman. He told me I might like it better than he did and should see it in the theater - since it's beautifully shot. I decided to wait for it to come out on HBO Max - it's too violent, and I'd rather not watch a dark, violent action movie at the moment on a big screen. My first movie theater post-Omnicron is calling to be Doctor Strange and the Multi-Verse of Madness, I think.
***
Plodding away on my revisions of my 800 page novel. We'll see where it goes. Or if I continue. The scarf that I'm knitting doesn't look too bad. Although I think my counting got off somewhere in there.
***
I looked at the news, it's depressing. Wales feels the need to keep me apprised of the nastiness in the news. She's worse than my mother, who has actually gotten better now that my father is in the long-term facility more or less permanently. (Alzhiemer's is a horrible disease, there is no cure, and all you can do is make the person as comfortable as possible. Mother can't take care of him - hence the long-care facility.)
Regarding the Ukraine. I live in NYC, we have a lot of Ukrainian immigrants in NYC. At the company that I worked for prior to crazy org - aka the video game company, I was seated next to a woman who had immigrated from the Ukraine. She was lovely and kind, and we had long conversations about her homeland - and why she left. Also how Russia had destroyed it prior to the Ukraine finally claiming its independence - this was in the early 00s.
Anyhow...Crazy Org asked for medical supplies - but it was the agency in Manhattan that was requesting them (Transit), so I couldn't do anything.
Here's an interesting article I found via Twitter on the Ilya Kaminisky on Ukrainan, Russian, and the Language of War
A crowd, including local media, was gathered around Boris as he spoke out against the bombings, against yet another fake humanitarian aid campaign of Putin’s. Some clapped; others shook their heads in disapproval. A few months later, the doors, floors, and windows of Boris’s apartment were blown up.
There are many stories like this. They’re often shared in short, hurried sentences, and then the subject is changed abruptly.
“Truthful war books,” Orwell wrote, “are never acceptable to non-combatants.”
When Americans ask about recent events in Ukraine, I think of these lines from Boris’s poem:
people carry explosives around the city
in plastic shopping bags and little suitcases.
****
Over the last twenty years, Ukraine has been governed by both the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West. The government periodically uses “the language issue” to incite conflict and violence, an effective distraction from the real problems at hand. The most recent conflict arose in response to the inadequate policies of President Yanukovych, who has since escaped to Russia. Yanukovych was universally acknowledged as the most corrupt president the country has ever known (he’d been charged with rape and assault, among other things, all the way back to Soviet times). However, these days, Ukraine’s new government continues to include oligarchs and professional politicians with shrewd pedigrees and questionable motivations.
When the standoff between the Yanukovych government and crowds of protesters first began in 2013, and the embattled President left the country shortly thereafter, Putin sent his troops into Crimea, a Ukrainian territory, under the pretext of passionately protecting the Russian-speaking population. Soon, the territory was annexed. In a few months, under the pretext of humanitarian aid, more Russian military forces were sent into another Ukrainian territory, Donbas, where a proxy war has began.
All along the protection of Russian language was continually cited as the sole reason for the annexation and hostilities.
Does the Russian language in Ukraine need this protection? In response to Putin’s occupation, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians chose to stand with their Ukrainian- speaking neighbors, rather than against them. When the conflict began to ramp up, I received this e-mail:
I, Boris Khersonsky, work at Odessa National University where I have directed the department of clinical psychology since 1996. All that time I have been teaching in Russian, and no one has ever reprimanded me for “ignoring” the official Ukrainian language of the state. I am more or less proficient in the Ukrainian language, but most of my students prefer lectures in Russian, and so I lecture in that language.
I am a Russian language poet; my books have been published mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. My scholarly work has been published there as well.
Never (do you hear me—NEVER!) did anyone go after me for being a Russian poet and for teaching in Russian language in Ukraine. Everywhere I read my poems in RUSSIAN and never did I encounter any complications.
However, tomorrow I will read my lectures in the state language—Ukrainian. This won’t be merely a lecture—it will be a protest action in solidarity with the Ukrainian state. I call for my colleagues to join me in this action.
A Russian-language poet refuses to lecture in Russian as an act of solidarity with occupied Ukraine. As time passed, other such emails began to arrive from poets and friends. My cousin Peter wrote from Odessa:
Our souls are worried, and we are frightened, but the city is safe. Once in a while some idiots rise up and announce that they are for Russia. But we in Odessa never told anyone that we are against Russia. Let Russians do whatever they want in their Moscow and let them love our Odessa as much as they want—but not with this circus of soldiers and tanks!
Another friend, the Russian-speaking poet Anastasia Afanasieva, wrote from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv about Putin’s “humanitarian aid” campaign to protect her language:
In the past five years, I visited the Ukrainian-speaking Western Ukraine six times. I have never felt discriminated against because I spoke the Russian language. Those are myths. In all the cities of Western Ukraine I have visited, I spoke with everyone in Russian—in stores, in trains, in cafes. I have found new friends. Far from feeling aggression, everyone instead treated me with respect. I beg you, do not listen to the propaganda. Its purpose is to separate us. We are already very different, let’s not become opposite, let’s not create a war on the territory where we all live together. The military invasion which is taking place right now is the catastrophe for us all. Let’s not lose our minds, let’s not be afraid of non-existent threats, when there is a real threat: the Russian army’s invasion.
As I read the letter after letter I couldn’t stop thinking about Boris’s refusal to speak his own language as an act of protest against the military invasion. What does it mean for a poet to refuse to speak his own language?
Is language a place you can leave? Is language a wall you can cross? What is on the other side of that wall?
4.
Every poet refuses the onslaught of language. This refusal manifests itself in silence illuminated by the meanings of poetic lexis—the meanings not of what the word says, but of what it withholds. As Maurice Blanchot wrote, “To write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely.”
The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us.
Ukraine today is a place where statements like this one are put to the test. Another writer, John Berger, says this about the relationship of a person to one’s language: “One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home.” He insisted that it was “the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man . . . One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god.” But what happens when a poet refuses his language as a form of protest?
Or, to put this question in broader terms: what happens to language in wartime? Abstractions very quickly attain physical attributes. This is how the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska sees her own body watching the war around her: Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in. The poet Kateryna Kalytko’s war is also a physical body: War often comes along and lies down between you like a child / afraid to be left alone.
The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us: the poet Anastasia Afanasieva writes using the first-person plural “we,” showing us how the occupation of a country affects all its citizens, no matter which language they speak:
when a four-wheeler with a mortar
passed down the street
we didn’t ask who are you
whose side are you on
we fell down on the floor and lay there.
5.
On another visit to Ukraine, I saw a former neighbor of mine, now crippled by war, holding his hand out on the street. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. As I hurried by, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me, I was suddenly brought up short by his empty hand. As if he were handing me his war.
As I walked away from him, I had an eerie feeling of recognition. How similar his voice, the voices of the Ukrainian poets I’ve been speaking with, to the voices of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose houses my own tax money has destroyed.
*****
Thunderstorm. Lightening. Hard rain. Wind. And the smell of the tropics.
Yet, it is winter in NYC. However, it smells like Florida at the moment.
I like the smell of rain, particularly warm rain.
Been quick to tears of late. Very weepy. Not sure why. Most likely menopause.
NYC has decided to lift the vaccine and mask mandates in restaurants, and indoor establishments - dammit. Just when I was getting up the courage to see a movie or a Broadway show, or go out to eat. The Mayor thinks this will encourage a return to normalcy and more people will go out to eat, etc. (Uhm no.)
Mother tells me that my brother feels the same way that I do. That he doesn't want to travel either.
Me: And yet he is.
Mother: Well, yes and no. He is coming down to help me, and he did travel into the city by train to see friends, and they'll go out in June to pick up their daughter from the UK, but no plans to do anything over there.
Me: Meanwhile I've not been anywhere but my workplace and back, and well Hilton Head in December, and Valatie, NY in July, but not sure that counts.
The worst bit? Mother is scared to go to church. It has no restrictions, no vaccine mandates, no masks, people can do whatever they want. And she can't afford to get COVID or get sick for that matter - she has teeth and knee surgery coming up, plus is visiting my father. Getting sick in December - scared her. And she got sick because of her stupid church. It scared both of us. [Bad Catholics. Bad.]
I've decided her Catholic Church is being very bad. (I was raised Catholic even though I am Unitarian Universalist). It's not being a good Christian or Catholic denomination. It's selfish. Instead of putting public health, the health of the community, the elderly, and others first - it's putting its own greed and convenience first.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Universe aka God would still "smite" bad people and organizations? Like in the old testament stories? You don't wear masks and don't get vaccinated and infect someone with COVID? SMITE! SMITE! Or you preach Putin was right to go to war with the Ukraine? SMITE! SMITE! Or you allow idiots to wander about your church without masks or vaccination? SMITE! SMITE!
Of course we'd probably all be dead, but still.
[Note I don't believe that God ever smited things, or any of that biblical stuff, I'm joking. I think the Bible is mostly a work of fiction or mythology. I don't take it that seriously. ]
**
Eh, here...have a picture:
no subject
Date: 2022-03-08 10:50 pm (UTC)