tingilinde

a dinner with a special guest

One of those classic New Yorker pieces by Paul Theroux 

 

the wolves of karelia

Thinking about Ukraine I recalled this short story that appeared in The Atlantic a few years ago..

snip

...

I’ve liked only two nicknames in my entire life. My father and mother both called me Simuna, which means “God has listened,” though I suspect what they each imagined he heard was different. It was M, though, who first called me Kettuseni, “my little fox.” When I think of those 98 days in the forest, I hear only that name. When I dream of M now, I wake myself sometimes, the sound of it floating around the room, before I understand that my own lips uttered it.

Our regiment commander, Lieutenant Juutilainen, was known far and wide as the Terror of Morocco, due to his time there with the French Foreign Legion, fighting the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains. We ourselves called him Papa. He was a quiet man with a sad, clownish face who spent most of his time drinking in his officer’s tent, where it was warmest and where he let me sleep between my hunts. This was more or less how he’d spent his time in the Atlases too, I gathered: drinking to stay warm in the frigid air, then venturing out for a whole day of stalking the slopes with his rifle and skis. By the time the Soviets shelled Mainila, though, his flurries of activity took place in the command tent. When the Russians began pouring toward our lines, and Major General Hägglund asked his famous question, I myself watched as Papa gave his famous response: “Yes, Kollaa holds. Unless our orders are to run away.”

...

 

 

from john mcphee

Tabula Rasa from the current issue of The New Yorker.

  One of my favorite authors.

 

 

 

a look at the maus ban

Looking at what's behind it and what it means.  An interview with Hillary Chute.

snip

...

One of the board members, who was pushing successfully to take the book out of the curriculum said “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids. Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” So that kind of answers the question about what’s really going on.

To me, as an English professor and a Maus scholar, and someone who teaches Critical Race Theory, it really jibes with a lot of the reasoning that we’ve been hearing from certain politicians and school boards and parents about not teaching books about slavery. This idea that we don’t need to encounter hard aspects of history in school curricula, is, in my view, deeply misguided. It links the banning of Maus with similar bans and attempts to ban books that fall under the rubric of so-called Critical Race Theory. The problem is that what these books and these words are depicting is historical fact, and the people who want to ban them don’t want their students to encounter history. That just seems like the wrong way to go, to put it mildly.

...

a tip of the at to Pat

 

Its fundamentally about the need to take control of history and rewrite it.  America is fracturing into ethnostates.

 

 

 

 

a recitation

I learned this in Jr High School.  Neil's reading is approximately better

language changes

And American English is changing right now.  

snip

...

I know some find it wearying. Why does language have to change all the time with all we have to think about? But we are not unique: There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet, and they get through it. In the 1700s, English speakers had to get used to a new idea that double and triple negatives were “wrong.” Shakespeare could write, “There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof” for Falstaff in “Henry IV, Part II,” but now we had to deal with the idea that two negatives signify a positive, despite no one being taught this aboutFrench and countless other languages.

In standard English, “thou” as the singular second-person pronoun fell away and one used “you” in both singular and plural. For a while, people used singular verb forms with “you.” John and Abigail Adams did it all the time. “I wish you was nearer to us,” wrote Abigail — these days embodied in our minds as, say, Laura Linney’s prim portrayal — in 1775. But grammarians didn’t like it, so people had to shape up and start saying even to one person “you were.”

...

 

 

good omens 2

Probably great news for fans of Good Omens.  Probably in the sense that Sir Terry is gone, but sketches were made ..  

 

pi day

At least in the US..  the rest of the world is on the more accurate 22/7..

Pi
by Wisława Szymborska

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.

 

BEATles

The connection between the Beats and the Beatles.

 

on yesterday

 

"A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.