Tag Archives: Ukraine

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

On the West Side of the Red Sea

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I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this week, and I’m having a hard time flipping over to the bright side of things. That’s where I’m going to lay the blame anyway.

He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart.

We should go, Papa. Can we go?

This year, as was last year, is going to be filled with difficult news. I’m asking myself, on which side of the Red Sea am I going stand, the west side or the east? Will I ask, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness” or say, “The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation” (Exodus 14:11; 15:2 ESV)?

I’m on the west side today, but I can see the east bank from here.

Let’s move on.

Ukraine: “Talking with Ukraine’s own ‘Generation of Fire’ who came of age during the past decade of Russian aggression against their country reveals a keen understanding of the hand they’ve been dealt, despite moments of despair or near disillusionment.”

“We’re faced with paying for the mistakes of previous generations,” Serhiy, a 21 year-old from Chernivtsi, lamented.

From the Shadows: Gina Delfonzo reviews the paintings and stories found in Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women by Hannah Rose Thomas. “I am so happy. I have never held a pencil in my life before, and this is the first time I have been able to write my name and even to draw my face!”

Poem: Here’s a poem that could be plucked from a fairy tale by Marly Youmans (via The Palace at 2:00 a.m.)

Real Food: Advocates for the environment need to wake up and enjoy the bacon. “They strive to protect bees from suffering by embracing policies that will extinguish all bees; they embrace no-animal policies that in the name of animal welfare will end all livestock animals being alive—and with them, the manure upon which plant agriculture has always depended will vanish.”

Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, The Press

‘Unsure Whether We Have the Right to Talk’

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From “The Interrogation” in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (alt link – Internet Archive)

My interrogator had used no methods on me other than sleeplessness, lies, and threats — all completely legal. Therefore, in the course of the “206” procedure, he didn’t have to shove at me — as did interrogators who had made a mess of things and wanted to play safe — a document on nondisclosure for me to sign: that I, the undersigned, under pain of criminal penalty, swore never to tell anyone about the methods used in conducting my interrogation. (No one knows, incidentally, what article of the Code this comes under.)

In several of the provincial administrations of the NKVD this measure was carried out in sequence: the typed statement on nondisclosure was shoved at a prisoner along with the verdict of the OSO. And later a similar document was shoved at prisoners being released from camp, whereby they guaranteed never to disclose to anyone the state of affairs in camp.

And so? Our habit of obedience, our bent (or broken) backbone, did not suffer us either to reject this gangster method of burying loose ends or even to be enraged by it.

We have lost the measure of freedom. We have no means of determining where it begins and where it ends. We are an Asiatic people. On and on and on they go, taking from us those endless pledges of nondisclosure — everyone not too lazy to ask for them.

By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.

I worry we’re getting to this point of silencing ourselves without Soviet interrogation.

The Press: CBS has reportedly “confiscated the records of” Catherine Herridge after firing her last month. Many suspect she wasn’t toeing the narrative line (or kissing the ring of the Right Side of History).

Ukraine: The aggressive invasion of Ukraine began two years ago this week. “. . . you have to gather all your strength and keep living — it’s easy to go mad from the onslaught of emotions and experiences. Sometimes I feel like we’ve all collectively gone mad.”

Real Men: Praise for the male lead in Helprin’s The Oceans and the Stars as the type of man we need everywhere. “As a leader, for instance, Rensselaer maintains the perfect distance from his crew. Though they know they can approach him for help and advice, he does not pretend to be their buddy. Nor is he aloof or self-absorbed. Rensselaer is all about the mission at hand, preserving the lives of those under his command, and winning in battle.”

ICYMI, Lars review The Oceans and the Stars last October.

Darwin’s Sequel: Robert Shedinger has a new book about the sequel to Origin of Species, which “promised evidence for natural selection” that was not included in the original. He says Darwin just kept promising his supporters, because he would never have the material to finish the book.

Western Canon: A college attempts to replace the Great Books with those aligned with a proper ideology. “‘Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment’s alternative to the Canon,’ Bloom groaned, ‘I reflect that these aspirants must believe . . . that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.'” This isn’t post-modern, the writer notes. It’s as old as the iconoclasts of history.

Photo: Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction, Poetry

Rejected Book Tour and Reading Dante in Ukraine

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An original limerick for your weekend.

In meetings at Kensington Cross 
For lingo I searched at a loss. 
One word—marinara 
Was all I could bear, uh, 
For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.

No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.

Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).

Sherlock Holmes: Getting the great detective into print was a challenge for Conan Doyle in that he hoped to publish one of the better markets. Historian Lucy Worsley, who has a new BBC series on the author’s relationship with his detective, says the first stories were rejected thrice.

The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.

After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.

Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)

Enraptured: February 12, 2024, will be the 100th anniversary of the first public performance of George Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue. World Radio had a segment on it earlier this month, discussing the piece and how it’s been altered in many recording.

Dante’s Inferno: “Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.

“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)

Photo by Danya Gutan on Pexels.com

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks

A Con Artist, Betrayal, and Artificial Intelligence

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If the Christian life is one of continual repentance, then what do we do with a minister who has lived in sin for many years, justified his sin with spiritual abuse, and disqualified himself from ministry–most of which was learned after his death?

One of my friends brought up an apologist who recently passed away and was subsequently exposed as having lived an abusive life for years. Before his death, we thought he was a great Bible teacher. Now, we slough off his books at the used bookstore. Aren’t his books still as good as they were before? He compared the apologist to King David, who sinned far more extensively than we usually give him credit for. We overlook Solomon’s gross sins too.

I didn’t say anything this time. I’ve argued my case before, and maybe it doesn’t sit well with me.

The comparison to David doesn’t work. He and Solomon are categorically different. We look to them and see the Lord’s saving grace unbound.

Should we reject a man’s published work for a pattern of sin mostly uncovered after his death? Does known sin raise any theological questions? The man wrote a book on living the faith we profess, and we should consider its merit on the words of the books, not the life of the author? If this were a local pastor, would we continue to distribute his books, studies, and recordings as if it’s all academic? No. If he were a local pastor, we would expect him to be excommunicated were he still alive. The filth of his sin touches everything.

But that argument doesn’t sit easily with me, because I think of readers down the road who won’t know of the sin. They’ll only know the books, and perhaps the Lord will demonstrate his unbounded grace yet again.

I assume you know whom I’m talking about. It still hurts to remember it. Why do I feel betrayed by someone I didn’t know personally? I don’t know. It isn’t academic for me.

What else do we have today?

Deception: I recently listened to the first season and a little more of a well-produced podcast by Brian Brushwood called “The World’s Greatest Con.” Brian is a good storyteller, and this show is dynamite. The first season is on Operation Mincemeat, a scheme from WWII to deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allied would attack Italy.

Artificial Intelligence: “With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that.”

This rings true to me. Microsoft’s Bing AI presents itself as if you’re talking to an intelligent friend, but it doesn’t give answers any better than regular search results. Microsoft seems to think we all want to search as if we’re talking to someone IRL, but if it doesn’t understand us like a friend could, it’s pointless.

Orthodox Church: St. George’s Church in Drohobych, Lviv Oblast (west Ukraine), is a gorgeous work. It “is a unique monument of Galician wooden architecture of the late 15th – early 16th centuries. It is one of the best preserved monuments of old Ukrainian sacral architecture.”

Also, St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (via The Cultural Tutor).

Coffee: I don’t mind pumpkin spice, but I don’t drink it either. “Six bucks is a small price to pay (apart from still being scandalous and highway robbery) for the appearance of agency.”

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Authors

Murdered Author’s Notebook on Russian Invasion Now Made Public

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Ukrainian father and children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenko took notes as Russian forces rolled into his Kapytolivka village in eastern Ukraine. When he knew they would take him away, he buried his journal in his backyard.

Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian, put together as much of the story as can be known, working with another Ukranian author, Victoria Amelina.

“I never thought that my home village would become the epicentre of the rashist occupation,” wrote Vakulenko in the opening paragraphs of his diary. The word “rashist” is a now widespread Ukrainian portmanteau, a combination of “Russian” and “fascist”, not to be given the dignity of an initial capital. “For me, with my patriotic, pro-Ukrainian views, it was extremely dangerous to find myself surrounded by the enemy.” But, he wrote, he had little choice: moving his son seemed impossible. He added: “You can get used to anything; what matters is what sort of person you are left at the end of it.”

“The manuscript is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and the text of the diary has been recently published in Ukraine, with a foreword by Amelina.”

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Reading

Amelina: ‘My Heroes Will Not Stop Dying’

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Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.

In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”

In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.

“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”

She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”

Here are some other things to read.

Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”

Reading: Do you write in your books? President John Adams did, and Joel Miller offers five reasons for doing it too.

“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”

Reading: Chekhov said, “I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.” Yes, but maybe there are other legitimate categories.

Photo: Sigurdur Fjalar Jonsson/Unsplash

Non-fiction

First-hand Account of Russian Invasion Translated

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A Russian paratrooper, who has sought asylum in France, wrote a lengthy account of experience in the invasion of Ukraine last year. Members of the Language-Enabled Airman Program, part of the Air Force Culture and Language Center, worked on translating the work into English.

“It was a difficult task: [author] Filatyev wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style filled with military jargon, typos, and colloquial expressions that do not translate perfectly into English.”

The account describes lousy equipment, lack of supplies, and poor communication.

“‘Who will be accountable for these lives lost and the wounded?’ Filatyev wrote about a suspected incident of friendly fire. ‘After all, the reason for their deaths was not the professionalism of the Ukrainian army, but the mess in ours.'”

He claims Russian is destroying itself with greed and envy.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

What Is the Essence of Story?

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The essence of a story is conflict. We may think the essence as theme and remember some stories for a moment of discovery or clarity that moves us, but that moment must come through conflict to carry meaning.

In a 1959 text called Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write, “A story is a movement through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity, through confusion to order.” Both adventures and mysteries follow this path. You begin with many questions and maybe competing statements of fact. The confusion may be as simple as being lost, and finding the way out takes a lot of problem solving. When order or simplicity is found, when the events finally make some sense, then you have a story.

There are many types of conflict, Brooks and Warren note, but an account of “purely physical conflict” can’t be called fiction. Motives and ideas are necessary. We need characters, not just actors. A writer needs to “investigate motives” and “imply sympathy or antipathy” for the characters involved. Dr. Jones wants to preserve the ark or save Marion and himself. Belloq wants to use the ark to conquer the world. (And there are layers of conflict despite what fan critics have said.)

In another Saturday post, I said games and sports could hit the points of story, and I think motives and character is what I was talking about. The conflict is there, and if you impute evil intent onto the other team, you’ve got something that smells like a story.

What else have we got?

Book Banning: The ALA asks us to believe “2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship” in mostly “school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula” in 2022. That’s a 38 percent increase over 2021. Though you may suspect the ALA of cooking the books to raise this number, a glance at the top 13 most challenged books shows “claimed to be sexually explicit” on every title. Why are any of these recommended in schools?

Faithfulness: A new book tells the stories of Lutherans under Stalin.

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state. One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

Ukraine: “[Victoria] Amelina is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated young literary figures and a common presence at literary festivals both in Ukraine and abroad.” Now, she researches war crimes, starting with what happened to children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.

Reader Reviews: A writer gets angry that ARC readers aren’t leaving reviews.

Grassroots Hatred: Will anti-Semitism ever die?

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Publishing, Reading

One War Began a Year Ago, And Bots Are on the Way

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The Brandywine Tradition: “A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years,” an illustration by Howard Pyle for Harper’s Monthly, 1909.

Ukraine: February 24, 2022, was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Yesterday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki five lessons Western countries should take into the coming years.

The distance from Kiev must not be used to appease our conscience. I am sometimes afraid that the West is indeed populated by many for whom having a lunch in a favourite caffe or watching a Netflix series is more important than the lives and deaths of thousands of Ukrainians. We can all see the war happening. No one will be able to claim that they did not know about the genocide in Bucha. We are all watching the atrocities being committed by the Russian army. This is why we must not be indifferent. Russia’s imperial plans go beyond Ukraine. This war concerns us all.

Art-Intel: Lincoln Michel notes ChatGPT doesn’t have to generate good writing to cause problems for writers. The sci-fi/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld stopped taking submissions this week after receiving a glut of AI-written submissions. They shared a graph on Twitter of the number of users they’ve banned from submitting since 2019. Just eyeballing it, they seem to have averaged only a handful per month. This month, they banned over 500.

Art-Intel: Amazon is selling AI-written shlock on its Kindle store, books that may or may not acknowledge ChatGPT as an author. Reuters describes one YouTuber who is selling his e-book for $1. “In the video, White says anyone with the wherewithal and time could create 300 such books a year, all using AI.”

In completely unrelated news, the U.S. Copyright Office has decided it won’t copyright AI-generated images. “To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed “non-human spiritual beings” or the Holy Spirit as the author — as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.”

Publishing: Roald Dahl’s publisher has announced it will also publish the author’s original text in a new Classic Collection after publishing its bowdlerized one (HT to Lars for reminding me of the word “bowdlerized”).

Reading: Is it better to have a reading plan, like the great classics starting with Homer, or to read as chance would have it? “My reading has always been happily chaotic, governed more by whim than central planning.”

Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Reading

Reading for Fun or Bragging Rights, Language Usage, and More

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I intend to read more books this year, but since I didn’t quite track how many I read last year, I don’t have an actual number to aim for this year. Goodreads has 23 on last year’s list, which includes several manga. Not sure those count, and a number of books isn’t my goal anyway. A number of pages would be more accurate.

I bought a few Christmas gifts for this purpose, and Tom Holland’s Dominion is 542 dense pages. That will take me a while to get through and in no way diminishes my enjoyment or education for being only one book. (I should take notes too.)

Writer Max Liu read a poetry anthology over two years, “each morning in the four minutes it took my coffee to brew. It was a wonderful reminder that reading is never about quantity and always about the quality of time you spend with a text.” He encourages all of us to read well and for fun, not to meet some goal. (via Joel Miller)

Christian Poetry: How would you define Christian poetry? What about a poem would make it Christian? In a new anthology, Christian Poetry in America (which I bought last month), part of that definition is placing “imitation and tradition over originality and self-expression.”

War in Ukraine: “Someone said it’s essential for Ukraine to win as it would give Russia a chance to rethink its values and undergo cleansing and much-needed change. We pray for it.”

Self-Absorbed Much? A new book is coming on the dangers of social media. The Wolf in Their Pockets is written to pastors to help them minister to “those whose online influences have filled them with cynicism and contempt.”

What’s in Icelandic? An Icelandic archaeologist and journalist is arguing that the Icelandic language was seeded with a lot of Celtic and Gaelic words from Irish and Scottish settlers. (via ArtsJournal)

Photo: Santa’s #1 reindeer, Magic Forest, Lake George, New York. 1996. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.