{"id":160721,"date":"2020-08-05T09:40:23","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T13:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=160721"},"modified":"2024-10-27T18:51:36","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T22:51:36","slug":"stuff-ive-been-reading-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=160721","title":{"rendered":"Stuff I’ve Been Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

2020 has been heavy, ain’t it. “This shit’s about to get heavy” (I worked so long on that Eminem piece<\/a>, his lyrics are still buzzing through me). When things get heavy, escapes are great, momentary respites are important. I have been … unable to manage that in 2020. I’ve had more time to read, since I’ve now been on lockdown since March 15 – coming up on 5 months. But I’ve also struggled with what they’re calling Covid fog … I can’t focus my damn MIND. So I’m doing my best. Here’s the stuff I’ve been reading over the last couple of months: <\/p>\n

— Theatre Street: The Reminiscences Of Tamara Karsavina<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Tamara Karsavina
\nKarsavina was a prima ballerina with the Russian Imperial Ballet. She was raised in the classical tradition, a rigorous and unchanging tradition, in terms of repertory, technique, presentation. But then came … Sergei Diaghilev. And Ballets Russes. And Nijinsky. And Stravinsky. And Modernism, in general. She became an acolyte of Diaghilev – he didn’t have collaborators, he had acolytes. It’s amazing that someone so tied to the “old way” would become such a star of the “new way” … this is her story. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nTamara Karsavina<\/i><\/p>\n

\nIt ends with a terrifying sequence about her return to Russia in 1917, 1918 – the war still going on – the Revolution in its first wave. Her depiction of St. Petersberg at that time, and how the Revolution infiltrated every aspect of life, including the ballet, is chilling. Since she had traveled abroad so much with Diaghilev, she was named an Enemy of the People (you see how Trump weaponizes that phrase. That phrase has a long long history. Believe me: those of us who know, have heard that dog-whistle and have been terrified of it from the jump. For good reason.) Posters of her face were hung up, saying she was a traitor. Realizing her days were numbered, she and her husband and infant son, fled, going through enormous privations just to get OUT of Russia. If they had tried to leave literally a day later, they would have been caught. Even as it was, it was almost impossible to get out. These are the final two chapters and they are absolute show-stoppers. Worth it to read that alone, since she gives such a vivid picture of the Revolution in its first phase. But the whole thing is fascinating. I already know quite a bit about all these people – Ballets Russes (see the documentary), Nijinsky (read his diaries) and the legendary Diaghilev – so it’s wonderful to get a picture of what it was like when these figures hit the scene, when this new kind of ballet arrived in Paris, in London. To say they caused a sensation is to completely understate the situation. There were riots. They changed the world.<\/p>\n

— The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Robert D. Kaplan
\nHe’s one of my favorite authors, commentators, journalists. I’ve been reading him ever since Balkan Ghosts<\/i>, which I took with me to Croatia since he writes so beautifully about Zagreb. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Here, he writes about geography and how geography is destiny – a very unpopular attitude. Can’t we make our own destinies? Well, yeah, but if you live in a land-locked nation you have a different attitude than if you live in a country up against a wide stretch of ocean. People who live in the mountains tend to develop different types of societies than those who live on the wide plains. And on and on. He writes about these things with a wary eye on the future. He gets some things wrong – as we all will and do – but, to his credit, he admits it when he’s wrong (and he has been wrong BIG). His books are not comforting but I learn a lot. He writes with an eye on antiquity and up through all the ages following, and if you have that mindset, history feels a little bit different. You’re not as surprised when nations go fucking insane, seemingly overnight.<\/p>\n

— The Trial<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Franz Kafka
\nA chilling eerie favorite. <\/p>\n

— The Museum of Unconditional Surrender<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Dubravka Ugre\u0161i\u0107
\nShe’s a Yugoslav dissident, self-described, run out of Croatia after war broke out in the Balkans in 1991. Her columns criticizing the war brought death threats, she legit feared for her life. Ever since, she has lived in exile in Amsterdam. This is a novel – although clearly autobiographical in parts too – based on the experience of the exile. What it is like to live as an exile, to live without memory, to have your past abolished. It’s a fascinating book, beautifully written, and I am now a huge fan. I will read whatever else I can find (not all of it has been translated). <\/p>\n

— Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Adam Higginbotham
\nSo depressing it was hard to even finish it. Weird to read this during the pandemic, watching the “leaders” – of a so-called democracy – act like the Communist leadership: lying, prevaricating, blame-shifting, downplaying a catastrophe, anti-science, anti-expertise, totally willing to put citizens at risk, refusing to tell the truth, refusing to believe what the experts tell them (“Show me the death charts.” What a comforting comment from a leader to his hurting mourning nation.) The official initial response to Chernobyl was not “bumbling” or “botched”. It was actively sinister. Higginbotham has done an excellent job piecing it all together, interviewing as many survivors as he could, to tell the story from all the different sides: the firemen, the wives trying to find out what happened to their firefighter husbands, the Commissars, the architects, the guys in the control room that night … He really puts it together so even if you have no background in physics (guilty), you can understand the issues in that reactor, and you can understand why the accident happened. GRAPHITE TIPS. I understand now. This one came out a while ago. I feel like I’ve read it before. I read Voices from Chernobyl<\/i>, written by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich – her book is – in my opinion – a masterpiece. A good companion piece to this one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2020 has been heavy, ain’t it. “This shit’s about to get heavy” (I worked so long on that Eminem piece, his lyrics are still buzzing through me). When things get heavy, escapes are great, momentary respites are important. I have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[1507,2423,2703,75,2079,1822,76,156,150,155,2134,2425,2424],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160721"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189821,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160721\/revisions\/189821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=160721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=160721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}