Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
To add some color to my previous post, it looks like office dwellers on Avenue Faria Lima move around on kick scooters and bikes: To avoid the jams, office workers venture out on rented bikes and scooters. Making up around…
I should have posted this two days ago, on March 5. Better late than never: March 5 is the day Stalin died in 1953, the so-called Cheyne-Stokes Day. In 2016, I wrote two more posts about that day of deliverance:…
A name from the poetic anthology mentioned in this post of mine has surfaced in a comment to a post at Language Hat: Elinor Wylie. Velvet Shoes was the only poem by Wylie I could recall. In the comment linked…
Reviewing Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age by Anatoly Liberman, Sibelan Forrester remarks: Russians who read Anglophone poetry in the Soviet period turned to the works available, which were largely translations or original editions of poetry from the era…
For English-language coverage of the protests in Russia, I’d probably recommend Kevin Rothrock‘s Twitter feed as a starting point. What’s different about this year’s Navalny-triggered protests are the high participation rate (relative to the population) outside of Moscow and St.…
Sergei Dovlatov once remarked: “In Soviet newspapers, only misprints are truthful.” His first example was gavnokomanduyushchiy instead of glavnokomanduyushchiy — “Commander-in-Shit” for “Commander-in-Chief,” roughly speaking. Dovlatov did not live to witness the spread of spell checkers and autocorrectors. We’re all…
When Trump visited Moscow in 1987, he did some preliminary probing for a possible real estate deal but came back disappointed: the USSR had no private ownership of land at all and the dispute resolution procedure his Soviet counterparts proposed…
From a conversation with Edward Luttwak published by the Wall Street Journal in March 2020: Ranching has been more than an investment. It has helped him understand the fundamental weakness of post-Soviet Russia. “Between Vladivostok and the North Korean border,…
At the Vereshchagin retrospective in 2018, I spent some time staring at a painting of a ruined Chinese theater somewhere in Central Asia. After posting these notes on Altishar and Kashgaria, I wondered if had Vereshchagin found his theatrical ruins…
A nurse in South Dakota says some of her patients refuse to believe they are infected with Covid-19 until their dying breath – literally. Some would rather be told they had the flu, pneumonia, even lung cancer (!) – anything…
Since I wrote about ruddy shelducks appearing in Moscow ponds alongside mallards (the default waterfowl, so to say), I’ve learned of four other bird species recently spotted in the city. Mandarin ducks seem to have made it to Moscow from…
Up until recently, Putin’s regime committed fraud at every important election. It wasn’t that easy, even though the perpetrators were told they would never face prosecution. In fact, having independent or opposition party observers at polling stations all but closed…