Fieldwork In Ukrainian Sex

I searched Oksana on Reddit, because I'd thought Oksana Zabuzhko would come up, the author of the Ukrainian novel I'm reading, but instead I got the photo of a nurse who got her legs blown off by Russian bombs in Lysychansk. You can watch her husband dance with her at her wedding. You can watch her rehab. More rehab. There's another Oksana who died, she was an actress. Another Oksana is a sniper.

There's a woman in my neighborhood who is Ukrainian, who has a son my daughter sometimes plays with. She's a nurse. Different fate. She works long hard hours and takes a long subway ride. A woman from Honduras has a son her sons age, and they play a lot and she watches both kids. She cleans offices. Her husband is Mexican and works in a restaurant.

Where is it safe? Where is life good?

"...in general all that Ukrainians can say about themselves is how, and how much, and by which manner they were beaten." p. 115

"And where there's no beauty--how can there be truth?" p. 117

"Once upon a time I had a certain, oh so excellently programmed patriotic friend who constantly complained about the fact that we fall in love not with the man, but with the national ideal..." p. 115-6

Past posts on novel

Ubi panis ibi patria: This has notes on references I looked up.

Poem

Comments

Manet and Degas

Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special. In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review

movie versus book

I'm watching the movie a second time, and I'm halfway through the book. Among the movie's differences from the book. Sortilege starts off narrating. The movie doesn't have the school bell for the phone either, just a regular ring. It's really weird the way Doc shouts when he sees the photo of Amethyst as a baby. I guess it's to dramatize the negative impact of being pregnant and using, but the child we see looks pretty healthy. The child doesn't huff out because they're boring like she did in the book. Superficially The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are similar but it's a completely different style of narrative. The Coen brothers are amazing, they have a very witty movie that I have loved for a long time. Pynchon is a whole other realm of fiction, and this conversion is fairly faithful, taking out the best lines and making it more compact. The audio book is 15 hours, the movie is 2 hours. Anyway, I like the different movies for different reasons. T...

Introduction

Robert B. Palmer's introduction to his translation of Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult (p. ix-xi) Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan, Pan is dead. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING The Dead Pan W H E N Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these lines which sound so pessimistic and so limited to any lover of the beauty and truth of Greek mythology, she had in mind a famous passage out of Plutarch's De Oraculorum defectu {Mor. 419 A-E) in which it was reported on good authority that Pan had died. But let Plutarch tell the story (Philip is speaking): As for death among such beings [i.e., deities], I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of...

Motley Kamuka

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