...the rulers would certainly have no reason to place blame upon me.
20 likes
...the rulers would certainly have no reason to place blame upon me.
Long ago, something happened and she lost her mind...
pickA look back at the artist's work visiting activists across the former Soviet Union. A reckoning with the pressures and cost of protest against a dictator (Putin). Ultimately, and sadly, an account of disillusionment.
Lomasko escapes a Russian crackdown against protest, and is all but banned from working in "the West" by states that previously took corrupt Russian money.
I spent a few hours at the demonstration. I didn't try to get close to the monument to Aleksandr Pushkin. where people were being violently arrested. Standing in the crowd, watching the beautiful youth who wished for the best, it felt like a swarm of colorful birds had landed on the snow and that there was nothing at all in common between them and the approaching black phalanx of riot police.
In Belarus.
"...Minsk can seem like a sleepy place...
On a street full of half-empty establishments, there's a tiny coffee shop with an incredibly long line out the door. A few days ago, O'Petit had sheltered protesters fleeing the police. One of the officers broke the café's glass door as revenge.
Now people stand in line for up to an hour and a half at a time, just to have a cup of coffee here and leave a generous tip."
The artist documents visits across the former Soviet Union, here in Yerevan.
Previously based in Moscow she is now in exile.
What the @#£% happened at the end? Is there another one? Does Jane meet him again?
Is this how we are going to spend the rest of our lives? Kudirat hiccupped.
'How else are we to live? We are expected to spend our entire lives dodging penises and drudgery. It's why we were born, what we were born to do. We are girls, we shall not be sexed!' That thought sobered them up faster than a bucket of cold water.
Through the windshield of the car they could see the forests of bare trees dusted lightly with snow, and towering above them, the gloriously white peak of Mt. Fuji. Miraculously, the peak was not hidden by clouds and the entire mountain was visible. As the car approached Lake Yamanaka, they looked directly at the eastern slope of Mt. Fuji; viewed from here.... the whole mountain seemed dignified and resolute
We drive cars that run on fuel created by the deaths of dinosaurs...
I was surprised when I opened the cover of this: it's a Penguin imprint.
The woman who had stopped to ask Hazel Ware how she was had moved on to a small group of other women, all drinking tea and looking more like the grown-up women I was used to. Knitted skirts, tan tights and hair that had been permed or set. We would see them in the hairdressers on the High Street, Aunty Jean among them, sat under the huge hoods that made them look like rows of Stormtroopers, protecting our town from invasion.
Everyone loves Chiyo, thought Jane, and yet, I wonder if she isn't the loneliest one of all.
so-soIntro level text into a key woman in Roman history (the author argues). Took me a while to get through, and some of the "contemporary" references are already dated (2018). I do love histories that work to reclaim women's stories though.
#RainyReading
In capitalism, people claimed to be free and equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available.....
'Do you remember Black Boy?' teacher Nora asked when we read Richard Wright's autobiography in school. 'In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a poor black person cannot be free. The police are after him. The law works against him.'
Oops!
(Do not make decisions if you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired)
[Question: can I make decisions when I'm asleep?]
I am so impressed by these books, informed by research (and even including unobtrusive references if you want to read more).
The narrator receives a visitor in prison. Lined up next to each other in either side of the bars, so do the other prisoners. The conversations interupt one another. It's hard to talk with his girlfriend.
pickEveryone should read Lucy Caldwell's short fiction.
pickThe manga version.
She'd imagined being a grandma would involve stirring up Christmas puddings, the wains on wee wooden stools with wee matching aprons beside you, taking it in turns to heave round the big wooden spoon. Though where she'd got the notion she hadn't a baldy, for her mother never bothered making a pudding when you could buy a perfectly decent one at the Co-op and her own grandma hadn't been a pudding-mixing sort, not at all.
NO ONE SERIOUSLY QUESTIONS that members of Congress are more polarized than they used to be. This is borne out anecdotally, as social scientists like to say, by watching them on cable television, where you can see the spittle in HD...
'Banned it?' Andrew said with a grin. 'How do you ban being patronizing?'
'Well, there were certain phrases he used that made me mad because they didn't sound rude but you knew they were. You know, things like "If you think about it," which means you're not thinking about it, and "With respect," which basically means without respect. "I think you'll find" is another one. I fined him twenty-five cents every time he said something like that.'
I see,' he said again. You've been planning this for some time, then.'
He made it sound like a bank raid, Megan thought, or maybe premeditated murder. But she would not allow him to make her feel guilty; she had done far more than her share. 'Yes,' she said briskly. I'm twenty-one and I think it's time I started my own life.'
...we passed a colourful mural that depicted the dead and disappeared....
¿Me olvidaste? asked José Carrasco, of MIR. Have you forgotten me?
¿Donde están? asked Ricardo Salinas, of the Socialist Party, who disappeared near San Antonio. Where are they?
Unexpected link to recent fiction reading (On the Calculation of Volume also feels like a rerun, sadly absent Bill Murray)
"Day one felt like Groundhog Day, the film in which a news reporter awakes each morning to a repeat of what has come before. From the outset, however, it was clear that these seven judges would take a different approach..."
"During the intifada. We don't talk about it. The boys with the stones, yes, we talk about them. But not the girls." She assured him that Rita stayed busy..... Then she returned the conversation to Ibn Hanna's wedding, which was coming up, and to life in America, and how had his people really elected that terrible casino owner as president. Didn't Americans know gambling was haram?
"The fine arts are always underappreciated." He sighs. "It's a modern tragedy, really."
"Sure." I say it curtly because I'm thinking how that's not a tragedy. Not really. A tragedy is a double homicide. Or a murder-suicide. Or a pileup on 695 when there are kids in the car. That's tragic...
Visit to one of my favourite bookshops at the weekend. I resorted to taking pictures of shelves because I was interested in so many...
Stats on original language of books I've read (so far) in 2025... (books in translation)
Harry was defensive about some of the methods he had used to get his stories. At one point, he turned on the reader, who he imagined censuring him for how he had obtained the Christie exclusive: 'Sit down there, you, that man in the back row, he admonished. 'I'll have no hypocritical comment! How many murderers' stories have you read, sir, in the Sunday papers? If you've never read one, then I'll listen to you. If you have read one, then shut up!
According to the constitutional law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment were "written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations."
We took almost nothing when we left. Mum kept saying, Don't worry we'll come back we'll come back so soon, and it was a lie. I think now to how they found that house with everything still in it, Papa's book still left open on the page where he stopped, and I am sick I am sick to my stomach. Whose stuff did they think that was? They must have known I can't imagine they didn't know. Who doesn't know a thing like that? They must've known.
Goodreads (via google) says this is "comforting manga for pet lovers..." I don't disagree.
One of those books that makes me wish for something between "so so" and thumbs up.
(Not) a little light reading.
Do love a historical map! Check out these endpapers 😍
My vulgar language also caused problems when I went to Cecilia's. Her father was a stern, distinguished, imposing man... Though he never missed his chance to intimate that he'd been particularly active in the years of armed struggle in the seventies and eighties, enjoying the astonished look on my face when his stories suddenly mentioned guns or kneecappings, he wasn't as indulgent when it came to another kind of violence: foul language.
When we finally discovered books, it wasn't a form of escapism, but rather the reassuring coalescence of boredom. I could almost picture it in my mind, white and miry: reading was like sinking into a pool of milk. I would stay immersed for hours, until even my body grew flaccid, the stagnant liquid seeping into my pores. It felt like everything suddenly acquired meaning, a phenomenon of transubstantiation, my flesh changing into boredom.
....there is no objective, capital T Truth about Agrippina. There is only a series of stories, drawn from other people's stories about men. The only way through is to be hon-est about that. This story is as much mine as it is Agrippina's, because I have chosen how to present the information I have. But it is a good story about a woman who deserves her own place in history.
...made the three sisters the first living women ever to be identified by name on a Roman coin.
I wasn't expecting David Cameron to turn up in the first few pages of this....
