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Dread and light
Write about dread. Dark of winter, beginning of the festival of lights and leaving for Poland tonight. All emails from friends in Krakow and Warsaw mention the terrible weather, heavy snow. And I’m leaving the comfort of Southern California, bright sun and clear bearable cold. I’ve been toggling between dread and excitement for the past […]
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Thinking about Katyn and onwards to Poland
All over Poland there are memorials to Katyn. For decades under Communism, all mention of this 1940 NKVD massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers in a remote forest in western Russia was taboo, punishable by prison or worse. Poland’s wartime underground heroes were considered traitors to the Communist cause. (In Moczarski’s “Conversations with an Executioner,” […]
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Brian Turner reading at ALOUD
Poet Brian Turner—a veteran of Iraq– read at the library as part of ALOUD last night. He read about exhausted Scheherezade falling off the Al-A’imma Bridge, about desert winds, and soldiers bleeding out. He read about child sobbing that his father was a “good man,” he read about headless Iraqi translators who appear in his […]
The Crooked Mirror, Louise Steinman's Blog 