MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Big thanks to Eugene Ostashevsky for introducing me to Vasily Kamensky’s immortal “Constantinople”: “a milestone,” as Ostashevsky observes, “in the history of Russian travel writing about Turkey.”

“Constantinople” originally appeared in Ferro-Concrete Poems (1914),“a work… famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper.”

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Shout-outs to three valued readers:

1. Anya von Bremzen, for her observation that the spectral tarsier basically just is Cheburashka.

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2. Carolyn Drake, for more amazing pictures from her Kars trip, which coincided, somewhat-luckily for posterity, with an illegal bear shooting at a garbage dump in Sarıkamış:

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3. Bernard Schwartz of the Unterberg Poetry Center, for sending along “Loving a Saint” by Sarah Lindsay – he was reminded of this beautiful poem while reading my article about Kars:

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Eco-conscious readers! I am happy to relate that “Natural Histories,” my profile of conservationist Çağan Şekercioğlu and his badass Kars-based NGO, is on newsstands now in the October 24 issue of the New Yorker, with photography by superstar Carolyn Drake.

I think Çağan was not super-happy with the above photo, because the bird had started to fly away before he had completely released it, and apparently it might look to a bird professional as if he had been holding it wrong. In fact he was holding it fine and nobody’s leg got broken, least of all that of the bird.

The cotton candy didn’t even try to fly away:

Click here for an outtake from the story, plus another very beautiful photograph.

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A new gem in the series of spooky reader dreams, courtesy of Laura from Argentina(?):

I dreamt that my boyfriend was Anna Ioannovna’s sex slave.

Honi soit qui mal y pense!

Because of my great love of monuments, I was really touched to read about the Isaac Babel monument unveiled last week in Odessa.  It represents Babel seated on some steps, a moderate distance away from a large enigmatic wheel.

According to sculptor Georgii Frangulyan, the steps represent Babel’s front stoop, and also the famous Potemkin stairs.

The wheel represents the tachanka wheels in Red Cavalry, the wheels of Mendel Krik’s horse cart in the Odessa Stories, the wheel of fate, the Red Wheel, and the wheel of history that ran off the track and crushed the writer.

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