Ma Mussolini ha fatto anche cose buone, 'But Mussolini also did good things': a common phrase in Italy, increasingly so as distrust in democracy grows and social media creates fertile ground for historical revisionism. Spend enough time in the country and you will hear the words....

Imagine it being slipped into conversation casually, muttered wistfully, like the refrain of a half-remembered hymn.

Sage blinked. 'So?"

"Oh, I just find it fascinating - the idea that people pin the unpredictable nature of life onto something so easily proved wrong. It would make just as much sense to blame the fae folk.'

'Exactly,' said Max, skimming the words but gathering the general point Richard was making. He drained his can. 'In other words, it's all a load of bollocks.'

'See, this is why I like astrology,' Sage said to the psychic. 'It annoys men.'

I think I left my hat at the library....

The author suspects there is another story behind the carrier pigeon awarded a medal...

That's a lot of books you got there..

(Katie is researching a graphic novel on WW1)

Over the years the Guerrillas have grown, become many, and their projects have travelled all over the world...

In its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box...

(Nodding so much am giving myself neckache.)

Where is this train of thought taking me?

I don't know, but nevertheless the train continues its march that journey that began in the green gardens of Silihdar and passed through the literary salons of Constantinople, Cairo's orphanages, Paris's universities, the brilliant minds of Yerevan, and Stalin's concentration camps, all the time heading towards the steppes of eternity...

Photo of Yerevan via Unsplash

Shushanik Kurghinian [published in 1947 but not until] half a century after her death that serious literary critique and publication around her work began to form.

....it was a careful, intentional, and organized disavowal. First, in the form of tsarist censorship because of her socialist and revolutionary material, then by Soviet Armenian intellectuals because she was a rebel; and finally, by literary criticism...

One girl, Aurelia, whose father owned the best gelateria in the nearby city of Pordenone, used to buy all the latest romances, read them, then pass them on, first to her sister, then to her mother, before, finally, handing them over at the school gates to Dirce, who would pay half the original price. 'It was our little system. A trickle-down as suspenseful and sweet as ice cream melting down a cone.

Detail from Barbara Regina Dietzsch, Dandelion, Butterflies, Snail and Beetle, c. 1750. Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.

... I have printed out the sombre mid-eighteenth-century studies of Barbara Regina Dietzsch and pinned them on a cork-board beside Jean-François Millet's drooping specimens from a century later, Monet's plump orbs, and Van Gogh's snowy heads, bobbing in the overgrown gardens of the Saint-Paul Asylum.

As these and other critics have demonstrated again and again, a sizable number of people polled either know nothing about the matters those polls purport to measure or hold no opinion about them. "The first question a pollster should ask," the sociologist Leo Bogart advised in 1972, is "'Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?"

Ballots were often printed in newspapers: you'd cut one out and bring it with you. With the turn to the secret ballot, beginning in the 1880s, the government began supplying the ballots, but newspapers kept printing them:; they'd use them to conduct their own polls, called "straw polls." Before the election, you'd cut out your ballot and mail it to the newspaper, which would make a prediction.

#learning

"Things aren't good here, Gul. Even our books could get us thrown in jail now."

"Our books?" I said, confused.

"In Kashgar, they've been burning books, thousands of them. Even Turghun Almas's histories! Dad's put his history books behind some Chinese dictionaries, but if they start looking...

Interesting look at the author's family history, heavily affected by mental illness.

For me, it was overlong, but judging from the comments on here this is a minority opinion!

...I made books my world.

(Name those books...)

"But the craziness was starting to get really bad.... She kept thinking people were chasing us..."

...the rulers would certainly have no reason to place blame upon me.

Long ago, something happened and she lost her mind...

A 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.

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 are made of the same material....

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.

Intro 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.'

Love this library (even though no books)

Lots of pictures of people reading.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/06/books/review/reading-outside-pastime.html?unl...

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.

Everyone should read Lucy Caldwell's short fiction.

The 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...

Langosh explores eastern Europe in 2015...

'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...

Gripping crime.