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Sunday, April 26, 2020

Someone Else’s Bread

 Happiness is a wondrous commodity: the more you give, the more you have.
— Germaine de Staël,  born in 1766
Goulash, chicken soup aka penicilin,  osso buco, French bread and potatos, crepes, dhal, beef stroganoff ... The home menu grows each week in isolation 

 Insomnia and Vivid Dreams on the Rise With COVID-19 Anxiety Smithsonian (Cold River cures insomnia you reach 6 pages and you fall asleep - guaranteed ;-)
Get your kids and grand-kids The Long Winter or Cold River. They had it worse than your kids do, at least for now. If you think Zoom school is bad, if you are growing weary of beans and rice, try heating your freezing house with twisted wheat and eating grain porridge for every meal

A Novelist’s Ambition to Define America





A woman from my dad’s hometown of Sylacauga, Alabama was hit by a meteor back in the 1950s and was badly bruised, but didn’t die.


“Someone Else’s Bread” is less than a page long. The narrator is entrusted with another prisoner’s daily ration of bread: 300 grams, about the weight of the human heart. He keeps it in a small wooden box reserved for his few possessions. After much restless pacing and inability to sleep, he takes the bread from the box, savors the smell, returns it to the box, and immediately removes it again. Crumbs fall from the loaf and he licks them from the palm of his hand. He salivates and takes three pieces “the size of my pinkie” from what remains. “And I went to sleep,” he concludes, “proud that I hadn’t stolen my comrade’s bread.”

 And yet, despite the emotional and physical damage he sustained in Stalin’s camps, Shalamov survived and wrote his hundreds of stories and poems. He embraces the very words he derides. Most other writers in comparison look like dilettantes. The title character in “The Life of Engineer Kipreyev” says: “The only thing you can prove to yourself is your own stupidity. Living and surviving is the task. And not to fail … Life is more serious than you think.”

 Patrick Kutp: My review of Sketches of the Criminal World by Varlam Shalamov has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2018, the LARB published my review of the earlier collection of Shalamov’s short fiction, Kolyma Stories. Both are translated by Donald Rayfield
Arnhem land coronavirus lockdown but you can visit through online concerts
Free audio recordings of books by Bertrand Russell and others — from Landon D.C. Elkind 


Majority Of Americans Would Rather Risk COVID Death Than Endure Any More Skype Lectures From Celebrities | The Babylon Bee.




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    Dwight Garner: “With so many hours to obliterate, I’ve found myself turning to the experts. I’ve pushed away the Tootsie Roll wrappers and empty root beer cans and gathered around my bed what I will call my library of indolence,” featuring such heroic figures as Bartleby the Scrivener and Oblomov. – The New York Times

    A Star Wars Oral History

    As The Clone Wars finally concludes a six-year cliff-hanger, we look at how the first lead female with a lightsaber changed galactic storytelling.

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