I don't often have an excuse to wear my jersey for the Greek national football team, but today as I headed to the LA Central Library downtown for a marathon public reading of Homer's great epic poem, The Odyssey, I was definitely in the tank for Team Ελλάδα. This fantastic event was just one in a series of Odyssey-related activities around LA this October organized by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. The Odyssey Project has included lectures, shadow puppet shows, readings by living poets and a modern Greek-style vase by Peter Shire that's traveling the County. It was jointly sponsored by the library, the Library Foundation and an organization called Readers of Homer. They organize these giant participatory readings of The Iliad and The Odyssey all across the country. Turns out, they're onto something. More than 200 people signed up to participate in LA. The reading ran from 10 a.m. until 5:30 (or so) p.m., with people coming and going throughout the day to read their assigned segment, or just sit in the audience and listen. The room was ringed with white curtains and the lights turned down low. Images of old maps, roiling seas and ships were projected onto the walls, changing from time to time to match the story. A low, droning, haunting music played in the background. The text appeared in superscript above the readers' heads. I was reader #80. Backstage in the green room I ran into David Kipen of Libros Schmibros, who launched The Big Read when he was at the National Endowment for the Arts. He was reader #77, and we giddily whispered to each other about how exciting this event was. While reading his section, he briefly donned a glittery gorgon hat. Reader #79 read her lines in Spanish, and played a recording of a song as part of her segment. Reader #81 read her first few lines in ancient Greek. That's the kind of enthusiasm I'm talking about. As I rehearsed my own lines and listened to others reading theirs, it was the emotions that really struck me. In the brief 33 lines I read on stage, Odysseus was, by turns, bombastic, sarcastic, arrogant and brave. I've read The Odyssey at least twice before, but never really felt the story or the character of Odysseus quite so clearly. That's what public engagement in the arts is all about, and we literary people know how to do it right. Photos by Melissa Wall
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If you look at a map of the Baltic region, you might notice a funny little piece of land sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland that isn't marked with a country name. That's Kaliningrad (Калининград in Russian), also known as Königsberg when it was under German rule for many years. It's a small piece of land that was was the scene of bitter fighting during World War II and eventually ended up as part of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet era Kaliningrad was never integrated into one of its neighboring Soviet states. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, it remained disconnected part of Russia. Today it's a port city of about a million people, where Russia houses its Baltic Sea fleet. It's Russia's only ice-free port in Europe, and Russia is serious about its ports. Some analysts believe one big reason Russia has remained steadfast in its support of Syria's murderer-in-chief Bashar al-Assad is because he lets them use the port of Latakia, which gives Russia access to the Mediterranean Sea. In the past few weeks, Lithuania has reported several incidents of Russian ships interfering with Lithuanian ships in the Baltic Sea. Lithuania has submitted a formal complaint in the form of a "diplomatic note" to the Russian ambassador. Amid today's heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine, this harassment is getting careful scrutiny. This month also marks the 42nd annual Baltic Operations exercise (BALTOPS 2014) where military forces from the US, NATO and eleven other countries get together in the Baltic Sea and flex their muscles. It's primarily a naval exercise, but the US Air Force is participating as well. It would appear that the US is just as serious about its own ports in foreign locales. At the same time, the US Army is leading Saber Strike 2014, ground exercises in locations across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, involving 4,700 military members from ten NATO countries. Here's the official Army-issued tri-fold brochure: All three Baltic countries - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - are members of NATO.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says these NATO maneuvers are hostile and intended as a threat to Russia, who in response has launched her own military maneuvers in the region. NATO and the Americans say these are longstanding annual festivities, not tied to recent events. Then again, while in Poland last week, President Obama a billion dollar "European Reassurance Initiative" to increase US troop presence in the region. The name is as polysyllabic and professorial as our president. Maybe if he'd given it a shorter name with more hard consonants and better imagery (think Saber Strike!) he might have better luck getting it through Congress. BALTOPS, not so much. Sounds like a brand of cheap candy. Perhaps what's most interesting about these military maneuvers is how little coverage they're getting in the American press. A Google news search generates any number of pieces expressing outrage from outlets like Russia Today, ITAR-TASS and Voice of Russia. Searches for BALTOPS and Saber Strike at the New York Times generated zero results. The same search at the Washington Post generated one AP story about Canadian participation. Even the Huffington Post didn't deliver. Not enough Kardashians? As in 1989 and as in 1939, world history is playing out in the Baltic nations while no one watches. In 1989, neocon political scientist Frances Fukuyama published an essay arguing that the impending breakup of the Soviet Union marked “the end of history.” It was highly controversial in its day and generated plenty of ink. We still used ink to print newspapers and magazines back then. The phrase “end of history” sounds ridiculous on its face, and Fukuyama didn’t mean it literally. Of course time would march onward and stuff would continue to happen. What he was arguing instead was that all the great “isms” had been tried and proven to be failures. He believed what was left – what every country in the world was on its way toward – was Western-style liberal democracy. From there on out, he argued, the major battles in society would no longer be over Great Ideas like communism versus capitalism, but over small mechanistic things, like increasing worker productivity and figuring out how to access Game of Thrones without having to pay for fifty other channels of crap. Recent events in Ukraine might suggest that the demise of history has been overstated. Residents of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, we’re told, want to reunite with Russia, while those in the west of the country want to join the European Union. The current crisis was set off when then-president of Ukraine refused to sign a free trade treaty with the EU during a November summit in Vilnius. Does Ukraine signal a return to grand ideological struggles? Kleptocracy versus technocracy? Or are we simply feeling the aftershocks of the end of Cold War? Which may themselves be aftershocks of the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Or are we looking at a fight over who will control the oil and natural gas resources needed to fuel the globe’s insatiable appetite for power of an electrical kind? Many countries calling themselves democracies certainly aren’t. There are others that have refused to become Western-style liberal democracies and are doing fairly well for themselves, like Iran and China. Arguments against Fukuyama’s thesis on the end of history have come from both the left and the right. It’s been nearly 25 years since his essay appeared. Eliane Glaser - not a fan of his work - has a thoughtful piece at The Guardian about it. She looks back on the past quarter century and explores some the things Fukuyama may have unfortunately gotten right. It’s definitely worth a read. |
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May 2018
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