Memoirous

I heard a snippet of a podcast the other day that reminded me of one of the tenets of this blog: to pay attention to small things, write about the mundane, stay present to daily life. Rough Translation is a podcast that explores language and crossover of language. It delves into the social and anthropological surrounding language and how culture and tribalism also impacts words. Yeah, fairly broad. A recent episode “The Cat Must Still Be Fed” is about: a hyperlocal news site in Red Hook, N.Y. posts a job opening. A journalist in Ukraine applies. And what readers think of as "local news" is going to change dramatically. At first the editor thinks its spam, a joke, a bot. Then she contacts the respondent. No, he just likes using the world wide web as a way to escape, to live vicariously—so no, he doesn’t have a background in journalism nor is he especially proficient in English. But, using algorithms and data sourced from the internet he thought he might be able to writ...

 War and Peace  for Max I am not interested in War and Peace , the epic sweeping drama, my attention is directed toward the Russian man lighting his pipe, his back against the grey exterior wall of the building, as he takes a pull on the pipe the embers ignite, his whiskered cheeks sink in and out like a concertina playing a lively mazurka where   the great bear dances. Tolstoy said War and Peace is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” I am not writing a novel or a poem nor history, it is about these people, the Russian man who, after smoking knocks his pipe against the outer wall, the sooty tobacco, dregs from the bowl onto the ground, takes a stroll down the city sidewalk and suddenly greets a stranger at a bus stop. He would never do this in his country, in St. Petersburg, where there people on the street do not greet one another, they go along with eyes on the ground, downcast, absorbed in their own thoughts of bread, ren...