Things I learned while looking up other things, 2022.03.11
Dear friends,
If you're not feeling overwhelmed enough, may I suggest a quick turn through the List of ongoing armed conflicts page on Wikipedia? Guaranteed to evoke feelings of dread.
When terrible things happen it's hard not to try to make some personal connection, even when it's not particularly useful. The recent news has thrown me back into memories of the Chicago neighborhood I lived in right after graduating from college, where I'm pretty sure we voted in the basement of this church (I mostly voted in churches when I lived in Chicago, which didn't seem weird to me because Chicago was the first place I ever voted—and before you ask, I generally voted 'late and once', not 'early and often'.)
One of the things I loved and miss about Chicago was just how you got used to little pockets of the world throughout the city, bubbles of diaspora everywhere. The (now-gone) Lithuanian restaurant where the borscht was transcendent. The (two!) Swedish neighborhoods (one of which I also lived in). The printer I went to was run by a guy named Sargon. (Chicago has a large Assyrian community, which meant that the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, where I worked as a volunteer, got more than a few phone calls from people looking for a dictionary of modern Assyrian, which it wasn't, instead of a dictionary of Akkadian, which it was.) Chicago without the Great Migration would never have become Chicago.
One thing that helps me is reading first-person narratives and diaries written during conflicts—not after, when people have had time to sort things out, but in the middle of things, when nobody knows anything and everything is current events, not history. (It's very reassuring to realize that nobody ever knows what will happen.) My absolute favorite of this genre is Story of a Secret State.
This installment has not been very 'things learned', I'm afraid—much more 'nobody ever learns anything'. So here are a few quick links:
If you're not feeling overwhelmed enough, may I suggest a quick turn through the List of ongoing armed conflicts page on Wikipedia? Guaranteed to evoke feelings of dread.
When terrible things happen it's hard not to try to make some personal connection, even when it's not particularly useful. The recent news has thrown me back into memories of the Chicago neighborhood I lived in right after graduating from college, where I'm pretty sure we voted in the basement of this church (I mostly voted in churches when I lived in Chicago, which didn't seem weird to me because Chicago was the first place I ever voted—and before you ask, I generally voted 'late and once', not 'early and often'.)
One of the things I loved and miss about Chicago was just how you got used to little pockets of the world throughout the city, bubbles of diaspora everywhere. The (now-gone) Lithuanian restaurant where the borscht was transcendent. The (two!) Swedish neighborhoods (one of which I also lived in). The printer I went to was run by a guy named Sargon. (Chicago has a large Assyrian community, which meant that the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, where I worked as a volunteer, got more than a few phone calls from people looking for a dictionary of modern Assyrian, which it wasn't, instead of a dictionary of Akkadian, which it was.) Chicago without the Great Migration would never have become Chicago.
One thing that helps me is reading first-person narratives and diaries written during conflicts—not after, when people have had time to sort things out, but in the middle of things, when nobody knows anything and everything is current events, not history. (It's very reassuring to realize that nobody ever knows what will happen.) My absolute favorite of this genre is Story of a Secret State.
This installment has not been very 'things learned', I'm afraid—much more 'nobody ever learns anything'. So here are a few quick links:
- This horse's name is pronounced "potatoes".
- Don't move the cursed skull.
- Posture as fashion.
- The mundane egg, which includes "in some mysterious manner, the vitality of the world".
Your friend,
Erin
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