This is one of those times in life when you know important stuff is happening (in Ukraine) and accurate information is hard to come by and things are moving quickly. My response has been to pick up my unread copy of The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen.

This book has been on my to read list for a while. Published in 2012 with an updated afterword by Gessen in 2014 I have always been curious what sort of a story Gessen would tell.

it’s odd to read this now because I was alive during the events Gessen attempts to chronicle. It is helping me understand the complex demise of the USSR. At the same time it casts light on living through history as we are now doing.

I have been getting a great deal of reading done. That’s the main reason I haven’t blogged lately.

Eileen and I had a fun chat with Sarah today. It last close to two hours. You might wonder what the heck we talk about but we never fail to find things to discuss even though Sarah inevitably apologizes each week for “babbling.”

Opinion | Putin’s Moves on Ukraine Will Be a Historic Mistake – The New York Times

by Madeline Albright and published Wednesday of this week before Putin attacked Ukraine. She is excellent.

Opinion | Putin’s Moves on Ukraine Will Be a Historic Mistake – The New York Times

Gessen article also published on Wednesday.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici Amazon

From Wikipedia “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation is a 2004 book by Silvia Federici. It is among the most important works to explore gender and the family during the primitive accumulation of capital As part of the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition, the book offers a critical alternative to Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.[ Federici argues that the witch hunts served to restructure family relations and the role of women in order to satisfy society’s needs during the rise of capitalism.

I picked up on this book from Roxanne Dunbar-Otyiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

I was delighted that in the first pages of Susan Howe’s 1985 Book, My Emily Dickinson, she refers to Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein as “two writers whose work refuses to conform to … Anglo-American literary traditions.” Yay! They are both obsessions of mine and I read on with relish (as Joyce says): “Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein are clearly among the most innovative precursors of modernist poetry and prose, yet to this day canonical criticism from Harold Bloom to Hugh Kenner persists in dropping their names and ignoring their work.”

Still on the first page of her book, Howe writes “Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein also conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history.” And then a couple of sentences that struck me so that I copied them into my running journal: “Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?” Whose indeed.

In a few minutes I put Howe aside to read some poetry by Dickinson.

I turned first to my library copy of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them edited by Cristanne Miller and read:

A sepal – petal – and a thorn
upon a common summer’s morn –
A flask of Dew – A Bee or tow –
A Breeze – a caper in the trees –
And I’m a Rose!

Miller ‘s footnote is illuminating: “RWF silently emends ED’s phrase ‘a caper’ to ‘a’caper,’ assuming it to be a verb.” RWF is R. W. Franklin and edited quite a bit of Dickinson. I don’t have his edition but my Thomas H. Johnson edition did not follow him in policing the grammar and parts of speech in that instance, but Johnson substitutes commas for the hyphens in the first line and does not indent the last. I know that mine above appears not indented but this is an instance of me not being able to get WordPress to do the layout I want.

It seems to be a quick instance of Howe’s patriarchal authority attempting to exert itself in the face of the skill, irony, and beauty of Emily Dickinson.