Et Al

Wow headline from nypost.com: “Saudi Arabia kills 81 in its largest mass execution ever recorded.” It included seven Yemeni and one Syrian.

While the Biden administration negotiates payoff appeasement with the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism, here’s an excerpt from an article by Patrick Reilly at NYP: “Up to a dozen ballistic missiles launched from Iran were fired early Sunday morning towards the US consulate in Iraq’s Kurdistan region capital of Erbil, officials said.” Will it be attributed to a rogue element? Then there’s this NYP headline: “Alarming — and true: Biden is letting Putin run the Iran nuclear talks.” Can’t make this stuff up.

From an article by Paul Steinhauser at foxnews.com: “According to a national poll released Friday by the Wall Street Journal… Voters were split at 45% in a hypothetical matchup between Biden and Trump, when asked who they would vote for in 2024.” How is it even close? What am I not seeing in the contrast between a good president and one who has surpassed, in a little more than a year, Carter and Obama as the worst in U.S. history? Am I that blindly partisan? WTF?

It used to be be called White Flight. Headline from FN: “Census: Black population grows in suburbs, shrinks in cities.”

Isaac Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. He fought in WWI and later sided with the Bolsheviks. Through short stories, most of them first person accounts that read like non-fiction, he imparts what he saw and experienced as a conflicted Jew in a land not kind to his brethren. A copy of Collected Stories came my way and I dove into it, as I’ve always been fascinated by Soviet doings. The pieces span before and after the revolution, and include the savage combat in the southwest region of Ukraine that borders Poland. That section of the book, dubbed Red Cavalry, is Babel’s most famous work and details the campaign, which was conducted almost exclusively on foot and horseback. The last is Odessa Stories, which largely covers a crime family. While there is a lot of fascinating stuff throughout the book, it is not thoroughly satisfying. There are many parts where I was baffled. I don’t know if it is something lost in translation. It is a tough read. Here are a couple of snippets that soared: “The squadron was commanded by a locksmith… a boy.” And: “The drunks lay about the courtyard like broken furniture…” Not much is known about Babel, who fell into disfavor with the Reds, was imprisoned at 41 and never heard from again. He’d had the wisdom to send his family to France, which he visited himself. Why he didn’t remain there, no one knows. 39 users at Amazon have rated Collected Stories, forging to a consensus of 4.6 on a scale of five. I’ll go with three. Although I was disappointed, I’m glad I got to sample Babel’s work.

It was cold despite the sunshine, but tolerable for curbside endeavor. My thanks to Bill Brown, author of Words and Music: A History of Lou Reed’s Music and other fine books, who bought The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II by Edvard Radzinsky and a Beethoven CD; and to the young woman who overcompensated me for a work on Sequential Mathematics, whatever that is; and to Mr. Conspiracy, aka Steve, who purchased The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 2nd Edition, Revised & Updated by E. D. Hirsch Jr., Joseph F. Kett, et al., the latter, who I dub E.A., one of my favorite authors.

My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts

Read Vic’s Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza