World of Penguins: charl08 travels the shelves #5

The security guards grabbed Katya. She managed to distract them all, and this bought us 40 seconds to do our performance. 40 seconds of crime.
40 seconds

‘what was the music like?’
‘goodness me, I don’t know how to describe it’
‘was it church music?’
‘no, certainly not!’
‘you mean to say it was not church music?’
‘absolutely not’
‘what did the instrument sound like?’
‘I don’t know what to compare it to, but it wasn’t at all Orthodox’
‘what are Orthodox sounds?'
‘I can’t answer that!’
judge: ‘you are obliged to answer the question’

‘Which two books would you take if you had to be away from home for an indefinite period of time? Which do you think I would take?’ a friend asked.
‘Not the Bible, I hope.’
‘Mandelstam and Rilke. You can always find a Bible.’

In one of my enormous bags I’m carrying books . At night, in the car, I read poetry . When I read out loud, everyone around me quietens down. goes quiet ‘Parting is more terrible at dawn than at sunset,’ Boris Ryzhy wrote.
‘Who’s reading?’ a convict calls out.
‘Don’t you know?’ comes a voice from another compartment. ‘Pussy Riot’s here!’

(Netgalley copy)

In summer 1917, the silent poet had met a young Russian poet in the royal palace of Herrenschiemsee. Her husband was a political prisoner in Berlin; she was Sophie Liebknecht, the wife of the German Communist Party's leader. The two became friends. ...he complained how the war was making him suffer, and she told him his suffering would be easier to bear 'if you did not spurn the times in which we live, if you paid more attention to them, read newspapers and took more interest, and thus developed a more real relationship with them"....

Not like the panther in Paris's Jardin des Plantes, about which he had written at the start of the century:

To him, there seemed to be a thousand bars
And out beyond those thousand bars, no world.

THere were no historical precedents for them to draw on. Direct, permanent democracy; everyone having a say in everything. A government of fantasy and fictions. They wanted the best and created horrors...
In I Was a German, Toller wrote: "You cannot just avoid reality when it was different from what you wished it to be, and excuse yourself by saying: that was not what I intended."
But the lesson from all the defeats is certainly not to grow feeble, to give up, to sleep, not even to begin.

I know the people on this path:
I know who were vagabond,
but now are returning home; I know
who are losing their home; who
walk in front of me
with only one place to go.

I know who are like me:
I know they want to stay
in between the rain and the sun
on the path that begins
with the moon but ends with the sun.

From "The Path"
Sophie Dunsby

It is no secret that the unnamed “community” in Milkman is the Ardoyne of Burns’ childhood. Much of the novel draws its inspiration from her own experiences; when Burns reads the passage about the teacher at night class who forces her reluctant students to consider that the sky might be colours other than blue, she reveals that this had its origins in an inspirational teacher of her own – Pat McCann – and that her former teacher is in the audience.
The point of the story, Burns says, is that it illustrates “how hard it is to change, to expand, if you’ve not been taught that it is possible”.

...the renowned historian of sexuality Dagmar Herzog shared a conversation with several East German men in their late forties in 2006. They told her that "it was really annoying that East German women had so much sexual self-confidence and economic independence. Money was useless, they complained. The few extra Eastern marks that a doctor could make in contrast with, say, someone who worked in the theater, did absolutely no good... 'You had to be interesting.'