Lithuanians everywhere
not that they admit it
Labas!
“Labas” is how we greet each other in Lithuanian - and I have never understood how it was possible to have a greeting so unrelated to any other Western or Eastern European greeting (okay except the Latvian labs which is clearly just a truncated version of our hello.) But thanks to the preposterous amount of Duolingo I have been doing, I have just learned that in French là-bas means “over there” - and from there it is a very short distance to “Ahoy!” or “Hey, over there!" Or imagine a French-Lithuanian person saying “Labas là-bas!” — “Hello over there!”
(I just saw that French Lithuanian film so, you know, it’s fresh.)
Hey, let’s talk about the fact that I just discovered that Michael Bloomberg’s mother was Lithuanian.
And Mike is not the only famous New Yorker who doesn’t talk about being Lithuanian. The guy who funds the David Prize is also, supposedly, Lithuanian on his father’s side.
And of course Andrew Giuliani married a stunning Lithuanian real estate mogul (and ex-Olympic ribbon dancer).
We’re everywhere.
Writing News:
On Tuesday, I hosted a terrific Pen Parentis Literary Salon with Christina Chiu. We interviewed three excellent novelists - Michael Bourne, Marina Budhos, and Nancy Ludmerer —plus we presented our annual Writing Fellowship for New Parents. The very pertinent theme was “collateral damage.” If you missed it, here’s the playback:
On Wednesday, I gave a podcast interview on the Diva Hustle Show - I don’t know when it will go live but it was fun!
For me, this was the week of Richard Powers, who is one of my all-time favorite writers. I attended an intimate “talk” - billed as a conversation about our relationship with nature, our understanding of time, and how hope is a defiant act in the face of the climate crisis, and because I have good friends, I landed front row center.
It was less of a conversation than a monologue with an interviewer who stayed silent probably because he intrinsically knew that every time he opened his mouth, he was taking up a little bit of the time he could be listening to Richard Powers.
One takeaway? That we are foolish to imagine that we are outside of Nature. This whole man-vs-nature thing is really us-vs-ourselves. Humans are inextricably part of the planet, part of the ecosystem. We are born somewhere and we stay or migrate and we reproduce and we build things and eventually we die. Our cities are as natural as beaver dens, mudwasp or termite nests or…more likely…strangler figs. We are just a little bit more inventive than raccoons since we fabricate not just scavenge. It’s strange and yet feels truthful to think of humanity as a part of the planet, not just colonizers.
It behooves us to recognize that, as part of the environment, we might want to strike more of a balance with our fellow life forms. Truly humanity thinks itself so exceptional, yet we barely last a blip of time on the earth compared to a mountain or a tree.
That said, we can be awfully destructive during that time.
When I was little, I frequently read in the branches of a tree. There was one in my backyard with a particularly inviting and comfortable crook in a low bough—I must have read dozens if not hundreds of books cradled in that arm. It is one of my fondest, oldest, more formative memories.
The night after this wonderful conversation, I watched this same MacArthur Genius narrate a concert. The piece was Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) - which is a musical style I enjoy, but one that my son said “sounded like the guy was trying to get back at the Nazis who forced him to write this piece.” (The Nazi reference is to the fact that Messiaen’s piece premiered in the yard of a work camp during the occupation of France—performed by four of the inmates, hence the odd choice of instrumentation for the quartet - a cello, violin, clarinet and piano. We learned all of this from a long excerpt of Orfeo that Powers read aloud, narrating the specificities of each section of the musical piece before we listened to it.)
It was a delightfully meta evening. You can listen to the piece and Richard Powers here.
And then on Thursday, I attended an awards ceremony at Poet’s House, which was open during its re-construction for one night only for a reading by several indigenous award-winning poets. There were a lot of flowers worn as decorative accessories:
Looking for something to do?
Read my Kirkus Review even if you don’t have time to read my book.
Or get my book and write your own review on Amazon.
Random Final Thought:
I spent some time reading here today. Hope you also are spending time in your backyard. (did you see the nice statue we put up in the back, there?)
labas-one of the few Lithuanian words I know in that beautiful language-