Thursday, October 22, 2015

Mary Oliver "Not Anyone Who Says"




NOT ANYONE WHO SAYS

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
  careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.









Thursday, October 15, 2015

Budapest Games

Berlin: 1936
Roma families are taken from their beds and detained in a camp outside of the city where visitors to the 1936 Berlin Olympics will never see them. Later they would be taken to death camps. Hitler had ordered Berlin transformed and perfected for the world to see his ideas made real on its streets. Anti-Semitic signs were removed (stored, and then replaced after the games). The Der Stürmer, a newspaper whose slogan was “The Jews Are Our Misfortune” was removed from newsstands.

Budapest: July, 2015
Budapest and the Hungarian Olympic Committee officially announce their intention to bid for the 2024 Olympic Summer Games.

Budapest: Nov. 7th, 2015
Excerpt from Viktor Orban’s Speech to his Diplomats: Hungary’s historical given is that we live together with a few hundred thousands Roma. This was decided by someone, somewhere. This is what we inherited. This is our situation, this is our predetermined condition…. We are the ones who have to live with this, but we don’t demand from anyone, especially not in the direction of the west, that they should live together with a large Roma minority.







Sources:
Description of Berlin: adapted from The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
Orban’s speech: English translation taken from the HungarianSpectrum, a blog written by Eva S. Balogh