Today the book tour took me (remotely, of course) to the Ukrainian city of Lutsk. This was the best event of the book tour so far because quite a few people in the audience already read the book, so I didn’t have to give a talk or show slides.
There were some brilliant people there who have read Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, one of Bauman’s favorite interlocutors. Their understanding of neoliberalism’s assault on morality was superb. Finally, somebody brought up neoliberalism during one of my events. Until now, people have been hell-bent on talking about nothing beyond literary criticism.
One of the people in the audience said, “I’m not sure if everybody realizes but our speaker is the daughter of a famous Ukrainian writer who, sadly, died two years ago.” I started bawling and she read some quotes from Ukrainian artists who admired my father. Then I bawled some more. Another person in the audience cried, too, so it wasn’t completely weird.
Then somebody talked about the situation in Kharkiv, and I wept again.
On the positive side, I did remember to wear a different shirt today, and here’s proof:
Klara woke me up at 3 am today because she had a dream that my pet dragon breathed fire on her. It took a while to explain that I’m not planning to get a pet dragon, so I look like I’m 60 as a result.
Clarissa's Blog 
[Merely a personal note which I hope won’t jar with the seriousness of your talk.] My family on my mother’s side is originally from Lutsk (Łuck in Polish), when it was still in the Pale of Settlement. It feels strange to have such a flickering connection with Ukraine, and a spate of questions crowd riotously into my mind… but I’ll stop here.
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Oh wow, this is so cool.
I don’t really know much about that part of Ukraine. The people kind of look all the same to me. They have a shared look for sure. I expected some difference from us in how they speak in both vocabulary and pronunciation but there was nothing. Just the look.
My father always gently mocked what he thought was the typical Volyn pronunciation but I haven’t encountered it in actuality.
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