REGISTER: Bette’s Happy Hour with Dr. Marci Shore - 'Why Have a War During a Literary Festival?'
Please register for our Tuesday Happy Hour with intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore as she updates the Bette community on her recent trips to Kyiv and Tbilisi - June 9, 11 am Pacific
***Bette members will find the registration link for this event below the paywall. To join our community events and support independent investigative journalist in a time of grave peril, please consider becoming a member.***
Our next community event for all levels of paid membership is Tuesday Happy Hour with Dr. Marci Shore — Tuesday, June 9, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern — as the intellectual historian and author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, discusses the topic:
“Why have a war during a literary festival?”
The theme comes from a recent Der Standard interview with Shore, who just returned from Kyiv, where she took part in the Ukrainian literary festival “Book Arsenal.”
She explained: “Everyone here is forced to live to the rhythm of air alarms. I listened to poetry readings in the bunker, signed copies of my books in the bunker, participated in conversations about feminism. During the night there were two air alarms, one around midnight lasted about an hour and another was around three o’clock. And then there were three alarms today (Friday, May 29, note) - which unfortunately interrupted all the panels I participated in.”
She sent me this screenshot from her phone:
When she was asked by the reporter from Der Standard “what does it say about the Ukrainian way of thinking about holding such a festival in the midst of heavy air raids?”
She responded: “It was Haris Pašović, the founder of a film festival in Sarajevo, who was asked in the mid-1990s, during the siege: ‘Why a film festival in the middle of war?’ And he replied, ‘Why a war in the middle of a film festival?’ I think that also captures the Ukrainian attitude quite well, and I love that. I feel a considerable awe for this attitude, and it is one of the reasons why I am always drawn to Ukraine.”
As she has told me many times before: “These are people who refuse to be broken.”
In addition to hearing her first-hand experiences from Kyiv, she will also update us on her trip to Tbilisi, where a student was arrested on the way to hear her lecture.
More on our guest here:
Dr. Marci Shore is an intellectual historian formerly of Yale University, who is now the Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Ukrainian Night, Caviar and Ashes, and Taste of Ashes
If you would like to take a crash course on some of Shore’s work, here are some links:
Links to Shore’s books:
Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.
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