This week’s blessing of unicorns includes Andrey Kurkov, Cesar Chavez, Evagrius of Pontus, what/where is the Midwest anyway, home births, ancient sea monsters, and modern ferrets.
***
The second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is at the end of this month, and I appreciated this interview with Andrey Kurkov at The Guardian about his experience living in wartime Ukraine and his new crime series—Amanda McCrina’s review for Current is coming next month. A taste from the interview, in the meanwhile:
The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov was having dinner with friends at his home in Kyiv on the evening of 23 February 2022, the day before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Within hours he was advised that his name probably featured on a Russian list targeting prominent Ukrainian figures for arrest, or worse, and he should leave the city. As Kurkov and his wife joined the thousands of Ukrainians who grabbed what possessions they could and headed to the west of the country, he began a stream of articles, speeches, interviews, broadcasts and other interventions – made at home and abroad – to explain the plight and position of his compatriots. He returned to Kyiv four months after the invasion, and the city has remained his base ever since for his continuing role as one of the best known and most assiduous advocates of a free and independent Ukraine.
***
Mike Jimenez is my successor at the Anxious Bench, and here is his first monthly column—“Returning to My Church History Roots, Finding Cesar Chavez.”
***
Matthew Milliner has a new and gorgeous monthly column at Comment. The opening salvo is very Lent appropriate—about the desert father Evagrius of Pontus. Yes, sure, I take some (theologically justified) pot shots at the desert fathers in my book, but Milliner reminds us of reasons they do deserve our attention and even admiration.
***
Yes, there’s a crisis among college students—they can’t read anymore. It seems that hardly a week goes by of late without another piece on this crisis. Adam Kotsko’s article at Slate is the latest to consider the problem and is worth reading.
***
H/t Jon Lauck: Middle West Review has done extensive polling recently on people’s perceptions of the geographical boundaries of the region. It is no surprise that if you live in, say, Iowa, you’re fairly certain that you live in the Midwest. But what about Ohio or South Dakota, for instance? Turns out, it’s a little more complicated:
The journal Middle West Review, in cooperation with Emerson College Polling, recently completed a second round of surveys focused on determining which Americans self-identify as Midwesterners. The new survey follows-up on an October 2023 survey and drills down deeper into four particular states which are located near regional boundaries: Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, and South Dakota. 2,000 Coloradans and 2,000 South Dakotans were asked if they lived in the Midwest, Great Plains, or West; 2,000 Ohioans were asked if they lived in the Midwest, the South, or Appalachia; and 2,000 Missourians were asked if they lived in the Midwest or the South.
The results of the survey strongly confirm the Midwestern identity of Missouri and Ohio, the mostly Midwestern identity of South Dakota, and the Western tilt of Colorado. 94.3% of Missourians surveyed said they lived the Midwest and 5.7% said the South. 87.2% of Ohioans surveyed said they lived in the Midwest. 9% said Appalachia and 3.9% said the South. 66.3% of South Dakotans said they lived in the Midwest, 30.5% the Great Plains, and 3.3% the West. 65.1% of Coloradans said they lived in the West, 26.2% the Midwest, and 8.8% the Great Plains.
“These two large-scale surveys demonstrate the strength and persistence of Midwestern identity and they help us to better see the boundaries of the Midwest,” said Jon Lauck, Editor-in-Chief of Middle West Review. “Roughly 90% of Ohioans and Missourians embrace their place as Midwesterners in states that, in the past, have been thought to be on the edges of the region or more divided than they now appear. At the same time, important nuances can be detected in the data, such as the southeastern Appalachian edge of Ohio. Also, while Eastern South Dakota remains strongly Midwestern and oriented toward Iowa and Minnesota, the Western half includes a noticeable Plains identity and a small Western alignment. The Western character of Colorado shines through in this new poll, but so does a Midwestern identity in the areas next to Kansas and Nebraska. There is less of a Plains inclination in Colorado than I expected. The brushes of Southern-ness can also be seen in the polling results for the southeastern bootheel of Missouri wedged between Tennessee and Arkansas.”
***
This reminds me: as a new Midwesterner, I dutifully read a guide recently on how to be a good Midwesterner. You have to know the difference between hot dish and casserole, for instance (one has tater tots on top, the other does not. And if you don’t know what tater tots are, it really is your loss). One other important thing I learned: whenever people say “watch out for deer,” it’s Midwestern code for “I love you.” So, now we know that the wonderfully welcoming people at our church (who do say this to us regularly) really love us. Next step: we need to train ourselves to say it back.
***
Evie Solheim’s piece on home births at The American Conservative is excellent. Very well worth reading, if you want to understand some of the dilemmas that many women deal with in considering their options today. I was reminded also of Ivana Greco’s essay in Compact a few months ago on the disappearance of rural maternity wards. After a traumatic hospital birth with my first child, I seriously thought about a home birth with my second and third baby but was lucky enough to find a midwife-only practice that delivered in a hospital (I wrote about this experience for Front Porch Republic last year).
***
Switching gears from humans to animals. Miles Smith’s latest at Ad Fontes is a fascinating deep dive (pun intended, thankyouverymuch!) into sea serpent sightings in the nineteenth century—with a theological twist: who did they think the Biblical Leviathan was? A taste:
In nineteenth century America the ubiquity of sea serpent sightings made them an opportunity for humor and also wonder. In 1817 numerous sailors and fishermen in the waters off of Cape Ann, Massachusetts reported seeing a sea serpent. The sightings inspired a humorous poem about gender relations by an anonymous Neptune which was distributed in New England papers. The debates in households over the true nature of the sea serpent sightings, said the writer, did nothing more than reignite the discord begun by the original serpent in Eden. Neptune was less interested in the scientific identity of the monster than he was with the typology of serpents in scripture, and how it related to the fall of man, and the perceive secularization of New England society. He alluded to the serpent in a poem alleging that New England’s women were not as modest as they had once been…
Batchelder, Melville, Matthews and later Perry Miller were all intellectually formed by the Calvinist intellectual tradition’s particular hermeneutic. This was not biblical literalism ala latter day fundamentalists, but it was assumed that that which was described in the scriptures was historically real without regards to whether the descriptions in the biblical text were literal or not. Melville alluded to “Leviathan” over seventy times in Moby Dick, sometimes poetically, sometimes as a synonym for known whales species, but never for something that was merely an ideal. W.D. Taunton, a priominent amateur scientist and inventor in Great Britain, took the study of sea serpents seriously, arguing that sea monsters should be treated as something very different than dragons in ancient literature. He also proposed that the biblical leviathan should not be associated with serpents or dragons representing the forces of evil, Leviathan was something more than a type.
***
From Leviathans to ferrets! This delightful story about keeping ferrets as pets, and at Princeton, no less, also appears in Adrienne Mayor’s recent(ish) cabinet-of-curiosities-style essay collection. A taste:
To counter our friends’ and relatives’ terror and to reveal the charms of our beloved Denise, we typed and mailed out an irregular series of newsletters titled “Denise’s Diary,” recounting her adventures and musings on life. Decades before the Internet and the Blogosphere, Denise was the first Ferret Blogger. Well traveled, she criss-crossed the country with us several times. In Minnesota, she learned to swim in my mother’s goldfish pond, and she escaped from a flimsy cardboard enclosure to surprise my father in the bathroom at midnight. In North Carolina, Denise was involved in setting a false fire alarm, as we tried to sneak her into a motel that frowned on pets of any kind. She lived in an outdoor cage filled with straw for a year as an illegal alien in New Hampshire (ferrets are banned by law in the state). In New Hampshire, Denise discovered maple syrup, fed to her by our 3-year-old niece Katy. Denise also accompanied us to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a year. She was allowed to dwell in our apartment only because the landlady was under the false impression that we owned a “small caged creature something like a hamster.”
Denise enjoyed an adventure-filled life of seven years, double the span of her wild relatives. By the time we lost her, ferrets were beginning to enter American popular culture. Maybe Denise’s widely disseminated “Diary” played some small part in making ferrets more acceptable. In 1986, ferrets were declared “Pet of the Year” on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.