Saturday, March 14, 2015

Kovo 11-a & Ukraine



Wednesday was the 25th anniversary of the 1990 declaration of a (re)independent Lithuania--but it was an anniversary under the cloud of continued strife in and around the Ukraine.

In the last few weeks we've seen the odd theater of the Minsk cease-fire conference (and its bloody aftermath); we've seen a key Russian opposition leader gunned down days before a Moscow rally; and we've seen Lithuania jump-start a plan to reinstate a type of military draft in order to get troop numbers up to believable levels.

This wasn't the script for how the quarter-century of independence was supposed to feel. This wasn't the script for how "Europe" was supposed to be in 2015.

In fact, sometimes it feels a lot like how I imagine 1938 or 1939.

Transitions Online has been running a series of short opinion pieces from key Ukrainian voices on the ongoing crisis--CLICK HERE for the latest installment.


Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Surfing the shortwaves

One of the luxuries of this semester has been having time to read some magazines cover-to-cover--for instance, the most recent issue of Baltic Worlds (free for the taking from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies [CBEES] @Södertörn University, home of the 2011 Baltic Studies in Europe conference)!

The article in particular that's prompting me to write is a short piece by Thomas Lundén on shortwave radio listening during the Cold War. It made me think of being in Šeduva and listening to shortwave in the late-90s...

As a conversational English teacher, I didn't have much of anything to sort in terms of grading--and a week's course prep could be adapted to the full range of ability levels. So... there was a lot of time for other things! And though I didn't have a TV, I didn't really miss it--I had my cassette/radio player.

I can remember going regularly to the BBC, but also searching around for random things... Hearing broadcasts meant for troops in the Persian Gulf was something--and hearing coded bursts of numbers and letters was something else. (This was echoed by the 2011 Wired piece discussing a curious Russian station.)



Of course, there was also "Radio Vilnius," the half-hour English-language daily broadcast on the Lithuanian state radio... That was an access point to local news and culture, as much or more than The Baltic Times. And my interest in that show was parlayed into actually working for the program in 2000-2001, but that's another post for another time...

I wonder if Mr. Lundén is on Facebook?

Click here for a set of archived recordings of "Radio Vilnius" from 1990-1991!

Monday, March 2, 2015

Kaunas chronicles: baby steps

We've been in Kaunas for a month now--the time has absolutely flown by. Now that we finally have our own apartment, it feels like something of a "reset" for the Fulbright... It was incredibly gracious of my father-in-law to help us by letting us stay w/ him in February, but it's just got to be better for everyone involved to have our own space again.

I'm teaching two classes at the moment... I'm co-teaching a Creative Nonfiction course (which is moving from print-based feature writing to a more transmedia storytelling approach), as well as an Innovations and Technologies course that's all mine. Both of those are undergrad courses, but I will be taking the 2nd half of a grad seminar on Visual Culture, bringing a production component to bear on their theoretical base.

It's at least a whole other blog post, but it's immediately striking how large the undergrad classes are--over 150 each! Here's my tease: How in the world do you facilitate the practice of writing in a lecture hall setting?!


So it's baby steps here in Kaunas--figuratively and literally. Did I mention DH is walking!!?!?!?!