Con/Artist Still Conning

Self is currently reading Con/Artist: A Memoir, by Tony Tetro, about his life as a “world-renowned” art forger (His main claim to fame is that he gulled Prince Charles into buying a Picasso, Dali, Monet, and Chagall, “insuring them for over 200 million pounds,” when they were “actually Tetros.”) He spent a year in jail when the forgeries were exposed (A year?) and then went on to write this memoir, which got a very favorable review in the Wall Street Journal, about a week ago. This book was co-authored (the co-author’s name is in very small print) by Giampero Ambrosi.

Chapter One is about his art education, in high school in Fulton, New York. He name-drops like mad! Then relates an anecdote of Michelangelo, only 22 when he began working on the Pieta, that has the artist sneaking “into the Vatican” to carve “his name on the sculpture — the only artwork he ever signed,” because rumors were going round that “his masterpiece had been made by one of his rivals.” Tetro commiserates: “I don’t blame him. It’s ironic considering what I do, but years later when I forged a piece that somebody else claimed, I think I understood what Michelangelo must have felt.”

Clearly, he can relate to the best! Anyhoo, self finds his constant calling attention to himself quite exhausting, and is glad that there are only two pages left of this chapter.

“Revenge doesn’t wait for permission.”

This is the tag line for Mother May I, by Joshilyn Jackson, which self found in an article on “Beach Reads” in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal. Of course, since self’s reading list is so unwieldy, she doesn’t actually get to read this novel until it’s almost winter. After the first rains have arrived.

Onward!

The opening is a definite “hook”:

I woke up to see a witch peering in my bedroom window.

She was little more than a dark shape with a predator’s hungry eyes, razor-wire skinny but somehow female, staring in through the partly open drapes. Sunrise lit up the thin, silvery hair that straggled out from under her hat.

#amreading: wsj front page, 13 October 2022

The Ukrainian advances in the east and the south of the country looked like separate operations but in retrospect they appear to be part of a coordinated plan.

“ukrainian strategy is running circles around russian forces” by stephen fidler, james marson and thomas grove, wall street journal, thursday, oct. 13, 2022, p. a1

wsj Thursday, 25 August 2022: Quote of the Day

On Wednesday, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report downgraded its outlook for the size of a GOP majority after the midterm elections and said it couldn’t rule out the possibility that Democrats maintain their majority, citing elevated Democratic turnout.

— Wall Street journal, p. A4, “democrats’ house win lifts midterm hopes” by joshua jamerson

And the Next Read Is: The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews

Wow! Self zoomed through Eyes of the Void, she was so hungry to get caught up on the plucky crew of The Vulture God. Idris gets kidnapped again, but this time he sides with his kidnappers. Honestly? She was happy when he got slapped by a kidnapper who was so tired of his “gormless” affect. Solace manages to reach him and he goes No, I have stuff to do, I am not going with you. Solace, apart from being an all-around awesome Warrior Woman, also has the patience of Job, to put up with this kind of boyfriend! She says he went “all native.” To say the least!

Self pulled The Homewreckers out of an article on Beach Reads that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. A few quotes from the article, by Ellen Gammerman:

• “Beach reads” are “loosely defined as any engrossing tale released for summer.”
• Beach books sell well when people who don’t have time to read say, “This is the one book I’m going to pack when I go to the Jersey Shore.”

Anyhoo, this is the first title in a long list she pulled from the article, and she had it on hold for a couple of weeks before it finally landed in her hot little hands. So she won’t give out the rest of the titles, because that might make her wait for these books at the library longer!

Stay tuned.

SCOTUS Votes 6-3 Again

Wall Street Journal, 28 June 2022, Page One: SUPREME COURT RULES COACH CAN PRAY ON FIELD AFTER GAME

Byline: Jess Bravin

Writing for the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch said coach Joe Kennedy’s prayers were private speech that couldn’t be construed as representing the school district and were protected by the First Amendment.

The court rejected arguments that the public devotions could be seen as coercive particularly to the players, who depend on the coach’s approval on matters ranging from time on the field to college recommendations.

Students who might feel discomfort with Mr. Kennedy’s evangelical Christian prayers should consider it a lesson, for “learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.

Dissenting Opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

• The First Amendment prohibits official “establishment of religion” to elevate another, in the clause protecting the “free exercise of faith.” The decision by the majority “elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all.” This decision of the majority was “particularly misguided because it elevates the religious rights of a school official, who voluntarily accepted public employment and the limits that public employment entails, over those of his students, who are required to attend school and who this Court has long recognized are particularly vulnerable and deserving of protection.”

“Where Are the Ukrainian POWs?” wsj, 14 June 2022

Where are the Ukrainian POWs?, by Jillian Kay Melchior, wsj editorial page writer

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently said Russia had taken nearly 6,500 Ukrainian soldiers prisoner since February, Voice of America reported. Ukraine said in early April that it held some 600 Russian POWs. The Ukrainian government is tight-lipped about negotiations for prisoner exchanges, and the families of Mariupol’s defenders say they don’t know how Russia has treated their loved ones. But Ukrainian human-rights activists say Russia routinely tortures prisoners of war, deprives them of necessities, and holds them in deplorable conditions.

Mariupol’s defenders included the Azov Regiment . . . and the 36th Marine Brigade. After enduring weeks of siege and brutal attack, the Ukrainian soldiers laid down their arms in hope of saving lives. Many civilians were successfully evacuated from the Ukrainian soldiers’ last stronghold in the city. Bohdan Krotevych, the Azov Regiment’s 29-year-old chief of staff, said last month that the Ukrainians proposed that Russia would receive their severely wounded soldiers and release them in a prisoner exchange.

The Russians said no — “either everyone or no one” would have to surrender. Mr. Krotevych told me by text message on May 18. “So we were faced with a very tough choice . . . Those with serious wounds were basically rotting away and slowly dying in our hospitals, while the enemy was robbing the humanitarian convoys with medicine.” By May 20 he had stopped responding to messages, and the press reported the soldiers’ surrender.

“The only comfort is they are no longer under direct threat of dying from combat,” says Maria Netreba, 24.

— The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, June 14, 2022, p. A19

wsj, Wednesday, 23 March 2022: Devastation, Mariupol

The excerpt below was from a Page 1 article written by WSJ correspondent Isabel Coles.

For those caught in Mariupol, the situation has been desperate. Women and children largely stayed hidden, while men ventured out to scavenge for food, find water and search for a phone signal to find out what was going on.

Dmitro, 25, joined efforts with neighbors he had never met before the war to find wood and keep a fire burning from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. On March 9, he was making tea on the fire when an airstrike hit the nearby maternity hospital in what was one of the highest profile attacks on civilians during the almost monthlong fighting. The shock wave lifted him off his feet. Since then, he said, the bombardment has been relentless.

As the bombing intensified, basements and bomb shelters filled up as people whose homes had been destroyed sought shelter in the shrinking area of the city controlled by Ukrainian forces.

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TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES

After Russian forces took control of the main intensive-care hospital, there was nowhere to treat the wounded, nor any medicine, people who fled the city said. The director of the heart-disease center told Mykola Trofymenko he had been forced to amputate the mangled leg of a patient using a kitchen knife without anesthetic.

Today’s Headlines, 3rd Tuesday of March 2022

WALL STREET JOURNAL, Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine — Russian forces are killing civilians and looting stores and homes across occupied parts of southern Ukraine, residents said, as Moscow arrested elected local leaders and sought to replace them with pro-Russian collaborators.

People arriving here from Russian-held areas over the weekend described hungry and undisciplined Russian troops shooting unarmed villagers, breaking into supermarkets and shops, and raiding homes in search of food and valuables as their own supply lines have failed.

“They just brazenly come in, without any shame, and take whatever they want,” said Valentyn Khodus, 64, who came to Zaporizhzhia from the small village of Myrne after days hiding in the cellar with her daughter and grandson as Russian troops went door to door ransacking houses.

Two neighbors who were driving a car with a Ukrainian flag were shot and killed by a Russian patrol last week, she said. “It’s still there, on the roadside, and their bodies are still inside,” Ms. Khodus said.

Russia said it isn’t planning an occupation of Ukraine and that its forces are liberating Ukrainians.

Quote of the Day: Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

To refuse to countenance a war that does not speak its true name . . . you can no longer mumble the old excuse, “We didn’t know”; and now that you do know, can you continue to feign ignorance or content yourselves with mere token utterances of horrified sympathy?

— Simone de Beauvoir, French author and activist