A Nod to Wordsworth

I am restoring my powers in Krakow.

For almost 48 glorious hours I have read, walked, visited with my wonderful extended extended cousin, and attempted to reflect tranquilly on the last month of unstoppable, intense work. There's a lot more tranquility to be recollected before the project gets edited and written, but I am, at this point, at least able to remember half of what Alison and I did in our weeks of work.

Alison flew out of Kyiv a few days ago with something like more than 10,000 images stored on various external hard drives. I have something like 40 hours of recorded interviews and songs and a notebook full of notes. We plan to cyber-manage all that information in the coming weeks, and I hope to update this blog occasionally with more images from our weeks of interviewing and travelling in Crimea in May. Our final day of documentation, on the Day of Deportation (May 18th) in Simferopol, felt like a very peculiar episode of "This Is Your Life." As Alison and I forged through the crowds in search of the ever-elusive Milara-odzha, we ran across countless people whom we had interviewed and photographed in the previous weeks all over Crimea.

Tonight, I will travel to Berlin where Susan and I will kick off our slapdash Debutante Hour European tour, and then meander our way down to Italy, across to Poland, and then back to Ukraine, where we will finish out with a performance at the Les Kurbas Theater in L'viv. Then, I will go back to Crimea, where I will begin another 6 weeks of research generously supported by an SSRC pre-dissertation fellowship.

More to come...