Please remove this blog, in its entirety, from the Internet Archive.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Vladimir's Mustache
An introduction to Vladimir's Mustache, a short story collection by Stephan Eirik Clark that is set against the backdrop of Russian history from the time of Peter the Great through the purges of Stalin and on into the mail-order bride agencies of the present day. With stories published in such magazines as Witness, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, and the Cincinnati Review, this collection is available now through Amazon and other book sellers.
by Stephan Eirik Clark
Youtube link
For more information, visit the website of the author at http://www.stephanclark.net or the publisher at http://www.russianlife.com/store/index.cfm/product/215_30/vladimirs-mustache.cfm
Monday, January 25, 2010
New Blog
Because this site isn't representative of the full range of my writing, I've created a new website, more general in nature. Find it at www.stephanclark.net or just click here.
For those who enjoyed this blog, thanks for reading. And keep in touch.
Finally, special thanks to Snowy for all the work he put into the redesign. Read More......
Thursday, May 21, 2009
The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr
One percent of our genes is devoted to the sense of smell (only the immune system rivals this) and yet still we can't say how the nose works. When we talk of the nose, we might as well be talking of the soul.
These thoughts and more are explored in this wonderful book, The Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr, which I find myself returning to again and again. It explores the perfume trade in France and a man with an unorthodox view of the sense of smell. Highly recommended:
Friday, December 19, 2008
Notes From an Underground (a recording)
In Ukraine, all of the smaller, corner stores work much like markets did in the United States fifty or one-hundred years ago. You'll go in and see that all of the goods are on shelves or in cold cases only employees can reach or access. Consequently, if you want some cheese, you'll have to go up to the dairy counter and speak with a blue-aproned продавщица (prodavschitsa/saleswoman) who will call out, Я слушаю! (ya slushayu!/I'm listening!) and take your order. If you want some meat, or some dry goods, you'll have to repeat the process, seeing two more Blue Aprons.
There is certainly a benefit to this system: a drastic reduction in theft. But the problem is, if you don't speak Russian, or if you speak a little Russian but are too shy to test it in public, you will likely starve, especially if you haven't yet discovered one of the western-style supermarkets, of which there were several in Kharkov.
Anyway, all of this is a long introduction to the fact that I wrote an essay about my experiences trying to scrape together a few good meals in Ukraine during my first couple of weeks in-country back in the fall of 2005. A while back I pointed you to the journal that published it, NOÖ Journal, which subsequently nominated the essay for inclusion in the Best of the Web 2009 anthology.
Now I'm writing to say you can find an audio recording of the essay below. Fourteen minutes long, it should prepare any traveler for a trip to the Former Soviet Union. Tell me what you think. And Приятного аппетита!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Manure
Just discovered this website that allows you to view magazines online -- and I found the second story I published had already been uploaded by Dave Housley, one of the editors of Barrelhouse. My story, "Manure," about my trouble with credit cards, begins on page 19.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Great blog
If, like me, you're learning -- or, more honestly, trying to learn -- to speak Russian, you'd be well-served by visiting this blog, which is written by a Swedish literature student living in Russia. I love the word of the week feature, as well as the type of travel reportage that I enjoyed posting here. The title of the blog, Russian Blog, sounds like the result of a brainstorming session that lasted all of five seconds. But each post is obviously the work of a good deal of effort. I'm certainly reading and hoping for more.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The Greatest Gift.
This should be of interest to many readers of this blog: a memoir of survival and Siberia. Get an introduction to the book here:
Sunday, August 31, 2008
The Cost of Marriage (Part Two)
Two years after receiving your conditional Green Card card -- the first you will receive after marrying a U.S. citizen -- you must apply to have its conditions removed, using form I-751. If you do not do this, you will not be allowed to live legally in the United States. If you do, and you're successful in your application -- meaning, your marriage is not ruled to be a fraud, entered into only to circumvent immigration laws -- you will be rewarded with a 10 year Green Card.
Can you guess how much it costs to file the I-751?
$545.
That includes $80 for a biometric finger-print.
Please, do not write USDHS on your personal check or money order. Write it out in full: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Some of you may say this is perfectly fine. You choose to marry a foreigner, you pay the price. But we do not parse out the costs of the nation in this way with other things. We all pay for the military. We all contribute to Social Security, MediCare, etcetera. Yes, homeowners support education. But do only drivers support the cost of building and maintaining new roads? Etcetera, etcetera.
For a previous entry on the Foreigner Tax see here.
Monday, May 26, 2008
How to Make Chicken Kharkiv
During my first month or two in Kharkov, I reported that I wasn't eating so well. Now the full story can be found in the latest issue of NOÖ.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Moloko
It's not exactly writer's block -- I just can't get going.
Consequently, I've spent much of the last two days on Flickr, securing my photos for posterity. The end result of all this is my forming a new group on that photo-sharing site devoted entirely to pictures of Soviet-era milk stores.
I'm not sure what the laws are for committing someone against their own will in the State of California, but that may be something the judge would look at unfavorably. "Milk stores, you say? Photographs of?"
"Yes, your honor."
By all means, join and post away.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Scamski City
People are fools if they want to find a wife on the internet.
It is not real. I correspond with a whole division of Westerners - and they are all idiots.
From an article in the Daily Mail. Read More......
Monday, February 11, 2008
From the About Time Department
Green Card rules relaxed. Now those lengthy FBI clearances -- detailed in my recent investigative piece -- will be reduced.
See The New York Times for more.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Democratic Party, Putin-Style
The more I learn about the American voting system -- and it takes several election cycles to cut through the murk -- the less "democratic" it seems.
Get this, forty-percent of the delegates currently at stake for Democratic presidential contenders are "super-delegates." The voters don't vote for these 842 people; they're high-ranking Democratic Party members: governors, leaders of the Democratic National Committee, former Presidents, like Bill Clinton. And they all go to the National Convention, just like the delegates the voters send, and pledge their vote to a candidate during the nominating stage.
This came as a surprise this morning, when I went to go check the delegate count, and, instead of seeing a field just now getting started, discovered Clinton way out ahead.
She has 159 "super-delegates," dwarfing the number she's received in Iowa and New Hampshire so far, and more than 100 more than the next candidate, Barack Obama.
Apparently, this isn't a centuries-old tradition in the Party either. As this MSNBC report states, it just a generation ago, when grass-roots movements, including those calling for women's rights, began to shake up the old Guard. The Democratic Party needed something to keep it stabilized through this volatile time, so the system was born.
“There was a belief that they would not want candidates who were dramatically out of sync with the rest of the party — particularly if these were people who were going to have to run on the same ticket with them,” says Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer, who has written extensively on the nomination process.
There were, Mayer says, two motives in giving elected officials a big voice in the nomination.
“One was not to get (ideologically) extreme candidates; the other was to avoid the Jimmy Carter phenomenon — where you had a guy who was not very experienced and not very well regarded by most of his fellow governors, but nevertheless managed to win the party’s nomination,” Mayer said.
Now, one of my favorite hobbies is questioning the American press' demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is not because I'm a Putin man. It's because I don't know why the American Press refuses to question anything in its own country, from the faulty intelligence and fear-mongering of the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the war in Iraq to the very things the press sees as problematic abroad. Such as President Putin's decision, in 2004, to directly name his country's regional governors, rather than leave this to the voting public.
Now, if it's undemocratic for him to do this -- something I constantly am told in the slicks and dailies -- isn't it also undemocratic for the Democratic party to give itself 4 out of every ten votes in the nominating process for its candidate for the President of the United States? The Republican Party doesn't do it. And the blessed Greens would sooner cut down a tree.
But I suppose Putin, Time Magazine's Man of the Year, would be proud.
A Tsar is Born indeed.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Geography of the Heart
The Geography of the Heart
How US immigration law divides families
By Stephan Clark
One Sunday almost four years ago, Thomas Carson, a 50-year old electrical engineer with corporate commendations from Nabisco and General Electric, parked his KIA Sportsman near the US-Mexico border and waited.
It was after dark in Las Milpas, once the largest colonia – or border settlement – in South Texas. Since being absorbed by the City of Pharr to the north in the late-eighties, this community of low- and very low-income Hispanics had almost doubled in size, reaching a population of 17,000. It had also received the type of things most Americans believe lacking in only the third world: running water and electricity, sewer service and paved roads. With such improvements, the community no longer laid claim to the state’s highest incidence of tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and leprosy, and it had even attracted the development of a Jack in the Box.
But one thing about Las Milpas remained unchanged in July 2003: its close proximity to the border. It was that which brought people like Carson here, just as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) had brought business to the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, then not quite ten years old.
Carson parked near the intersection of Highway 281 and East Dicker Road. Beside him in his SUV was his son, 11-month-old Thomas Alexander, secure in his baby-seat. Further south was the boy’s mother, Carson’s girlfriend of five years, one Lucia Ramirez Hernandez. This night, she wouldn’t be traveling over Pharr’s celebrated bridge.
Hernandez had attempted that crossing in Jan. 1999, just a few months before a fire at a maquiladora in Reynosa would send Carson south of the border on work. Her crime that day was simple: after being stopped in a car with Texas plates, she made a false claim of U.S. citizenship.
Since 1996, when Congress last overhauled immigration law, this act has drawn a punishment as severe – a lifetime ban on entering the United States – as it is permanent. Hernandez cannot appeal or seek a waiver. She is no different than the terrorists, communists and practicing polygamists also singled out by law. She has no means of appeal.
“It wouldn’t matter if someone had a pistol to your side and you drove up to the border crossing and said, ‘I’m a US citizen,’” said Carson. “That’s it. You’re inadmissible. You don’t have a case.”
And so that night four years ago, while Carson and Thomas Alexander waited in the dark, Hernandez stepped into the river that runs along the Texas border between the Gulf of Mexico and El Paso. It is a tributary President Bush knows well. Going back to his days as Governor of Texas, he has frequently said family values do not end at the Rio Grande.
After emerging on the other side, Hernandez got into a car and continued toward her family. Carson spotted her passing the little strip plaza where they’d agreed to meet. He followed her to an area home, where Hernandez changed clothes and got into Carson’s SUV. The three then drove north – father, son and mother – toward the secondary inspection point at Falfurrias.
Eight months previous, Carson, a US Navy veteran, had imagined a reunion of another sort, petitioning for an immigrant’s visa on behalf of Hernandez and her two children from a previous relationship. But the false claim of U.S. citizenship derailed that effort, and so the descendant of five American veterans of five different foreign wars had been left with only what he’d been taught in the military: if you are captured, you must try to escape.
“We were desperate,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.“
Parts 2-8 of this story can be purchased at Amazon.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The Sovietization of American Media
Is coming to a city near you. Pravda.
The freedom of the press starts with freeing up the printing presses, no? Yet we keep on selling them off and bundling them up and giving them to one man, oftentimes a man in Australia.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Battle Continues
I was mistaken in my last post. Two people died, in separate incidents, owing to bombs planted or dropped during the Great Patriotic War.
The first death was July 29, a village woman burning trash in what had been a mine field. The second, cited below, happened on the evening of Aug. 4, behind the airport in Belgorod.
I would've expected this to be big news, the stuff of sad stories in national papers. But it seems it may be all too commonplace. Here's the brief write-up in the Belgorod paper (Russian).
The picture above is the soviet memorial of Prokhorovkoe Field, nearer to Kursk than Belgorod, where the largest tank battle took place during the Second World War. The newpaper headline references it, saying the battle continues.
The picture below is the Yelstin-era memorial, a few kilometers down the road from the Soviet structure.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
62 Years Later, WWII Finds Another Victim
I couldn't believe what I heard just yesterday, when my wife told me how a 25 year-old father -- and the friend of her girilfriend's husband -- died in the woods behind her parents' dacha. He was doing something so Russian -- cooking shashlik, skewered meat, over an open flame. Barbecuing, if you will. And in an area I've been before myself. But there was something else there, waiting for him since well before he was born, since before his father was born, most likely, a bomb that had been put there by the German some sixty-two years ago this day. It seems implausible, but this is what I'm told. He selected a spot that was charred, darkened by a fire already, but while building his flame, the heat of the soil ignited the bomb that was juch an inch or two below -- shrapnel cut his cheek, he was dead inside of ten minutes. So young, married, with a child. There's a reason Russia still celebrates Victory Day every year, and you see signs commemorating how many years it's been since the fascists were driven off their land. It's a war that's still killing.
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