Sherry Chandler

Governor Ernie Fletcher and the Kentucky Arts Council have announced the 2006 Governor’s Awards in the Arts.

I am pleased to see Morehead State University’s public radio station honored, and I’m pretty sure my friend Georgia Green Stamper will be pleased about the Russell Orchestra getting the Education Award. She lived in Russell for many years.

The awards will be presented at 10:00 a.m. on February 14 in the Capitol Rotunda.

A correspondent has sent a link to this Soviet bus stop photo series at Polar Inertia. The photographer is Christopher Herwig. The passage below is excerpted his statement:

For the most part Soviet architecture and design is remembered for its heavy block buildings and functionally Spartan designs. Its overpowering desire for conformity left little room for individual creative freedom. A notable exceptions to this is in the transportation sector. … While many of us are aware of the elaborate splendor of the Moscow underground, it is easy to overlook the phenomenon of the common roadside bus stop as an example of soviet art and design letting loose and becoming a little weird and crazy.

… much time, effort and imagination went into many roadside bus stops. The sky was the limit with different shapes and design– blocks, domes, columns, towers, A-frames and archways, even ones shaped like birds, yurts and hats. If the bus stop was less bold and daring with its architectural design then the creators would often attract attention with decorating the structure with murals or mosaics. The themes that these decorated bus stops took usually varied depending on the region, often reflecting the local culture, history, or industries.

Sadly, with the breakup of the Soviet Union many of the bus stops are quickly deteriorating from their original glory. That being said some local communities have recognized the local treasures as worthy of preserving and have maintained and repainted them. They will appear in the most unlikely places – sometimes in the middle of the desert, steppe or countryside, sometimes with no homes in sight. They will make you wonder why and they will make you smile. The following collection of images was taken during 2002 and 2006, starting with a cycling trip through the Baltic countries to St. Petersburg and followed by several road trips around Central Asia.

I like the one with the horse in it.

Photo by T. R. Williams

From Margaret Atwood’s “The Bad News” in Moral Disorder and other stories (Doubleday, 2006):

Our now-dead cat, Drumlin, developed cat senility when she was seventeen. Drumlin — why did we call her that? The other cat, the one that died first, was Moraine. Once we thought it was amusing to name our cats after glacial-dump geological features, though the point of it escapes me now. Tig said Drumlin ought to have been named Landfill Site, but he was the one whose job it was to empty her litter box.
      It’s not likely we will have another cat. I used to think — I thought this quite calmly — that after Tig was gone (for men die first, don’t they?) I might get a cat again, for company. I no longer consider this an option. I’ll surely be half-blind by then, and a cat might run between my legs, and I’d trip over it and break my neck.
      Poor Drumlin used to prowl the house at night, yowling in an unearthly fashion. Nothing gave her solace: she was looking for something she’d lost, though she didn’t know what it was. (Her mind, in point of fact, if cats can be said to have minds.) In the mornings, we’d find small bites taken out of tomatoes, of pears: she’d forgotten she was a carnivore, she’d forgotten what it was she was supposed to eat. This has become my picture of my future self: wandering the house in the darkness, in my white nightdress, howling for what I can’t quite remember I’ve lost. It’s unbearable. I wake up in the night and reach out to make sure Tig is still there, still breathing. So far, so good.