Updates -- Testimonial Banquet and other surprises

Hi, dear folks

Have been behind in everything!  A few followers have asked about new postings.  Will catch up to myself eventually.

Not used to self-promotion (well... not much....  ;-)   )

http://mpue.ca/Osvita/website/default.htm


I'm not used to being on the receiving end of these things.   Just last year I was the MC for this banquet honouring William Solomon of Hoosli.

I should be in relatively good shape on the 20th - after recuperating from a trip to Australia!   Will keep you posted about that soon.  

A heads-up -- have finally begun serious preparation on my Ukrainian Christmas book of my many articles over the decades.  Will be launched in the fall of  2014 (she said optimistically).  Very much to learn about the business and publishing angles of this.  Then there's the fundraising.   

thanks to all for your interest, and will be in better touch.

PYSANKY ON CBC RADIO MANITOBA

Had an interview about pysanky on CBC Manitoba Weekend Morning Show with Ismaila Alfa  (March 30)

If you check this out a few days from now, you'll have to scroll down to this date.

 Five minutes!   I could talk for hours!   Don't they understand?!?!   ;-)


Thanks, Ismaila.    You're so good!


https://www.facebook.com/CBCWeekendMorningShow

PYSANKY

Before I forget, here are some of my articles on pysanky, those gems of Ukrainian folk art.  There are some earlier articles, too, but I still need to extract them from earlier files.  

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1999/149921.shtml

Tracz,  Orysia Paszczak.  “A Pysanka Mystery Almost Solved”  Ukrainian Weekly  April 27, 2008: 7      A discussion of the (unacknowledged) influence of Zenon Elyjiw’s work on Erast Binyashevsky’s book about traditional Ukrainian pysanky.

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2001/160119.shtml

http://www.artukraine.com/old/egg/pysankaex.htm    

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2000/180013.shtml

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1997/179721.shtml   (part 1)   [still nee to finish the translation of this one!   Oy!]

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2005/510523.shtml

http://www.artukraine.com/egg/pysankareq.htm

and more info on pysanky here:

 

http://www.pysanky.info/BOOKS/Bibliography.html

 

MORE ABOUT VERBA/LOZA/BAZ'KA -- THE PUSSY WILLOW FOR UKRAINIAN PALM SUNDAY

From The Ukrainian Weekly, April 4, 2010   (If you don't subscribe to it yet -- do so!  http://www.ukrweekly.com/   )

WATCH THE WHACKING WILLOWS… AND OTHER STRANGE THINGS

Orysia Paszczak Tracz

The man ahead of me in line to receive the loza on Kvitna Nedilia (Flower, or Palm Sunday) looked bewildered.  He got the myrovannia (anointing with oil on the forehead), and his fat pussy willow branch, and as he was headed towards the exit, watched the members of the congregation hitting each other (gently, of course) with the branches, and smiling and reciting something.  The people who already received the branches even went back through the pews to gently hit the ones who were still waiting in line.  Then I did it to him, and he was really confused.  He had no idea what was going on!  I explained to him that this was a special ritual for Ukrainian Palm Sunday, and that it meant that Easter and spring were coming, and also meant a wish for health.  He smiled and thanked me for the information, saying that now he understood.  The man was clearly not Ukrainian, but loves the service, the singing, and the rituals, and comes every Sunday.  I’m not sure what he’ll think about people bringing baskets of food to church on Easter.

He is not the first person to be confused and confounded about our old but new ways.  There really is an explanation for all this.  What is admirable and amazing is that these rituals, well modified to suit the present, are still carried out at all.

In the olden days, we had Ukrainians sleeping on the stove/oven – ok, the pich (peech) – an appliance/piece of furniture pretty difficult to explain in English.  Then you have young folks dumping pails of water on each other on the second day of Easter (nowadays, the SuperSoaker works so much better). At Midsummer’s Night (Kupalo to us) they also jump over bonfires, alone or holding hands with a significant other.  On special feast days, rolling around in the early morning dew in your birthday suit was also very common and beneficial.  The jumping over bonfires at Kupalo is no longer birthday-suit-obligatory, as it used to be extremely long ago [that wouldn’t go over too well with the camp uprava, eh?].  Of course, in the weeks after Easter, there will be services, and food and drink in the cemeteries, on the graves of the departed.  This is reminiscent of El Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, the honoring of ancestors also from time immemorial.   And I am sure many of us still follow our mother’s ritual of burying the eggshells and other remnants of the Easter breakfast deep in the garden.  With composting being so popular now, we’re really “with it” – but then, we’ve always been, right?

  

These are all traditions and rituals from our ancient past, from pre-Christian times.  They each had particular reasons, purposes, and symbolism for the actions.  The power of traditions has kept them alive through all the persecution and hardship of our people through the centuries.  The fact that these strange and often not well understood actions are still done so enthusiastically and so willingly by people far-removed by time and place from their ancestral homeland shows how indeed powerful tradition is.  We continue to write our pysanky and bake our paska and babka for Velykden’ [Great Day – a pre-Christian name that survived, and is still the Ukrainian name for Easter].  We sit down to the Easter breakfast and share the slices of the one egg (a symbol of the togetherness of the family) and go to church to watch the hahilky [ritual spring round-dances].  At Christmas, we reverently sit down for the special Sviata Vechera [Holy Supper] of twelve dishes, leaving that empty chair and place setting for our ancestors.  At weddings today, the couple stands on a rushnyk [ritual cloth] and has its hands ceremonially bound with a rushnyk by the priest, and often the “crowns” on the couple’s heads are wreaths of barvinok (periwinkle).  These rituals – and so many more -- are practiced in Canada, the USA, Brazil, the Balkans, other countries in Europe, Australia, the far east of Russia in Zelenyi Klyn, as well as in the homeland itself.  Some of the modifications that have emerged in Ukraine are quaint or even bizarre, but then some of the ones in the other places are pretty strange, too.  But the thought is there, as is the inherent desire to carry out an action that connects us to our distant, very distant ancestors.  We are very rich, indeed.

UKRAINIAN EASTER / VELYKDEN BREADS AND PUSSY WILLOWS

Dear friends, 

Have been behind with my posts.   A dead computer will do that.   Then to get used to the new laptop, and transfer everything and all that......    Hoping to keep up now.   Have to many projects on the go....   I never learn.

For now, here are some of my articles on Easter [Velykden' in Ukrainian - Great Day] from years ago.  This doesn't change.

Will post more later.   How nice that my "Paska and Babka Forever" article is so popular with my readers.

Wonder where the parishes in Winnipeg who celebrate on the new calendar will be getting their pussy willows for today -- still much snow out there!   And then, for the old calendar, the folks may need to travel far north to find them -- may be too warm here in May?

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1997/139718.shtml 

 http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2000/170020.shtml

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2001/140117.shtml

GOING BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM

There is still time to register for this year's specialized tour to Ukraine (August 22-Sept. 8) with me as your "glorious leader" -- as one group named me. 

You can travel on your own (we all become friends and family) or you can bring a friend, relative, or significant other -- or a tribe -- as the Marykuca/Torbiak family did a few years ago.  This is Marvin's travel tale:

http://orysia.blogspot.ca/2012/03/my-good-friend-marvin-marykuca-wrote.html

please check out, and contact Martha:   

 http://www.greatcanadiantravel.com/europe-ukraine-culture-escorted-tour

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BULLYING

It is so terrible, so very wrong, that bullying exists.  At least now there is discussion and action to curtail it, if not to stop it.  Do young kids learn this on their own?  Do they just follow others?  Or do they learn by example from adults?

There is another type of bullying out there -- in the media.  Switching channels, I came across two sad excuses for "entertainment" -- TMZ and The Fashion Police.  Sure, celebrities are in the news and need to be in the news.  It's a vicious circle -- you have to be out there to be current, but you hate to be pursued by the paparazzi and other "reporters."  But you need that photo or article -- but to what degree?  Where is the fine line?

So, the above-mentioned programs (and there may be others that, mercifully, I don't know about) do cover celebrities, but in a most cruel way.  

Fashion Police discusses and disses what celebrities wear.  Yes, many of the outfits are pathetic and wrong, but who are the people dissing them and how qualified are they to do so?  A young woman with lavender/gray hair with too many tattoos all over her body, a plastic-surgeon-stretched foul-mouthed woman who needs to turn the mirror on herself, and the rest of this entourage?  What do they look like?  And they're judging others, with such downright cruel vicious comments?  Watched this once, and wanted to take a shower.

Same with the childish and cruel TMZ -- this gaggle of arrested adolescents, permanently attached to their bottles and cups, not exactly very well groomed themselves, are dissing and mocking others?   If you can't say anything cruel, don't say anything at all?  If this isn't public bullying, I don't know what is.

Yes, some celebrities need to look in the mirror before buying an outfit, and not listen to the supposed stylist who has no taste him/herself, but that's their choice.  

The tabloid journalism in print, on TV, and online feeds on itself and on the cruelty it spouts in mocking and belittling and bullying others.   What a great job!  What a great example to others!   Do you feel good in what you have accomplished?
_____

So today I see this item.  I cannot fathom Lady Gaga.  But there she is, also talking about bullying!