Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Potemkin

RantWoman has been taking literature brain off to multiple adventures this week. Maybe RantWoman will specify the adventures. Maybe not.

Yesterday RantWoman got invited to an experience that made her want to crawl through the floor while simultaneously wanting to bounce a bunch of ideas around with one of the participants. As badly as RantWoman wanted to crawl through the floor on behalf of someone, she is hoping that uttering the phrase "business need to train" made an appropriate impression so that RantWoman can put on one of her provocateur hats, chat up a person RantWoman thought made a number of highly cogent points and whom RantWoman definitely wants to get better acquainted with.

Today, RantWoman found herself massaging the remnants of yesterday's encounter with thoughts of Potemkin. RantWoman is pleading greater than everage headache as an excuse not to Wikipedia her allusions for precision and blundering ahead anyway. Potemkin was a regional prince in Russian history. The tsar was coming to check on the well-being of the locals. Potemkin did not exactly have much to show on that front so he built a bunch of fronts like a good movie set. The tsar was fooled.

RantWoman is not nearly enough of a historian to know what happened next. It would be good to know what happened next because Potemkin next surfaces in RantWoman's mind as a battleship in the Russian navy during one of the early 20th century revolutions. Arguably knowing how a battleship got named after a local politician known for architectural playacting would be yet another reason at least to visit Wikipedia, but RantWoman is stretching metaphors even further thinking of a Sergei Eisenstein film by the same name about an insurrection aboard that very battleship during that very revolution.

RantWoman is going to make her dear readers guess and speculate what in heck all this has to do with the Friendly Neighborhood Center for..... for one thing because RantWoman needs to focus on working the problems behind the russian history allusions. Let's just say we hope that in a few months this all looks like some kind of work of art, maybe with some arty overdone moments but a work of art in its own right. But art is not quite happening tonight...

2 comments:

  1. Don't know much about Russian history--except for the sex scandals. Potemkin was the lover of Catherine the Great, no? She didn't have him done away with, so I wonder if she was in the know about the false villages ruse.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you! Catherine the Great'x sex life would be at least one thing this story does not need. RantWoman will have to verify the exact allusion, but then RantWoman would also have to specify how the allusions relate to sound nonprofit management and other themes near and dear to RantWoman's heart.

    ReplyDelete