"The bear... used its paw to pry open the sliding glass door of the Grand Hotel Balvanyos, before squeezing its shoulders into the lobby."

"As a terrified employee sprinted away, it headed to the breakfast buffet and ate all the packets of honey. Another bear entered the resort’s spa and downed a three-liter jug of massage oil, while a third opened a door into a hotel hallway and chased away a housekeeper. Romania’s relationship with its bears has come undone. The brown bear — the ursus arctos — is one of the country’s national treasures, interwoven into its mythology. Villagers still host annual bear dances, a ritual that goes back to pre-Christian times, when people believed the animals staved off misfortune. Romania’s brutal Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, would flaunt his power by ordering aides to lure bears from the forest with food, then shooting them in a macabre display of machismo...."

From "The Law Protects Them. The Villagers Fear Them. Romania’s growing bear population has turned conservation into confrontation for people living in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains" (NYT).

"She said she realized that the craft risked dying out when the only person left in her village who knew how to make a blouse was an 87-year-old woman."

"She asked the woman to help teach local youngsters embroidery and started a class at her home. On a recent afternoon, 16 girls sat in rapt attention as they stitched away for hours.... Teaching teenagers to stitch, Ms. Uta said, not only keeps traditional handicrafts alive, but also helps wean young people off their cellphones, at least for a few hours.... Politicians 'are all wearing fake blouses and setting a bad example for everyone,' she added. 'We need to go back to traditions but real ones, not traditions deformed by politics.'"

From "A Blouse Gets Entangled in a Political Tussle in Eastern Europe/Nationalists in Romania have adopted an item of clothing traditionally worn by villagers, particularly women. Liberals say it’s an appropriation of a cultural identity that belongs to everyone" (NYT).

1. Does it matter exactly what this blouse looks like? Here's how Henri Matisse painted it in 1940:

2. Will embroidering keep the kids off their phone? It will keep them from looking at their phone, but not, I think, from listening. What music/podcast/audiobook would you listen to if your were doing some time-consuming, detailed embroidery? Here's a playlist of Romanian popular music. 

3. What item of traditional American clothing could a political movement adopt and cause you distress like that experienced in Romania over this blouse — something you or people you like want to keep wearing and now feel that to wear it is to express support for a cause they oppose?

4. When I was young, I used to worry that various items of clothing (or jewelry) had symbolic meaning that I didn't understand and I worried about unintentionally associating myself with a cause I didn't know or understand. 

5. "Though Henri Matisse’s prolific career as an artist greatly inspired numerous pieces and collections designed by the creative legend Yves Saint Laurent, it was Saint Laurent’s interpretation of Matisse’s illustrated and painted Romanian folk blouses that became an iconic house staple for generations to come...." These days, the elite won't do that. They are controlled into submission by the phrase "cultural appropriation."

"Unserious."

Romania under Ceausescu was dystopian with or without an abortion ban. This article is unserious. https://t.co/tRozykQ6XJ

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) May 17, 2019

"In Romania, on moonlit nights, the peasant women used to look down into a well until they saw the reflection of the moon."

"Then they let down a pail, slowly drew up water with the moon in it and, with a spoon, drank its reflection. Looking down into the well at that moment, they could see the face of their future bridegroom."

(A quote at the end of an essay by Saul Steinberg, found in a fruitless search for a drawing I remember or misremember with "we" and "they" —or is it "Who are they?" — drawn to signify the emotion contained in those words — a search undertaken after writing "So we they are not chomping cheeseburgers simply for sensual pleasure....")

"While witches enjoy popular support in Romania..."

"... many in the government view them as swindlers whose presence makes their country seem superstitious and backwards.... It seems that tensions will diffuse when witches feel respected by their government and Romania feels respected by the West."

"Will Dylan or Oates get literature Nobel today?"

Oh, how deluded we Americans are! Even to ask that question! The Europeans don't love us, and it's just embarrassing to publicly swoon about their possible love. Bob Dylan isn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature:

Before last year's prize announcement, outgoing permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said the United States was too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world, setting off an uproar.

Go ahead, Europe. Boost your ego at our expense. It's what you need. It's what we're here for.

However, England struck a different tone, saying that in most language areas "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."

Engdahl, England... what difference does it make? Do we care what you think?

The contretemps has made people think there is a better-than-normal chance that an American will receive the prize.

Oates has been called a favorite to win for 25 years.

However, British betting firm Ladbrokes is giving the lowest odds to Israel's Amos Oz and German writer Herta Mueller.

And Herta Mueller it is.

In ... two works, Muller depicts life in a small, German-speaking village and the corruption, intolerance and repression to be found there. The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively. Because Mueller had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania, she was prohibited from publishing in her own country....

The novels Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jaeger (1992), Herztier (1994; The Land of Green Plums, 1996) and Heute war ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997; The Appointment, 2001) give, with chiselled details, a portrait of daily life in a stagnated dictatorship.

Well, let's see some sentences. Let's see some lines and passages. Let's see those "chiselled" details.

Meanwhile:

Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism.
Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
But there's no time to think.

Lampooning the balance between "would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space."

It's "Entropa," by Czech artist David Cerny, a 172-square-foot multi-part sculpture attached to the European Council building in Brussels. It's the Czech Republic's turn at the EU presidency, you see.

Entropa portrays Bulgaria as a toilet, Romania as a Dracula theme-park and France as a country on strike....

The Netherlands is shown as series of minarets submerged by a flood — a possible reference to the nation's simmering religious tensions.

Indeed, it's possible!

Germany is shown as a network of motorways vaguely resembling a swastika....

The old swastika — on a government building.

Cerny would like to know "if Europe is able to laugh at itself."

UPDATE: Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra says:

"I apologise to Bulgaria and its government if it feels offended..."...

"We wanted to prove that 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there is no censorship," said the former Czech dissident.

But he refused to share the platform with the artist, who insisted his piece was in the European tradition of satire, like Monty Python and France's Les Guignols.

He also denied that the Lego entry for Denmark was a representation of one of the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that appeared in 2005.

AND: Here's a picture of the Demark section.