A Spring-like Prelude, by Longfellow

Pleasant is was, when woods were green,
And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene,
Where, the long drooping boughs between,
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternate come and go.

Or where the denser grove receives
No sunlight from above,
But the dark foliage interweaves
In one unbroken roof of leaves,
Underneath whose sloping eaves
The shadows hardly move.

Beneath some patriarchal tree
I lay upon the ground;
His hoary arms uplifted he,
And all the broad leaves over me
Clapped their little hands in glee,
With one continuous sound.--

A slumberous sound, a sound that brings
The feelings of a dream,
As of innumerable wings,
As, when a bell no longer swings,
Faint the hollow murmur rings
O'er meadow, lake, and stream.

From: "Voices of the Night," The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J.M. Dent, 1927

The Twiddling of Thumbs

Today was another bright sunny day where I could have gone out but didn't. Instead I started reading books (including my paternal grandmother's memoirs), played the piano (at first unsuccessfully, but then well), and made vanilla pudding out of the package in the evening. And yesterday I watched an unconscionable amount of non-educational YouTube television, which numbed my brain considerably. The next interesting event at the UdK or elsewhere is on May 2nd, which means that I'll have to think of something else to tempt me out of the apartment. Yesterday I was reduced to passing a badminton birdie back and forth with Ge. in the hallway, then trying to smash the birdie into the corner of the living room sofa. The exercise was effective enough to make the lower arm painful, but, as that is the usual result of attempting tennis or badminton after a long hiatus, it didn't bother me. I wish that my siblings would feel like going out-of-doors, so that I won't be reduced to bouncing a pink birdie on a badminton racquet as I walk around and around and around the Kleistpark, or bouncing tennis balls off the Kammergericht wall to practice my returns until irate officers of the law stalk out the doors to arrest me.

Anyway, Mama was busy today rearranging our books. By request, the English literature ("up to and including Oscar Wilde," I said, but I suspect that there will be more) will be lodged by my bed. The classics and German literature (including many lovely old sets) are already quartered in the corner room; the reference books are in the computer room. A selection of our duplicate copies of Reclam books is above my bed now too, silently encouraging me to make another excursion into the realm of Teutonic letters. Papa is reading a lot for his university studies, but, as with most mornings, he played the cello today too. As for T., Gi., Ge., and J., there is not much to report . . . except, perhaps, that Ge. briefly played the ukulele as usual, and that Gi. played a piece or two on the piano.

As for my pirate story, I was able to continue it today. I have temporarily christened the ship the "Argyllshire." The problem with it is that I think that's already the name of a military regiment. Having begun the tale at dawn, I am also having trouble figuring out how to pass the time until the sail of the distressed ship appears on the horizon in the afternoon. Perhaps that's a stupid problem, but, then, I don't have much experience writing stories beyond the point where I've exhausted my poetic skills by writing a few lyrical paragraphs about the setting. The expedient I decided to adopt is that of introducing the crew of the ship as it awakens and appears on deck. The captain's history and character will probably be left until later to be elucidated, but I've already written a paragraph on the skipper. I did summarize his character, which would probably horrify my English 11 teacher and many others ("Show, don't tell!"), but if it really is unnecessary I can just change it later. Well, I still have to see which crew members there are. From Treasure Island and other nautical reading, I gather that there is a captain, a first and second mate, a steward, a skipper, perhaps a doctor, a cook, and then the rest of crew, with cabin boys at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I still don't know whether these positions all existed on navy ships in the mid-eighteenth century, and I still can't place the midshipmen and the boatswain (or bo'sun). One convenient thing about the mutiny is that any gaps in the crew can be explained by it; of course I'll still do the research, but even before that's done my ignorance won't impede my writing too much.

Some day I'll write about what I know . . . it just feels at present that I don't know enough. But I think that, given the type of literature that I intend to write, it isn't to be expected that I should be able to do it now. The thing is that I want my stories to be as true-to-life as possible, which means that I must have a good command of detail. Besides, I want my books to be written with a good, precise vocabulary, dense and original language, well-rounded characters, natural and characteristic dialogue, broad perspective, and, above all, I want them to seem as if they might be describing events that actually took place. The reason for this last criterion is that I think that books should help people to see and understand the world, and, through understanding it, to come to terms with it. Optimistic literature, I find, mostly makes life endurable because it raises hopes and expectations that are never fulfilled, or because it temporarily lets one escape from real life. It's a sedative and very rarely a cure. Pessimistic literature is worse, I think, because it makes good things ugly, and because it also does not provide any means of improving one's life. Comedy and satire are a good middle ground, particularly if done well. And so are books like War and Peace. Which is why realism and comedy are what I prefer -- now that optimistic literature has rather let me down. Anyway, I won't pretend that I'm not retreading very well-worn paths; I just need to formulate my theories once in a while.

An Ode to Summer's Advent

Behold the balmy days of May
where luckless man begins to stew,
and June will not for long delay
to fry us poor unhappy souls.

The sun at present is still warm
the beams perhaps still pleasant are;
no sunburns boasts your leg or arm,
but their unpleasant day will come.

Enjoy the perspiration now,
for it is but a trickle yet;
a month or two you must allow
until it bathes you head to foot.

In slumber now you may feel freed
of eiderdown and featherbed;
but summer's heat will soon impede
the best attempts to get to sleep.

The flies and wasps, though back they be,
are few and shy when spring is young;
wait but a week, and you shall see
a thriving genealogy.

The comforts countless are and rare
that dog us April through September;
in winter's chill we may not care,
but by June we will remember.

The Rimes of the Ancient Tennyson

Yesterday evening I started "Tithonus," a thus far bleak poem about immortality, which is apparently like the "death in life" that J.K Rowling describes in the case of Voldemort after he drank the unicorn blood. I also browsed the poem about St. Simeon Stylites. In it, the saint wails about his sinfulness, but he does not give any particular examples of it, or try to make amends in any way other than flagellating himself verbally and letting himself rot away in the open for several decades. Also, he belittles the sufferings of the other saints as part of his argument as to why he should get into heaven, which is not what I would do if I were trying to recommend myself to God. To me it makes more sense to make amends for sins by doing good for other humans (like St. Elizabeth of Hungary, for example) and by trying to do better next time. But I suppose that healing people by miracle, as St. Simeon apparently did, is already sufficiently good.

But I am not calculated to find much good in austerity, because I fall apart without my beloved physical comforts. It's like a character says in an Agatha Christie book: forget heroic stoicism -- run a few pins into people and most of them would fold. But I think that everyone is dependent on comfort, psychological if not physical; even many strong and self-disciplined people crave not only the satisfaction of contemplating their own strength, but also the satisfaction of generously disciplining other people who seem unable or unwilling to do it themselves. And I suppose that, if one does austerity properly, one is deriving comfort from a sense of getting closer to God.

Recently I read the end of "The Princess: A Medley," which is essentially about womens' suffrage. In the unintentionally hilarious final pages, the Amazonian heroine dissolves into tears over the sick-bed of the prince-hero, reads a book of sentimental poetry as she watches him devotedly, and admits weepingly once he recovers that she had been silly and proud, and that all she ever needed was a man to complete her soul . . . The transformation is a little abrupt.

Anyway, as for "Claribel," I'm not sure if this strikes anyone else, but I find the constant "eth"s (Anglo-Saxon run amok) considerably amusing:

"At eve the beetle boometh
Athwart the ticket lone:
At noon the wild bee hummeth
About the moss'd headstone:
At midnight the moon cometh,
And looketh down alone."

You would think that would be enough, but . . .

"Her song the lintwhite swelleth,
The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,
The callow throstle lispeth,
The slumbrous wave outwelleth,
The babbling runnel crispeth,
The hollow grot replieth
Where Claribel low-lieth."

It is also funny when one maliciously translates the poetry into prose: "At evening the beetle "booms" through the detached hedge, the bee hums in the graveyard, the moon looks down alone (the stars evidently having run off to the other hemisphere), the birds are singing -- except for the mavis, which prefers to "dwell" --, a sleepy wave is bulging, a creek is "crisp"ing and a cave is echoing it, and Claribel (hopefully a sleeping fairy, but perhaps a deceased human) is lying about somewhere nearby." Well, I must admit it's poetic even after I've mangled it.

As for "Sir Galahad," it reminded me of the way I thought of the title character when I read Sir Roger Lancelyn Green's Sir Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table when I was little. The more conflicted characters like Sir Lancelot, Balin and Balan, King Arthur himself, etc., appealed to me more than Sir Galahad did. Their errors made for unhappy reading, but at least they suffered and grew, instead of being perfect from the beginning. The opening four lines of "Sir Galahad" are certainly obnoxious, -- partly, I believe, because of the first-person narration:

My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.

To move on to the leper poem that I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I now find that it is entitled "Happy: A Leper's Bride." I would call that an irony overload. (By the way, an air raid siren is wailing -- from the television in the corner room. The world wars live on, after all.)

Anyway, to be serious, I do like all of Tennyson's poems that I've read so far, no matter how much I find to criticize in them. Besides the story of "The Falcon," I particularly like that of "Lady Clare." Many of the poet's lines and phrases are old friends because I've encountered them in books (except for "the even tenor of her way," which has become more like an old enemy because it has been so frequently used). There are also, I think, few better ways of exploring the questions that occupied the philosophical Victorian mind than by reading his later poems. And, even in our time, it's always nice to read lines like, "Kind hearts are more than coronets,/ And simple faith than Norman blood." In the realm of the ideal, it remains "as true today as it was, when it was written."

Pastoral Pleasures, and Prairie Perils

Today was another stay-at-home day; I went out to buy mineral water, but that was it, though it was a sunny day and the trees are now splendidly leafy and the sunset was smashing, as it were. In the morning a plumber came to fix the bathtub drain, which had regurgitated its contents and flooded the bathroom. I was peacefully sleeping when the watery catastrophe occurred, though it doesn't seem to have been that spectacular anyway. Which reminds me that a bird flew into our kitchen yesterday before Mama carefully advanced toward it and thereby encouraged it to leave again. A while ago a fly came to visit, and its unfrenzied humming (sometimes flies hum frenziedly, and other times in a nice, slow, contented way) immediately reminded me of Wray Avenue.

I'm beginning to miss the beautiful surroundings of our old house very much. I knew nearly every single plant on our property, and made rounds where I visited each bush and flower. And now I won't see the luxuriant, junglish growth of May, where the countless bluebells thrive, the leaves of the chestnut spread and the spikes of magenta-specked white flowers blossom, and the broad leaves of the tulip languishingly bend back onto the ground; or the spiky green grass sprinkled with daisies and dandelions, or the pale purple lilac blossoms mingling with the pale yellow gorse blossoms beside our pond, where the tangled dark branches of the birch with their tender leaves are reflected in the brown waters. Or the rhododendrons, light pink and purple and dark pink. Or the dark red maple tree with its golden cascading tassels of blossoms. Or the starry blossoms of the plum, the musky-smelling, brown-pistilled ones of the pear, the soft pink-tinged ones of the apple, or the billowy white ones of the cherry. Or the finely scented pale pink roses behind the garage. And so on and so forth. It really did resemble the Garden of Eden, to me at least. I miss the sounds of the songbirds, cows, crows, dogs, ravens, frogs, crickets (though it would probably still be too early for them), Canada geese, and chickens too. I think I'd vegetate if I were transplanted into the countryside again, but on the whole I don't think any city can be nearly as beautiful as the countryside at its best.

Anyway, I didn't make progress on the pirate story because the computer where I wrote it was mostly occupied today. I didn't mind either; I've been going through more of it in my mind. I was debating whether the hero should die at the gallows at the end. Of course I'd prefer to go without, and give him a less ignominious death (if any), but truthfulness seems to demand that outcome. I think I'll have him rescue an English ship-of-the-line from a French warship first, though -- not to paint the English admiralty in blacker colours, but to show
1) that even people who are seen as beyond the pale of the law are capable of good deeds;
2) that heroism is rarely recognized or rewarded by one's fellow man; and
3) the harm that people do who, as the quotation goes, would rather die than think (for themselves).
Which makes the story sound much more didactic than I intended. But when I write I'll probably forget this ideological agenda.

I've also read a Western novel again, Gunsight Pass by William MacLeod Raine, about a young rancher from Arizona who is framed for murder, goes to prison for many years, then emerges and helps set up and run an oil drilling corporation for an old friend. In the modern perspective, of course, the tale does not particularly have a happy end, but the author and characters are happily oblivious of the bigger picture. The book is a well-rounded specimen of its genre, with a desert, cattle, prison, bets, horses, a rattlesnake or two (not really part of the tale), cowboy lingo, a fiendish ranch boss, corrupt rail officials, a bank, a hold-up of a stage coach, a brush fire, the oil (of course), guns of various makes and calibres, and Mexicans (this time alluded to without racist epithets, I do believe). The preferred Western heroine seems to be an affectionate, vivacious, independent, pretty woman with curly red-gold hair and a graceful way of moving, and the heroine of this book covered the criteria quite well. The hero was, as always, "lean," "bronzed," "strong," etc., but the author didn't indulge as much in the nauseating virile-strength-and-beauty-worship, or talk of the "purification" of men in the rough-and-tumble Wild West life, as other authors of Westerns do.

Besides this I also played the piano; the Notebook of Anna Maria Magdalena Bach went particularly well, and the first movements of Schubert's sonatas D. 958 and 959 went well as far as I played them, but everything else was clumsy. At least the Mozart sonatas that I played were also decent. Lately, whenever I try to play the pieces while correcting errors in timing and dynamics, and so on, it really does interfere with the actual music. A mezzoforte turns out an awkward, unpretty forte, for example. It's not really fair that I just conscientiously try to play something properly and then it makes the whole thing sound insincere, stilted and bad. But I suppose that dynamic markings, or the information that a certain trill is best played using the second and fourth fingers, are not the stuff of which musical inspiration is made.

A Tale of the High Seas

Today has been an unmusical day, except that I played lots of Mozart and Beethoven and Bach and Chopin at home. I sightread parts of Chopin's preludes and études, because I figure that I should try to disciplined-ly learn a piece, from memory, with dynamics, with proper fingering, proper timing, and everything. The last time I tried this was a year or so ago with a Schubert impromptu; it's only one page and a half long, but I only memorized about two staffs(?) and of those I'm starting to forget the fingering -- not because I'm an imbecile but because I seldom had the self-discipline to look at the piece with severe objectivity.

In the morning I worked on a story that I started yesterday,which is about a mid-eighteenth-century British navy ship and its captain. The ship had started out from Portsmouth with a full crew and an insecure, cruel captain. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic the crew mutinied, imprisoned their captain and second officer, and dropped them off at the nearest port. The former first officer has taken over the command. He is a man of a powerful mind, few words, and a very strong code of honour, who inspires the respect and allegiance of nearly everyone he meets. Like Napoleon(?), he has acquired the habit of only sleeping about three hours every night, and making up for the rest with cat naps throughout the day; he mostly spends his hours carefully watching the ship and its crew, and brooding over maps and reading books in his cabin. His first act as de facto captain is to give each crew member a large sum of gold and permit them to stay at the next large port. The crew members who are money-greedy and alcoholic all tumble into town and decide to stay for a round of riotous living, whereas the more desirable crew members keep the money for their families and merely purchase a few necessary items before returning to the ships. And this is exactly the result that the first officer had intended. So now the smaller but congenial crew are roaming the oceans, trying to avoid being spotted by English warships for fear of being engaged in a battle, and perhaps (I still have to consider the ethics of this) lightening the loads of the French warships that pass. Maybe they could come across a bona fide pirate ship . . . Anyway, at the point where the story starts, the ship is about to encounter another ship in distress, and rescue the people on board.

One problem with this story is that (as J. also pointed out) pirate and navy stories have often been done before. And much of the nautical knowledge that I'm using is what I've collected from fiction over the years, though yesterday I did begin reading Richard Hough's biography of Captain James Cook, which my aunt gave me many years ago. I'll try to read contemporary literature to get a sense of the language and thought at the time; I will also try to use period dialect, and even give crew members different dialects because they come from different parts of England. The first officer already has an educated English, one of the crew will have a Yorkshire accent (taken from Shirley), another perhaps a Somersetshire accent (out of Lorna Doone), yet another perhaps a Cockney accent (taken from Evelina), and so on and so forth. I don't think that copying accents from other books is unethical, is it? But, either way, I am going to try to make this very much my own story, though of course it will end up resembling dozens of other stories (The Sea-Hawk or Captain Hornblower, for instance) -- if I ever continue it, that is.

In the Kammersaal, Again

This afternoon I went to a piano masterclass with Dr. Sandu Sandrin. It took place in the Kammersaal from 11:00 to about 5:00, but when I came it had adjourned for a lunch break. So I took out Aristotle's Poetics -- I have it in my handbag not because I want to show off in public, but because I figure that when I'm bored somewhere I'll be likelier to read it -- and read. A student was practicing Beethoven's Sonata in A flat major (Op. 110). I knew the beginning already because Papa has played it, but it's in the back of the second volume of the sonatas, which I consider as a sort of mysterious wilderness, like the depths of the Amazon, or of Africa while it was still uncharted.

And this student was the first to play when the masterclass resumed; he just played one movement of the sonata through at a time, then repeated it, interrupted by the commentary and suggestions of Dr. Sandrin. He played very well, again with unassumingly good technique, nicely ("schön" is the right word, I think, somewhere in between "nice" and "lovely"), with varied dynamics, and no apparent memory slips. Best of all, I ended up really liking the sonata and wanting to play it myself. But the chords were too hard. I suspect that many students use too much forte as a trick to get more into the spirit of Beethoven's sonatas; it works, but it imperils the ear drums and doesn't really do justice to the music. The professor who was doing the masterclass mostly got the student to play with more nuanced dynamics.

Then a student played a piece by Schumann. She was fond of the forte too, but her dynamics were altogether fine. And, as the professor said, she brought out the inner voices really well. She did, however, overapply the pedal, if I remember correctly. Like the other students, it was really good how absorbed she was in the music. Except when the students' piano professors (for some unfathomable reason) were whispering (though very quietly) to each other, the room was silent, and one could hear the birds twittering outside. But on the whole I didn't particularly like the atmosphere of the piece, so I let my mind wander again.

The third student played a theme with variations by Rachmaninoff. By the end of it I was reminded of the pun, "Argh, man; enough!" She seemed to have trouble understanding how to play the notes, though she played them all, in good time and expressively enough. The rhythm was hard to distinguish. Also, I would never have guessed that the piece (which did not much appeal to me anyway) had been composed by a Russian, though, like the few other works by Rachmaninoff that I've heard, it is in itself very Russian-sounding. Dr. Sandrin did say that she understood the harmonic structure well. Oddly enough, when he started going through the piece with her, she played much better -- not necessarily because of his corrections, which were more about other things. She used too much pedal on the lyrical parts, and he did not, for example, address that. Anyway, my mind was doing lots of wandering during the Rachmaninoff, but I still enjoyed the masterclass.

An Evening of Two Pianists

This morning I woke up late, having had a most fascinating dream involving pirates. Then I read internet articles, went grocery-shopping, and played the piano. At first the playing was awkward and felt "fake" again, and I did do finger exercises; but then, especially during the Beethoven sonatas, I did get into the spirit.

In the evening I went to a piano recital at the Universität der Künste (henceforth to be referred to only as the UdK) building in the Fasanenstraße. I was late again, more so because I thought I had memorized the location of the room; I had more or less, but took the wrong staircase and therefore ended up roaming three floors again until I espied a member of the audience through a window. The recital took place in the Kammersaal, a not particularly large room tastefully done in a mixture of old and new style, with white and light greyish-blue paint on the molded walls, long mirrors with brass(-esque) sconces, nice large windows looking out onto the courtyard, light parquet in a herringbone pattern, light wooden chairs with dark red velvety cushions, a dark red cembalo with gold trim against the wall to the right, and two pianos. The piano that was being played was a Steinway. There were not too many people in the audience; the seats were only arranged in rows of eight, separated in the middle to allow for an aisle.

Two students played. When I entered, J. P. had just started Haydn's Sonata in E flat major (Hob. XVI:52). He played with vigour and excellent technique and some expression, but on the whole still in the way that beginners do: nearly constant mezzoforte, and a tendency to rush the tempo. The way he played would have been better suited to Beethoven. Aptly, therefore, F. P. then began Beethoven's Sonata in c minor, better known as the Moonlight Sonata. The first movement was good, unexciting but at the same time not boring. The second movement was played fairly legato; I think of it as a more sprightly movement, but I liked the other way too. The third movement was appropriately fast but not rushed, and the individual notes still came out nicely (I believe that the technical term is transparency; and in Daniel Barenboim's performance that we saw on television a while ago, I thought it was occasionally lacking). The chords were loud and startling enough to wake the dead, but that is merely by the way. F.P. had a more nuanced expression, and a technique that was, I think, as good (he had, by the way, seemingly adopted the Horowitzian curled pinky). Then followed Chopin's Étude in c minor (Op. 10 No. 12), which J.P. played what I would consider a forte throughout. After that came Liszt's Eroica, which (in my antagonistic point of view) consists of a profoundly uninteresting galloping motif being repeated at top speed in varying levels of thunderousness and squeakiness. Chopin's Barcarolle (Op. 60) and Liszt's Ballade No. 2 in b minor followed, at which (very long) point I let my thoughts drift. Finally J.P. rounded off the programme with two Romanian dances by Bartók, which appeared to have been more thoroughly thought through in terms of expression than his other pieces.

A last round of modest applause, and we filed out. F.P., who was sitting exhausted on a bench in the hallway had, as we passed, rather the air of a prisoner watching as the jury leaves the courtroom to deliberate on his fate. Altogether, though, the two pianists considerably impressed me. Their powers of memorization and their unpretentiously good technique were admirable, and they only made a very few perceptible errors, though they were nervous and perspiring. And I think that, as they get more experience, their ability to understand the music will improve -- and, even if they mistake loudness for expressiveness, at least they don't mistake theatrics for it.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on piano-playing, despite the rather pedantic tone that has crept into this blog post, and my evaluation should certainly not be taken as the last word on the subject.

Flawed Ecclesiastics and Other Tales

Today was truly a day of rest, as Sunday should be. I've rather wondered if God (at least hypothetically speaking) does mean that one should rest on the Sabbath day even if one hasn't worked on any other day. But that's just by the way.

It was sunny and tempting outside, but I stayed inside. I read two Western novels as well as A Sicilian Romance, and played much Beethoven and Bach and a little Chopin on the piano. The piano has gone splendidly yesterday and today. Without conscious effort I'm playing with considerable variety and feeling and fluency, and finding new ways of playing every piece. But this is probably not a sign of a lasting improvement; it is like a lovely enchantment in a tale of Hans Christian Andersen, an interlude which fades out like a dream, to vanish for ever without hope of being recaptured. In a few days the sonatas and waltzes and minuets will most likely revert to their usual clumsy state, and I will be forced to explore the lesser magic of scales and technical exercises again.

Anyway, the Sicilian Romance, which I'd already read before, was considerably amusing. It was written by Ann Radcliffe, and I'm sure that Jane Austen read it. The heroes are Ferdinand de Mazzini, his sisters Julia and Emilia, and his friend Count Hippolitus de Vereza (who is the beloved of Julia). The villains are the father, the Count de Mazzini; the stepmother, Maria de Mazzini née di Vellorno; and the Duke de Luovo, a suitor of Julia. Romantic conventions crowd the novel: picturesque and rugged scenery, unnatural characters (either angelically good or diabolically bad), banditti, caves, secret passageways, a castle, a shipwreck, a monastery, a deeply flawed ecclesiastic, a saintly nun, idealized peasant life, imprisonment in a dungeon, a wife locked away in a gloomy chamber, faithful retainers, a serenade, swordfights, and at least four deaths that turned out to be false alarms. And, in the grand finale, there is one suicide by stabbing, one murder by poison, the reunion of the Mazzini children with their long-lost mother, and the wedding of Julia and the Count de Vereza. A rattling good yarn, as it were.

At least I'm reading non-online books too. Yesterday evening I finished the Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew, which was slightly maddening as far as its limited insight into her personality went, but pleasant on the whole. I'm also leafing through Tennyson's poems. I'm working my way up from the short bits like "The Kraken" and "Charge of the Light Brigade," and the longer sentimental narrative poems, and diving into In Memoriam, "The Voice and the Peak," and more of his comparatively drier poems. His short play "The Falcon" particularly interests me. I think the way he presents it is too saccharine and contrived, but the story itself (which is out of the Decameron) somehow really gripped me, and I intend to write something based on it. There is another poem, narrated by a woman who has come to live with her husband, who is a leper. I can't say I admire the poem's masochism. I did wonder, though, what I would do if I married and my husband had a fatal contagious disease (Ebola, for instance), and I was fairly sure I would stay with him too, unless we had children who still needed a parent. It would be more because I would despise myself eternally if I abandoned him than for any higher reason. Probably most people would do the same.

Anyway, the only other non-virtual reading I've done today was of the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on beer, for the purposes of J.'s homework about monasteries. He had to write a letter from a monk to a secular, free-range friend. It was quite funny. He writes that the monastery's donkey got loose in the barley field and rampaged until Brother Theodosius, who is fond of beer, came onto the scene and unleashed a torrent of curse words. Brother Petrus felt faint and had to go to the infirmary. In the evening everyone was going to pray for the soul of Brother Theodosius.

A Third Afternoon of Lieder

This morning I woke up at quarter to twelve again, to an overcast day where the wind that had brewed up late last evening was still sweeping the tender new leaves of the trees outside. I cleaned up my clothes and papers and books a little, made my bed, spent time on the Internet, and on the whole enjoyed myself. Today the cooking was taken care of, so I had time to play out of the notebook of Anna Maria Magdalena Bach.

I did see Mama this time before I left for the third masterclass. Today the students were not so much in top form, and didn't respond as quickly to corrections as they had yesterday, let alone the day before that. I came only about a minute late today, and the usual opening singer was just beginning her song. Then came the powerful-voiced one, (appropriately named Ilsa, if I remember correctly) with a piece by Wagner (I think), about "Lebewohl." Under the influence of directions her singing became temporarily less aggressive; perhaps nervousness had also been a problem. The singer with the "belly voice" followed with the third (well, really the second) of Schubert's "Harfenlieder," this time about "eating bread with tears." Mr. Fischer-Dieskau asked him at one point not to sing as much with the throat but more from the stomach, and the suggestion worked wonders. After that, because the accompanist of the fourth singer had not arrived, Ilsa sang another song by Hugo Wolff, entitled "Er ist's," about the arrival of spring. Then it looked like the masterclass was over, when the long-awaited accompanist came speeding in just as people had begun to get up to leave. Then the singer who had not been there yesterday sang a piece by Schumann; as far as I could tell, the performance was not particularly controlled, because he and the accompanist were still rather excited, but at least there was a nice range of pitch and effect.

Now I am at home again, eating the bread of idleness -- without any tears, however. Soon I'll check up what's happening tomorrow. I may go to the concert that is to bring the masterclass series to a triumphant close, or I may go somewhere else. Anyway, I'm enjoying the sense of being busy and having something to go out to every day. And now Mama's friend G. is here for a visit, so I'd better go. (c:

Trivial Pursuits

After I had made lunch again (this time, turkey schnitzel, broccoli, a salad with oak leaf lettuce and eggs, cranberry sauce, and apple sauce) I went off to the second masterclass. I was late again -- about ten minutes -- and the singer on the stage was the dark-haired one again. The order was different, but the repertoire was similar: Hugo Wolff and Richard Strauss and Schubert. Quite honestly, the songs all sound more or less the same to me, except that I am occasionally vaguely aware of a Viennese touch in Strauss. The students were more confident this time around, I think; their voices were fuller and their diction considerably better, and the accompaniments were better synchronized with the singing. On the other hand, today the faintest note of irritation did creep into Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's voice now and then, when a student persisted in certain errors that should have been easy to correct. The student whose singing I liked the most did not sing today (unless I came too late for it), but I also liked the voices of three others very much.

My other activities today included very, very slowly reading about France before the Revolution while simultaneously picking out songs on the ukulele. Perhaps the stimulation of the left(?) side of the brain does have a beneficial effect on learning after all, because I absorbed the information easily. And, while I was cooking, I listened to Gi. and Ge. discussing school, particularly the adverse effects of their difficulties with German on their tests, and the pendulum experiments they have been doing in Physics. J. complained about three tests that will, I think, take place tomorrow; Ge. comforted him by means of making absurd suggestions, for example that J. should quickly get a degree in medicine so that he can write doctors' notes to excuse himself. And then the others discussed certain animé series, for example "Death Note," which sounds most interesting, but whose premise they had pretty much picked apart by the end.

An Afternoon of Song

Today the big news was that Papa is now registered at the FU for, I think, his diploma! It was a relief to know it, and we celebrated with chocolate (and plenty of it), licorice allsorts and fruit gummies. It took a while until everyone came home, though. By the time I had finished preparing dinner (rotini with ground beef and a tomato sauce, with cherry tomatoes and bell pepper strips on the side) Mama had not come back yet.

At perhaps quarter to four I set off per U-Bahn to the Universität der Künste (UdK) building in the Fasanenstraße, close to the S- and U-Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten. At first I went in the wrong direction, but I suspected as much, and I soon received the right heading. It is a composite building, really, consisting of an old building (I'm guessing from the first years of the twentieth century) at the core, with two modern glass-and-steel-and-concrete additions to either side. I went first into the Konzertsaal part; completely empty, light brown, a sort of interior decorating wasteland, with one lone formally dressed woman sitting, bored stiff, in a ticket booth behind perforated plexiglass. She directed me to the 1B building. There I roamed about for at least ten minutes (it seemed longer), on three of the floors, in the vain search for the Theatersaal. The floor plan was intimate but complicated, because there were two small interior courtyards. At last I asked a lady in an office (I asked for the way to "das Theatersaal" instead of the correct "den Theatersaal," which was embarrassing, but at least instructive because she very tactfully corrected me) where the room was. So I went to the appropriate building annex, whose darkness and sixties-ish flair provided a decided contrast. A suited gentleman stood outside and answered my query as to whether I could still enter the Theatersaal rather grumpily.

Anyway, in the theatre, the masterclass (the first in a series of three) that I had come to see was well underway. A respectable crowd of well over fifty people had assembled in the audience, and on the black and rather harshly-lit stage there were a Steinway, an accompanist, a young dark-haired singer in black top and white skirt who was singing in nice full tones, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who was half-sitting and half-standing to the right. Soon the next singer was up; he sang a "Harfenlied" by Schubert, with what I suppose one could call a"belly voice," and lots of vibrato as well as a somewhat unclear diction. Then came another singer who sang something from Richard Strauss, with "Daemmergrauen." He was easier on the vibrato and, I suppose, used his "head voice" more often, which was a nice change and also automatically made it easy to understand the words. After that came a fairly rotund student with copious curly golden hair, who had lots of energy but shot it off in every direction as she sang something about "Kammerfenster" and "Gespenster" by Hugo Wolff. And then came a small student who had a small voice at the beginning, but who had a larger voice by and by after the many corrections to her incomprehensible and not very well calibrated, but still nice performance. The final song came from a tall student who sang another song from Mahler(?), this time (I think) with the lines, "Lasst mich allein/ Dein eigen sein." The lines stuck in my head because he made a break after the "allein," and Mr. Fischer-Dieskau suggested that he do a crescendo on the "allein" to tie it into the "dein," because otherwise it would sound like "Let me alone!" instead of "Let me alone . . . be yours." On the whole, I liked his singing most of all.

Anyway, this was an unusually painless masterclass. There was no acerbic commentary, no trembling, and no cold silences punctuated with nervous laughter. The only jarring element was the whispered and rather critical commentary of two very irritating girls. I relieved my feelings by glaring at them, but they didn't notice. At any rate, the main points that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau corrected were failures of tempo, failure to pronounce words properly (like singing "Liecht" instead of "Licht," or "Morgään" instead of "Morgen," and making "lebt" and "liebt" indistinguishable), an overly loud or overly fast accompaniment, and not suiting the singing to the words (like bellowing "schmachten" instead of singing it more quietly and lingeringly). It was hard to hear everything that was said, but at least the singing came across well.

Yesterday I went to another UdK event, this time a viola concert in the Bundesallee building, quite as enjoyable. It's pleasant that there is such an emphasis on singing or playing expressively here, because in Canada the emphasis mostly seems to be on the technique, which makes for more boring masterclasses that occasionally "make the soul hurt" because the musician is not engaging with the music at all (even the dynamics are programmed in to the playing rather than being a natural part of it). But I must confess that I only went to two university-level masterclasses (one for the violin, the other for the piano) in Canada. I won't write more about yesterday's concert except to say that the students played pieces by Karl Stamitz, J.S. Bach and Max Reger, and that I don't detest the viola as many people seem to do.

The Balm of Books

Today I was in a better frame of mind. I woke up fairly early, cleaned up the area around my bed a little, then wandered off to the Kleistpark with Sense and Sensibility in hand. As I walked down along the BVG building the lovely warm breeze carried the vague scent of blossoms. The splendid plane tree near the colonnades is beginning to bear leaves again, and this time it blended in with the colonnades in a less austere way. As for the trees in the large round lawn in the middle of the park, they were quite green. There were innumerable families out, in scattered groups that immediately reminded me of a painting. I found an unoccupied bench and managed to read quite well; but I'm probably still "stale" as far as Jane Austen goes, because I didn't get into the book. I haven't read any of her books from cover to cover for over a year, but once I knew Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, for example, practically word for word. This time her severe characterization of Lady Middleton, for example, struck me unpleasantly. Maybe I should try rereading her other books, or waiting a few years.

When I came back home Mama and Papa had already set up a new base for a bookshelf in T.'s and my room, and Mama was filling the shelves with books. After she was done I rearranged the lower shelves, so that my favourite books will be at arm's reach for bedtime reading. I haven't read many non-virtual books for a while, but I intend to start again. Particularly children's books, when read properly, make me feel that the world is in order as very few other things can. It's nice to rearrange books, too, so that they have a new context. One of the charms of the books in our shelves is that I can look at most of them and immediately picture where they were in our old house. They weren't schematically arranged even then, and I'm not homesick for our old house, but the mental associations are still pleasant.

I feel a little ashamed about yesterday's post. First of all, it is rather whiny; secondly, I believe on mature reflection that its analysis is inaccurate. I like pity, or at least sympathy, but in this case I doubt that I deserve it, or at least I worry that it would be quite unmixed with any respect for my common sense. It's all in the perspective, I suppose; many people would probably like to be in a position where they are not working and where they still have many options open. If I were outside of myself, I would probably find it patently obvious what I should do, and tell myself to do instead of think. And I'd probably rather despise myself. As it is, I must impatiently wait for enlightenment, whether through the glacially slow process of reason or through happy circumstance. But by now I've done so much introspection that my mind must (metaphorically speaking) resemble the mirror-filled dressing room of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion; as Admiral Croft exclaimed, "Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no getting away from oneself!"

Thoughts at the Crossroads

Today is the third in a series of discouraged days. It has been very sunny and beautiful outside, and the trees along the street are unfolding more and more leaves with every day, and everyone is coming out of their houses and "making glad" the streets. But there is little corresponding jollity within me.

But nothing else is to be expected if I sit inside as much as I do -- though I did walk to the Zwölf-Apostel graveyard with J. yesterday -- and I'm still uncertain what to do next. It takes me a very long time to figure out what I want to do. Part of the reason for this is that my years in school were not calculated to help me develop my interests, talents, or personality. Of course I read many books and learned many things on my own, but I did it unintelligently, so that I didn't get nearly as much out of it as I could, and there was nearly nothing in my environment that lent any new dimension to what I was doing. For example in literature, no matter what I read -- Shakespeare or George Eliot or Dickens -- I had to understand it through imagination or through my own feelings rather than, for example, through knowing people who resembled their characters, or knowing about English history from school. This is why, for the worst weeks in Grade 11, I couldn't properly read books any more; I was not able to tie anything to the real world -- if that makes sense. George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte I could, however, almost always read, because their books are largely about isolation, repression by environment, etc. Anyway, in university and here in Berlin, the conditions were and are much more favourable. I am at the point now where I can "find myself," but this process is considerably hampered by the pressure I am under to choose a bachelor programme and career. It is a little humiliating but true to say that, at twenty-one, I am in most ways basically at the point where most people are (or seem to be) at fifteen or sixteen.

What I would love to do is to have a year or two where I can just work on the things that suit me best, in the way that works best for me. I have no intention of sitting around and doing nothing. But if I had a congenial piano teacher, if I were free to write and draw and read and play music as I like, if I could go to museums and art galleries and concerts without worrying about the cost, if my siblings would go and play soccer or badminton or whatever in parks with me, if I could read in many subjects, and perhaps have a small pleasant job, just for one year, I think it would finally compensate for the deficiencies of my school years and gently close that chapter of my life once and for all. To tell the truth, all of these things I could already have done, but I haven't yet cast off the self-doubt and habits of procrastination and restlessness that probably keep me from doing these things properly.

Anyway, that was all the complaining I wanted to do. Now I am, again, ready to admit that my problems are very small peas indeed.

Easter, Seven Years Ago . . .

Photo by Edithor, 2000 (est.)

Happy Easter!

This morning I woke up at around ten o'clock, roused in part by the tolling of church bells (they also tolled at half past eleven yesterday evening, I think, for no apparent reason). T. was already awake, watching episodes of Poirot on YouTube; so were Mama and Papa. I hid chocolate Easter eggs in the corner room (which we also refer to as the living room or, rarely, the library), mostly in the bookshelves. Then, slowly, everyone else woke up; J. entered the library while I was still at work, closely wrapped in his blanket-toga, then curled up with a crime novel (by Agatha Christie, I think). Mama prepared yeast dough into hot cross buns (minus the candied lemon peel and raisins and pudding cross on top and sugar glaze . . . (c: ) as well as a stately Easter wreath (this time with raisins).

At last we had the usual Easter breakfast. I thought it was more fun when we were little, when we were eager to wake up for Easter, and we (or I, at least) would scrupulously avoid looking at the decorated table until we were all awake and present. Once everyone was awake and assembled at the foot of the stairs in our old house, Mama would start to play our Messiah record as our cue to festively enter the kitchen to partake of the breakfast. Anyway, this year the breakfast consisted of croissants, the hot cross buns, hard-boiled eggs, chocolate eggs and minuscule candy eggs, Ovaltine or coffee, and jam or honey or Schinkenspeck or Lachsschinken ("salmon ham") to go with the buns. For once we had no chocolate Easter bunnies, but I might buy them belatedly, or perhaps no one really missed them that much.

Then T., Ge., and J. hunted for the Easter eggs in the corner room, a very quick affair, where they only overlooked three of the eggs. Afterwards I went on a short walk to the Kleistpark. There were few cars on the road, and it was unusually peaceful. In the Kleistpark itself there were small groups of people scattered about, mostly still in black winter clothing. The second colonnade in the park has been entirely renovated now; the scaffolding and plastic sheeting are gone. But the bushes that used to grow around the statue of Cupid(?) in front of them has gone, which I think is a pity, because the juniper and laurel bushes that grew there were so nice and Italian, in perfect keeping with the architectural style of the colonnades and of the Kammergericht. Also, but this probably happened a while ago, a thicket of juniper or hemlock trees had been hewn down. Perhaps they went in order to permit a clear view from the colonnades out onto the Kammergericht, but they were not directly in the way, and (to me, at least) it looks more like they were put out of the way for the passage of a tank. I don't particularly like the severity of gardening in the classical style anyway; having lived in a place where trees grow freely and densely and naturally to impressive heights, sheltering and shadowy, with an untamed junglish tangle of salalberry or moss and swordfern at their bases, I will of course not be so taken by gardens where large empty spaces predominate.

Anyway, there were many flowers out already; starry yellow forsythias, the fringed Oregon grape blossoms that I also saw in the graveyard, light blue squills (whose German name, "Blaustern," or "blue star," is somewhat nicer), voluminous and frilly deep yellow flowers on a bush, red tulips, purple and white Grecian windflowers with their beautiful soft purplish-green leaves, some very pale blue grape hyacinths that did not appeal to me at all, and white and pink blossoms of two members of the plum or cherry families. The hazel has sent out its leaves already, but most of the trees and bushes were still barren. Birds, including a pretty, plump pair of speckled, dark-brown ones, were foraging for food here and there.

Two Poems

I worked on a long post today, but the final version was lost when Netscape crashed. So here, instead, are two quatrains that I wrote just now.

Tony Blair

A master of the statesman's art
Of meaning very, very well
Whilst paving with his whole small heart
A most progressive road to hell.

*

Dick Cheney

The US's second-greatest resident,
He puts the "vice" back in "vice-president."
Quail or Iraqi, he's ready to kill,
And Congress is ready to pay off the bill.

The Last of Siberia

This afternoon I finished Tent Life in Siberia. This last segment saw the reunion of the original surveying expedition, who had been divided up and who had jointly found a route from the Amur River to the Bering Sea where the telegraph line could be put up. Labour and logs for the telegraph poles had been organized, and supplies gradually and belatedly arrived from America. Then, after two years, the news came, by newspaper and then by a proper message, that the second Atlantic cable had been laid, and that the first, unsuccessful cable had even been fished out and repaired in addition. The Western Union Telegraph Company lost something like $3,000,000 in the venture, and decided to stop the project. So the large wooden poles were left to freeze unused, the glass insulators were sold for teacups, and the Americans and Russians of the expedition left either by ship for America or by sleigh for St. Petersburg. The book ends quite abruptly, after a description of Irkutsk, which, as an outpost of civilization that had so many houses that numbers were needed to identify them, was the first and rather difficult station on the road back to the life to which Mr. Kennan had been used.

I liked the book. I'm not sure how truthful it is, but it is well-written (though in a somewhat unindividual style of the time, and though the author sometimes repeats sentences), detailed, and certainly interesting. Since the author is an American, he is not as condescending to the Kor(y)aks and other Siberian natives as one might expect, and he seems to have had a good understanding with them. At the same time, it doesn't take a crusading "p.c.-fascist" to detect a racist undercurrent, or at least a strong distinction between employer and employee. And there are incidents of cruelty to animals, though not mean-spirited ones.

Besides reading, I made my bed and washed two of the window frames and dusted the top of my Sekretär (which is a desk with a bookshelf or drawers on top of it), then played some piano. Though spring has never had this effect on me before, it has inspired me to spring cleaning this year, much like it inspired Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows. As for the music session, it included accompanying T. as she played Marcello and Telemann on her recorder.

Flightless Birds and Alisania

To continue my report about our Palm Sunday, Mama, in one of her rare baking sessions, made the birds out of yeast dough ("Palmmöskes") a few hours ago. I had just coincidentally discovered that the word "lady" comes from the Middle English for "loaf" and "knead." So, I was indignantly thinking, all that women are apparently here for is to knead bread. )c:< Anyway, Mama's specific dough had risen beautifully and looked like a sponge with all the air bubbles; it enlightened me as to the reason why nineteenth-century women talked about "setting the sponge" for bread. She briefly kneaded it, then cut it into equal pieces. Each of these she formed into the rough shape of a bird, with a beaked head, a tail, feet, and a demi-ovoid body. One piece of dough was very oddly shaped, so she made it into a pelican; another she made into a swan. I made a lot of wisecracks about the process, for example Mama's method of "strangling" the bird to make the head distinct from the body. J. joined us, too. Then Mama shaped the remainder of the dough into simple palm leaves. Then, when she had brushed the birds with milk and given them each a raisin eye, she placed the palm leaves where the wings would be, and its effect was very nice. The birds even came out of the oven perfectly baked, golden-brown, slightly toasted at the bottom, golden and moist on the inside.

When I was not in the kitchen, I was on the internet or roaming the halls of the house or cleaning up. There has long been a stately mound of clothing at the foot of my bed; I aired and folded some, put others in the laundry, and then laid everything away except for a heap of clothes that are not supposed to be machine-washed. I handwashed one cardigan, admiring how the rather bright orange became a beautifully subdued autumnal colour once it was thoroughly wet, kneading the thing and wondering whether I needed to use laundry detergent or something. As a result of my deliberations, and of my occasional tendency to overdo things, I took the bar of handwashing soap and passed it over the cloth. Then I hauled the sodden mass over to one of our clothes-drying racks, put one of our simple cloth rugs under it so that the wooden floor wouldn't become wet with the drippings, and hoped for the best. Anyway, I'm not doing any more handwashing until I see how the cardigan withstood it.

Then I thought of writing a story again, with the result that I took up a pen and one of my numerous notebooks, and wrote out information about the imaginary country which the protagonist of my scion-of-noble-family-living-in-Victoria story is supposed to come from. I've read quite enough stories with imaginary countries (Evallonia, Ruritania, etc.) that have pseudo-Slavic languages and people, and that always end in -nia; so I thought that I would never descend to that -- besides, I have no trouble keeping track of Russia's -stans and the Balkan states, so I can spot a pretend-state despite the -nia. But now I have become everything I most despise, for my protagonist is a proud (though expatriate) Alisanian. Alisania, population 65,920 according to a 2003 census, is a moderately wealthy ex-principality, speaking predominantly Russian, German, and Alisanian. It was once part of Prussia, but became part of the Soviet Union after World War II. For the purposes of my plot, which would be too complicated if the protagonist is still a contender for the throne, I have decided that the protagonist's grandfather will have been a Quisling (well-intentioned, but a Quisling nonetheless), and that therefore the royal family has fallen from grace forever.

Anyway, after a failed revolution in the 1980s (which would come a year or two before the one in Czechoslovakia), in which the protagonist's parents died, Alisania became automatically independent as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Then it turned into a democracy; I must still determine whether it has a unicameral or bicameral legislature, which powers the president has, and how the power is shared between the legislative and executive branches (the Political Science 220 course that T. and I took is evidently bearing fruit). I will use the government systems of the other Baltic states to help me figure it out. The population as of the 2003 census was 45% atheist (a triumph of Soviet education), 23% Protestant, 9% agnostic, 8% Catholic, and 15% other. Perhaps it's ridiculous working and writing all of this background information out -- I suppose I'm the writing equivalent of a method actor -- but I like detail and accuracy.

As for the rest of the world, T. recently went to sleep; Gi., Ge., and J. are amusing themselves on the computer; and Mama, Papa and uncle W. are in the corner room smoking and talking. The day was sunny; trees are beginning to be flecked with green; the tulips in the middle of the street are already withering; birds chirp and sing freely in the courtyard so that one could imagine one is in the countryside; and the mood out on the street is appropriately springlike.

Palm Sunday, and More of Siberia

Today Mama woke me up at around 11:00 to partake of a communal breakfast, in honour of Palm Sunday. In Canada we sometimes marked this day by having small parades around the yard or around our grandfather's apartment with sharpened hazel branches (from the two trees behind our house) that had a bundle of boxwood twigs (also from our garden) tied around the tip and a bird baked out of yeast dough speared on top of it. Anyway, this year the feast is mostly culinary, from the breakfast to the coffee and cake (consisting of the birds) in the evening.

When Mama, T. and I went to church many years ago (we stopped going to church when we temporarily moved to Germany in April 1996), we learned the following song for this season:

Prepare the royal highway;
The King of kings is near!
Let ev'ry hill and valley
A level road appear!
Then greet the King of glory
Foretold in ancient story:
Hosanna to the Lord
For he fulfills God's word.

Anyway, when I reached the kitchen this morning, Papa, Mama, and T., had assembled, all reasonably awake. We had soft-boiled eggs; buns and baguette slices with Schinkenspeck (which resembles, I think, prosciutto), cheese, Nutella, and marmalade; and Mama and I each had raspberry-flavoured Götterspeise, the terribly fake but refreshing equivalent of Jell-o of the species that is sold ready-made in the grocery store refrigerators. With that we had tea and Carokaffee (coffee substitute). Anyway, I was still sleepy, and took a long while to respond to remarks or queries. Soon J. joined us, and summarized for us two tales from Strange Tales from the Strand before going to work on a kiwi that was so intransigent that a knife was needed to demolish it.

Yesterday I spent much of the day on the Internet. I kept on reading Tent Life in Siberia. The author travelled per horse and boats up into the central Kamchatkan mountain range during the brilliant autumn, then, as winter began, with sledges further and further into the snowy wasteland that is associated with Siberia until he reaches the Russian village of Gizhinga, then Anadyrsk. At most villages he changed his mode of transportation, and at the biggest ones he exchanged the guides and other native members of the expedition. Along the way he stayed in the dwellings of the native inhabitants, the Kamchadal (also known as Itelmen) and the Koryk (wandering and settled). There were yurts where one had to climb up at the side, then slide in on a pole through the smoke-hole, until one entered the dirty interior where the walls were black with smoke. Then there were large yurts that had no smoke-hole and were therefore awfully stuffy, with compartments of animal furs lining the outer wall; one had to enter them by crawling through a subterranean passage. There were houses that had fish bladders for windows, others that had blocks of ice for windows, and some that had no windows at all. And so on and so forth. Where there were no windows the usual lamp was a bowl of seal oil with moss floating in it for a wick.

Here is a typically humorous description of a miserable stay in an abandoned yurt whose wooden frame had been partially removed for firewood:

After a scanty supper of _selánka_, dried fish, hardtack, and tea, we stretched our tired bodies out in the shallowest puddles we could find, covered ourselves with blankets, overcoats, oilcloths, and bearskins, and succeeded, in spite of our wet clothes and wetter beds, in getting to sleep.

The wandering Koraks were essentially herders of reindeer. They used every part of the animal, just as the Plains Indians used every part of the buffalo. The bones were saturated with seal oil and used as fuel, the skin for clothing, the intestines stuffed with tallow and eaten, etc. Other groups also subsisted on fish and berries (blueberries and cranberries, for instance). It was altogether remarkable how ingeniously they survived despite temperatures of even around 68 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-55.6 degrees Celsius).

But another people that had made its mark on the Siberian population was the Cossacks, who had been sent in the eighteenth century to conquer and colonize the easternmost regions of Russia, and who, after the warfare was ended, remained and often intermarried with the native inhabitants. Altogether the land had already been explored to a surprising degree. Petropavlovsk had been founded by Vitus Bering, and it was named (as I discovered on Wikipedia) after his ships St. Peter and St. Paul. De Lesseps, whose name sounds familiar but whom I can't really place, also seems to have been there, because he had compounded a vocabulary of at least one of the indigenous languages. And the tallest peak on Kamchatka, the volcano Klyuchevskaya-Sopka (Mr. Kennan calls it "Kluchefskoi"), was already climbed in 1788 by Daniel Gauss and two other "westerners."*

Anyway, I also watched certain films aimed at the younger female demographic on YouTube. There was one British period drama, a "Kostümschinken" that was humorously aware of the fact, of which I watched the last eight minutes or so. Where I started watching Hazard of the Heart, the heroine, clad in a white dress with an Empire waist, was running through a mansion pursued by Diana Rigg (clearly enjoying herself), who wore a bright red dress and ran with a rapier stretched out in front of her with evidently homicidal intentions. The heroine rushed into the library, where an elderly man lay deceased in the style of an aristocratic or monied victim in Poirot, bent forward with his head on his desk. I found this part a little off-putting. At any rate, the maiden then runs out through a secret door consisting of a bookshelf, to find herself in dimly-lit underground caverns. But the pursuer had heard her fastening the latch, and enters the caverns by another route. The villainess catches up with her, as does an unwanted suitor of the heroine, who seemed to have been hanging out in the caverns for no discernible reason. The latter despatches his confederate with a dagger in order to avoid being blackmailed ("It would have been ten thousand pounds this year, then ten thousand the year after that . . ." says the murderer** -- "No, twenty thousand," Diana Rigg unrepentantly replies with her dying breath). The heroine is in imminent danger of being dragged off, when a very neatly-clad and very British-looking gentleman, who is also evidently the beloved of the heroine, rushes up and engages the villain in a long rapier duel. At this point it is quite nice, really, that the heroine is genuinely distressed by the violence, no matter what the outcome. Either way, the villain eventually succumbs. And the hero and heroine live happily ever after.

N.B.: There are apparently three, not two, volcanoes visible from Petropavlovsk.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klyuchevskaya_Sopka
** I'm paraphrasing here.