Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Songs of a Blithe Spirit
Whilst whiling away the night writing a sentimental story that wouldn't overtask the intellect of an eight-year-old, I listened to YouTube classical music videos for the first time in a while, and came across a black-and-white film where Mischa Elman, accompanied by Josef Bonime, plays Antonin Dvorak's "Humoresque" and François Joseph Gossec's "Gavotte." Altogether I find the film pleasantly atmospheric; from the introductory text, through the setting — a tall window in the back with the heavy drapes to either side, pilasters, the curve of the piano smothered in a sumptuous coverlet, and the pompous bust at the wall — to, above all, the romantic playing and lightly antiquated sound quality of the recording.
Both of the pieces happen to be in the canon of the Suzuki Violin School, in which I was placed at the age of five and remained for two or three years. I play the "Humoresque" rarely now, first of all because I only pick up the violin about every two weeks, and secondly because that piece is particularly difficult to play if one is used to the multitude of notes in piano music — where notes tend to be part of an aggregate and not independent entities — and doesn't know how to make a melody sound meaningful on its own. In the Suzuki score, the second voice is missing, too (but it seems only to be the melody transposed down a third, so maybe I should pencil it in).
Elman, I find, gives the pieces dignity, warmth, and life. The Gavotte is delightfully gay (in the original meaning of the term (c: ) and seems perfectly suited for a session of chamber music in an airy room in the summertime. Also, I hope it isn't pretentious, overgeneralizing balderdash to say that his rendition has an optimistic and naïve mood that is intriguingly unmodern.
And Beethoven's Spring Sonata as played by Henryk Szeryng and Artur Rubinstein is also well worth the listen.
This time I was purposely searching for a poem that might provide a good title for the music post, so, after trying Chaucer's "Prologue" and Hardy's "Darkling Thrush," I lucked out with "To a Skylark." It is one of my favourite poems, though the poet's grandiloquence (exemplified by his line in another work that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world") gets on my nerves now and then. A species of this grandiloquence that I particularly dislike is the Romantic tendency to identify with and apostrophize a greater power. It reminds me of obnoxious classmates who would constitute themselves co-authorities with the teacher, trying to advance from the ranks of the hoi polloi by keeping the others in order; so, for example, if people talked in the back of the room, they turned around pointedly, with a sanctimonious stare of horrified indignation that would have been proportionate if the delinquents were holding a cannibal feast.
One poetic example is the "Apostrophe to Ocean," as it was called in my English Lit 12 class, from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The narrator expatiates on his love of solitary promenades to the seashore to "Mingle with the universe"; but, despite the exalted privilege of his one-on-one interviews with the Ocean (something like Bush's chats with God, I presume), he still condescends to "love not Man the less, but Nature more" because of them. Then he goes on and on about how men are killed by the sea, and seems rather to relish it. I'll venture a daring literary theory: "he" is actually a misanthropic "she," which is why she can so easily talk of men in the third person. But I should say that, odd bits aside, I like the verses.
In any case, Shelley's poem turned out to be eminently seasonal, and also topical insofar as it concerns music, so here it is:
One poetic example is the "Apostrophe to Ocean," as it was called in my English Lit 12 class, from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The narrator expatiates on his love of solitary promenades to the seashore to "Mingle with the universe"; but, despite the exalted privilege of his one-on-one interviews with the Ocean (something like Bush's chats with God, I presume), he still condescends to "love not Man the less, but Nature more" because of them. Then he goes on and on about how men are killed by the sea, and seems rather to relish it. I'll venture a daring literary theory: "he" is actually a misanthropic "she," which is why she can so easily talk of men in the third person. But I should say that, odd bits aside, I like the verses.
In any case, Shelley's poem turned out to be eminently seasonal, and also topical insofar as it concerns music, so here it is:
TO A SKYLARK
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight:
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflow'd.
. . .
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
. . .
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now!
Quoted in: A Treasury of English and American Verse, Fritz Krog, Ed.
Hirschgraben Verlag, 1967
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Sequel: Tempelhof and Delphi
The Tempelhof vote results were released late last evening, and "Nay" triumphed; ca. 60.2 % of those who voted chose "Yea," but the necessary quota of "Yea" votes, which would have had to represent 25% of the 2.4 million eligible voters, was not reached. How fairly the referendum was set up is debatable (well, not much point in debate; it was unfair), but on the whole I admit that I am fast settling into my usual political apathy again. I didn't really understand anyway, why we voters would have a chance to determine the future of however many square kilometers the airport covers, whereas truly serious issues like sending our fellow citizens to be killed and to perform dubious activities in Afghanistan, in our name, are out of our hands entirely. There no one in the government cares for our opinion, except the opposition parties who, as in everything else, are partly honestly opposed and partly want to make political capital out of it. (Or so I believe.)
* * *
As for the Delphi story, which I have temporarily rechristened Omphalos so that the title is more specific, it is not getting along very well. For one thing, I can't understand a heroine who would abscond with a car even though the woman to whom it was intended to be delivered probably needs it herself, or might at least be extremely puzzled if she doesn't get it. But I have already described the route from Athens to Delphi as best I could, relying only on Google Maps; fortunately the hilly areas there are evidently very high, so I see the changes in altitude wonderfully well (unlike in Northumberland, but more about that later). The description is not too brilliant -- probably very clichéd -- but here's a sample:
This morning I was lucky again. In preparation for university, based on the hope that I'll be accepted this year, I've been reviewing my Ancient Greek. But I had discontinued my daily sessions for a day or three when, today, I decided to finish Lesson VII in An Introduction to Greek (Henry Lamar Crosby and John Nevin Schaeffer, Allyn and Bacon, 1966). Immediately I realized that there were black-and-white photos of Delphi in it, excellently detailed and taken at roughly the time when Mary Stewart wrote her book. So far I've noticed that the grassy bank above the stadium, which is wooded with firs now, was quite bare then -- a small detail but perhaps useful -- and that there's a "plunging pool" near the gymnasium.
Anyway, even if I never write another word of the story, my toils have been most rewarding. For example, the aesthetics of the site at Delphi have really grown on me: the chalky stone of the higher crags with the splashes of pastel pink and the gnarled growth of olive-tinted scrub, the dark spires of cypress(?) reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance painting, the dusky firs, the aisles running down the seats of the greyish theatre, the warm beige pillars on the Temple of Apollo, the thin paths threading along the slopes below, the flat-bottomed valley winding through the dark green mountain spurs, and the cool pale blue where the sea creeps in at Itea. I haven't seen any purple mountains on the photos yet, though. (c:
* * *
Yesterday I also took another whack at neglected writing projects. For one thing, I added some paragraphs to "Castle Besieged" (a medieval tale, possibly ca. Wars of the Roses, that I am writing for my own amusement) and "Newsbreak" (set in a newspaper office in present-day New York). Besides, I had another Google Maps session. First up was the stretch between London and Gloucestershire, for my tale set in the time of Oliver Cromwell's reign and entitled "The Fountain in the Labyrinth." But probably the land has changed its character greatly since the 17th century; now it is only little fields fringed with forest, whereas I am sure it was once nearly all forest. At least I have ground-level knowledge of how portions of Oxfordshire might have looked (i.e. fresh and green and lovely) thanks to two train rides between London-Paddington and Oxford.
Anyway, passing on to Northumberland, I zoomed right in on Hadrian's Wall, then scrolled back and forth looking for a house on a hill that is near the wall, but had no luck. There were barnyards, grey and square and apparently modern, and a castle; only one knot of buildings could have been a village (Porsbury, in my tale) at the bottom of a hill with a mansion on its top, and that mansion improved on its imaginary counterpart by being nestled in a clump of forest. It appeared to be too far away from Hadrian's Wall, however, though it strikes me now that tinkering with distances is quite permissible under artistic license. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn't see the hills properly because the map lacked relief, but one large, knobbly patch of bare brown was almost certainly a mountain. In any case, it was fun scrolling to and fro to see the dark squiggle where a stream once ran, terraces that may be left over from Neolithic times, crop circles, the odd spirals and ridges and curves of the furrowed fields, and the white specks that were presumably sheep.
* * *
As I was thinking of a title for this blog post, a line of Keats's popped into my head, which I promptly googled, to find his poem "Fancy." It is long, but the first lines seem the perfect note on which to end:
EVER let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let wingèd Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
* * *
As for the Delphi story, which I have temporarily rechristened Omphalos so that the title is more specific, it is not getting along very well. For one thing, I can't understand a heroine who would abscond with a car even though the woman to whom it was intended to be delivered probably needs it herself, or might at least be extremely puzzled if she doesn't get it. But I have already described the route from Athens to Delphi as best I could, relying only on Google Maps; fortunately the hilly areas there are evidently very high, so I see the changes in altitude wonderfully well (unlike in Northumberland, but more about that later). The description is not too brilliant -- probably very clichéd -- but here's a sample:
Barely ten minutes had passed when I was leaving the bright sea of white apartment buildings, and the roar, and the congestion behind me, and was free to follow my own trains of thought as I sped away on the westward stretch of the Leoforos Athinon. The Mediterranean, which I had seen from many Grecian shores at many times of the day, now spread sparklingly blue before me, and the breezes fled past the windshield with an accelerating rush that made me feel nearly as if I were soaring. I turned onto the Ethniki Odos Athinon-Korinthou confidently, not even needing to consult the map, and rounded the bay. The island of Salaminos spread out to the west, the sharp curve of the white sands beside the road was dotted with people, the piers that jutted out from the northern shore below Eleusina were bristling with white boats, and stately yachts of the jet-setting crowd and magnates lay in the water in a bright constellation. Here, again, was the bustle that I knew from the city, translated into the marine idiom.But the research is going swimmingly. I've pored over photos of the ruins of ancient Delphi for hours and tried to recapture the scenes in word-pictures for my notes. Besides, Goldfinger has come on television twice; it turns out that I was actually thinking of that film, in particular the scenes where James Bond is curving around the Swiss mountainside near Geneva in his dashing Aston Martin. The film was released in 1964, too, and I found myself looking very closely at the clothing, cars, interior design (in the Miami hotel and the airplane), the Swiss gas station, etc. (I also realized what a good film it is; I especially liked the scene in Fort Knox where, amid the shoot-out between the soldiers of Goldfinger and of the US Army, Bond is hovering perspiringly over the bomb whose timer is ticking down to the crucial seconds, trying to stop the dials and wheels, finally resolving to pull out a neat bundle of cables -- then a grey-suited government man comes over, reaches in calmly, and turns the device off with the airy flick of a switch.)
This morning I was lucky again. In preparation for university, based on the hope that I'll be accepted this year, I've been reviewing my Ancient Greek. But I had discontinued my daily sessions for a day or three when, today, I decided to finish Lesson VII in An Introduction to Greek (Henry Lamar Crosby and John Nevin Schaeffer, Allyn and Bacon, 1966). Immediately I realized that there were black-and-white photos of Delphi in it, excellently detailed and taken at roughly the time when Mary Stewart wrote her book. So far I've noticed that the grassy bank above the stadium, which is wooded with firs now, was quite bare then -- a small detail but perhaps useful -- and that there's a "plunging pool" near the gymnasium.
Anyway, even if I never write another word of the story, my toils have been most rewarding. For example, the aesthetics of the site at Delphi have really grown on me: the chalky stone of the higher crags with the splashes of pastel pink and the gnarled growth of olive-tinted scrub, the dark spires of cypress(?) reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance painting, the dusky firs, the aisles running down the seats of the greyish theatre, the warm beige pillars on the Temple of Apollo, the thin paths threading along the slopes below, the flat-bottomed valley winding through the dark green mountain spurs, and the cool pale blue where the sea creeps in at Itea. I haven't seen any purple mountains on the photos yet, though. (c:
* * *
Yesterday I also took another whack at neglected writing projects. For one thing, I added some paragraphs to "Castle Besieged" (a medieval tale, possibly ca. Wars of the Roses, that I am writing for my own amusement) and "Newsbreak" (set in a newspaper office in present-day New York). Besides, I had another Google Maps session. First up was the stretch between London and Gloucestershire, for my tale set in the time of Oliver Cromwell's reign and entitled "The Fountain in the Labyrinth." But probably the land has changed its character greatly since the 17th century; now it is only little fields fringed with forest, whereas I am sure it was once nearly all forest. At least I have ground-level knowledge of how portions of Oxfordshire might have looked (i.e. fresh and green and lovely) thanks to two train rides between London-Paddington and Oxford.
Anyway, passing on to Northumberland, I zoomed right in on Hadrian's Wall, then scrolled back and forth looking for a house on a hill that is near the wall, but had no luck. There were barnyards, grey and square and apparently modern, and a castle; only one knot of buildings could have been a village (Porsbury, in my tale) at the bottom of a hill with a mansion on its top, and that mansion improved on its imaginary counterpart by being nestled in a clump of forest. It appeared to be too far away from Hadrian's Wall, however, though it strikes me now that tinkering with distances is quite permissible under artistic license. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn't see the hills properly because the map lacked relief, but one large, knobbly patch of bare brown was almost certainly a mountain. In any case, it was fun scrolling to and fro to see the dark squiggle where a stream once ran, terraces that may be left over from Neolithic times, crop circles, the odd spirals and ridges and curves of the furrowed fields, and the white specks that were presumably sheep.
* * *
As I was thinking of a title for this blog post, a line of Keats's popped into my head, which I promptly googled, to find his poem "Fancy." It is long, but the first lines seem the perfect note on which to end:
EVER let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let wingèd Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Democracy on Wings
At around 4 p.m. I went to the Rathaus Schöneberg in order to vote in the referendum on the future of the Berlin-Tempelhof airport. The market, white with the plastic sheeting that shelters the tables, was in full cry, and the sidewalks between the Akazienstraße and Rathaus were bustling with people eating ice cream, going for a walk, talking at restaurant tables, etc. There was no sign of the referendum except two modest posters at the bottom of the city hall stairs, and white pieces of paper pointing one to the side entrance on the Freiherr-von-Stein Straße. There a lone trio of black-clad men from a television station stood conversing with one or two citizens, the door was open, and I uncertainly entered the door that is normally used to get to the marriage office (Standesamt).
Up the dark but broad winding stairs I went, and it was easy enough to find Room 1003. Two other voters were standing in line in a well-lit room that was smaller than many a classroom. One of the two students sitting at a white table to the right examined my notification letter and passport, and pointed me to a modest table in one corner where a grey cardboard shield protected one's privacy. With great effort, I summoned my forces to unfold the ballot and mark a cross on the circle beside "Ja," then I walked over to the table where three plump and friendly women were sitting. They checked off my name on the voter list after consulting the notification letter again, and pointed me to the metal box that served as the urn. A fourth woman stood there, somewhat listlessly holding a blue duotang over the slit, and then as listlessly moving it aside to let me drop in the ballot. My civic duty was thereby performed.
As I went out and descended the stairs, a second television trio, who had been loitering on the landing, stopped me and asked me to say how I had voted and why. Given the fact that I am generally inarticulate and rambly and don't pronounce my "s"s properly, any footage of me would probably be unusable, but I decided to give it a shot and let them decide. Besides, I was giggling internally with excitement like a giddy schoolgirl, though I probably looked poised and serious as far as this is reconcilable with evidently being in a good mood. So I agreed. At that point they swung into action; a fuzzy black microphone hovered from the left, the unwieldy black camera approached from the right, and in the middle there stood the anchor, her smile very white, broad and fixed as she asked me the question.
As far as I remember, these are the pearls of wisdom that I confidently imparted: "Ich habe 'Ja' gestimmt. Ich finde, dass eine Stadt wie Berlin mehr als einen Flughafen braucht. Eine Stadt mit 3 Millionen Einwohner [here the confidence in my tone wavered into uncertainty, because that figure might be wrong] brauch zwei Flughafen." In a nutshell: "I voted 'yes' because a large city like Berlin needs more than one airport." Walking back home, I remembered that "brauch" should have a "t" at the end (if I'm lucky, the wrong pronunciation is a colloquialism), and that the plural of "Flughafen" is "Flughäfen." Anyway, it doesn't really matter, and in any case what bothers me more is that the substance of what I said is unenlightening at best, but most probably stupid.
What the issue was, is that the government intends to close down the Tegel and Tempelhof airports and expand the Schönefeld airport into a huge one called "Berlin-Brandenburg International." Tempelhof hasn't been used by commercial passenger airlines in ages, and apparently only serves dignitaries and businessmen now. So its operation license was revoked, and the government had agreed to redevelop it into a park or something of the sort; a public initiative was started against this closure, however, and that's why the referendum happened.
I think that it is immensely stupid to have only one large airport serve all of Berlin. If something goes wrong, let's say an oil slick on the runway or whatever, there should always be an alternative site. And the convergence of all Berlin-bound flights on one spot sounds unnecessarily dangerous to me. London, though admittedly much larger than Berlin, has Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and (I think) Luton; even Vancouver, with probably half the population of Berlin, has YVR and Vancouver-Abbotsford.
The official information brochure that we were sent in the mail also presents more specific arguments: apparently BBI would not be large enough to handle all the flight traffic, the closure of the airport would cost Berlin millions in revenue, and ca. 70% of Berliners are for the continuation of Tempelhof as it is. None of the counter-arguments that I've read seem compelling. Pollution drifts with the wind, so what difference does it make if it originates in BBI or Tempelhof? The noise is a pity, but, at the risk of being mean, I will say that people who choose to live nearby, when Berlin's housing market is (from what I've seen and heard) wide open, should suck it up.
Up the dark but broad winding stairs I went, and it was easy enough to find Room 1003. Two other voters were standing in line in a well-lit room that was smaller than many a classroom. One of the two students sitting at a white table to the right examined my notification letter and passport, and pointed me to a modest table in one corner where a grey cardboard shield protected one's privacy. With great effort, I summoned my forces to unfold the ballot and mark a cross on the circle beside "Ja," then I walked over to the table where three plump and friendly women were sitting. They checked off my name on the voter list after consulting the notification letter again, and pointed me to the metal box that served as the urn. A fourth woman stood there, somewhat listlessly holding a blue duotang over the slit, and then as listlessly moving it aside to let me drop in the ballot. My civic duty was thereby performed.
As I went out and descended the stairs, a second television trio, who had been loitering on the landing, stopped me and asked me to say how I had voted and why. Given the fact that I am generally inarticulate and rambly and don't pronounce my "s"s properly, any footage of me would probably be unusable, but I decided to give it a shot and let them decide. Besides, I was giggling internally with excitement like a giddy schoolgirl, though I probably looked poised and serious as far as this is reconcilable with evidently being in a good mood. So I agreed. At that point they swung into action; a fuzzy black microphone hovered from the left, the unwieldy black camera approached from the right, and in the middle there stood the anchor, her smile very white, broad and fixed as she asked me the question.
As far as I remember, these are the pearls of wisdom that I confidently imparted: "Ich habe 'Ja' gestimmt. Ich finde, dass eine Stadt wie Berlin mehr als einen Flughafen braucht. Eine Stadt mit 3 Millionen Einwohner [here the confidence in my tone wavered into uncertainty, because that figure might be wrong] brauch zwei Flughafen." In a nutshell: "I voted 'yes' because a large city like Berlin needs more than one airport." Walking back home, I remembered that "brauch" should have a "t" at the end (if I'm lucky, the wrong pronunciation is a colloquialism), and that the plural of "Flughafen" is "Flughäfen." Anyway, it doesn't really matter, and in any case what bothers me more is that the substance of what I said is unenlightening at best, but most probably stupid.
What the issue was, is that the government intends to close down the Tegel and Tempelhof airports and expand the Schönefeld airport into a huge one called "Berlin-Brandenburg International." Tempelhof hasn't been used by commercial passenger airlines in ages, and apparently only serves dignitaries and businessmen now. So its operation license was revoked, and the government had agreed to redevelop it into a park or something of the sort; a public initiative was started against this closure, however, and that's why the referendum happened.
I think that it is immensely stupid to have only one large airport serve all of Berlin. If something goes wrong, let's say an oil slick on the runway or whatever, there should always be an alternative site. And the convergence of all Berlin-bound flights on one spot sounds unnecessarily dangerous to me. London, though admittedly much larger than Berlin, has Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and (I think) Luton; even Vancouver, with probably half the population of Berlin, has YVR and Vancouver-Abbotsford.
The official information brochure that we were sent in the mail also presents more specific arguments: apparently BBI would not be large enough to handle all the flight traffic, the closure of the airport would cost Berlin millions in revenue, and ca. 70% of Berliners are for the continuation of Tempelhof as it is. None of the counter-arguments that I've read seem compelling. Pollution drifts with the wind, so what difference does it make if it originates in BBI or Tempelhof? The noise is a pity, but, at the risk of being mean, I will say that people who choose to live nearby, when Berlin's housing market is (from what I've seen and heard) wide open, should suck it up.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Golden Interlude
An odd but very beautiful warm sunset that I tried to capture with Gi.'s digital camera on March 5th, 2007.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Tales of the Armchair Traveller
Once in a while the moment arrives when the computers are all occupied, including my own laptop, and I have no intention of watching television. So I wander listlessly among the bookshelves, and since the English literature by authors from A-S is stranded high above my short reach, I am forced into close contemplation of the children's literature in the hallway, or the literature from S-W. Three to four days ago this paid off when I discovered three works by Mary Stewart, a novelist who dabbled, with considerable success, in the romance-adventure genre during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Nine Coaches Waiting is the best of these, I think. The premise is that Linda Martin, a half-French and half-English orphan in her early twenties, becomes the governess of the nine-year-old Comte de Valmy in Haute-Savoie, and becomes enamoured of the brooding son of the Comte's uncle, before she finds out that there is a sinister scheme to bump off the Comte and no longer knows whom to trust. In the spirit of the typical novel synopsis, heightening suspense to the utmost, I hereby add ellipses: . . . Anyway, the two or three episodes of vigorous kissing aside, the tale itself is a good yarn, with interesting characters, fine sense of scenery, and a profusion of literary quotations and allusions that do not seem like a wearying attempt to show off but like the overflowing of a genuine love of books. It is not set in an ambiguous time, either, but reflects the decade when it was written, and reminded me vaguely of To Catch a Thief and the less exotic European scenes in James Bond (Thunderball, I think). And I suspect that the dashing description of Paris in the beginning is efficiently excellent, too.
At present I'm at a loss for things to do. I am not working on any story, and I haven't yet tried writing a travel article for the Globe and Mail as I had intended. My fantasy about spending two days in Florence was short-lived, because my enthusiasm wasn't so great; my American prairie idea was abandoned a long time ago because, given my inexperience, it is highly unlikely that I could have earned my room and board, and not having a driver's license in the countryside is awkward. And, for whatever reason, I have not taken the step to whole-heartedly look for a job, though I know now what I could do: homework help, freelance writing, minor proof-reading, minor translating (German to English and French to English, though having 23% in my second UBC French Lit course might torpedo my chances there), secretarial work that does not involve telephoning, dish-washing, and cleaning. I did visit a tutoring office on a mission of inquiry, but it was after-hours and I haven't returned; as for online job-searching (one of the circles of quotidian purgatory that Dante presumably left out), I have not done it for at least two weeks.
The newest castle-in-the-air about moving into my own apartment has been severely damaged by the trebuchet of financial considerations. I wanted to have only one or two rooms, parquet or plank floors, in a building predating the 1930s,and a separate kitchen and bathroom, but with the costs of heating and electricity and water this would have amounted to at least 300 Euros per month. Then I would factor in 150 Euros per month for food and toiletries; I can eat moderately, but if my siblings or other guests come over I would want to have a stock of pistachios, chocolate, etc., too. Payment of health insurance (my coverage under my parents' plan will, so I've been told, end when I turn twenty-three) will swallow about another 60 Euros per month, given an annual income of 9600 Euros. The cell phone costs I'm not quite sure about yet, but they should not exceed 15 Euros per month; an internet connection might require another 30 Euros. A year's ticket for the U-Bahn, buses and S-Bahn in the AB region of Berlin would cost me 670 Euros, which I would be able to pay from my present savings account; it would be cheaper if I am a student, but the university fees and textbook costs would also set me back a few hundred Euros. So, as far as my research has indicated, I could hold two 400-Euro jobs, or one job paying at least 700 Euros (if I had gotten the job at the Café Einstein, it would have been 800 Euros per month), which would be my prerequisites for moving out, and still run the risk of only scraping by.
Anyway, as I was googling Mary Stewart and her oeuvre, the idea struck me that I might try to take the premise of one of her novels and write my own according to her plot-paradigm and setting. So I typed out a first chapter from Amazon.com, found hints about the plots and characters from reader reviews, and began to research the setting, which is at first Athens but mostly Delphi. The point is not to steal ideas, but to try writing according to preset guidelines (as authors with companies like Mills & Boon must do, according to a recent Guardian article), with precise historical detail and "local colour," entirely for my own practice. Once I did pick one of the novels, I was reluctant to go far with it -- the heroine is named "Camilla Haven" . . . ("Linda" is not my favourite name, either, by the way) -- but I thought that I might as well undertake the research.
First of all I went to Google Maps (which was useful a few weeks ago when, for the purposes of a historical tale, I was trying to trace the route that a 17th-century carriage would have taken from London to Gloucestershire, though I doubt that the modern A40 corresponds to that route), and followed the highway out of Athens, around the bay, and along the mountains to Delphi. I noted the landscapes and towns on the way. Then I researched the flora and fauna of the slopes of Mount Parnassos, which overlooks Delphi and the vividly green river valley below that runs out to the sea, and found out historical and geographical details about that mountain and the ancient site of the oracle itself. Now I am much the wiser, though the Greek place names are slipping my memory again.
And, for the first time, I feel tempted to visit Greece. On the whole I've tended to think of it (I know, I'm a terrible philistine) as a hot country full of loud modern buildings and glaring yachts, barren rock and mountains on which forage unhappy sheep and goats under the humourless eye of surly shepherds, tourist beaches, and piles of crumbling stone that are all that remain of buildings and civilizations, which one must read about for hours and hours if one is to understand them. The Greek Orthodox Church intrigues me, and I like the food and wines, the intensely blue Mediterranean, and bees gathering honey on the slopes of Mt. Hymettos, but these temptations are not great enough. Also, I liked learning about Ancient Greece (much preferring it to Rome, esp. before Athens became an empire) in school and university, and am very fond of the myths, but I prefer to create my own picture of it in my imagination. In any case, either in Greece or in Scotland, I should like to see the "purple mountains" that I've encountered so often in fiction and never in real life.
Nine Coaches Waiting is the best of these, I think. The premise is that Linda Martin, a half-French and half-English orphan in her early twenties, becomes the governess of the nine-year-old Comte de Valmy in Haute-Savoie, and becomes enamoured of the brooding son of the Comte's uncle, before she finds out that there is a sinister scheme to bump off the Comte and no longer knows whom to trust. In the spirit of the typical novel synopsis, heightening suspense to the utmost, I hereby add ellipses: . . . Anyway, the two or three episodes of vigorous kissing aside, the tale itself is a good yarn, with interesting characters, fine sense of scenery, and a profusion of literary quotations and allusions that do not seem like a wearying attempt to show off but like the overflowing of a genuine love of books. It is not set in an ambiguous time, either, but reflects the decade when it was written, and reminded me vaguely of To Catch a Thief and the less exotic European scenes in James Bond (Thunderball, I think). And I suspect that the dashing description of Paris in the beginning is efficiently excellent, too.
At present I'm at a loss for things to do. I am not working on any story, and I haven't yet tried writing a travel article for the Globe and Mail as I had intended. My fantasy about spending two days in Florence was short-lived, because my enthusiasm wasn't so great; my American prairie idea was abandoned a long time ago because, given my inexperience, it is highly unlikely that I could have earned my room and board, and not having a driver's license in the countryside is awkward. And, for whatever reason, I have not taken the step to whole-heartedly look for a job, though I know now what I could do: homework help, freelance writing, minor proof-reading, minor translating (German to English and French to English, though having 23% in my second UBC French Lit course might torpedo my chances there), secretarial work that does not involve telephoning, dish-washing, and cleaning. I did visit a tutoring office on a mission of inquiry, but it was after-hours and I haven't returned; as for online job-searching (one of the circles of quotidian purgatory that Dante presumably left out), I have not done it for at least two weeks.
The newest castle-in-the-air about moving into my own apartment has been severely damaged by the trebuchet of financial considerations. I wanted to have only one or two rooms, parquet or plank floors, in a building predating the 1930s,and a separate kitchen and bathroom, but with the costs of heating and electricity and water this would have amounted to at least 300 Euros per month. Then I would factor in 150 Euros per month for food and toiletries; I can eat moderately, but if my siblings or other guests come over I would want to have a stock of pistachios, chocolate, etc., too. Payment of health insurance (my coverage under my parents' plan will, so I've been told, end when I turn twenty-three) will swallow about another 60 Euros per month, given an annual income of 9600 Euros. The cell phone costs I'm not quite sure about yet, but they should not exceed 15 Euros per month; an internet connection might require another 30 Euros. A year's ticket for the U-Bahn, buses and S-Bahn in the AB region of Berlin would cost me 670 Euros, which I would be able to pay from my present savings account; it would be cheaper if I am a student, but the university fees and textbook costs would also set me back a few hundred Euros. So, as far as my research has indicated, I could hold two 400-Euro jobs, or one job paying at least 700 Euros (if I had gotten the job at the Café Einstein, it would have been 800 Euros per month), which would be my prerequisites for moving out, and still run the risk of only scraping by.
Anyway, as I was googling Mary Stewart and her oeuvre, the idea struck me that I might try to take the premise of one of her novels and write my own according to her plot-paradigm and setting. So I typed out a first chapter from Amazon.com, found hints about the plots and characters from reader reviews, and began to research the setting, which is at first Athens but mostly Delphi. The point is not to steal ideas, but to try writing according to preset guidelines (as authors with companies like Mills & Boon must do, according to a recent Guardian article), with precise historical detail and "local colour," entirely for my own practice. Once I did pick one of the novels, I was reluctant to go far with it -- the heroine is named "Camilla Haven" . . . ("Linda" is not my favourite name, either, by the way) -- but I thought that I might as well undertake the research.
First of all I went to Google Maps (which was useful a few weeks ago when, for the purposes of a historical tale, I was trying to trace the route that a 17th-century carriage would have taken from London to Gloucestershire, though I doubt that the modern A40 corresponds to that route), and followed the highway out of Athens, around the bay, and along the mountains to Delphi. I noted the landscapes and towns on the way. Then I researched the flora and fauna of the slopes of Mount Parnassos, which overlooks Delphi and the vividly green river valley below that runs out to the sea, and found out historical and geographical details about that mountain and the ancient site of the oracle itself. Now I am much the wiser, though the Greek place names are slipping my memory again.
And, for the first time, I feel tempted to visit Greece. On the whole I've tended to think of it (I know, I'm a terrible philistine) as a hot country full of loud modern buildings and glaring yachts, barren rock and mountains on which forage unhappy sheep and goats under the humourless eye of surly shepherds, tourist beaches, and piles of crumbling stone that are all that remain of buildings and civilizations, which one must read about for hours and hours if one is to understand them. The Greek Orthodox Church intrigues me, and I like the food and wines, the intensely blue Mediterranean, and bees gathering honey on the slopes of Mt. Hymettos, but these temptations are not great enough. Also, I liked learning about Ancient Greece (much preferring it to Rome, esp. before Athens became an empire) in school and university, and am very fond of the myths, but I prefer to create my own picture of it in my imagination. In any case, either in Greece or in Scotland, I should like to see the "purple mountains" that I've encountered so often in fiction and never in real life.
Friday, April 18, 2008
After the Hibernation
After Easter was over, and no more chocolate was to be had, but I was nourished sufficiently to last me a while, I decided to go into winter hibernation. So I crawled under my bed, put on ear-muffs, curled up, and slept for weeks and weeks. Today I reemerged with a wolfish, lean and hungry look, growled at any family members who crossed my path, and ransacked the refrigerator. My voracious appetite being satisfied, I've spent the afternoon gazing out of the window at the clouds, the budding oaks, the drooping red tulips on the Hauptstraße median, and all the cars, while nibbling away at hazelnuts and trying not to swallow the shells as I gnawed these off.
Anyway . . . what really happened is that I indulged in the usual literary and musical pastimes, and also discovered the New York-based culture news blog Gawker. I tend to skip the celebrity news, since I consider it none of my business, and also as beneath my dignity. But I do enjoy the banality of the "celebrity sightings," which are generally in this vein: "I saw Miss X at Peppe's restaurant, corner of 51st and Broadway. She has perfect skin in person, and as she was eating a salad with deep-fried curly things on it, probably calamari, she was saying to a well-dressed female friend that she doesn't like rainy weather." The reader comments are unusually witty and well-written, though there is tasteless joking that jars on me.
On Saturday I e-mailed four poems to the New Yorker. Their genesis was a nocturnal reading session, which I interrupted to open the Text file where I write my notes. After staring blankly at the pixelated white-grey rectangle for some seconds, inspiration struck and I began describing seaside scenes near Opapa's condominium in Sidney in good detail and well-chosen words. Every poem, even after I worked out the rhythms throughout the next days, has its flaws, but I am very proud of three of them. I sent the fourth poem -- a gory tale in extremely blank verse (as L.M. Montgomery once put it) about an eagle who devours a fish carcass on a pier, while fending off a trio of obstreperous crows, in a scene that I really did observe once -- mostly because I've found to my great annoyance that people tend to prefer the poems that I like least.
I thought that the first poem in my original series was nice but too generic, so I've copied it below. Unfortunately a dead crab is, in my experience, too limp to hold onto anything; but besides that small logical flaw the only other evident shortcoming is probably the colon, of which a grammarian would not approve, though the poet might.
In the Darkness of the Seaside
It is night, and on the shore
the darkened rocks are lapped in shadow;
beyond: the distant rush and roar
of the waves that curl the ocean's blackness,
and the tide creeps in oblivion
in along the sleeping sands
gently pushing and amassing
the kelp and seaweed that is passing
from the seafloor to the strand.
In the morning, on the shore,
the wettened fringe will still be there;
frail, thin corpses of the crabs
with tiny legs still grasping
slippery translucent bands
or tangled in a mossy clump
and chalky limpet-shells whose cones
and mussels whose oblong sky-blue casings
decompose, abrade and crack
and turn to dust upon the strand.
My teachers have liked my poetry, but from other quarters I've heard little, also because I usually don't show my productions to anyone, anyway. Firstly, I don't want to submit work to others' judgments when it does not satisfy my own. Secondly, I've taken the lesson of Aesop's fable about the man, his son, the donkey, and the critical strangers to heart. And, thirdly, there is the example of my "Elegy" poem. It may come across as a recycling of ancient clichés, but I wrote it in an English churchyard, in the evening, near weathered tombstones and a pigeon and a yew, and the feeling was genuine. Earlier in the day we had gone to St. Alban's Cathedral, and I had felt very sorry for the people who had been buried under the floor, whose engraved names were fading away to oblivion; I never visited graveyards in Victoria, so they seemed profoundly hallowed and mysterious places, rather than the quietly enjoyable places I find them to be now; and, prosaically, jet lag had made me hypersensitive. I put the verse in the family newspaper because I liked it, and thought that others might too, but I didn't want to submit it to any magazine because of its personal nature and solemn subject.
Anyway, one reader wrote to tell me that I should acknowledge that I was ripping off ("trying to emulate") Gray's "Elegy," which hurt very much at the time, though I think he didn't mean it to have that effect. To him it seemed that I was trying to attain Gray's level, which would have been absurd, whereas I really only wanted to record my mood and the scene. And, to be completely honest, I felt insulted by the implication that I would be so unintelligent as to try to deceive well-read people by plagiarizing a well-known poem like Gray's "Elegy." 'T'any rate, this jumble quite proved the point that if one feels deeply about a piece of art one should keep it for one's self. It's one of my two favourite poems and it has taken a while not to feel that it is tarnished.
Theoretically I much prefer the form of the novel, because it isn't so wishy-washy, abstract, and sentimental. At the same time I must admit that it is as common in prose as in poetry to fudge emotional experiences that one has never had, but that one enjoys in the same way as I don't much mind reading about a gruelling Arctic expedition in mid-summer. Anyway, I could go on and on about this subject, but I won't. The point is that I'd rather write novels, but I am convinced, also by experience, that I won't be in the position to write a good novel for decades, due to my immaturity of character and of intellect.
On Saturday I went to guard Uncle Pu's and Aunt K.'s house in the countryside. I was on my own after the first day and a half because my co-guard fell ill and went to see a doctor and recuperate back in Berlin. So, for three days and two nights I tended the house, and went outside only to fetch the mail, and to dig out chickweed in the strawberry plot (an oddly satisfying experience). I read Die Zeit -- but not front to back, through all the sections, minus the advertisements, as on previous occasions. My feud with the writing style and the mentality of the contributors (self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and not very engaged with the subject) persists; I was wickedly gratified to find an error in one of the many English phrases that were dropped; but the interviews with Helmut Schmidt in the ZeitMagazin were refreshing as usual, and this week's magazine was altogether unusually entertaining. And I liked Katja Nicodemus, the film critic's, interview with director Sidney Lumet. Striking the right tone in an interview is, as I've found in my extensive newspaper reading, highly difficult. Painfully inconsequential accounts of the interviewee's attire, prying personal interrogations, snide denigration or overt hostility, silly adulation, brain-deadeningly unoriginal questions -- these are problems that plague the genre.
As far as interviews go, by the way, the New Yorker is pleasingly consistent; even the recent article about George Clooney (whose appeal I have never fully understood) was serious, and I liked reading it, though it only confirmed my opinion that the actor is agreeable but bland. Somewhat à propos, I feel like relieving my mind about the Washington Post feature article, "Pearls Before Breakfast," that just won a Pulitzer. It deserves the prize for the nice premise (famous violinist dresses in street clothes and plays during rush hour at subway station in Washington, D.C.; how do people react?) and for the thorough work and enthusiasm that went into it; but not for the philosophical and musical sciolism,* or the style, which lapsed here and there into abject gushing.
But, to return to my week of rustication, I also played the piano and violin (Pudel's, which he generously permitted me to play) with much greater freedom than I feel when anyone is within earshot, so that it sounded quite good. And I read the first essay in Samuel Johnson's Rambler, as well as the biographical foreword; the first chapters of Middlemarch as well as a foreword by Gordon S. Haight; the beginning of an unsympathetic essay on Edmund Spenser; and the first chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop. My appreciation of Charles Dickens is unfortunately still greater objectively than subjectively (though I did greatly enjoy Nicholas Nickleby as far as I read it), because the way he keeps nudging the reader, and his characterizations of heroes and heroines, invariably "gets my goat."
Even Middlemarch irritated me, because I don't like the Victorian strain of idealization (verging on kitsch) and religiousness in it. For example:
* sciolism: superficial pretense to knowledge
(I've had to look up the word a couple of times, hence this definition, paraphrased from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964)
Anyway . . . what really happened is that I indulged in the usual literary and musical pastimes, and also discovered the New York-based culture news blog Gawker. I tend to skip the celebrity news, since I consider it none of my business, and also as beneath my dignity. But I do enjoy the banality of the "celebrity sightings," which are generally in this vein: "I saw Miss X at Peppe's restaurant, corner of 51st and Broadway. She has perfect skin in person, and as she was eating a salad with deep-fried curly things on it, probably calamari, she was saying to a well-dressed female friend that she doesn't like rainy weather." The reader comments are unusually witty and well-written, though there is tasteless joking that jars on me.
On Saturday I e-mailed four poems to the New Yorker. Their genesis was a nocturnal reading session, which I interrupted to open the Text file where I write my notes. After staring blankly at the pixelated white-grey rectangle for some seconds, inspiration struck and I began describing seaside scenes near Opapa's condominium in Sidney in good detail and well-chosen words. Every poem, even after I worked out the rhythms throughout the next days, has its flaws, but I am very proud of three of them. I sent the fourth poem -- a gory tale in extremely blank verse (as L.M. Montgomery once put it) about an eagle who devours a fish carcass on a pier, while fending off a trio of obstreperous crows, in a scene that I really did observe once -- mostly because I've found to my great annoyance that people tend to prefer the poems that I like least.
I thought that the first poem in my original series was nice but too generic, so I've copied it below. Unfortunately a dead crab is, in my experience, too limp to hold onto anything; but besides that small logical flaw the only other evident shortcoming is probably the colon, of which a grammarian would not approve, though the poet might.
In the Darkness of the Seaside
It is night, and on the shore
the darkened rocks are lapped in shadow;
beyond: the distant rush and roar
of the waves that curl the ocean's blackness,
and the tide creeps in oblivion
in along the sleeping sands
gently pushing and amassing
the kelp and seaweed that is passing
from the seafloor to the strand.
In the morning, on the shore,
the wettened fringe will still be there;
frail, thin corpses of the crabs
with tiny legs still grasping
slippery translucent bands
or tangled in a mossy clump
and chalky limpet-shells whose cones
and mussels whose oblong sky-blue casings
decompose, abrade and crack
and turn to dust upon the strand.
My teachers have liked my poetry, but from other quarters I've heard little, also because I usually don't show my productions to anyone, anyway. Firstly, I don't want to submit work to others' judgments when it does not satisfy my own. Secondly, I've taken the lesson of Aesop's fable about the man, his son, the donkey, and the critical strangers to heart. And, thirdly, there is the example of my "Elegy" poem. It may come across as a recycling of ancient clichés, but I wrote it in an English churchyard, in the evening, near weathered tombstones and a pigeon and a yew, and the feeling was genuine. Earlier in the day we had gone to St. Alban's Cathedral, and I had felt very sorry for the people who had been buried under the floor, whose engraved names were fading away to oblivion; I never visited graveyards in Victoria, so they seemed profoundly hallowed and mysterious places, rather than the quietly enjoyable places I find them to be now; and, prosaically, jet lag had made me hypersensitive. I put the verse in the family newspaper because I liked it, and thought that others might too, but I didn't want to submit it to any magazine because of its personal nature and solemn subject.
Anyway, one reader wrote to tell me that I should acknowledge that I was ripping off ("trying to emulate") Gray's "Elegy," which hurt very much at the time, though I think he didn't mean it to have that effect. To him it seemed that I was trying to attain Gray's level, which would have been absurd, whereas I really only wanted to record my mood and the scene. And, to be completely honest, I felt insulted by the implication that I would be so unintelligent as to try to deceive well-read people by plagiarizing a well-known poem like Gray's "Elegy." 'T'any rate, this jumble quite proved the point that if one feels deeply about a piece of art one should keep it for one's self. It's one of my two favourite poems and it has taken a while not to feel that it is tarnished.
Theoretically I much prefer the form of the novel, because it isn't so wishy-washy, abstract, and sentimental. At the same time I must admit that it is as common in prose as in poetry to fudge emotional experiences that one has never had, but that one enjoys in the same way as I don't much mind reading about a gruelling Arctic expedition in mid-summer. Anyway, I could go on and on about this subject, but I won't. The point is that I'd rather write novels, but I am convinced, also by experience, that I won't be in the position to write a good novel for decades, due to my immaturity of character and of intellect.
On Saturday I went to guard Uncle Pu's and Aunt K.'s house in the countryside. I was on my own after the first day and a half because my co-guard fell ill and went to see a doctor and recuperate back in Berlin. So, for three days and two nights I tended the house, and went outside only to fetch the mail, and to dig out chickweed in the strawberry plot (an oddly satisfying experience). I read Die Zeit -- but not front to back, through all the sections, minus the advertisements, as on previous occasions. My feud with the writing style and the mentality of the contributors (self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and not very engaged with the subject) persists; I was wickedly gratified to find an error in one of the many English phrases that were dropped; but the interviews with Helmut Schmidt in the ZeitMagazin were refreshing as usual, and this week's magazine was altogether unusually entertaining. And I liked Katja Nicodemus, the film critic's, interview with director Sidney Lumet. Striking the right tone in an interview is, as I've found in my extensive newspaper reading, highly difficult. Painfully inconsequential accounts of the interviewee's attire, prying personal interrogations, snide denigration or overt hostility, silly adulation, brain-deadeningly unoriginal questions -- these are problems that plague the genre.
As far as interviews go, by the way, the New Yorker is pleasingly consistent; even the recent article about George Clooney (whose appeal I have never fully understood) was serious, and I liked reading it, though it only confirmed my opinion that the actor is agreeable but bland. Somewhat à propos, I feel like relieving my mind about the Washington Post feature article, "Pearls Before Breakfast," that just won a Pulitzer. It deserves the prize for the nice premise (famous violinist dresses in street clothes and plays during rush hour at subway station in Washington, D.C.; how do people react?) and for the thorough work and enthusiasm that went into it; but not for the philosophical and musical sciolism,* or the style, which lapsed here and there into abject gushing.
But, to return to my week of rustication, I also played the piano and violin (Pudel's, which he generously permitted me to play) with much greater freedom than I feel when anyone is within earshot, so that it sounded quite good. And I read the first essay in Samuel Johnson's Rambler, as well as the biographical foreword; the first chapters of Middlemarch as well as a foreword by Gordon S. Haight; the beginning of an unsympathetic essay on Edmund Spenser; and the first chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop. My appreciation of Charles Dickens is unfortunately still greater objectively than subjectively (though I did greatly enjoy Nicholas Nickleby as far as I read it), because the way he keeps nudging the reader, and his characterizations of heroes and heroines, invariably "gets my goat."
Even Middlemarch irritated me, because I don't like the Victorian strain of idealization (verging on kitsch) and religiousness in it. For example:
Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray under the rush of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own.Shakespeare himself, I admit, elevated his heroes and heroines into virtuous and wholly unreal abstractions; George Eliot, however, could have brought the modern tradition of differentiated characterization of primary characters to a fine peak, if she had not been defeated by her yearning to conform to the sentimental moralizing strain of her times. In any case, I had worried that I wouldn't bring any new insights to the reading this time (I last read it properly at least three years ago). On the contrary; it turns out that I used to ignore the gentle irony and observations, and the secondary characters like Mr. Brooke and Mrs. Cadwallader, so there is a whole, broad layer to the book that I now discern and value much more.
* sciolism: superficial pretense to knowledge
(I've had to look up the word a couple of times, hence this definition, paraphrased from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
