This day began with a communal breakfast. Soon after Mama announced it I arose and went expectantly to the kitchen, only to find that though the plateware had been ceremoniously set the edibles consisted only of one measly basket of buns, a jam jar, the butter dish that is always on the table anyway, a little round of camembert cheese and gouda slices. Measly, I say! There was admittedly also hot milk, with which Papa kindly prepared a café au lait for me. Anyway, I registered my protest, then dismissed the matter. In the shelf all the ingredients for "Haferflocken mit Kakao" (oats with milk, cocoa powder and sugar, which is an unrefined but tasty combination) were there, so I made that instead. Gi. is in Münchehofe again and T. was still asleep, but the rest of us, including our uncle N. who is visiting over Christmas, were all present.
Then N., Ge., J., and I went off for a walk to the nearest park. Even though my legs were bare — I've never liked following the conventional wisdom regarding weather-appropriate clothing because it's unimaginative, restrictive, and often exaggerated, besides which I can't be bothered — it wasn't too cold. Later in the day the thermometer outside the window indicated a temperature of ca. 3 degrees, which is a big improvement over the lows of around -10 in the past week. The frozen snow was murderous, though, and the fact that none of us slipped on it is a minor miracle.
After that I had an internet session. The New York Times website has a slideshow of photos from the past year. It started out with pictures of Barack Obama's inauguration but by the time I'd finished it I was totally depressed. Fortunately Gawker also has a post, "Our Favorite Things About 2009: These People Are Gone," which encapsulates the members of the Bush Administration and then reminds us that no matter what else happens, (God willing) we no longer need to know, remember, or care that these people exist!
***
Throughout the early afternoon I decompressed with a very long piano session, which I only interrupted for dinner (more on that later). It reached from Bach (from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II; the Goldberg Variations; and all of the Concerto in d minor) and Händel (the suite which ends in the "Harmonious Blacksmith" variations) through Beethoven and Schubert (from the sonatas) as well as Chopin (waltzes, a polonaise, and a mazurka) to Enrique Granados (Spanish Dances Nos. 4 through 6) and Tchaikovsky ( from the Seasons).
The Baroque music went well, but playing it from non-urtext editions is extremely annoying because editors often stick in their phrasing, so that I have to make the mental effort of not only inventing my own phrasing but also of consciously not using the editor's phrasing, because the editor's phrasing more often than not totally obfuscates the composer's original intentions by creating a neoromantic sound soup. I hadn't played Chopin for weeks or months, but it went well. It's still difficult to relax and play it fluidly and lightly because constantly hitting the wrong notes and overusing the pedal makes me very tense (which is conversely sort of useful with grumpy pieces like Beethoven's and Bach's). As for the nocturnes, I did play the beginning of Op. 27 No. 2; this is the only one I can stand to hear and play often, since it's pretty much the only one that isn't a supine, substance-free mood piece. Fairly or not, I especially detest the canned drama of Op. 20 in c sharp minor, a plague which The Pianist (the film with Adrien Brody) apparently unleashed on YouTube.
On the whole I'm pleased with the way I've been playing for the past week or so; it has been easier to follow the thread of the compositional narrative, convey the mood, and capture the composer's idiosyncracies well enough that a listener could hopefully tell quickly which is which. Getting an objective distance from the music by focusing on other things for the past weeks/months has helped me a lot because it gives me time to recognize thoughtless bad habits, to think of better ways to interpret it, and altogether to avert the contempt bred by familiarity. I've also been in a grumpy and unhappy and cynical mood lately — partly due to the worry about finding a job (I think about my dwindling bank account several times a day), partly due to feeling useless and beginning to wonder if I am suited to any work at all, and partly due to the fact that it's winter. This, while not so great for my feelings, is musical gold. (Learning to deal with the mood also builds character, but that's so obvious it really requires no pointing out.)
***
Dinner consisted of a tradition known in our household as the "Arabic plate." There was a basket of Turkish flatbread ("Milchfladenbrot," to be precise), a hot bowl each of couscous, basmati rice, and bulgur wheat, and then two large plates whereupon were heaped sundried tomatoes kept in oil, black olives, pickled rolls of grape leaf containing bulgur, and a dozen or so dips from the Turkish supermarket down the street. Besides the obvious tzatziki and baba ghanoush, there were compounds of goaty or sheepy cheese, ground chili peppers, chickpeas or whatever, etc., which were new to all of us.
Since then we've sung Christmas carols in the corner room, English and German and French, though once again I was a frog and left the proceedings early for the sake of returning to my beloved internet (N.B.: not a replacement, merely an extension, of my family (c:< ). Now that I have returned to the beloved internet for a while now, I really want to watch television. Lately there have been tons of documentaries in the programme, intelligent and superbly made ones (especially on the channels Arte and 3Sat) which are not all devoted to the memory of Hitler or to conspiracy theories about the Mayan calendar or to history so simplified and inaccurate that I feel like a piece of my brain is missing after watching it. [N.B.: Re.: historical "reenactments" in documentaries, they are an innovation so rubbishy that if I were given the choice to go back in time and change something, preventing them from ever existing would be my first priority, were it not that countless extremely lousy actors are employed because of them.] Anyway, I haven't seen a documentary since the day before yesterday and am currently in withdrawal.
***
At any rate it's Christmas tomorrow! It will be very unmaterialistic (N. was joking about each of us receiving a single sugar pearl as a present, but I fear that tomorrow morning he will find that it was no joking matter )c: ) as customary — I weighed buying presents this year and even thought out what to get everyone, but after imagining my self asking Papa and Mama for money in a couple months when my bank account runs out before I have a job because I spent too much too quickly, I decided against it, which was depressing until I thought that at least this teaches me the value of being able to give nice presents (though then I realized that my siblings would probably be happier with nice presents than with the knowledge that their deprivation has led to their sister's spiritual enlightenment) — but there will be loads of chocolate and other delicious things to compensate. (c: Besides, a primary function of religion is to offer stern "consolations" for the difficulties in life!
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Winter Is Icumen In
It has been snowing modestly and in tiny flakes for the past three or four days. One day it fell glittering in the glow of the street lamps like flecks of gold dust settling in a stream; on another it was like pieces of ash driving through the air above and around a bonfire; and today it is like the minuscule white flies or gnats hovering and swooping over the deeper grass in summer. The quantity of snow covering the ground is not so impressive, but ragged lines of it are cleaving to the tree branches outside the apartment windows, the rooftops are dusted, cars powdered, and the grass on the street median only visible in dark patches through the white.
If I overcome my laziness I'll crack a volume of Henry Thoreau's essays and reread "A Winter Walk" (?), because it describes the snowy landscape extremely well. Living beside a thoroughfare in the city the descriptions of hallowed silence might not ring a bell as much (besides which I haven't been outside the apartment in five or so days), but as the platonic ideal even those have a certain relevance.
If I overcome my laziness I'll crack a volume of Henry Thoreau's essays and reread "A Winter Walk" (?), because it describes the snowy landscape extremely well. Living beside a thoroughfare in the city the descriptions of hallowed silence might not ring a bell as much (besides which I haven't been outside the apartment in five or so days), but as the platonic ideal even those have a certain relevance.
Monday, December 14, 2009
A Spot of Tipple
Having nothing much to write about, I want to share two drink recipes that have been keeping me contented during the past weeks. [Warning: The quantities are an approximation.]
***
The first is a refreshing and summery antidote to the winter, and very much like the punch which we traditionally prepare for New Year's:
1 canned peach half
syrup of canned peach
mandarin orange (optional)
white wine
sparkling mineral water
Cut the peach half into neat little wedges and put those into a wineglass. Pour enough syrup over the fruit to cover it generously; plunk in about three of the mandarin orange's segments, cut in little wedges or just in half. Pour in white wine perhaps in a 1:2 or 1:1 ratio to the syrup. Then add enough mineral water to bring out the flavour of the peach again (the alcohol tends to blot it out) but not so much that the drink tastes watery. A mint leaf would probably be a pretty garnish, but I haven't tried it and couldn't say if the flavours fit.
Often the pieces of fruit refuse to slide out of the glass on their own, so we use a fondue or dessert fork to fish them out.
*
The second recipe is warm and more wintery. Given the paucity of sugar and absence of cream, it is less flavourful and more healthy than Irish cream, and besides it's pretty much ordinary coffee with a splash of whisky, so I have no doubt that connaisseurs of alcohol or coffee or both would scorn it. But I make it often.
coffee, previously made
1 tsp. sugar
hot water
milk
dash of whisky
Put the sugar into the bottom of the mug, and pour two fingers of coffee onto it. Pour in hot water almost to the top of the mug or until the coffee is a little weaker than you would customarily drink it; then add milk until the coffee is as dark or light as you wish. Finally put in the whisky. When I make the coffee with Glenfiddich it's a nobler drink, but the plonk which we also possess under the name of whisky doesn't clash with the coffee as much flavour-wise and makes the drink more comfortably boozy.
***
And here is a New York Times slideshow with links to *real* winter drink recipes. The most feasible are probably the eggnog (as long as you try the classic recipe, and not the modern ones for people with a venturesome spirit and far too much time on their hands) and the apple cider toddy.
On the Guardian website I also liked this lengthy debate on the merits of mulled wine/Glögg/Glühwein. Sometimes I do find Glühwein cloying and rather medieval due to the strong spices, but am not violently opposed to it.
***
The first is a refreshing and summery antidote to the winter, and very much like the punch which we traditionally prepare for New Year's:
1 canned peach half
syrup of canned peach
mandarin orange (optional)
white wine
sparkling mineral water
Cut the peach half into neat little wedges and put those into a wineglass. Pour enough syrup over the fruit to cover it generously; plunk in about three of the mandarin orange's segments, cut in little wedges or just in half. Pour in white wine perhaps in a 1:2 or 1:1 ratio to the syrup. Then add enough mineral water to bring out the flavour of the peach again (the alcohol tends to blot it out) but not so much that the drink tastes watery. A mint leaf would probably be a pretty garnish, but I haven't tried it and couldn't say if the flavours fit.
Often the pieces of fruit refuse to slide out of the glass on their own, so we use a fondue or dessert fork to fish them out.
*
The second recipe is warm and more wintery. Given the paucity of sugar and absence of cream, it is less flavourful and more healthy than Irish cream, and besides it's pretty much ordinary coffee with a splash of whisky, so I have no doubt that connaisseurs of alcohol or coffee or both would scorn it. But I make it often.
coffee, previously made
1 tsp. sugar
hot water
milk
dash of whisky
Put the sugar into the bottom of the mug, and pour two fingers of coffee onto it. Pour in hot water almost to the top of the mug or until the coffee is a little weaker than you would customarily drink it; then add milk until the coffee is as dark or light as you wish. Finally put in the whisky. When I make the coffee with Glenfiddich it's a nobler drink, but the plonk which we also possess under the name of whisky doesn't clash with the coffee as much flavour-wise and makes the drink more comfortably boozy.
***
And here is a New York Times slideshow with links to *real* winter drink recipes. The most feasible are probably the eggnog (as long as you try the classic recipe, and not the modern ones for people with a venturesome spirit and far too much time on their hands) and the apple cider toddy.
On the Guardian website I also liked this lengthy debate on the merits of mulled wine/Glögg/Glühwein. Sometimes I do find Glühwein cloying and rather medieval due to the strong spices, but am not violently opposed to it.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
An Olive Branch in Oslo
Through sheer good luck (and lack of something better to do than turn on the "idiot box") I caught the tail end of Barack Obama's speech in receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. The following is my impressionistic, which is to say probably inaccurate, summing up of the event:
To deal with the inessentials first, the setting of the Oslo City Hall was bright and spacious, rather like that of a federal legislative assembly. In the stage area the floral arrangements were in my opinion underwhelming, especially the wrinkly anthuriums (or similar flowers; at any rate they're the ubiquitous spade-shaped specimens of living plastic for which the crass but useful term "butt-ugly" might have been invented) in an unappealing shade of green, set in cushions of an apricot-tinged blossom.
The sea of people in their chairs was looking bored/antagonistic — though Michelle Obama was attentive as in duty bound though probably suffering from jet lag and evidently at pains to keep her eyes propped open, and Will Smith with family was relatively alive — as was warranted by the length of the ceremony. I remember that the year where the Muhammad Yunus won, a cheerful Bangladeshi dance troupe performed, and the audience could not have possibly looked more humourless, inanimate, and pasty-faced; this year it seemed marginally better. As is usual with televised audiences, the camera zoomed in on faces with desperate attempts at topicality (a fellow in a white kippah was a frequent victim, and when China and the Cultural Revolution were mentioned, possibly Chinese people were singled out, whereupon one of them looked puzzled) and the owners of those faces strove to shutter them as well as they could. Four persons presumably all of the Norwegian royal family were stranded front and centre in an isolated row of chairs which made them very conspicuous, but they bore it stoically and one white-clad lady in an admirable cloche hat and immaculate blonde coiffure even fished up a smile from time to time. Another member of that row was a gentleman with a finely trimmed beard framing his visage, which fascinated me through its paradoxical expression of uncommunicative mental alertness. At the end Lang Lang (in a white coat, suggestive of a wedding cake and adorned with doves at the sleeves) performed the Liebestraum (No. 3?) by Liszt with much enthusiasm.
As for the speech, it was a characteristically Obamian, fluent and uncomplicated mixture of refreshing common sense, rhetorical flourishes, (since it was directed at an international audience) first-year world history lesson, and sincerity. Obama referred to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. He argued that peace cannot be just or lasting if it is only the absence of conflict and not also the prevalence of human rights; he name-checked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which impressed me because it is likely either gibberish or anathema to the majority of Americans, but which makes sense given his field of legal expertise; besides he argued that human rights are not a western construct but truly universal (which was of course music to this ex-Amnesty International-er's ears). He emphasized that mass abuses of power cannot be ignored, and that if the international community were willing to stand as a united front and be willing to enforce heavy sanctions, etc., then hopefully one wouldn't be faced with the dilemma of military action vs. passive complicity in crime. But condemnation of such abuses will not achieve anything on its own; one must still be ready to engage in dialogue, and to offer the responsible government a friendlier avenue of policy. Then he argued forcefully in favour of pursuing ideals that seem unreachable, even if they are in fact not fully reachable, rather than settling for an unsatisfactory status quo in the name of "realism." To illustrate this argument he again mentioned Gandhi and King, whose proposals may not always have been 100% practical but whose guiding principles are extremely valuable.
So far so good. What was really problematic was his defense of the war in Afghanistan, though he had the decency to look unhappy about it. He tied it back directly to September 11th, apparently forgetting that 15(?) of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, that the Afghan population had nothing at all to do with the matter (I'm inclined to believe that the attacks were really the initiative of those who carried it out and not to be tied back in any except a tenuous way to the former mujahideen in Afghanistan), and so on and so forth. I shouldn't become too self-righteous about it, because I haven't opposed the war in Afghanistan much. But if one defends that war one has to be aware that one is defending the deaths of entire innocent families and even, if some reports are accurate, of entire innocent villages through aerial raids — this does mean people of all ages being burned alive and torn to pieces and disabled. It means defending the deaths of hundreds of American, British, Canadian, and other soldiers, at times through "friendly fire." It also means defending the destruction of opium poppy fields which, however undesirable the health effects on the consumers and however undesirable the funnelling of money for weapons to violent parties may be, deprives terribly poor people of their income. It also means defending an egregious breach of a country's sovereignty (thereby setting a bad precedent, one might add), and the installation of a corrupt president who apparently has no means to ensure any modicum of security, prosperity, or civil liberties outside the confines of the capital city. It also means defending what I think is a totally inept excuse for rebuilding a country that was so miserably indigent anyway that it should have been impossible not to significantly improve the infrastructure (education, health care, electricity, etc.) through even a modest injection of foreign aid.
But, to return to Obama's speech, what especially got my goat is when he talked about achieving peace through war, or displayed glimpses of Shrub-like smugness; one of my alternate-universe nightmares is of Bush and Blair winning the Nobel Peace Prize for the invasion of Iraq — for which they were genuinely nominated back in the day by persons evidently underequipped with brains — and at times in the speech their spirit peeked forth. I also didn't think the speech was an appropriate platform to nag at the designated villains of Iran, North Korea, and Burma again; of course their governments are not beacons of civil liberties, but mentioning them would only not have been overly political if he had criticized American allies (Belarus, for instance) or examined the proverbial beam in his(/the American government's) own eye as well. For instance when he said that the US had never waged war against a democracy, it may be literally true, but the CIA-supported coup against Salvador Allende immediately (and the one against Mohammad Mossadegh, later) leapt to mind. Altogether it will require a whole lot more time, incense, atonement, and holy water before the demon of the Bush Administration is exorcised once and for all.
Besides I think that an enormous obstacle facing human rights today is that the European Union and the US discarded them so easily once a pretext for doing so arose with Sept. 11th, despite the fact that we are far richer, more stable, and better furnished with (e.g. law enforcement) resources than most or all of the countries whose governments we consider morally depraved. What I thought was good about the Clinton Administration was that it proved through its actions that financial growth, international political might and humanitarian ideals were not incompatible; besides, at least as far as good intentions went, it was very serious about genocide and other mass human rights abuses. (On the other hand I never liked Madeleine Albright's — and apparently Hillary Clinton's — dogmatic conflation of her perception of America's interests as well as America's incumbent government's philosophy, with the overarching moral imperative in foreign policy.) In a nutshell, I wish that Obama had said something about the importance of proving the practicability of one's precepts and setting a good example.
To deal with the inessentials first, the setting of the Oslo City Hall was bright and spacious, rather like that of a federal legislative assembly. In the stage area the floral arrangements were in my opinion underwhelming, especially the wrinkly anthuriums (or similar flowers; at any rate they're the ubiquitous spade-shaped specimens of living plastic for which the crass but useful term "butt-ugly" might have been invented) in an unappealing shade of green, set in cushions of an apricot-tinged blossom.
The sea of people in their chairs was looking bored/antagonistic — though Michelle Obama was attentive as in duty bound though probably suffering from jet lag and evidently at pains to keep her eyes propped open, and Will Smith with family was relatively alive — as was warranted by the length of the ceremony. I remember that the year where the Muhammad Yunus won, a cheerful Bangladeshi dance troupe performed, and the audience could not have possibly looked more humourless, inanimate, and pasty-faced; this year it seemed marginally better. As is usual with televised audiences, the camera zoomed in on faces with desperate attempts at topicality (a fellow in a white kippah was a frequent victim, and when China and the Cultural Revolution were mentioned, possibly Chinese people were singled out, whereupon one of them looked puzzled) and the owners of those faces strove to shutter them as well as they could. Four persons presumably all of the Norwegian royal family were stranded front and centre in an isolated row of chairs which made them very conspicuous, but they bore it stoically and one white-clad lady in an admirable cloche hat and immaculate blonde coiffure even fished up a smile from time to time. Another member of that row was a gentleman with a finely trimmed beard framing his visage, which fascinated me through its paradoxical expression of uncommunicative mental alertness. At the end Lang Lang (in a white coat, suggestive of a wedding cake and adorned with doves at the sleeves) performed the Liebestraum (No. 3?) by Liszt with much enthusiasm.
As for the speech, it was a characteristically Obamian, fluent and uncomplicated mixture of refreshing common sense, rhetorical flourishes, (since it was directed at an international audience) first-year world history lesson, and sincerity. Obama referred to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. He argued that peace cannot be just or lasting if it is only the absence of conflict and not also the prevalence of human rights; he name-checked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which impressed me because it is likely either gibberish or anathema to the majority of Americans, but which makes sense given his field of legal expertise; besides he argued that human rights are not a western construct but truly universal (which was of course music to this ex-Amnesty International-er's ears). He emphasized that mass abuses of power cannot be ignored, and that if the international community were willing to stand as a united front and be willing to enforce heavy sanctions, etc., then hopefully one wouldn't be faced with the dilemma of military action vs. passive complicity in crime. But condemnation of such abuses will not achieve anything on its own; one must still be ready to engage in dialogue, and to offer the responsible government a friendlier avenue of policy. Then he argued forcefully in favour of pursuing ideals that seem unreachable, even if they are in fact not fully reachable, rather than settling for an unsatisfactory status quo in the name of "realism." To illustrate this argument he again mentioned Gandhi and King, whose proposals may not always have been 100% practical but whose guiding principles are extremely valuable.
So far so good. What was really problematic was his defense of the war in Afghanistan, though he had the decency to look unhappy about it. He tied it back directly to September 11th, apparently forgetting that 15(?) of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, that the Afghan population had nothing at all to do with the matter (I'm inclined to believe that the attacks were really the initiative of those who carried it out and not to be tied back in any except a tenuous way to the former mujahideen in Afghanistan), and so on and so forth. I shouldn't become too self-righteous about it, because I haven't opposed the war in Afghanistan much. But if one defends that war one has to be aware that one is defending the deaths of entire innocent families and even, if some reports are accurate, of entire innocent villages through aerial raids — this does mean people of all ages being burned alive and torn to pieces and disabled. It means defending the deaths of hundreds of American, British, Canadian, and other soldiers, at times through "friendly fire." It also means defending the destruction of opium poppy fields which, however undesirable the health effects on the consumers and however undesirable the funnelling of money for weapons to violent parties may be, deprives terribly poor people of their income. It also means defending an egregious breach of a country's sovereignty (thereby setting a bad precedent, one might add), and the installation of a corrupt president who apparently has no means to ensure any modicum of security, prosperity, or civil liberties outside the confines of the capital city. It also means defending what I think is a totally inept excuse for rebuilding a country that was so miserably indigent anyway that it should have been impossible not to significantly improve the infrastructure (education, health care, electricity, etc.) through even a modest injection of foreign aid.
But, to return to Obama's speech, what especially got my goat is when he talked about achieving peace through war, or displayed glimpses of Shrub-like smugness; one of my alternate-universe nightmares is of Bush and Blair winning the Nobel Peace Prize for the invasion of Iraq — for which they were genuinely nominated back in the day by persons evidently underequipped with brains — and at times in the speech their spirit peeked forth. I also didn't think the speech was an appropriate platform to nag at the designated villains of Iran, North Korea, and Burma again; of course their governments are not beacons of civil liberties, but mentioning them would only not have been overly political if he had criticized American allies (Belarus, for instance) or examined the proverbial beam in his(/the American government's) own eye as well. For instance when he said that the US had never waged war against a democracy, it may be literally true, but the CIA-supported coup against Salvador Allende immediately (and the one against Mohammad Mossadegh, later) leapt to mind. Altogether it will require a whole lot more time, incense, atonement, and holy water before the demon of the Bush Administration is exorcised once and for all.
Besides I think that an enormous obstacle facing human rights today is that the European Union and the US discarded them so easily once a pretext for doing so arose with Sept. 11th, despite the fact that we are far richer, more stable, and better furnished with (e.g. law enforcement) resources than most or all of the countries whose governments we consider morally depraved. What I thought was good about the Clinton Administration was that it proved through its actions that financial growth, international political might and humanitarian ideals were not incompatible; besides, at least as far as good intentions went, it was very serious about genocide and other mass human rights abuses. (On the other hand I never liked Madeleine Albright's — and apparently Hillary Clinton's — dogmatic conflation of her perception of America's interests as well as America's incumbent government's philosophy, with the overarching moral imperative in foreign policy.) In a nutshell, I wish that Obama had said something about the importance of proving the practicability of one's precepts and setting a good example.
Friday, December 04, 2009
A White Night and the West Wind
I've been up since yesterday, and have watched TV (news, Tatort, CSI and Bones), practiced the piano (bits of Bach's Partita No. 4 and of the Moonlight Sonata), drafted an email to Papa (who is currently abroad) which I ended up not sending after all, caught up on the Guardian and New York Times and Globe and Mail as well as assorted blogs (Gawker, Jezebel, Chocolate&Zucchini, Je Mange La Ville, The Sartorialist, and A Don's Life), read a late 19th-century novel (The Award of Justice, set in a mining town at the Rocky Mountains, by A. Maynard Barbour) on Project Gutenberg, and finally worked again on a Lighthouse blog post about one of Shelley's poems. Lastly I took a shower which put a period to my previous piglet-like state of happy dirtiness. (c:
*
Since then Mama's friend M. has come for a visit and the two of them are chatting away in the corner room. In honour of the occasion Mama prepared an elaborate breakfast from which I have already profited. It specifically consists of croissants, buns, brie and camembert (or two bries, or two camemberts, for all I know), cucumber slices and tomato wedges, gouda, ham-like meat, jams, honey, eggs boiled in the shell, coffee, and tea as well as a munificent platter of Christmas delicacies: Spekulatius, Pfeffernüsse, Printen, Dominosteine, Marzipankartoffeln, and gold coins which hopefully contain chocolate and not the intriguing brown toffee-ish substance which is its occasional alternative. Where the platter is concerned I have only had a Marzipankartoffel and a fragment of Spekulatius for fear of depriving my school- and university-beleaguered siblings; aside from the ethics of the matter, and the natural impulses of sisterly sympathy, it isn't wise to make them cranky.
*
The Shelley post has sucked up hours and hours in work, also because I went in knowing little about the poet aside from a general impression gathered from his most famous poems, and therefore found out a lot of interesting and necessary pieces of information and ideas only during the process of writing the blog post. Though I was repeatedly tempted to say that it's done and just post it, I didn't until just now because of the niggling feeling that it's only a tiny bit short of complete.
Now and then I have wondered whether to "illustrate" one of the Lighthouse posts with music; in this case it took a while to decide not to embed a YouTube video of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor. The thing is that the concerto really feels suited to the poem; it is rebellious and unconventional but also lyrical and mostly optimistic, it reminds me (as I wrote in a previous blog post) of a tempest and therefore of wind, it has impassioned passages interspersed with tranquil lulls, and it likewise ends on a peculiarly ambiguous (fulfilling/unfulfilling) note. As for the time frame, Mozart composed the concerto in 1785 whereas "Ode to the West Wind" was written in 1819 and published in 1820.
Another artistic work that came to mind in connection with the poem is a Shakespearean sonnet. I decided to keep that out of the blog post, too, but initially I wrote:
As it turns out the one significant cultural cross-reference I kept in the post was a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, as a literal illustration. I am not a great fan of that artist and this particular painting is perilously close to kitsch. (I also suspect that whoever uploaded this image to Wikipedia photoshopped it to heighten that unfortunate effect, but at least the details are easier to make out here especially given the reduced picture size than in the other, nobler and darker image.) On the other hand it comes from the same period and atmospherically depicts an apposite scene.
*
In any case I seem to have reached the point of sleep deprivation in which my brain is on autopilot, but I'll practice the piano. Then, as soon as someone besides Gi. is at home, common sense will presumably propel me to the bank to take care of an urgent point of business. (A propos of the latter, and because a picture is worth a thousand words: )c:<<< )
*
Since then Mama's friend M. has come for a visit and the two of them are chatting away in the corner room. In honour of the occasion Mama prepared an elaborate breakfast from which I have already profited. It specifically consists of croissants, buns, brie and camembert (or two bries, or two camemberts, for all I know), cucumber slices and tomato wedges, gouda, ham-like meat, jams, honey, eggs boiled in the shell, coffee, and tea as well as a munificent platter of Christmas delicacies: Spekulatius, Pfeffernüsse, Printen, Dominosteine, Marzipankartoffeln, and gold coins which hopefully contain chocolate and not the intriguing brown toffee-ish substance which is its occasional alternative. Where the platter is concerned I have only had a Marzipankartoffel and a fragment of Spekulatius for fear of depriving my school- and university-beleaguered siblings; aside from the ethics of the matter, and the natural impulses of sisterly sympathy, it isn't wise to make them cranky.
*
The Shelley post has sucked up hours and hours in work, also because I went in knowing little about the poet aside from a general impression gathered from his most famous poems, and therefore found out a lot of interesting and necessary pieces of information and ideas only during the process of writing the blog post. Though I was repeatedly tempted to say that it's done and just post it, I didn't until just now because of the niggling feeling that it's only a tiny bit short of complete.
Now and then I have wondered whether to "illustrate" one of the Lighthouse posts with music; in this case it took a while to decide not to embed a YouTube video of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor. The thing is that the concerto really feels suited to the poem; it is rebellious and unconventional but also lyrical and mostly optimistic, it reminds me (as I wrote in a previous blog post) of a tempest and therefore of wind, it has impassioned passages interspersed with tranquil lulls, and it likewise ends on a peculiarly ambiguous (fulfilling/unfulfilling) note. As for the time frame, Mozart composed the concerto in 1785 whereas "Ode to the West Wind" was written in 1819 and published in 1820.
Another artistic work that came to mind in connection with the poem is a Shakespearean sonnet. I decided to keep that out of the blog post, too, but initially I wrote:
If Shelley had grown older, disillusioned, and resigned, or if he had lived in a different political climate and period, perhaps he might have written something closer to what feels to me like the "Ode"'s thematic twin but emotional antithesis: Shakespeare's sonnet LXXIII ("That time of year thou may'st in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," etc.
*
In any case I seem to have reached the point of sleep deprivation in which my brain is on autopilot, but I'll practice the piano. Then, as soon as someone besides Gi. is at home, common sense will presumably propel me to the bank to take care of an urgent point of business. (A propos of the latter, and because a picture is worth a thousand words: )c:<<< )
Monday, November 23, 2009
A Spectacular Interview Failure
My trip to the interview turned out to fail for a thoroughly stupid reason in an equally thoroughly unexpected way. The surprising thing is how many things could go wrong and didn't. I carefully figured out where the café is located, decided to walk there (which is a fairly heroic measure, but I didn't have much else to do and didn't want to use up two transit tickets) along a route that was familiar, left myself an hour and a half and decided to use public transit if I was running late, briskly completed the walk (though after the Brandenburger Tor I let myself stroll along at a relaxed pace) and found the café in at most 1 hour 10 minutes. This was ca. 20 minutes early so I sat outside and tried to read more of Humboldt's Ansichten der Natur, specifically a lecture on the characteristics of vegetation based on the latitudinal zone which described in the usual nice manner the formation of lichens on bare rock and the luxuriant growth of the tropical zones (he emphasizes that, though to Europeans of his day hot climates may be associated with the desert, the desert did not always exist in its present extent and in any case the equatorial jungles prove the impression wrong). But it was hard to concentrate.
At nine or ten minutes to 12:30 I entered the café and mentioned to one of the girls at the counter that I had come for the interview. The café owner (who, funnily enough, is (almost) in her 30s and wears her hair in a pixie cut just as I had guessed from her voice over the telephone) was still talking to someone, so the girl said I could sit in the corner nearby and then they would tell me when it's my turn. It was awkward because I was within close earshot of the other interviews, but I turned away and tried very hard not to listen but to read. It didn't entirely work, and I overheard for instance that several people were late, through which I had the impression that the whole interview schedule was dragging anyway. So there were three interviews, and since someone was sitting between us and the café was fairly noisy I was only aware of snatches of the last and was therefore unaware when it ended. At length, however, I did become aware, and asked the lady (who was sitting there a little forlornly) if someone else would still be having an interview before me.
At that moment the person who would be having the next interview arrived. The interviewer inquired how long I had been waiting, and I said "half an hour" (which was a mild understatement, even ignoring the time spent outside), and when she asked I explained about being told to wait, etc., careful not to blame anybody (which I genuinely didn't; the café really was busy and so on and so forth). Then came the shock when she, though expressing commiseration, cancelled my interview so that the schedule wouldn't be wrecked; she asked me to send an "Anschreiben" instead, but it sounded as if the ship had sailed anyway.
So I went outside, where it began to rain just like in a film, very much wanting to burst into an ear-shattering wail like a baby. Instead I took deep breaths to avoid such a drastic reaction and (walking along to the bus station at the Tor) felt sad. The only thought that cheered me up occasionally — besides the standard ones: it can be helpful to channel the disappointment into something else, another valuable (ha!) experience has been gathered, and in the grand scheme of things this may have been a fortunate mishap — was the horrid irony that the one time I plan things perfectly, come truly early, and altogether act in what seems to be the most exemplary manner, I encounter grievous injustice!
The thing with the "Anschreiben" is that the interviewer already has my c.v. as well as an informal cover letter in which I state what my intended career direction is and why I would like the job. Besides, aside from the problem of culinary inexperience, I would have to get the health pass at the last moment (which, as I once read — though perhaps it would be best to doublecheck that —, should be procured in the district of Berlin where the workplace is located), so my chances appear tiny. Thirdly the interviewer seemed harried and mentioned, if I understood the context correctly, that she had tonnes of applications. And frankly I'm grumpy about the whole affair. So I'd like to move on.
Fortunately Gi. and Ge. and J. have been full of sympathy. Gi. even asked if I wanted anything special from the grocery store, like ice cream or chocolate, and returned with a small feast of both before going off to babysit. It also makes me feel better to remember being called overqualified after the last interview and the way it still reassures me that I'm not useless, and to be conscious that for once I did pretty much everything right.
At nine or ten minutes to 12:30 I entered the café and mentioned to one of the girls at the counter that I had come for the interview. The café owner (who, funnily enough, is (almost) in her 30s and wears her hair in a pixie cut just as I had guessed from her voice over the telephone) was still talking to someone, so the girl said I could sit in the corner nearby and then they would tell me when it's my turn. It was awkward because I was within close earshot of the other interviews, but I turned away and tried very hard not to listen but to read. It didn't entirely work, and I overheard for instance that several people were late, through which I had the impression that the whole interview schedule was dragging anyway. So there were three interviews, and since someone was sitting between us and the café was fairly noisy I was only aware of snatches of the last and was therefore unaware when it ended. At length, however, I did become aware, and asked the lady (who was sitting there a little forlornly) if someone else would still be having an interview before me.
At that moment the person who would be having the next interview arrived. The interviewer inquired how long I had been waiting, and I said "half an hour" (which was a mild understatement, even ignoring the time spent outside), and when she asked I explained about being told to wait, etc., careful not to blame anybody (which I genuinely didn't; the café really was busy and so on and so forth). Then came the shock when she, though expressing commiseration, cancelled my interview so that the schedule wouldn't be wrecked; she asked me to send an "Anschreiben" instead, but it sounded as if the ship had sailed anyway.
So I went outside, where it began to rain just like in a film, very much wanting to burst into an ear-shattering wail like a baby. Instead I took deep breaths to avoid such a drastic reaction and (walking along to the bus station at the Tor) felt sad. The only thought that cheered me up occasionally — besides the standard ones: it can be helpful to channel the disappointment into something else, another valuable (ha!) experience has been gathered, and in the grand scheme of things this may have been a fortunate mishap — was the horrid irony that the one time I plan things perfectly, come truly early, and altogether act in what seems to be the most exemplary manner, I encounter grievous injustice!
The thing with the "Anschreiben" is that the interviewer already has my c.v. as well as an informal cover letter in which I state what my intended career direction is and why I would like the job. Besides, aside from the problem of culinary inexperience, I would have to get the health pass at the last moment (which, as I once read — though perhaps it would be best to doublecheck that —, should be procured in the district of Berlin where the workplace is located), so my chances appear tiny. Thirdly the interviewer seemed harried and mentioned, if I understood the context correctly, that she had tonnes of applications. And frankly I'm grumpy about the whole affair. So I'd like to move on.
Fortunately Gi. and Ge. and J. have been full of sympathy. Gi. even asked if I wanted anything special from the grocery store, like ice cream or chocolate, and returned with a small feast of both before going off to babysit. It also makes me feel better to remember being called overqualified after the last interview and the way it still reassures me that I'm not useless, and to be conscious that for once I did pretty much everything right.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
An Interview, Romance, Gourds, a Model, and Ravel
Tomorrow I will be going to an interview for a job at a café in Mitte, and I was very excited during the morning, only to lose some of the optimism as the day progressed and my cautious and wet-blankety side asserted itself. Before going to sleep I'll probably put everything in order for tomorrow, then shower and breakfast after waking up again; I'm still undecided whether to go to the interview per bicycle (J.'s, to be precise) or U-Bahn.
***
To be honest I'm becoming bored with the ways I like to waste time. For instance, 19th-century popular novels already grew stale half a year ago, which is unsurprising considering that I was immersed in them for about five years. Admittedly I still read them occasionally. Yesterday I started Susan Warner's Diana, expecting as usual to become (enjoyably) incandescent with indignant rage at her brand of happily obsolete New England Christianity and her preachy, arrogant, and dictatorial heroes. On the other hand I've already encountered a very amusing passage. After a meeting where the heroine, her mother, and a group of fellow parishioners meet the new vicar, the heroine's mother claims that the vicar is too "masterful." The heroine implicitly pish-poshes the charge. It seems Miss Warner temporarily forgot the fact that she literally named the man Mr. Masters.
As for Gawker and the sister site for women, Jezebel, I'm not as absorbed in either of the blogs as I used to be, perhaps in the case of the former because the prospect of moving to New York is more distant than ever and so I don't have an immediate motivation to stay as up-to-date and become as informed as possible.
***
Besides that I've been reading tonnes of harlequin novels since around June, but it turns out that I'm too much of a skeptic, can't find much in them after at the very most four readings (this coming from an inveterate re-reader), and become easily irritated at the deception, cowardice, and emotional coercion which all too often characterize the behaviour of the main characters, especially if the author never makes them realize the error of and change their ways.
Some of the books, while well-meant, are too embarrassing to read with full enjoyment, especially when they are written by British or American authors and depict foreign characters like sheiks and businessmen of the Italian, Spanish, or Greek persuasion. For the sheik books I have to metaphorically pinch my nose to get past the titles and premises, studiously ignore the obligatory mention of the word "harem" and the obligatory explanation that harems no longer exist, and then sigh patiently through a parade of stereotypes like camping in the desert, camels, veils, Arabian horses, souks and bargaining, peculiar "traditional" marriages, and the inevitable civilizing western influence exerted by the heroine. But the Italian, Spanish and Greek businessmen are often quite funny, as the author dutifully sprinkles their conversation with "Accidenti!", "Dio!", "gatita," "ochi," and "ne" as the situation requires to convey their nationality (for their Gallic counterparts "Zut!" generally suffices); and of course they are required to be as vaguely hypermasculine as possible.
But it's also hard for me to take the Italo-Graeco-Spanish books seriously since, given my limited circle of acquaintance, the first names that pop up when I think of "French man" or "Italian man" are "Sarkozy" and "Berlusconi" respectively, and of Napoleon complexes and bad government policy and (especially in the latter case) contempt for the law. After this point thoughts of romance are impossible. For "Greek man" I admittedly just think of a random burly person with a curly brown beard and hair, in his forties, who could be a Plataean soldier from the 5th century B.C., Macedonian shepherd, medieval fisherman or taxi driver. Which is admittedly also a stereotype, and not romantic either.
There are also the historical novels. Georgette Heyer is I think the most widely respected authoress in the Regency genre, but I find her books peculiarly cold and unsatisfying in their frivolity (I've had the same problem when reading P.G. Wodehouse) and a little too derivative of Jane Austen. Frankly there are lots of Regency novels that owe their debt to "A Lady" too obviously; I become disproportionately disgruntled when the only streets in Bath are Laura-Place, Camden-Place, and Milsom Street: not subtle hommage, just lazy research. But then there are writers who take the trouble to independently research the 18th century, presumably also in university; so I learn a bit of social history during the read, besides which a new perspective on the era is valuable (even though I grouchily believe that it's far too easy to be a feminist protagonist and a Friend of the Servants with the benefit of centuries of hindsight).
What's more amusing is (are?) the medieval and Scottish novels. Having read Chaucer, etc., I am perfectly well aware that the dialogue in the novels is totally inauthentic, even if the gentlemen in the kilts say "Aye" now and then and employ terribly cheesy metaphors. What was also fun to read was the medieval romance whose author was almost entirely concerned with touting the virtue of cleanliness in general and baths in particular. Said author is almost certainly a North American woman who considers "Thou shalt shower daily" as one of the Ten Commandments. But I can sympathize a little, because two years or so ago I started a story set in 15th-century France about a woman who wanders through the countryside in solitude, and my escapist mellow was thoroughly harshed when I realized how stinky she would presumably have been.
Lastly, very few romance novels are in the least convincing if one asks one's self whether the relationship as depicted in the novel could prove a solid foundation for 50, 30, or even 15 years of marriage. So I may suspend disbelief, and succeed to a certain degree — besides which I like picking out the stray germs of truth, psychoanalyzing the books in an amateur way, and dissecting the author's craftmanship and thought processes; besides it's depressing if I don't indulge any romantic illusions — but the fact remains that the sensational course of reading has run its course.
***
So I've grudgingly turned to the television, and while yesterday I ended up contentedly watching a children's animé film entitled Neko no ongaeshi in Japanese, Königreich der Katzen in German and The Cat Returns in English, today was devoted to High Culture. There was an excellent documentary, shown on the French-German culture channel Arte, about a cooperative in a village in Paraguay's southeast, where women earn a supplementary income by turning loofah gourds into sponges and — in an eco-friendly experiment — into wall panels and insulation. These cucumber-like fruits are harvested, hanging dark and green from the tanned, wilted vines, then soaked in water, and then peeled and emptied of their seeds, so that the porous flesh remains; then they are hung up to dry, tinted (at least I think it happens at this point) with natural dyes, lain on the sandy grass to dry again, and sent off to be sold. The film also had an interesting interlude in the slums of Asunción, from which a father and his son set out in a horse-drawn cart, rolling along on incongruous metal-hubbed, rubber tyres, along the muddy roads to the asphalted streets where the rich and middle classes live, and the man collects garbage for reuse. (A literal illustration of the saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure," though "treasure" is too strong a word.)
After that there was a concert with Georges Prêtre conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. First there was a symphony by Beethoven (or "Luigi," as Mama likes to flippantly refer to the Grand Teuton), which seemed generic and unimpressive, especially since Prêtre's light approach uncomfortably highlighted how slight its comparative musical merit really is. But Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2, was a fine showcase of his and the Philharmonic's skill. It might be mood music presumably intended to plunge its listeners into an abjectly stupid narcotized state, but it was played with disembodied grace, sensitivity, and an unexpected seriousness and complexity. Thanks to The Rest is Noise I was better able to pick up on the compositional structure and musical influences. But I didn't recognize any part of it from the concert we attended last November.
Then there were Debussy's Nocturnes, which did come across as effect-mongering sadly familiar from the soundtracks of Disney movies, but again it was excellently rendered. The "Sirens" was a bit of an oddity. In a laudable inspiration the camera direction was arranged so that we were treated to views of the gilded caryatids along the sides of the concert hall. These sculptures have, however, rather stolid faces and incipient double chins, and are not altogether what I'd picture under the word "siren." A woman's choir was assisting the orchestra by intermittently breaking into what was intended to be an eerie ethereal howl. But, though perhaps intentionally, their notes mostly sounded a trifle flat, and when at one point two especially resonant voices rang out together one of them was as flat as ever and the other was ostentatiously swelling at the right note just above that to show how it should be. The camera also narrowed into one singer's face who was presumably deemed especially picturesque, with blue eyes and golden hair; she appeared peeved by the attention. Altogether I think that the New Year's Concerts have ruined me for Viennese music, because now the mental images of kitschy dancing, wide-angle shots of palaces, camera lenses lingering on stray lemons in an orangerie, and choreography of all kinds, persist on intruding, so I become distracted and nitpickish and I only make silly surface observations about the music.
Then there was an interview with the model Iman, carried out painfully by a (starstruck?) CNN interviewer who was apparently incapable of responding naturally to her subject and instead asked questions and, at receiving the answers, acted out sympathy, shock, and amusement in a gruesomely unnatural and clumsy way. Iman was, by contrast, intelligent, a fluent conversationalist and possessed of a lovely speaking voice, and what she said was thoroughly interesting. A misguided article at the outset of her modelling career in New York claimed that she had been "discovered" by Peter Beard in a jungle, herding goats or something of the sort, and it was generally believed that she could speak little or no English. In fact her family had been well-to-do before they fled Somalia; she was a political science student at the University of Nairobi and knew five languages. Beard came across her in the city, and she agreed to be photographed for the sake of paying her tuition. I also liked that she emphasized in the interview that contrary to popular belief, refugees are often not parasites who like to exploit foreign governments, and that nobody in his right mind would voluntarily leave his home country in order to throw himself on the tender mercies of strangers in an unfamiliar nation.
Anyway, aside from that I practiced the piano a little — Scott Joplin, the fifth and sixth Spanish Dances of Enrique Granados, Bach's Concerto in d minor (just the keyboard part, obviously), and the first movement of a Mozart concerto in C major (ditto). Then Papa and I went through our duet repertory, even including movements from Beethoven's very difficult cello sonatas. And I started but lost a game of Age of Empires (II) on the computer. But now I intend to check my e-mail, prepare things for the next morning, and go to sleep.
[N.B.: Apologies for the length of this post. /c:]
***
To be honest I'm becoming bored with the ways I like to waste time. For instance, 19th-century popular novels already grew stale half a year ago, which is unsurprising considering that I was immersed in them for about five years. Admittedly I still read them occasionally. Yesterday I started Susan Warner's Diana, expecting as usual to become (enjoyably) incandescent with indignant rage at her brand of happily obsolete New England Christianity and her preachy, arrogant, and dictatorial heroes. On the other hand I've already encountered a very amusing passage. After a meeting where the heroine, her mother, and a group of fellow parishioners meet the new vicar, the heroine's mother claims that the vicar is too "masterful." The heroine implicitly pish-poshes the charge. It seems Miss Warner temporarily forgot the fact that she literally named the man Mr. Masters.
As for Gawker and the sister site for women, Jezebel, I'm not as absorbed in either of the blogs as I used to be, perhaps in the case of the former because the prospect of moving to New York is more distant than ever and so I don't have an immediate motivation to stay as up-to-date and become as informed as possible.
***
Besides that I've been reading tonnes of harlequin novels since around June, but it turns out that I'm too much of a skeptic, can't find much in them after at the very most four readings (this coming from an inveterate re-reader), and become easily irritated at the deception, cowardice, and emotional coercion which all too often characterize the behaviour of the main characters, especially if the author never makes them realize the error of and change their ways.
Some of the books, while well-meant, are too embarrassing to read with full enjoyment, especially when they are written by British or American authors and depict foreign characters like sheiks and businessmen of the Italian, Spanish, or Greek persuasion. For the sheik books I have to metaphorically pinch my nose to get past the titles and premises, studiously ignore the obligatory mention of the word "harem" and the obligatory explanation that harems no longer exist, and then sigh patiently through a parade of stereotypes like camping in the desert, camels, veils, Arabian horses, souks and bargaining, peculiar "traditional" marriages, and the inevitable civilizing western influence exerted by the heroine. But the Italian, Spanish and Greek businessmen are often quite funny, as the author dutifully sprinkles their conversation with "Accidenti!", "Dio!", "gatita," "ochi," and "ne" as the situation requires to convey their nationality (for their Gallic counterparts "Zut!" generally suffices); and of course they are required to be as vaguely hypermasculine as possible.
But it's also hard for me to take the Italo-Graeco-Spanish books seriously since, given my limited circle of acquaintance, the first names that pop up when I think of "French man" or "Italian man" are "Sarkozy" and "Berlusconi" respectively, and of Napoleon complexes and bad government policy and (especially in the latter case) contempt for the law. After this point thoughts of romance are impossible. For "Greek man" I admittedly just think of a random burly person with a curly brown beard and hair, in his forties, who could be a Plataean soldier from the 5th century B.C., Macedonian shepherd, medieval fisherman or taxi driver. Which is admittedly also a stereotype, and not romantic either.
There are also the historical novels. Georgette Heyer is I think the most widely respected authoress in the Regency genre, but I find her books peculiarly cold and unsatisfying in their frivolity (I've had the same problem when reading P.G. Wodehouse) and a little too derivative of Jane Austen. Frankly there are lots of Regency novels that owe their debt to "A Lady" too obviously; I become disproportionately disgruntled when the only streets in Bath are Laura-Place, Camden-Place, and Milsom Street: not subtle hommage, just lazy research. But then there are writers who take the trouble to independently research the 18th century, presumably also in university; so I learn a bit of social history during the read, besides which a new perspective on the era is valuable (even though I grouchily believe that it's far too easy to be a feminist protagonist and a Friend of the Servants with the benefit of centuries of hindsight).
What's more amusing is (are?) the medieval and Scottish novels. Having read Chaucer, etc., I am perfectly well aware that the dialogue in the novels is totally inauthentic, even if the gentlemen in the kilts say "Aye" now and then and employ terribly cheesy metaphors. What was also fun to read was the medieval romance whose author was almost entirely concerned with touting the virtue of cleanliness in general and baths in particular. Said author is almost certainly a North American woman who considers "Thou shalt shower daily" as one of the Ten Commandments. But I can sympathize a little, because two years or so ago I started a story set in 15th-century France about a woman who wanders through the countryside in solitude, and my escapist mellow was thoroughly harshed when I realized how stinky she would presumably have been.
Lastly, very few romance novels are in the least convincing if one asks one's self whether the relationship as depicted in the novel could prove a solid foundation for 50, 30, or even 15 years of marriage. So I may suspend disbelief, and succeed to a certain degree — besides which I like picking out the stray germs of truth, psychoanalyzing the books in an amateur way, and dissecting the author's craftmanship and thought processes; besides it's depressing if I don't indulge any romantic illusions — but the fact remains that the sensational course of reading has run its course.
***
So I've grudgingly turned to the television, and while yesterday I ended up contentedly watching a children's animé film entitled Neko no ongaeshi in Japanese, Königreich der Katzen in German and The Cat Returns in English, today was devoted to High Culture. There was an excellent documentary, shown on the French-German culture channel Arte, about a cooperative in a village in Paraguay's southeast, where women earn a supplementary income by turning loofah gourds into sponges and — in an eco-friendly experiment — into wall panels and insulation. These cucumber-like fruits are harvested, hanging dark and green from the tanned, wilted vines, then soaked in water, and then peeled and emptied of their seeds, so that the porous flesh remains; then they are hung up to dry, tinted (at least I think it happens at this point) with natural dyes, lain on the sandy grass to dry again, and sent off to be sold. The film also had an interesting interlude in the slums of Asunción, from which a father and his son set out in a horse-drawn cart, rolling along on incongruous metal-hubbed, rubber tyres, along the muddy roads to the asphalted streets where the rich and middle classes live, and the man collects garbage for reuse. (A literal illustration of the saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure," though "treasure" is too strong a word.)
After that there was a concert with Georges Prêtre conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. First there was a symphony by Beethoven (or "Luigi," as Mama likes to flippantly refer to the Grand Teuton), which seemed generic and unimpressive, especially since Prêtre's light approach uncomfortably highlighted how slight its comparative musical merit really is. But Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2, was a fine showcase of his and the Philharmonic's skill. It might be mood music presumably intended to plunge its listeners into an abjectly stupid narcotized state, but it was played with disembodied grace, sensitivity, and an unexpected seriousness and complexity. Thanks to The Rest is Noise I was better able to pick up on the compositional structure and musical influences. But I didn't recognize any part of it from the concert we attended last November.
Then there were Debussy's Nocturnes, which did come across as effect-mongering sadly familiar from the soundtracks of Disney movies, but again it was excellently rendered. The "Sirens" was a bit of an oddity. In a laudable inspiration the camera direction was arranged so that we were treated to views of the gilded caryatids along the sides of the concert hall. These sculptures have, however, rather stolid faces and incipient double chins, and are not altogether what I'd picture under the word "siren." A woman's choir was assisting the orchestra by intermittently breaking into what was intended to be an eerie ethereal howl. But, though perhaps intentionally, their notes mostly sounded a trifle flat, and when at one point two especially resonant voices rang out together one of them was as flat as ever and the other was ostentatiously swelling at the right note just above that to show how it should be. The camera also narrowed into one singer's face who was presumably deemed especially picturesque, with blue eyes and golden hair; she appeared peeved by the attention. Altogether I think that the New Year's Concerts have ruined me for Viennese music, because now the mental images of kitschy dancing, wide-angle shots of palaces, camera lenses lingering on stray lemons in an orangerie, and choreography of all kinds, persist on intruding, so I become distracted and nitpickish and I only make silly surface observations about the music.
Then there was an interview with the model Iman, carried out painfully by a (starstruck?) CNN interviewer who was apparently incapable of responding naturally to her subject and instead asked questions and, at receiving the answers, acted out sympathy, shock, and amusement in a gruesomely unnatural and clumsy way. Iman was, by contrast, intelligent, a fluent conversationalist and possessed of a lovely speaking voice, and what she said was thoroughly interesting. A misguided article at the outset of her modelling career in New York claimed that she had been "discovered" by Peter Beard in a jungle, herding goats or something of the sort, and it was generally believed that she could speak little or no English. In fact her family had been well-to-do before they fled Somalia; she was a political science student at the University of Nairobi and knew five languages. Beard came across her in the city, and she agreed to be photographed for the sake of paying her tuition. I also liked that she emphasized in the interview that contrary to popular belief, refugees are often not parasites who like to exploit foreign governments, and that nobody in his right mind would voluntarily leave his home country in order to throw himself on the tender mercies of strangers in an unfamiliar nation.
Anyway, aside from that I practiced the piano a little — Scott Joplin, the fifth and sixth Spanish Dances of Enrique Granados, Bach's Concerto in d minor (just the keyboard part, obviously), and the first movement of a Mozart concerto in C major (ditto). Then Papa and I went through our duet repertory, even including movements from Beethoven's very difficult cello sonatas. And I started but lost a game of Age of Empires (II) on the computer. But now I intend to check my e-mail, prepare things for the next morning, and go to sleep.
[N.B.: Apologies for the length of this post. /c:]
Monday, November 09, 2009
Sense and Sensibility, Part I
This was written when I should have been sleeping, which should explain any logical or other peculiarities. If corrections are necessary I'll probably make them, silently, later.
One of the stumbling-blocks in my research about Brittany and the French Revolution is that I have deemed it necessary to read the relevant works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but after repeatedly starting the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (catchy title, by the way) it's evident that I won't finish it anytime soon. It's a bit embarrassing because Rousseau's sentences are hardly labyrinthine or lapidary and their meaning is not so knotty, but still. So yesterday I decided to approach the matter differently and read the chapter on Rousseau in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. While Russell is not the most even-handed commentator, his skill at capturing the gist of things is undeniable and, due to the succinct, lucid, and entertaining manner in which he does so, I knew that I would probably understand and remember the key points of Rousseau's works and life best by reading him.
***
As it turns out, Russell's take on Rousseau is entertaining even by his standards, and I was both interested and laughing while reading it. First and foremost Russell emphatically states that the Swiss philosophe was by no means one of the great philosophers, and that his ideas must be examined rather for the sake of their influence in politics and culture than for their soundness and worth. (Which is pretty much what Papa unenthusiastically said when I asked him about Rousseau a week or two ago.) So the British philosopher despatches the subject by providing a scathing overview of Rousseau's life, character, Discours, and Confessions, clearly giving his irritation free rein, and by only providing a serious summary of The Social Contract.
A major contribution of Rousseau, particularly in the light of the Romantic movement, is his preoccupation with sensibility in the 18th-century sense and his very idealized views of man in relation to nature ("noble savage," etc.). Already in the previous chapter on Romanticism Russell gives the cult of sensibility short shrift, and points out its inherent egotism and hypocrisy. He drily defines "la sensibilité" as
***
Nowadays I think most of us know this concept of sensibility through Jane Austen. And since Marianne Dashwood is selfish, rude, and blind to the harm she does to herself and others during her pursuit of the fashionable ideas of natural and refined feeling, it is evident that Austen saw the same general flaws in the trend. But there are many other critics even among her contemporary colleagues. Despite her reputation as the author of Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe is one of them; in Mysteries of Udolpho Emily St. Aubert's gentle but preachy father warns her about the dangers of thoughtlessly indulging in feeling, however fine, and altogether her heroines are fairly quiet and restrained. I admittedly don't have much use for the cult of sensibility either, because it is (or was) so often artificial, unfairly demanding of the people who were forced to put up with the outpourings and histrionics of its devotees, and unhealthy. In my view noble feeling is much lovelier when it is unselfconscious and unadorned, and it enriches life especially when it is mostly kept sacrosanct and private. But perhaps that's a miserly way of proceeding.
***
But, to return to Rousseau, while summarizing the Discours Russell quotes a very funny passage (which I've given below in the original French) out of a letter which Voltaire sent to Rousseau after reading the work:
(In the History it is translated as, "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it." In the quotation above the last sentence goes on a while longer to say, approximately, "and I leave that natural [bearing?] to those who are worthier of it than you or I.")
One of the stumbling-blocks in my research about Brittany and the French Revolution is that I have deemed it necessary to read the relevant works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but after repeatedly starting the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (catchy title, by the way) it's evident that I won't finish it anytime soon. It's a bit embarrassing because Rousseau's sentences are hardly labyrinthine or lapidary and their meaning is not so knotty, but still. So yesterday I decided to approach the matter differently and read the chapter on Rousseau in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. While Russell is not the most even-handed commentator, his skill at capturing the gist of things is undeniable and, due to the succinct, lucid, and entertaining manner in which he does so, I knew that I would probably understand and remember the key points of Rousseau's works and life best by reading him.
***
As it turns out, Russell's take on Rousseau is entertaining even by his standards, and I was both interested and laughing while reading it. First and foremost Russell emphatically states that the Swiss philosophe was by no means one of the great philosophers, and that his ideas must be examined rather for the sake of their influence in politics and culture than for their soundness and worth. (Which is pretty much what Papa unenthusiastically said when I asked him about Rousseau a week or two ago.) So the British philosopher despatches the subject by providing a scathing overview of Rousseau's life, character, Discours, and Confessions, clearly giving his irritation free rein, and by only providing a serious summary of The Social Contract.
A major contribution of Rousseau, particularly in the light of the Romantic movement, is his preoccupation with sensibility in the 18th-century sense and his very idealized views of man in relation to nature ("noble savage," etc.). Already in the previous chapter on Romanticism Russell gives the cult of sensibility short shrift, and points out its inherent egotism and hypocrisy. He drily defines "la sensibilité" as
a proneness to emotion, and more particularly to the emotion of sympathy. To be thoroughly satisfactory, the emotion must be direct and violent and quite uninformed by thought. The man of sensibility would be moved to tears by the sight of a single destitute peasant family, but would be cold to well-thought-out schemes for ameliorating the lot of peasants as a class.His incredibly concise elucidations of Rousseau's life tend to illustrate the point. Whilst professing a great capacity to fine feeling, Rousseau in fact displayed only the loosest conception of morality, and was quite ready to lie, steal, take mistresses, betray friends, and behave however he wished without thought for the wellbeing of others. Besides Rousseau did not invent the cult of sensibility.
***
Nowadays I think most of us know this concept of sensibility through Jane Austen. And since Marianne Dashwood is selfish, rude, and blind to the harm she does to herself and others during her pursuit of the fashionable ideas of natural and refined feeling, it is evident that Austen saw the same general flaws in the trend. But there are many other critics even among her contemporary colleagues. Despite her reputation as the author of Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe is one of them; in Mysteries of Udolpho Emily St. Aubert's gentle but preachy father warns her about the dangers of thoughtlessly indulging in feeling, however fine, and altogether her heroines are fairly quiet and restrained. I admittedly don't have much use for the cult of sensibility either, because it is (or was) so often artificial, unfairly demanding of the people who were forced to put up with the outpourings and histrionics of its devotees, and unhealthy. In my view noble feeling is much lovelier when it is unselfconscious and unadorned, and it enriches life especially when it is mostly kept sacrosanct and private. But perhaps that's a miserly way of proceeding.
***
But, to return to Rousseau, while summarizing the Discours Russell quotes a very funny passage (which I've given below in the original French) out of a letter which Voltaire sent to Rousseau after reading the work:
J'ai reçu, monsieur, votre nouveau livre contre le genre humain, je vous en remercie. [...] On n'a jamais employé tant d'esprit à vouloir nous rendre bêtes ; il prend envie de marcher à quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage. Cependant, comme il y a plus de soixante ans que j'en ai perdu l'habitude, je sens malheureusement qu'il m'est impossible de la reprendre et je laisse cette allure naturelle à ceux qui en sont plus dignes que vous et moi.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Sense and Sensibility, Part II
Russell skims over the novels Émile and La Nouvelle Héloise. (At one point I was interested in reading them, but abandoned the former and never started the latter after concluding that they were too tiresome.) He does remark on the furore which Émile unleashed and go into unimpressed detail about the "Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar" ("Although it professes to be what the voice of nature has proclaimed to a virtuous priest [. . .] the reader finds with surprise that the voice of nature, when it begins to speak, is uttering a hotch-pot of arguments derived from Aristotle, St Augustine, Descartes, and so on. ").
But in connection with the "Confession" he credits Rousseau with originating the practice of "proving" God's existence not through intellectual but emotional arguments, which is really a significant contribution. What infuriates me about such "proof" is that it is subjective, so it is unjustifiable to persuade others who of course have different experiences and feelings and needs into accepting one's own theology. Besides, because it is unverifiable I think one should honestly acknowledge one's religion as a hypothesis instead of as the universal truth. But this criticism only really applies to proselytizing. As long as religion keeps us happy and more self-aware and nicer to be around than might otherwise be the case, as long as we freely recognize that it is just a hypothesis, and as long as we keep our grubby little paws away from the souls of our fellow humans, grounding it in emotion is fine by me.
Then I was a little horrified but greatly amused by Russell's tangent — in his rebuttal of the idea that the heart is infallibly a benevolent and worthy guide of human conduct— about the reasoning that the unhappiness of earthly existence is a guarantee of future bliss. In a scarcely respectful analogy he argues indignantly, "If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that 'the heart' encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below."
As for the Social Contract, the summary reminds me pleasantly of PoliSci 100 (we didn't read Rousseau specifically, but the questions and concepts and historical parallels are familiar), but the kind of liberty it espouses is clearly not much to my taste and it sounds tedious. Unfortunately it is hugely relevant to the Revolution.
So I might read portions of the Discours after all because what I've seen of Robespierre's speeches is so directly influenced by it (though Robespierre seems more disingenuous and coldly clever), but I'm mostly convinced that I dodged a tedious bullet by not doing so yet. Either way the Social Contract should come first.
***
I should probably say something about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I can't remember it (due, no doubt, to the fact that we had moved from Berlin to West Germany proper by then) and have no valuable insight to contribute on the subject. What I will say is that the consciousness of the previous existence of the Wall thoroughly fascinated me whenever we visited Berlin after we moved away in 1989. For one thing, I may remember little about living here as a baby and probably imbue what I do remember with greater meaning than is just; but when we glimpsed the Brandenburg Gate while driving past in 1996, I think that I felt a spontaneous, genuine, and profound sense of awe for its forlorn but liberated exposedness and for the fact that one can freely pass through it. Apparently the Wall had loomed vaguely in my consciousness even at the age of three or four without my realizing it until much later when it felt strange that it was gone.
But in connection with the "Confession" he credits Rousseau with originating the practice of "proving" God's existence not through intellectual but emotional arguments, which is really a significant contribution. What infuriates me about such "proof" is that it is subjective, so it is unjustifiable to persuade others who of course have different experiences and feelings and needs into accepting one's own theology. Besides, because it is unverifiable I think one should honestly acknowledge one's religion as a hypothesis instead of as the universal truth. But this criticism only really applies to proselytizing. As long as religion keeps us happy and more self-aware and nicer to be around than might otherwise be the case, as long as we freely recognize that it is just a hypothesis, and as long as we keep our grubby little paws away from the souls of our fellow humans, grounding it in emotion is fine by me.
Then I was a little horrified but greatly amused by Russell's tangent — in his rebuttal of the idea that the heart is infallibly a benevolent and worthy guide of human conduct— about the reasoning that the unhappiness of earthly existence is a guarantee of future bliss. In a scarcely respectful analogy he argues indignantly, "If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that 'the heart' encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below."
As for the Social Contract, the summary reminds me pleasantly of PoliSci 100 (we didn't read Rousseau specifically, but the questions and concepts and historical parallels are familiar), but the kind of liberty it espouses is clearly not much to my taste and it sounds tedious. Unfortunately it is hugely relevant to the Revolution.
So I might read portions of the Discours after all because what I've seen of Robespierre's speeches is so directly influenced by it (though Robespierre seems more disingenuous and coldly clever), but I'm mostly convinced that I dodged a tedious bullet by not doing so yet. Either way the Social Contract should come first.
***
I should probably say something about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I can't remember it (due, no doubt, to the fact that we had moved from Berlin to West Germany proper by then) and have no valuable insight to contribute on the subject. What I will say is that the consciousness of the previous existence of the Wall thoroughly fascinated me whenever we visited Berlin after we moved away in 1989. For one thing, I may remember little about living here as a baby and probably imbue what I do remember with greater meaning than is just; but when we glimpsed the Brandenburg Gate while driving past in 1996, I think that I felt a spontaneous, genuine, and profound sense of awe for its forlorn but liberated exposedness and for the fact that one can freely pass through it. Apparently the Wall had loomed vaguely in my consciousness even at the age of three or four without my realizing it until much later when it felt strange that it was gone.
Thoughts on Twentieth-Century Noise
Accustomed as I am to reading books on the internet, it requires a great deal of effort to read a printed book. My aunt L. queried once whether this practice is not degrading to the intellect, or something to that effect. But honestly I like reading on the internet because whatever the material is feels more alive and immediate that way, and I can scroll over the verbal dead weight or passages I don't much like, and read faster in general because there's no need to turn pages (depending on the document format, of course). The problem with books or articles is, at least in my experience, that they can be dull and meaningless if they are not illumined by one's experience, or explained a little by a friend or relative or someone else who is qualified by their experience, different perspective, or superior intelligence to speak of it. But somehow this problem is not as acute on the internet, perhaps also because I can look up secondary literature, relevant online encyclopaedia articles and pictures, etc., really easily.
In any case, the printed book I am presently slogging through (though I have dozens of started books lying around the bed) is Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, a birthday present from my godfather. I intend to write about it on the Lighthouse blog at some point, but in the meantime I want to ramble about it, not ex cathedra (as it were), but just informally. I'm only on the eighty-somethingth page in the nearly telephone-width volume (the print is large) anyway.
First I'll begin by saying that by and large I find 20th century art unsympathetic, with its pessimistic view of reality, restrictive minimalism, and incarnation of the very inhumanity which it is often intended to protest or counteract. There are all sorts of exceptions to this rule, and if someone explains the appeal of 20th century art to me in intellectual terms I can kind of understand it (if only on the intellectual level, because conscious tolerance is as a rule neither very profound nor lasting). But it still isn't my thing.
One aspect of The Rest is Noise which I like very much is that Ross brings out the humanity of this epoch, the composers, and the music, even when these composers and music have rather cold and hyperintellectual tendencies. Rather than striding into the material with arrogance and prejudice, arraigning one set of composers whilst praising the other, stating absolutely that this artistic movement is superior to that, or characterizing the human subjects with more boldness than accuracy, he practices good old-fashioned American neutrality, attentively following the arguments and recognizing the merits of all sides, and refusing even after coming to a fair and sensible assessment to pronounce an inviolable judgment on the entire affair. Which is refreshing because the European approach does tend to be very dogmatic; and entertaining as this dogmatism can be especially in its aphoristic phases, after the first glow of admiration has passed it is irritating to find one's self left with only a healthy sense of skepticism and a highly biased knowledge of the truth.
In any case, Ross begins by immersing the reader in the Viennese school, as well as the composers who drifted in and out of the Austrian capital. Salome is one of the first works discussed, and even though I don't know the music well, I was quite interested because I've read the libretto repeatedly as Oscar Wilde's play. Whether I'd want to listen to it or read the play again is another question. On the one hand literature and music and so on are only harmful if one lacks common sense; on the other hand common sense only goes so deep, and I like to be a bit selective about the thoughts and images and information that enter and will presumably muck around in my subconscious for the rest of my life. Besides which there's no need — it's even insensitive and stupid — to probe into the realm of misery and darkness when these feelings are rife enough anyway.
Biographies of figures like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg are woven unaffectedly into the narrative, and numerous anecdotes illustrate clearly enough the childish games (jealousy, covetousness, backbiting, etc.) in which the so-called adults of Vienna's music world liked to engage. Ross doesn't go, or hasn't gone as far as I've read, into salacious detail about their carnal relationships, which is a relief because I have never been convinced that biographers and other writers who thrive on such detail are really highmindedly providing psychological insights rather than just gossip-mongering, prying, and perhaps compensating for their own comparatively unadventurous existence by roaming vicariously. Either way, it's impressive how much research clearly went into the book, and though the trivia interspersed in the text often feel like footnotes, it's also impressive how well Ross has synthesized and filtered the research.
A year or so ago I read Schöpfer der Neuen Musik by H. H. Stuckenschmidt, which covers roughly the same ground. Though Stuckenschmidt was in top form when he was writing about Debussy and Ravel (he integrated the information about their background, education, interests, personality, and compositional philosophy so well into his descriptions of their music that a good reader could probably recognize their compositions even without seeing or hearing a single note of them previously), by the time that Berg and Milhaud came along the chapters had dwindled to dry and rather pitiful music-theoretical synopses of the composers' works. (I'm probably exaggerating, but still, only a very enthusiastic reader would enjoy the book's home stretch.) Besides which, despite my admiration for Stuckenschmidt's brilliant mind and his devotion to 20th-century music, I had major issues with the book's structure and the author's pompous use of language — for instance idiotic compound adjectives in the vein of künstlerisch-schöpferish and natürlich-ästhetisch — and have therefore recused myself from indicting any serious review of the book. It would be unfair to say outright that one book is better than the other; certainly Ross's is friendlier.
Perhaps my biggest quibble with Ross's book is that the style would be better suited to a series of articles — the sentence structure streamlined and simplified as a newspaper or magazine article would demand it, and the concepts and information pared down to cater to the apparently drosophilic attention spans and preadolescent understandings of the readers. I wish that it were more condensed and enigmatic, as is in my view more appropriate given the scope of a book. On the other hand, one of the charms of Alex Ross's style is precisely that it is unpretending, genuine, and perfectly expressed in its efficient way. (And I like his articles in the New Yorker precisely because they are free from pretention and cattiness.) And non-fiction books are, it seems, rarely condensed and enigmatic anyway.
***
Here is a link to Alex Ross's old blog:
The Rest is Noise
and his new blog, at the New Yorker:
Unquiet Thoughts
In any case, the printed book I am presently slogging through (though I have dozens of started books lying around the bed) is Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, a birthday present from my godfather. I intend to write about it on the Lighthouse blog at some point, but in the meantime I want to ramble about it, not ex cathedra (as it were), but just informally. I'm only on the eighty-somethingth page in the nearly telephone-width volume (the print is large) anyway.
First I'll begin by saying that by and large I find 20th century art unsympathetic, with its pessimistic view of reality, restrictive minimalism, and incarnation of the very inhumanity which it is often intended to protest or counteract. There are all sorts of exceptions to this rule, and if someone explains the appeal of 20th century art to me in intellectual terms I can kind of understand it (if only on the intellectual level, because conscious tolerance is as a rule neither very profound nor lasting). But it still isn't my thing.
One aspect of The Rest is Noise which I like very much is that Ross brings out the humanity of this epoch, the composers, and the music, even when these composers and music have rather cold and hyperintellectual tendencies. Rather than striding into the material with arrogance and prejudice, arraigning one set of composers whilst praising the other, stating absolutely that this artistic movement is superior to that, or characterizing the human subjects with more boldness than accuracy, he practices good old-fashioned American neutrality, attentively following the arguments and recognizing the merits of all sides, and refusing even after coming to a fair and sensible assessment to pronounce an inviolable judgment on the entire affair. Which is refreshing because the European approach does tend to be very dogmatic; and entertaining as this dogmatism can be especially in its aphoristic phases, after the first glow of admiration has passed it is irritating to find one's self left with only a healthy sense of skepticism and a highly biased knowledge of the truth.
In any case, Ross begins by immersing the reader in the Viennese school, as well as the composers who drifted in and out of the Austrian capital. Salome is one of the first works discussed, and even though I don't know the music well, I was quite interested because I've read the libretto repeatedly as Oscar Wilde's play. Whether I'd want to listen to it or read the play again is another question. On the one hand literature and music and so on are only harmful if one lacks common sense; on the other hand common sense only goes so deep, and I like to be a bit selective about the thoughts and images and information that enter and will presumably muck around in my subconscious for the rest of my life. Besides which there's no need — it's even insensitive and stupid — to probe into the realm of misery and darkness when these feelings are rife enough anyway.
Biographies of figures like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg are woven unaffectedly into the narrative, and numerous anecdotes illustrate clearly enough the childish games (jealousy, covetousness, backbiting, etc.) in which the so-called adults of Vienna's music world liked to engage. Ross doesn't go, or hasn't gone as far as I've read, into salacious detail about their carnal relationships, which is a relief because I have never been convinced that biographers and other writers who thrive on such detail are really highmindedly providing psychological insights rather than just gossip-mongering, prying, and perhaps compensating for their own comparatively unadventurous existence by roaming vicariously. Either way, it's impressive how much research clearly went into the book, and though the trivia interspersed in the text often feel like footnotes, it's also impressive how well Ross has synthesized and filtered the research.
A year or so ago I read Schöpfer der Neuen Musik by H. H. Stuckenschmidt, which covers roughly the same ground. Though Stuckenschmidt was in top form when he was writing about Debussy and Ravel (he integrated the information about their background, education, interests, personality, and compositional philosophy so well into his descriptions of their music that a good reader could probably recognize their compositions even without seeing or hearing a single note of them previously), by the time that Berg and Milhaud came along the chapters had dwindled to dry and rather pitiful music-theoretical synopses of the composers' works. (I'm probably exaggerating, but still, only a very enthusiastic reader would enjoy the book's home stretch.) Besides which, despite my admiration for Stuckenschmidt's brilliant mind and his devotion to 20th-century music, I had major issues with the book's structure and the author's pompous use of language — for instance idiotic compound adjectives in the vein of künstlerisch-schöpferish and natürlich-ästhetisch — and have therefore recused myself from indicting any serious review of the book. It would be unfair to say outright that one book is better than the other; certainly Ross's is friendlier.
Perhaps my biggest quibble with Ross's book is that the style would be better suited to a series of articles — the sentence structure streamlined and simplified as a newspaper or magazine article would demand it, and the concepts and information pared down to cater to the apparently drosophilic attention spans and preadolescent understandings of the readers. I wish that it were more condensed and enigmatic, as is in my view more appropriate given the scope of a book. On the other hand, one of the charms of Alex Ross's style is precisely that it is unpretending, genuine, and perfectly expressed in its efficient way. (And I like his articles in the New Yorker precisely because they are free from pretention and cattiness.) And non-fiction books are, it seems, rarely condensed and enigmatic anyway.
***
Here is a link to Alex Ross's old blog:
The Rest is Noise
and his new blog, at the New Yorker:
Unquiet Thoughts
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Internship, the Moths, and the Wardrobe
Yesterday I learned that I will not be doing the internship. But the disappointment was made milder — or at least hope was encouraged — by the explanation that given the high level of my qualifications the company didn't think it right to ask me to empty the wastebaskets, etc. I had also requested to be kept in mind if there are any new jobs in the next three months, and this request was freely granted. Since then I've been afraid of a delayed bad reaction, viz. the feeling of being utterly crushed and defeated, but if it has yet to emerge it will certainly be minor. Frankly what irks me a bit is that the moment I decided to work instead of study, two years ago, it was with the implicit determination to accept any paying job — as long as the working environment is not sleazy or similarly degrading, the employer's modus operandi is ethically sound, and I can carry out the required tasks well. It is rather pitiful if I have to remain ignorant of and unskilled in the really practical things in life just because I have a predilection for acquiring foreign languages, for instance.
Financially I am still good for a couple of months, but spending money literally only on transit tickets to and from the Agentur für Arbeit, the bank, and the job interview, and on unexpected fees (*&@$#!) in addition to my monthly insurance payments is not the nicest state of affairs. I already have a list going of what should be paid with my first wages: firstly, the debt in money borrowed for stamps and transit tickets which I owe to Mama, then the cost of a new battery for the watch that my English aunt (as I like to think of her) gave me.
An overhaul of the closet would be good, for instance; I have an enormous quantity of clothes, but it is mostly a feast of the Tantalus variety. It must be admitted, though, that if I washed the shrinkable items carefully, found a way to repel the moths, did a round of mending, and provided a visual counterpoint to the clothing that makes me look like a porpoise for instance by wearing black tights or long pants underneath it, or necklaces and scarves over top, this motley assortment would be less of a torment. I would like to buy a nice pair of high-heeled shoes, the one perfect dress, a fresh supply of black tights, and one superlatively well-fitting rainjacket. But these things can wait. Besides, if my closet meant that much to me I would have summarily annihilated the objectionable items in a sort of sartorial Reign of Terror long ago.
Financially I am still good for a couple of months, but spending money literally only on transit tickets to and from the Agentur für Arbeit, the bank, and the job interview, and on unexpected fees (*&@$#!) in addition to my monthly insurance payments is not the nicest state of affairs. I already have a list going of what should be paid with my first wages: firstly, the debt in money borrowed for stamps and transit tickets which I owe to Mama, then the cost of a new battery for the watch that my English aunt (as I like to think of her) gave me.
An overhaul of the closet would be good, for instance; I have an enormous quantity of clothes, but it is mostly a feast of the Tantalus variety. It must be admitted, though, that if I washed the shrinkable items carefully, found a way to repel the moths, did a round of mending, and provided a visual counterpoint to the clothing that makes me look like a porpoise for instance by wearing black tights or long pants underneath it, or necklaces and scarves over top, this motley assortment would be less of a torment. I would like to buy a nice pair of high-heeled shoes, the one perfect dress, a fresh supply of black tights, and one superlatively well-fitting rainjacket. But these things can wait. Besides, if my closet meant that much to me I would have summarily annihilated the objectionable items in a sort of sartorial Reign of Terror long ago.
Monday, October 12, 2009
A Third Tilt at the Interview Windmill
This afternoon I went to an interview somewhere in the wilds north of Unter den Linden, in the hopes of being employed as an intern in the office of a tour guide company. I printed out a copy of my c.v., double-checked how to get to the interview location, put together the papers that a potential employer might want to see, etc. As for my clothing, I decided that it's best to wear something on the formal end of what I would wear anyway, so it was a fine chocolate brown corduroy skirt, a dark blue knit sweater, green tights, and a pewtery necklace inlaid with black and red enamel, orange carnelian, and purple amethyst (?) .
Originally I had intended to arrive at the nearest S-Bahnhof by 1:30 (half an hour early), but the weather was rainy though in a half-hearted manner and it didn't turn out that way in any case, so it was around 1:30 when I stepped into the U-Bahn. It was the A***straße 5a where the interview would take place; I found the A***straße 5 soon enough, but realized that it wasn't the right place and (after asking a lady who was sitting on a bench eating her lunch and who could only inform me that she wasn't from the area either and that she would advise me to look further along the street) continued on down the street.
With dismay I found that the 5a referred to a vast and near-abandoned courtyard, ringed in garages and workshops and former factory offices, shuttered in by a metal gate with a door suspended in its centre, and adorned in graffiti. The scene was peculiarly anachronistic and looked as if no one had been there since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, though the glossy handful of cars assuaged the sense of temporal misplacement. I walked warily through the middle of the scene and headed toward the building at the back, where an old and stately red-and-yellow brick cupola rises at the corner, and a young man in a (?) purple and pink sweatsuit was idling and gazing at the ground underneath a porch, perhaps on a cigarette break. Fervently hoping that I would not end up walking into a bizarre underground club, I entered the building and climbed the stairs until a sign pointed me in to the company office.
Once I entered the office, at pretty much exactly 2 p.m., the scene changed. The rooms were expansive and the ceilings at a lonely height, but there was bright furniture and two or three people were milling about, including the perhaps Australian girl who greeted me. The interview began, funnily enough, with the question which career direction I was trying to work toward. Altogether the focus was rather on what I would like to do and could do well, on what it would be like to work in the company, and (implicitly) on which work within the company might suit me, rather than on determining whether I fit a predetermined slot. This was a great relief, and I no longer felt so humiliated and intimidated by the job-seeking process; besides, it was refreshing to be told that I would surely do the work competently and that speaking French is useful, since the tendency of the job-search is to firmly convince its victim that he (or she) is of no use at all. So though I was still nervous the interview was much more relaxed and enjoyable than expected.
The advertisement already mentioned that the remuneration for an internship would be 400 Euros per month (this is fine by me, since it would neatly cover my monthly expenditures and even, I think, provide me with an employment health insurance plan). What I learned today is that the working hours would be from 10-5, the overall length of the internship anything from a month onwards, and the tasks diverse and a mixture of dropping off mail at the post, answering phones, and more challenging things.
In a day or two I should find out if the interview was successful. At least it already means that I will no longer automatically associate the word "interview" with the fiasco of April. (Deo volens.)
Originally I had intended to arrive at the nearest S-Bahnhof by 1:30 (half an hour early), but the weather was rainy though in a half-hearted manner and it didn't turn out that way in any case, so it was around 1:30 when I stepped into the U-Bahn. It was the A***straße 5a where the interview would take place; I found the A***straße 5 soon enough, but realized that it wasn't the right place and (after asking a lady who was sitting on a bench eating her lunch and who could only inform me that she wasn't from the area either and that she would advise me to look further along the street) continued on down the street.
With dismay I found that the 5a referred to a vast and near-abandoned courtyard, ringed in garages and workshops and former factory offices, shuttered in by a metal gate with a door suspended in its centre, and adorned in graffiti. The scene was peculiarly anachronistic and looked as if no one had been there since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, though the glossy handful of cars assuaged the sense of temporal misplacement. I walked warily through the middle of the scene and headed toward the building at the back, where an old and stately red-and-yellow brick cupola rises at the corner, and a young man in a (?) purple and pink sweatsuit was idling and gazing at the ground underneath a porch, perhaps on a cigarette break. Fervently hoping that I would not end up walking into a bizarre underground club, I entered the building and climbed the stairs until a sign pointed me in to the company office.
Once I entered the office, at pretty much exactly 2 p.m., the scene changed. The rooms were expansive and the ceilings at a lonely height, but there was bright furniture and two or three people were milling about, including the perhaps Australian girl who greeted me. The interview began, funnily enough, with the question which career direction I was trying to work toward. Altogether the focus was rather on what I would like to do and could do well, on what it would be like to work in the company, and (implicitly) on which work within the company might suit me, rather than on determining whether I fit a predetermined slot. This was a great relief, and I no longer felt so humiliated and intimidated by the job-seeking process; besides, it was refreshing to be told that I would surely do the work competently and that speaking French is useful, since the tendency of the job-search is to firmly convince its victim that he (or she) is of no use at all. So though I was still nervous the interview was much more relaxed and enjoyable than expected.
The advertisement already mentioned that the remuneration for an internship would be 400 Euros per month (this is fine by me, since it would neatly cover my monthly expenditures and even, I think, provide me with an employment health insurance plan). What I learned today is that the working hours would be from 10-5, the overall length of the internship anything from a month onwards, and the tasks diverse and a mixture of dropping off mail at the post, answering phones, and more challenging things.
In a day or two I should find out if the interview was successful. At least it already means that I will no longer automatically associate the word "interview" with the fiasco of April. (Deo volens.)
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Contented Mortals and Carnac
For the "Lion and the Mouse" research I'm reading the first part of Hester Lynch Piozzi's Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany, published in 1789 and describing a journey that began in autumn 1784. That her sagacity (not to mention capacity for prediction) is at times at fault is evident in the following passage:
Another book which I am consulting (also at gutenberg.org) is Brittany & Its Byways by Fanny Bury Palliser, and that was published in 1869. It begins in Cherbourg, and for a while I wanted to skip ahead, but the book crossed the Couësnon and entered Brittany soon enough. I like the little anecdotes in it, even the horrifying one about the watchdogs who used to run the streets of Saint-Malo after 10 p.m. every night, until 1770 when they brutally killed a navy officer. I also like the insights into daily life, like how the washerwomen bleach linens in a barrel using ashes and boiling water. Every time an interesting village or castle or church is mentioned I look it up in a certain online encyclopaedia to read about it in depth from a different angle.
What I hadn't realized before was how much of Arthurian legend and Druidic culture was alive across the Channel, and how much Brittany teems with relicts of the Stone Age. (Astérix and Obélix should have informed me on that point long ago, but when I read comic books they tend to be Tintin or Lucky Luke.) Looking at photos of the Forest of Brocéliande, which was once haunted (according to legend) by Merlin and Morgan le Fay, and then of the vast field of worn and lichen-covered stones at Carnac, was very impressive. The photo above is from Carnac.
***
As for the Day of Reunification, I stayed in the apartment all day and only ran across photos of the gigantic marionettes in my newspaper- and blog-browsing, and therefore have nothing intelligent to report on the matter. The election outcome was a pity (and pitifully stupid), but I don't feel as worried about solipsist decision-making, misguided and often decidedly outré ideologies, and gross incompetence as I would if a neoliberally-influenced conservative party in the North American pattern had won the election. Now the SPD has the time to rediscover an independent platform that is based not on taking the left-leaning side of every centrist position in the determination to at once thumb its nose at, and distinguish itself in the voters' eyes from, the CDU, but on (more) genuine ideological or pragmatic conviction. Perhaps, however, my diagnosis of the underlying problem is wrong. Either way, if the CDU-FDP coalition is too awful, there is still the slight possibility of a vote of no confidence.
The French are really a contented race of mortals;—precluded almost from possibility of adventure, the low Parisian leads a gentle humble life, nor envies that greatness he never can obtain; but either wonders delightedly, or diverts himself philosophically with the sight of splendours which seldom fail to excite serious envy in an Englishman, and sometimes occasion even suicide, from disappointed hopes, which never could take root in the heart of these unaspiring people.It's another lesson not to generalize about national character.
Another book which I am consulting (also at gutenberg.org) is Brittany & Its Byways by Fanny Bury Palliser, and that was published in 1869. It begins in Cherbourg, and for a while I wanted to skip ahead, but the book crossed the Couësnon and entered Brittany soon enough. I like the little anecdotes in it, even the horrifying one about the watchdogs who used to run the streets of Saint-Malo after 10 p.m. every night, until 1770 when they brutally killed a navy officer. I also like the insights into daily life, like how the washerwomen bleach linens in a barrel using ashes and boiling water. Every time an interesting village or castle or church is mentioned I look it up in a certain online encyclopaedia to read about it in depth from a different angle.
What I hadn't realized before was how much of Arthurian legend and Druidic culture was alive across the Channel, and how much Brittany teems with relicts of the Stone Age. (Astérix and Obélix should have informed me on that point long ago, but when I read comic books they tend to be Tintin or Lucky Luke.) Looking at photos of the Forest of Brocéliande, which was once haunted (according to legend) by Merlin and Morgan le Fay, and then of the vast field of worn and lichen-covered stones at Carnac, was very impressive. The photo above is from Carnac.
***
As for the Day of Reunification, I stayed in the apartment all day and only ran across photos of the gigantic marionettes in my newspaper- and blog-browsing, and therefore have nothing intelligent to report on the matter. The election outcome was a pity (and pitifully stupid), but I don't feel as worried about solipsist decision-making, misguided and often decidedly outré ideologies, and gross incompetence as I would if a neoliberally-influenced conservative party in the North American pattern had won the election. Now the SPD has the time to rediscover an independent platform that is based not on taking the left-leaning side of every centrist position in the determination to at once thumb its nose at, and distinguish itself in the voters' eyes from, the CDU, but on (more) genuine ideological or pragmatic conviction. Perhaps, however, my diagnosis of the underlying problem is wrong. Either way, if the CDU-FDP coalition is too awful, there is still the slight possibility of a vote of no confidence.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
A Lengthy Ramble on the Election
Papa and Mama have been excited about the German federal election for weeks now, debating for a long time over pipes and cups of tea in the living room about the issues and which party one can vote for in good conscience, and Ge. has been keeping himself informed in the course of his dutiful and regular readings of the Berliner Zeitung. As for me, I've been cheerfully uninformed — though of course I try to have a good and up-to-date insight into the essential state of the political scene — and was not especially taken with any party, and therefore doubted I think until yesterday whether it was worthwhile to cast a vote at all. My parents were, however, insistent that I shouldn't "be a frog," which is to say a spoil-sport and wet blanket, and that no matter how I vote it's good that I vote at all (even if it's for the FDP). So I did last-minute soul-searching and internet research, and decided to vote for the Green Party.
Once this decision was made I felt completely at ease with it. Normally I'd be a determined SPD voter, but I have felt deeply uneasy about some of the decisions the party leadership has made as part of the government (especially on civil rights and foreign affairs issues), and don't want to risk becoming complicit in anything similar in future. Anyway, it is a wonderful luxury to be able to vote for the Green Party in an electoral system that is not a single-member district plurality electoral system. I have neither automatically cast a vote for the largest right-wing party (the Alliance in Canada and the Republicans in the US), nor is the whole exercise futile because there's only a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing a representative of the Greens in parliament. But I also think that the North American Green Parties tend to be too narrow in focus and at the same time too heterogeneous because they are composed of individuals who each espouse their own, often small-scoped causes, and ignore everyone else's. Besides I have conservative tendencies for instance in that I sympathize a great deal with the American penchant for small government, though I guess that in practice it never really works anyway because it relies too much on the goodwill and good sense of the community.
So this afternoon, Mama, Ge., J., and I went to the nearby school, located the correct voting room, and then presented the letters with which we were invited to the election to one of two men sitting at a table beside the door. Then, after he gave the basic instructions, we waited until one of two booths was free, sat down at the desk behind the cardboard screen, and opened the folded ballot. The ballot paper was grey and therefore presumably recycled (conscientious!); the font size of the ballot was patronizingly large. There was one column of names to the left, which were the candidates for our electoral district; this was the First Choice. To the right there was a much longer column of political parties; this was the Second Choice. I crossed the desired circle for each, then folded the ballot as instructed, and went to a different desk. There I showed my ID card with the letter, was matched up to a list, and then personally inserted the ballot into the box, whose slot a woman was ceremonially covering with a paper.
When we stepped back out of the room a friendly gentleman from the ARD asked us if we would participate in an exit poll, and then gave us each a sheet where we were to indicate our first and second choices, our age range, and our gender (only male and female were options, which is admittedly predictable; the only time I remember seeing "transgender" as an option was for a university residence survey). Then we inserted said sheets into the ARD's more modest box, and went on our merry way. On the way home we stopped to obtain (through Mama's generosity) a material reward for exercising our civic duty: ice cream from the nice gelateria at the Kleistpark intersection. We each had two scoops; the others had cherry, hazelnut, vanilla, espresso, lemon, pear, and chocolate, but I had fig and peach. In any case I don't think it would be a catastrophe if the "Great Coalition" formed again, though the prospect of a CDU-FDP coalition is not at all delightful; but an SPD-Green government would be, given the choices, ideal.
Once this decision was made I felt completely at ease with it. Normally I'd be a determined SPD voter, but I have felt deeply uneasy about some of the decisions the party leadership has made as part of the government (especially on civil rights and foreign affairs issues), and don't want to risk becoming complicit in anything similar in future. Anyway, it is a wonderful luxury to be able to vote for the Green Party in an electoral system that is not a single-member district plurality electoral system. I have neither automatically cast a vote for the largest right-wing party (the Alliance in Canada and the Republicans in the US), nor is the whole exercise futile because there's only a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing a representative of the Greens in parliament. But I also think that the North American Green Parties tend to be too narrow in focus and at the same time too heterogeneous because they are composed of individuals who each espouse their own, often small-scoped causes, and ignore everyone else's. Besides I have conservative tendencies for instance in that I sympathize a great deal with the American penchant for small government, though I guess that in practice it never really works anyway because it relies too much on the goodwill and good sense of the community.
So this afternoon, Mama, Ge., J., and I went to the nearby school, located the correct voting room, and then presented the letters with which we were invited to the election to one of two men sitting at a table beside the door. Then, after he gave the basic instructions, we waited until one of two booths was free, sat down at the desk behind the cardboard screen, and opened the folded ballot. The ballot paper was grey and therefore presumably recycled (conscientious!); the font size of the ballot was patronizingly large. There was one column of names to the left, which were the candidates for our electoral district; this was the First Choice. To the right there was a much longer column of political parties; this was the Second Choice. I crossed the desired circle for each, then folded the ballot as instructed, and went to a different desk. There I showed my ID card with the letter, was matched up to a list, and then personally inserted the ballot into the box, whose slot a woman was ceremonially covering with a paper.
When we stepped back out of the room a friendly gentleman from the ARD asked us if we would participate in an exit poll, and then gave us each a sheet where we were to indicate our first and second choices, our age range, and our gender (only male and female were options, which is admittedly predictable; the only time I remember seeing "transgender" as an option was for a university residence survey). Then we inserted said sheets into the ARD's more modest box, and went on our merry way. On the way home we stopped to obtain (through Mama's generosity) a material reward for exercising our civic duty: ice cream from the nice gelateria at the Kleistpark intersection. We each had two scoops; the others had cherry, hazelnut, vanilla, espresso, lemon, pear, and chocolate, but I had fig and peach. In any case I don't think it would be a catastrophe if the "Great Coalition" formed again, though the prospect of a CDU-FDP coalition is not at all delightful; but an SPD-Green government would be, given the choices, ideal.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Breton Research, Thus Far
A view of the port town of Saint-Malo from Wikimedia Commons. The original photo doesn't look blurry or watery, but after accidentally achieving this look by attempting to make it bigger, I think that this has artistic value (provided that it doesn't pixelate too much once the blog post is published).Since the last time I discussed the research for "The Lion and the Mouse" I can't pretend to have read a brace of historical works, but the desultory reading has been coming along nicely. I discovered a website with a set of modest lessons to teach one Breton, Keravon. I haven't gone past the first lesson (*cough*) but am letting the language/dialect slowly sink in. One thing that especially puzzles me is how to pronounce everything; while the website does helpfully explain e.g. that "ñ" is pronounced nasally (as if, I presume, it were the "n" in French diphthongs like "an," "en" or "on") whereas a plain "n" is not, questions such as whether the "t"s are enunciated or not continue to puzzle me. Besides, the dialect is not in the Romance family of languages, but instead bears a close affinity to the Celtic-derived languages of the British Isles, which makes sense because it is a relict of the people who fled from southwestern England to the Armoric Peninsula in the Middle Ages. So it takes getting used to, though on the other hand I've wanted to learn Welsh for a while and this comes close. Never mind that there are four dialects of Breton and at least as many different orthographies. As for Gallo, I haven't bothered to learn it, because though I vaguely want the hero of the story to come from Haut-Bretagne, where that dialect is spoken, I'm certain that the sailors who would crop up in the at first predominantly seabound tale would be far more likely to speak Breton. But I am putting together an English/French/Breton/Gallo vocabulary list.
The Château des Rochers-Sévigné (as in Madame de Sévigné) likewise from Wikimedia Commons. I like the witchy peak of the lefthand tower. The proportionate size of the chapel is admittedly rather grandiose.Then I've been reading my way through the fairy tales which were collected and translated from Breton into French by François-Marie Luzel in the 19th century, at Légendes Bretonnes. On the one hand his French is delightfully fluent and readable, the tales also fluent and charmingly benevolent and interestingly bizarre. On the other hand, tales tend to resemble each other, and even more at times to resemble Grimm fairy tales, and after disgruntledly checking the latters' date of publication confirmed the unwelcome suspicion that M. Luzel's collection is sometimes merely secondhand Grimm. "Les Trois Poils de la Barbe d'Or du Diable" is scarcely different from "Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren," and both are quite amusing, but I like the latter better.
Anyway, the first tale in the website's collection, "La Fille Qui Se Maria À Un Mort," is as the title suggests about a girl (a princess, even) who marries a corpse. After the ceremony and a period of uninterrupted wedded bliss the bride is visited in a luxurious subterranean palace by her eldest brother, who is henceforward the hero of the tale. The woman (who, given that she is content never to venture out, is apparently an anticipation of the modern couch potato) has no complaints except that the husband is abroad all day. So the brother decides to accompany the husband, with the latter's acquiescence. First they come across a field barren of all but heather and gorse and meagre ferns [N.B.: very Breton flora], with two fat and gleaming cows in the middle. The prince remarks upon the oddity of the scene, and instead of his brother-in-law the cows respond and say, "God bless you." Then they come across a field that is bursting with luxuriant green, in the middle of which there stand two skeletal-looking cows. The brother once again audibly finds this all very odd, and once again only the cows respond, "God bless you." [And by this point the reader is unhappily and fully aware that a heavy moral allegory is underway.] Then they encounter two goats violently and bloodily fighting each other. The brother takes pity on them, and the animals bless him in turn and separate to let the men pass. Then the travellers reach an old ruined church full of ghosts. The dead man dons his priestly vestments and goes up to the altar to hold a sermon, which is somewhat unorthodox as he begins spewing forth toads "and other hideous reptiles" [N.B.: toads are, of course, not reptiles but amphibians], as do the others present. After the spewing has ceased and the ceremony with it, the congregation choruses, "Vous nous avez délivrés! Merci! Merci! " and leaves.
Archway at the ruined 11th or 12-century Abbaye de Saint-Mathieu de Fine-Terre (a Benedictine monastery). It stands on a green plain above the seashore and a bright, trim 19th-century lighthouse stands besides it. The pink flowers visible through the arches are almost certainly hydrangeas, which appear based on my photographic explorations to be hugely popular in the region, but I am pretty certain that they wouldn't have been around, or not much, in 18th-century Brittany. (Wikimedia Commons)When the men have returned home, the prince wants to know the meaning of this scene. His brother-in-law clarifies that the first pair of cows represented poor people who lived devoutly and contentedly despite their poverty; the second pair of cows represented rich people who lived only for their own worldly gain and therefore lived unhappily; and the fighting goats represented thieves who are intent only on fighting and destruction. As for the scene at the church, the brother-in-law was a priest in his pre-corpse career, but not a sincere one, and the amphibians/reptiles he was vomiting were devils that once possessed him. And, because a living man took pity on the cows and the goats, and because the corpse-man married a princess and said his mass in front of a prince [I don't understand what precisely "répondre une messe," which is what the prince did, is], all these sinners were saved and permitted to go to heaven.
As Luzel remarks in his footnote, there is a strong mixture of old pagan and undoubtedly recent Christian elements in this story, which he recorded in 1872 from a servant in the Côtes du Nord region. On reconsidering the story the theology is not precisely to my liking, but then I doubt that its ideas of redemption are to be taken either literally or seriously.
The parish enclosure of Pleyben: a calvary completed in 1650 and the Eglise Saint-Germain, completed in 1583. (Wikimedia Commons)Besides this sort of reading I've looked at many more photos; I've included a couple in the blog post to show, perhaps, why the region has fascinated me so much since I began to research it. The seashore by itself would already be attractive; one scene that particularly caught my imagination was a rough grey stone church isolated at the brink of a towering cliffside, at the shores of the Baie des Trepassés, so called either because of a prosaic linguistic flub or because of a poetically mournful history of corpses that were washed ashore when ships wrecked off the coast. Little scenes of rigging and rope-pulleys and ships with full sails, or fishing boats resting on the dented sand during low tide and attached by then perfunctory ropes to rings in the ground, are also hugely interesting to me for some reason. But it's the perfectly intact (/reconstructed) though often weathered churches and other ancient edifices — corbelled houses, i.e. ones in which the upper stories overhang the street, with exposed timberwork are one old Breton tradition — out of uncovered natural materials, and executed at times with much solid whimsy, as well as the benign leafy trees that flock the less rugged shores, that have attracted me most. Looking closely at castles has often been disillusioning after the ideas I formed of them across the Atlantic and centuries after they were constructed, but the Château de Vitré and others are doing much to restore those illusions.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Fashion Week and Pseudo-Philosophy
This afternoon, having exhausted the slideshows from the first day of Milan Fashion Week, I went on to look at the last day of London Fashion Week at Style.com. Two weeks ago I flipped through the New York slideshows with a dedication that surprised me, because the last time a fashion week came around the whole thing bored me dreadfully; but now there are so many aspects I like to think about, and then there is the occasional moment where I become absorbed in an aesthetic and the time, place, and artistic environment it suggests. Even though past London fashion weeks have not been much to my taste, since the prevailing aim seems to be to make every single element clash (colours, patterns, peculiar and unflattering silhouettes vs. natural outline of body, etc.) in a desperate bid for modernity, not to mention a tired imitation of American fashion in the 80s and 90s, I unexpectedly appreciated some of the shows. (And not only Burberry's, whose grace and safeness would naturally appeal to me.)
Perhaps my appreciation for shows that don't fall into the limited and conservative category I personally prefer is not entirely sincere, but what's true is that I often forget when admiring especially inventive clothes or a well-worked-out theme that I would be unlikely to wear any of the clothes even if they were affordable. But that's also because my body shape and lack of height make certain looks impracticable; and while I don't theoretically mind wearing bright and unusual clothes for fun, I prefer to wear unobtrusive clothes that don't distract from the face, which is where I want to unconsciously express character. (When I look at other people their attire is pretty much the last criterion I'd use to guess at their character. Even where apparel is the result of careful consideration — with me it rarely is, except that I am fond of coordinating colours — it can only convey a limited range of nuances, and even then it tends to convey the personality a person wishes to project rather than their true personality.)
The other principal reason why I dislike overwhelming clothing is that the idea of becoming a faceless clotheshorse and thereby denying, or being denied, one's identity, is intolerable. This was one aspect that put me off of fashion shows for a while, but now that the models' faces are growing familiar and I see sparks of their individual selves behind all the make-up and through all the fabric trappings, the runway no longer feels so inhumane. Nevertheless it makes me sad to see (apparent) fashion victims in the true sense, meaning the ones who think that their clothes are more important and more presentable than the person wearing them.
Perhaps my appreciation for shows that don't fall into the limited and conservative category I personally prefer is not entirely sincere, but what's true is that I often forget when admiring especially inventive clothes or a well-worked-out theme that I would be unlikely to wear any of the clothes even if they were affordable. But that's also because my body shape and lack of height make certain looks impracticable; and while I don't theoretically mind wearing bright and unusual clothes for fun, I prefer to wear unobtrusive clothes that don't distract from the face, which is where I want to unconsciously express character. (When I look at other people their attire is pretty much the last criterion I'd use to guess at their character. Even where apparel is the result of careful consideration — with me it rarely is, except that I am fond of coordinating colours — it can only convey a limited range of nuances, and even then it tends to convey the personality a person wishes to project rather than their true personality.)
The other principal reason why I dislike overwhelming clothing is that the idea of becoming a faceless clotheshorse and thereby denying, or being denied, one's identity, is intolerable. This was one aspect that put me off of fashion shows for a while, but now that the models' faces are growing familiar and I see sparks of their individual selves behind all the make-up and through all the fabric trappings, the runway no longer feels so inhumane. Nevertheless it makes me sad to see (apparent) fashion victims in the true sense, meaning the ones who think that their clothes are more important and more presentable than the person wearing them.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Ploumanac'h, Purcell, and Porridge
Since the appointment at the Agentur I've thought of writing a book set in Brittany and southern England during the French Revolution, with a plot loosely along the lines of the fable of the lion and the mouse. Embarking on a story is really quite like trying to ride up a hill on a bicycle; it's hard to tell beforehand if there will be enough momentum or staying-power to complete the ascent. So the story may fizzle out, but on the other hand it might not. At any rate, first I wrote a plot synopsis of the beginning of the story, determined the name of the main character, and decided to simply entitle it "The Lion and the Mouse." Then I looked up de la Fontaine's version of the tale, but as I told Papa and Mama later "The Lion and the Rat" isn't particularly poetic, besides which the poem is a little spare; so I found Aesop's original tale in Greek on the internet and will presumably quote that at the beginning of the book instead. Since then I've been burrowing into information on the Bretagne, specifically the Breton and Gallo dialects, Breton cuisine, the crops and livestock that were around in the 1790s, the history (I've gathered a broad outline and will fill in the details later), and the landscape. For the last I looked at photos at TrekEarth.com; needless to say that was too enjoyable to feel like hard investigative labour.
Today I've been acquainting myself with sails and navigation, e.g. fore-and-aft rigging, the gaff sail, the genoa, and the luff. But after I finish that I still need to decide which type of ship my emigré will use to escape to England, and to find out about everything from the currents and landmarks and topography of the Breton coast, through the winds, setting a course for a ship, and determining latitude and longitude, to how and when to manipulate the sails and rudder. Apart from the nautical details I want to learn about the local traditions (there are Breton saints and ghost tales, like the one about the Bride of Trécesson), the Parlement and lower-level administration, personalities like Madame de Sévigné, and the individual towns and villages. That's only the first step in the research; after that I want to learn about what went on in Paris during the Revolution, and then about what went on in England. And then I'll think about my characters and the niceties of the plot.
I've been at this for four days or so, and though of course I read online books on the side and occasionally become bored and lazy, I like the cycle of resting, pushing myself to do work and then enjoying the new information and ideas. It's only a daydream, but if the book and internet research hasn't petered out in three months' time I would love to go on a lengthy bike tour of Brittany, and see the ocean and the castles and the towns in person. Either way it would be nice to finally write a story with intellectual substance, though that's more my ego speaking than my nice ideal of twinning art and knowledge in the pursuit of a nobler vision of the human condition (to put it in an obscure and wordy way).
Apart from that I've been learning new pieces on the piano, like a Scarlatti sonata and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 (obviously I've only played the very short second movement all the way through; the first and third movements will require much more time), and revisiting old ones like the partitas in the Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. What I'm watching for now is the phrasing given in the score; I've tended to ignore it but after practicing chamber music I've realized that it can indicate the composer's intentions very helpfully. Besides I am trying to figure out how to play Bach so that it sounds quintessentially Bach, Scarlatti so that it sounds quintessentially Scarlatti, etc. One aspect of that, which I'm not close to mastering, is being able to inhabit a piece, as if it were a course of true events, so that the performer shares the mood and the notes come alive.
Besides I've found more treasures on YouTube:
1. Andrés Segovia: 5 Pieces by Purcell
2. Agustín Barrios: La Catedral
3. José Iturbi: "Rigaudon," "Musette" and "Tambourin" by Jean-Philippe Rameau
(On the harpsichord. Pleasantly peculiar twanging and nasal tone, and a dancing rhythm, reminiscent of medieval folk music with hurdy-gurdies and the rest of it.)
4. Jussi Bjoerling: "An Silvia" by Schubert
(This recording made me reconsider the opinion that the song is boring.)
5. Wanda Landowska: Excerpt from Concerto No. 3 for Harpsichord by Bach
(An impressive lady. The tone of the harpsichord is really immensely protean; it sounds at times as if there were indeed a string orchestra playing in the background.)
6. Wanda Landowska, London Philharmonic: Piano Concerto No. 26 in D major, by Mozart
(The orchestra's style is dated — either the recording is at fault or the strings really slide all over the place — but I think their understanding of Mozart is uncommonly good, with the right combination of tranquillity, intelligent refinement, and genuine sensitivity.)
7. Benedetto Michelangeli: Sonata in C major by Baldassare Galuppi, Mvt. 1
(Papa used to practice this piece. The theme repeats often, but it's lovely.)
8. Clara Haskil: Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor by Mozart
(This was the second piano concerto which I listened to almost every evening before falling asleep during my second year at UBC. After a few times I decided that it "describes" a vicious storm at sea with shrieking winds and titanic waves and pelting rain, intermittently lulled. It's dark and unsettling, not only in comparison with the rest of Mozart's oeuvre, and not an obvious choice for bedtime, but also lyrical and quite beautiful especially during the second movement.)
Anyway, the question of an income remains unsettled, but if I continue to spend next to no money apart from insurance payments, my bank account will only run out in perhaps a year. What I've been daydreaming of doing, besides being immersed in music and writing an epic historical novel, is learning to cook well, picking up new languages, reading history, and finding out as much about physical pursuits like sailing and carpentering as I can in books and on the internet. As far as the cooking is concerned, I haven't been doing much lately except boiling spaghetti and concocting a tomato sauce out of the miscellany in the fridge and the pantry. This time there was a jar of basil tomato sauce from the store, a box of tomato mush, three onions, a clove of garlic, green peppercorns, a bay leaf, red wine that has been sitting behind the coffee-maker since before the trip to Austria, ground paprika, and a heaping tablespoon of spicy pepper paste. One thing I've learned from the countless improvisations of this repast is that the garlic is too strong if it's minced and fried golden-brown; instead I crush the whole clove and pop it in before the olive oil is properly warm so that it stews more than it fries.
Another frequently attempted (though not recently) recipe is porridge. We buy the tiny rolled oat flakes, which tend to congeal into a grey mush when they are worked into the venerable Scottish dish, but the matter is improved if the oats are only shaken into the milk after the milk is already warm, and if they are not cooked long. Uncle Pu, a past master at porridge, says that he just boils the flakes with water and then pours milk over everything once it's in the bowl, but he uses large oat flakes and I am convinced that applying that technique to the tiny flakes would result in a Dickensian slop. So the Platonic ideal of porridge that I had in my mind's eye — tender goldeny and brown-speckled flakes suspended in a gentle, pale cream matrix, surrounded by a sea of whiter milk and crowned with a sprinkling of brown sugar — has hitherto been unattained.
[N.B.: The Ploumanac'h of the blog title is a little seaside spot in Brittany where the shore is covered in pink granite boulders which the waves have worn into fascinatingly peculiar blobs. It seems as if it's as easy to find unintended sculptures in them as in cumulus clouds.]
Today I've been acquainting myself with sails and navigation, e.g. fore-and-aft rigging, the gaff sail, the genoa, and the luff. But after I finish that I still need to decide which type of ship my emigré will use to escape to England, and to find out about everything from the currents and landmarks and topography of the Breton coast, through the winds, setting a course for a ship, and determining latitude and longitude, to how and when to manipulate the sails and rudder. Apart from the nautical details I want to learn about the local traditions (there are Breton saints and ghost tales, like the one about the Bride of Trécesson), the Parlement and lower-level administration, personalities like Madame de Sévigné, and the individual towns and villages. That's only the first step in the research; after that I want to learn about what went on in Paris during the Revolution, and then about what went on in England. And then I'll think about my characters and the niceties of the plot.
I've been at this for four days or so, and though of course I read online books on the side and occasionally become bored and lazy, I like the cycle of resting, pushing myself to do work and then enjoying the new information and ideas. It's only a daydream, but if the book and internet research hasn't petered out in three months' time I would love to go on a lengthy bike tour of Brittany, and see the ocean and the castles and the towns in person. Either way it would be nice to finally write a story with intellectual substance, though that's more my ego speaking than my nice ideal of twinning art and knowledge in the pursuit of a nobler vision of the human condition (to put it in an obscure and wordy way).
Apart from that I've been learning new pieces on the piano, like a Scarlatti sonata and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 (obviously I've only played the very short second movement all the way through; the first and third movements will require much more time), and revisiting old ones like the partitas in the Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. What I'm watching for now is the phrasing given in the score; I've tended to ignore it but after practicing chamber music I've realized that it can indicate the composer's intentions very helpfully. Besides I am trying to figure out how to play Bach so that it sounds quintessentially Bach, Scarlatti so that it sounds quintessentially Scarlatti, etc. One aspect of that, which I'm not close to mastering, is being able to inhabit a piece, as if it were a course of true events, so that the performer shares the mood and the notes come alive.
Besides I've found more treasures on YouTube:
1. Andrés Segovia: 5 Pieces by Purcell
2. Agustín Barrios: La Catedral
3. José Iturbi: "Rigaudon," "Musette" and "Tambourin" by Jean-Philippe Rameau
(On the harpsichord. Pleasantly peculiar twanging and nasal tone, and a dancing rhythm, reminiscent of medieval folk music with hurdy-gurdies and the rest of it.)
4. Jussi Bjoerling: "An Silvia" by Schubert
(This recording made me reconsider the opinion that the song is boring.)
5. Wanda Landowska: Excerpt from Concerto No. 3 for Harpsichord by Bach
(An impressive lady. The tone of the harpsichord is really immensely protean; it sounds at times as if there were indeed a string orchestra playing in the background.)
6. Wanda Landowska, London Philharmonic: Piano Concerto No. 26 in D major, by Mozart
(The orchestra's style is dated — either the recording is at fault or the strings really slide all over the place — but I think their understanding of Mozart is uncommonly good, with the right combination of tranquillity, intelligent refinement, and genuine sensitivity.)
7. Benedetto Michelangeli: Sonata in C major by Baldassare Galuppi, Mvt. 1
(Papa used to practice this piece. The theme repeats often, but it's lovely.)
8. Clara Haskil: Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor by Mozart
(This was the second piano concerto which I listened to almost every evening before falling asleep during my second year at UBC. After a few times I decided that it "describes" a vicious storm at sea with shrieking winds and titanic waves and pelting rain, intermittently lulled. It's dark and unsettling, not only in comparison with the rest of Mozart's oeuvre, and not an obvious choice for bedtime, but also lyrical and quite beautiful especially during the second movement.)
Anyway, the question of an income remains unsettled, but if I continue to spend next to no money apart from insurance payments, my bank account will only run out in perhaps a year. What I've been daydreaming of doing, besides being immersed in music and writing an epic historical novel, is learning to cook well, picking up new languages, reading history, and finding out as much about physical pursuits like sailing and carpentering as I can in books and on the internet. As far as the cooking is concerned, I haven't been doing much lately except boiling spaghetti and concocting a tomato sauce out of the miscellany in the fridge and the pantry. This time there was a jar of basil tomato sauce from the store, a box of tomato mush, three onions, a clove of garlic, green peppercorns, a bay leaf, red wine that has been sitting behind the coffee-maker since before the trip to Austria, ground paprika, and a heaping tablespoon of spicy pepper paste. One thing I've learned from the countless improvisations of this repast is that the garlic is too strong if it's minced and fried golden-brown; instead I crush the whole clove and pop it in before the olive oil is properly warm so that it stews more than it fries.
Another frequently attempted (though not recently) recipe is porridge. We buy the tiny rolled oat flakes, which tend to congeal into a grey mush when they are worked into the venerable Scottish dish, but the matter is improved if the oats are only shaken into the milk after the milk is already warm, and if they are not cooked long. Uncle Pu, a past master at porridge, says that he just boils the flakes with water and then pours milk over everything once it's in the bowl, but he uses large oat flakes and I am convinced that applying that technique to the tiny flakes would result in a Dickensian slop. So the Platonic ideal of porridge that I had in my mind's eye — tender goldeny and brown-speckled flakes suspended in a gentle, pale cream matrix, surrounded by a sea of whiter milk and crowned with a sprinkling of brown sugar — has hitherto been unattained.
[N.B.: The Ploumanac'h of the blog title is a little seaside spot in Brittany where the shore is covered in pink granite boulders which the waves have worn into fascinatingly peculiar blobs. It seems as if it's as easy to find unintended sculptures in them as in cumulus clouds.]
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