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.

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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.

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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.

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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:]