A Snowman on the Rampage

A story suggested by the length and Damoclesian implications of the icicles outside. It transpires in New England. A nod likewise to Calvin and Hobbes.

***

For five weeks the snow had covered the ground and grown to the height where the house's foundation met the weatherboarding.

Leafless beeches, elms, and ash trees grew in the forest round about, and if snow had not been caught in the broad mesh of the wire fence the territory belonging to the house would have seemed to go on forever.

Though the clouds were thick with snow and the air was hazy where the powdery flakes fell like cherry blossoms out of season, the sky was as dark as if it had been clear.

There was a quiet traffic in birds, owls, rabbits, mice, and greater predators.

The movement behind the trunk of the only locust tree was as furtive but very different.

It came from a rounded figure, whose head and spherical shoulder blotted out the background for an instant before melding back into the trunk's shadow.

A strange depression sank into the ground beside the tree, and a strange marking of white was left on the locust bark as a twigged hand slithered, scratchingly, across it.

It was the snowbeast.

*

One twigged hand still bore the scrapings of the tree bark, the other emerged, uplifted, not with a carrot, but with a colourless arm of a like shape.

That arm was an icicle.

It did not drip; it had not cracked; it was not ribbed with the marks of the twig.

In the residual light of the benighted countryside, it reflected an eerie whitish glow and a fleeting watery dissolution.

*

Closer the snowbeast came.

The water-darkened rock which served as its nose twitched.

Two half-rotted beechnut hulls which served as its eyes bristled.

Its mouth, a moribund locust bean, turned upside down.

The twigs were raised; the icicle fell.


*

A lantern sprang apart with a shattering clutter.

The bulb extinguished.

The rays on the snow vanished with the silhouettes of the trees.

A rabbit at the fenceline hobbled away in affright.

The owl hooted and left an elm with a virulent flap.

*

The icicle stabbed and stabbed at the windowpane.

It was double-glazed.

The snowbeast advanced to the door.

The fanlight was single-glazed.

Stab and crash.

*

A great shard of grass settled in the snowbeast's midsection.

Meltwater gurgled up through the snow-wound and dissolved the creature as it thrashed in violent throes.

A bird twittered.

*

In the morning the owner stepped outside to sweep up the glass.

His wife called, "Do phone the insurance people, dear."

FINIS.

Dec. 27, 2010

[It's a dumb story, but maybe amusing. The original title is "Rime of the Snowbeast."]

An Imaginary Banquet and Poetics

The snow still lies thick upon the ground, trodden likewise into café au lait tinged slush whose crumbly consistency is owing to its powdery quality and to the continuing frigidity, and from here I can see the deep paw-prints which a child made in the snowbank on the rear windshield of a car presumably on Monday. The trees are thickly clad, though the wind perturbingly wafts drifts of it to the ground, and in the courtyard the dusting against the solid dark ivy and the spades on the bicycle seats and the rampart along the top of the brick wall separating it from the next court have remained intact. The sky is as blank and greyish-white as an old computer screen, though of course unpixelated.

Yesterday Gi. did the first proper installment of our Christmas shopping: sugar, tomatoes, green beans, etc. I have daydreamed about baking Vanillekipferl, Dominosteine and maybe a chocolate or caramel brittle, to give as presents, but haven't found the time, leisure, or will to realize it. The dulce de leche coffee and the seasonal bowl of eggnog have yet to be made. An experiment with dissolved cream toffee, coffee, milk, cocoa powder, and plum liqueur produced reasonable results, and resembled a certain bottled Irish cream. I might make the eggnog today if a kind person would procure the ingredients. The recipe is from one of our Christmas books: you beat together egg yolks and sugar, add milk and heavy cream (I use whipping cream if we have it) and rum, and stir in beaten egg whites. The rum technically decimates germs; we never leave the eggnog sitting around long, though, but at least drink it straight away when it's fresh and before the egg white foam separates as it inevitably and annoyingly will. There might be vanilla extract in it too. In the New York Times food section I noted a butterscotch variant, but it might be too fiddly, whereas I have resolved upon a course of plain (if any) cooking.

As for the medieval repast, it is unlikely to be made but I've been thinking about it. If relevant Guardian articles and my recollection are correct it turns out that for a British Christmas the main dish was once boar or peacock, which became a swan in the 17th century up until the Victorian Age, when goose and turkey became popular. But I have been thinking more of the desserts. The question is whether anyone will eat apples and oranges and nuts if they are presented on the table. Watching another food documentary this time set in the Provence, I was thinking that the 13 Desserts seem somewhat medieval, so I could arrange a plate or two with raisins, nuts, dried apricots, prunes, figs, sliced nougat, etc., as the lady did, also with marzipan. I thought of making apple dumplings but they seem a lot of work, and straight roast apples with raisins in the middle are never accorded the affection which they deserve in my point of view, though to be fair the last round which I made was blackened (and in the case of exposed raisins, charred). I was thinking that it would be nice to press marzipan into a little cake or tart mould (we have two little ones), lined with ground or chopped almonds so the marzipan doesn't stick, and then to decorate it with pieces of glacé cherries or the like; or to make a Middle Eastern plate with halva, pistachios, dates, etc. Blancmange seems a little of a bother, but it is mentioned *pedantic cough* in the prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Besides, and of course not related to desserts, I have a hankering to make Yorkshire pudding once.

Unrelated to the Middle Ages and to British cuisine, I was thinking of putting together a fruit bowl as I did for my birthday, and which was much appreciated; the way it was special is that the fruit was more varied than ordinary, I washed and dried it very carefully, let it ripen in the early autumnal warmth for a day or two, took out our silver or pewter dish as well as a grand pottery dish to arrange it in, and of course spent much more time thinking how best to present it than customary. But what's nicer is the basket which we have every year on Christmas morning, most often containing a pineapple, a coconut, and a package of figs and of dates, besides the slew of mandarin oranges and apples.

Anyway, now I have had the enjoyment of imagining all this excellent food without having to shop for it, pay for it, wash dishes for it, prepare it, or dispose of any disasters (my rule of thumb is that if it's edible I must eat any remainders of my cooking, and I believe have only had to concede inedibility twice, though the improvised pumpkin pie I finished on this principle at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, with its hardbaked shell and stringy and savourless filling, will likely haunt me far into adulthood), so I am content.

As for the bookshop, three gentlemen have come to pick up their orders and one lady came in, first of all to point to the audiobook in the window and ask me if I knew what "On Civil Disobedience" was about. Whereupon I said, I think justly though maybe naming the date might have helped, that Thoreau was against the Spanish-American war and therefore refused to pay taxes, and was therefore locked up in prison, where he wrote this as a plea for non-violent resistance through non-cooperation with the government, and that it influenced among others Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. This disquisition comes courtesy, I believe, of an introduction to that essay, which is one of those cases where after reading the thorough and unobjectionable introduction the tiny flame of curiosity for the book proper has extinguished itself. She ended up buying a different philosophical work and intermittently commanding her little white-and-orangey-brown dog to staaayyy. As she paid and received a little bag for her purchase and I asked whether she would like a receipt, the dog growled here and there, and she cheerfully remarked to him in an aside how nice it was of him to protect her. Which is in retrospect kind of funny; at the time I was thinking absentmindedly that his growling sounded like mild disembodied thunder so that one couldn't really tell where the little dog left off and the noise beyond the shop began.

One of the ordered books was the Nicomachean Ethics, so I asked the customer whether he was reading it for a course, but he said just for leisure and seemed to genuinely enjoy looking forward to the prospect; he wondered why I was surprised at the purchase and I said that I'd tried to read the Poetics and found it very tough going, and mumbled something about laconic language. He said that he had to check the glossary for practically every page but otherwise it was fine. So I'll take his word for it and admire a better man than I.

In German translation and likewise in a R*** edition (I mention it culturally and not advertisingly, hence the asterisks) the Poetics weren't so bad, however, though I never finished it or indeed broached more than a fourth or so of it, and I think the point is mainly to describe what plays were like in Aristotle's time and a major point in reading it is to see which blueprints playwrights have followed or sworn off following ever since. The stuff about poetry being like dancing in rhythm, etc. and so forth, didn't seem all that interesting. The true ordeal was when Papa and I once started the beginning of his Metaphysics in the original, and despite our Greek courses had to look up terms constantly whilst my not so carefully cultivated grammatical knowledge unravelled at the critical junctures, and I still have no idea what the words with half a dozen definitions like thymos exactly mean. Doubtless it would be better today, but I still think that Aristotle dominates the fine art of making one feel that one has made no progress in grasping anything.

Anyway, the second pair of people has walked by with a Christmas tree, so on that note (also since Mama has come in) I will end this post!

A Winter's Peroration

Snow is falling again, but this time as a dust. The tree branches are still highlighted in white, curves of snow slide along the street lamps, icicles hang from the radiators of cars, and many cars bear a fleecy hood. Along the streets it has been threshed into grey lumps, and on the sidewalks either stomped into an uncomfortable hard carpet or marked sparingly in footprints and lone tire treads, or scraped and mixed with gravel and sand. It has slumped on the apartment roofs and left the topmost tiles half-bare, crowding at the gutters.

I've been here at the bookshop for an hour or so, and so far have had little to do except pull out a letter from the mail slot and record its arrival in my chronicle of events. There is a bag of gummy bears which accompanied a past shipment from the book delivery service which we use, and I have been profiting by that, and I read a small portion of The Age of Napoleon, lit a cone of incense, and began revising the beginning of a blog post about Persuasion. Altogether I have done a lot of draft work for the Lighthouse blog, but after spending much time over The Canterville Ghost yesterday decided that it would be best to write about it when I'm older, because my insights seemed neither very original nor very profound, I wasn't quite reading the story in the spirit in which it was written, and besides the draft post itself didn't correspond to my ideal of a book review. Whether rightly or wrongly I have had the sense in the past months of having to write anything I write ex cathedra, as it were, and not to publish anything which I wouldn't still find reasonably accurate, good and worthwhile in ten years. What this partly means is to write a good deal and follow trains of thought as far as they go before deciding to remove unimportant or imperfect passages and to boil down the rest, or to abandon it entirely as a sacrifice on the altar of literary judgment.

Where writing is concerned the historical tales are dormant. The newest incarnation of the one set in the time of Henry VIII began well, but I felt that I had reached not the 16th century but rather an odd intermediary point, and besides there were still a great many details to research and character traits to figure out. Only the plot could come on its own, since I have blatantly filched the outline from elsewhere and as for the rest have no reason not to think that the story will come of itself as I write, which has been the case in the past and is much more enjoyable through the element of surprise than most things my plodding brain could evolve. Recently I started a scientific book by Marat, in which he describes the origins of the modern understanding of electricity, and though not disposed to like him politically found myself liking the book. Other than that I have done precious little for the French Revolution research. The Age of Napoleon has reached the Age of Napoleon and mostly left behind the Revolution, so its continuing pertinence is slight.

Yesterday evening Ge. and Papa prepared a large dinner of Indonesian noodles, as it is termed in our family, and I helped cut up the leeks for it. My latest method is to remove the outermost layer or two, rinse the leek, chop off the stalk to be sliced, then to remove the outermost leaf or two, rinse it, chop off the stalk, and so on and so forth, and if it falls apart to "reconstitute" it. I was worried that the purple-silvered leaves would be tough, but they melted away. It was delicious and I had two large portions of it. Other than that I made carrot cake twice in the last week of November, once with a cream cheese, butter, and icing sugar frosting which was to my dismay yellow and fluid instead of white and stiff, and once with thick icing concocted of icing sugar, warm water, vanilla extract, and Cointreau. The second icing was fiendishly saccharine but I had no objection.

The next project I am meditating is a dulce de leche coffee: hot coffee, dulce de leche dissolved in it, kahlua, sugared whipping cream, and grated chocolate. I believe that would be called "moreish" in the British jargon. I found it on the website of a famous cooking blogger from, I think, Oklahoma, whose website is recommended on Jezebel quite often and which quite reliably has recipes for things my siblings would actually eat. Then there is a butterscotch eggnog recipe from the New York Times's food section. Besides I have been thinking of cooking a Scottish meal with a cranachan for dessert, and a medieval banquet with beer and things served on our wooden cutting boards (to be rechristened "trenchers"), and a French breakfast with croissants and delicate meats and brie and jams and hot cocoa (er, chocolat frappé) or tea or coffee or a combination thereof. But since the dishes have been piling up into a species of kitchen Mordor and I am still very antsy about washing the dishes in wintertime after the way my hands blew up and sprouted hives three or so winters ago, these may remain daydreams.

This year the Christmas season has been relaxed and low-key. St. Martin arrived quickly in the midst of other occupations, so I didn't even think of working on a lantern until the day had arrived and pretty much gone; the first Advent Sunday came in with some fanfare; and we celebrated St. Nicholas on the day before, which is to say that I slept in while some of the others had breakfast, and showed up in the early evening to find a lot of chocolate on my plate. When Papa was travelling in the U-Bahn a BVG Nicholas was on his rounds and so he ended up with a teddy bear key chain, and at work Mama received a package containing the Ferrero triumvirate of Rocher, Küsschen, and Mon Cheri. I've been thinking that maybe Christmas is more a holiday for children, which to put it baldly makes theological sense because of the "child" in Christ Child; but though in past years I have felt that I could hear the creaking and groaning of the industrial Christmas machine winding into gear around September and then cranking out a deluge of advertising into January, this year I am an insider at least in the book industry and therefore don't find it so artificial or overwhelming. So I'm not particularly grinchy and, though still inclined to be gloomy about selfconscious, intentional (the German word "vorsätzlich" popped into my head; can't think of the right English term for now) dogoodery and benicery, don't devote that much time to thinking about it.

On television in the past week there was another cooking documentary on Arte, one of my favourite genres. This time the protagonist was a French woman who hunts for truffles with her pig — quite a nice, tidy-looking pink pig as pigs go — and makes black truffle omelette, truffled boiled eggs, chicken stuffed with truffles, and rabbit, and serves the latter to a round of friends each in their own way carrying on a local tradition, for instance hunting truffles with hounds (more expensive than pigs, since they must be trained, and prone to distractions, whereas as long as there are no acorns nearby pigs are apparently exemplary in their devotion to the task at hand) and tending the rabbits.

On the piano I have been looking at Schumann's piano concerto again. I liked it and didn't love it at first, and maybe the same holds true now, but the more I work with it the more I like it and the deeper I dig into its substance. It is teaching me to take time with the music, to tie the notes together better in a legato and to tackle specific scales, and so on. Of course there is a value in playing it as slowly as I am, because it leaves me more time to notice things and because it is much easier to solve problems that crop up at a mild speed than at a furious one, though one can play absentmindedly as easily in one mode as in the other, and I think it is good mental exercise to find enough in the music that one isn't frustrated by the length. I think playing a passage quickly and discovering a macrorhythm or macrophrase is more of a trick than a true enrichment of the music, though of course it is often integral to the music, in composers like Liszt and Bach (where the melody is sometimes very well hidden amid the counterpoint, I think) the music is practically devoid of sense without it, and if one wants to play professionally people demand that one observe it.

I revisited Bach's Concerto in d minor recently, too, and enjoyed it much more than before, because though this is an undignified metaphor it feels like a very meat-and-potatoes sort of music, nourishing and strong and warm, though I still find the second movement desolate — and technical difficulties no longer interfere so much with this quality. Revisiting a Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt was not as uplifting, though the tedious clinkery of the Friska and so on went reasonably well for sightreading, and I didn't play through to the end. Then I came across the Satie "Gymnopédie" which I remember playing for an exam, and arrangements of The Nutcracker, and the Christmas songbook which I am playing through a couple of songs at a time. Besides there is a Haydn sonata, and anything else which recommends itself at least for a glance.

On the reading front I began to read romance novels on the internet again. It was much easier to do it bravely and cheekily when the only alternative was to do dutiful things, be bored, and become depressed again, and less easy to do it now. It was a little intimidating when we were forced to pay 500 Euros for bit-torrenting (which has also killed some of my enjoyment of YouTube, because I still fear the day when a long letter of twenty-something pages will come listing all of the films I've watched in violation of copyright and extorting a bullshit — pardon the language, but it is suited to the context — sum for each of them) and when a host of viruses, Trojan horses and rootkits and spy agents, ran riot on the computer where I mostly read them. On Sunday, I think, I copied our files onto a USB stick and then (also with Gi.'s help) reinstalled Windows on that computer, and since then there have been protracted searches for the CD required to install the network driver, the printer, and so on and so forth. The whole has inspired me to learn more about computers and the internet, though so far I have read only a measly handful of pages in a JavaScript textbook from 1997.

I have become so paranoid about the internet that it isn't funny, somewhat justified by a recent problem with Facebook in which my account was purportedly accessed from Munich and I'm not sure whether that is just indirectly our computer or not, and being shut out of my risky Gmail account (which is no longer my risky Gmail account since I used it for Facebook and don't want all those details getting out). I'm sure it takes all kinds to make a world, but I find it increasingly difficult to understand why hackers are willing to waste their time to waste the time of billions of others, in a very invasive way, and to endanger the livelihoods of people who must finish something on their computer for work in a given time, and so on. Even sociopolitical hackery like 4chan's on VISA or whoever in retaliation for barring donations to Wikileaks is in the end a pain in the hindquarters for everyone besides the executives who promulgate such decisions. I find it darnedly tedious to change passwords so often and can't be certain that information recovery, etc., isn't phishing. Besides I hate the laxity with which the sphere of internet privacy is regarded by governments and courts.

Reading the news, listening to music, drawing things, writing things, corresponding with friends and businesses and so on, commenting on things you see and hear or do, are all profoundly private things. Crime, politics, and the intentional offer of goods and services are public things, and even there one has more choices in real life — for example, if one has a shop one can choose its neighbourhood and therefore have a manageable category of customers whose seriousness one can gauge in person, instead of being open to any customer, spurious, honest, or otherwise. Though I admit that here at the bookshop there has been non-virtual spam, too, some of it well-meaning and some of it truly not kosher.

Anyway, this has become a long and fairly indiscriminate ramble despite the ex cathedra principle. But I'll call it stream of consciousness and send it.

*

Words are like leaves, and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

(Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism)

The Sea-Gnarlies

Something I began to write last night. It is inspired by all the photos of Brittany which I've looked at for my research, specifically of the Abbey of St. Mathieu and the Baie des Trepassés. It's probably nonsense but I find it intriguing.

THE winter wind drove grey ridges of snowy-peaked waves against the cliffs, which thousands of summers had burnished into a dark clay red, and up in a fleeting mist which scattered furling to rain even onto the downtrodden heather at their edge. In every direction the rock was seamed, into and along every seam the brine and the wind ran, and the boulders in strange Neolithic forms which stood as towers in the bereft sands at low tide were now lightless houses on water-embowered islets.

A strange sound arose on the winds as they strafed the long-untenanted shell of an abbey, curved around the pillar of the lighthouse, sought the hollows among the gorse and the grasses, and whipped into a shiver the flexible twigs of dormant oaks and sombre pines. Even the river which ran into the bay was agitated as it swelled with a sudden cargo of rainwater.

Up from the shore crept the sea-gnarlies, the gnomes of sealskin pelts and tiny eyes buried in wrinkles and mighty tiny bodies, who sleep in the crevices in the sea floor and emerge only when a submarine tension and tremor signals a commotion on the surface. Then they hunt for their food: the stray corpse of fish or lobster or other creature which lands on the shore, oysterbeds and scallops and rope-encircled posts of mussels, unwary seabirds abroad on the same errand, and even a human. When they had scaled the cliffs with their fierce fingernails and toenails they brushed through the heather with a soft furtive sound, scratching here and there at patches of grass to bare the insects in the soil, and pinching or skewering or grabbing fistfuls of the resistant prey before swallowing them with grim joviality as amuse-bouches.

Down they crept to a swathe of boulders, gambolling through the surf and diving deep to the stone hidden by the winter tides, to pry the barnacles with their teeth and draw the crustacean innards into their mouths.

Through the abbey flitted the grey forms of the friars, not the ghosts of the dead friars but the ghosts of the living friars they had been eight hundred years since and as the eerie phantoms of their dream selves: amoral, unperceptive, yet arrested at moments into consciousness and intelligence. They copied Latin tales onto invisible scrolls, relived bawdy encounters, vituperated their head abbot and the bishop or some papal bull from Rome which had long since sunk into obscurity, complained about the rude and uncivilized folk among whom they unwillingly lived, cultivated vegetables or flowers or orchards which had long since withered and crumbled, or fought supernatural battles with angels and demons, dragons and selkies, and the wolves and boars and robbers which haunted the environs of the abbey or the regions of France from which they had once come.

In the nineteenth-century lighthouse which stood rooted in the land of the abbey but rose from it like a thriving sapling from a moribund trunk, the keepers’ dream selves, too, held vigils, each unaware of the other. And it was a peculiar contrast to see the automated beacon turning, beaming, flashing, turning, beaming, and flashing, as the weather station recorded the wind speeds and temperature and air pressure of its own accord, while the former tenants in their old-fashioned manner and dress employed antiquated invisible devices and measurements recorded in invisible ledgers, or sent radio messages to people who did not exist, and perceived and described eerily enough the weather conditions as they were in actuality. These mundane dreams alternated, too, with dreams of war, shipboard travails, imaginary fiends and adventures, and distant families and loves.

Oldest of all, the vague white shapes of Neolithic men and women mingled with the similar weak figures of tree-spirits and the solid stony outlines of Roman soldiers, who were for the most part not at ease and some of whom bore the bloody marks of axes and celts and spears on their persons. These were oddly pragmatic and therefore enacted the scenes of daily cooking, warfare, sailing, grave ceremonies around tumuli and dolmens, and gatherings among parades of stones across the heath, and still at times the Romans dreamed of their origins in the Mediterranean basin, and faintest wisps of almond trees, dolphins, the splashing of the wine-dark sea against a brighter shore, or the sirocco even manifested themselves in this adverse northern climate.

[. . .]

The sea-gnarlies were by no means, however, the only living beings abroad, even disregarding the gulls, cormorants, porpoises, and other animals. There were the Liths, boulder trolls who resembled the Romans in their grey girth but were far less anthropoid in form; the Liths sipped riverwater and ate sand from the shore and, having no need of alternative nourishment, they were singularly unaggressive and they rarely spoke so as to be heard except by their kinsmen. These Liths, in fact, were lumbering down to the shore then, leaving no prints in the sand as they waded through, for it settled again at once.

Slubbering Over the Trianon

At the risk of being tiresome, I have idly begun reading Horace Walpole's letters again, and rediscovered a passage describing Versailles and King Louis XIV which I partially quoted long ago and which I want to share at length now. Firstly I like the ingenious turns of phrase and secondly the sarcasm and thirdly the way he sounds like any enervated traveller who catches an unsatisfying glimpse of a popular place and instantly falls in grudge. It was written in 1739 to Richard West.

Stand by, clear the way, make room for the pompous appearance of Versailles le Grand!----But no: it fell so short of my idea of it, mine, that I have resigned to Gray the office of writing its panegyric. He likes it. They say I am to like it better next Sunday; when the sun is to shine, the king is to be fine, the water-works are to play, and the new knights of the Holy Ghost are to be installed! Ever since Wednesday, the day we were there, we have done nothing but dispute about it. They say, we did not see it to advantage, that we ran through the apartments, saw the garden _en passant_, and slubbered over Trianon. I say, we saw nothing. However, we had time to see that the great front is a lumber of littleness, composed of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold rails. The rooms are all small, except the great gallery, which is noble, but totally wainscoted with looking-glass. The garden is littered with statues and fountains, each of which has its tutelary deity. In particular, the elementary god of fire solaces himself in one. In another, Enceladus, in lieu of a mountain, is overwhelmed with many waters. There are avenues of water-pots, who disport themselves much in squirting up cascadelins. In short, 'tis a garden for a great child. Such was Louis Quatorze, who is here seen in his proper colours, where he commanded in person, unassisted by his armies and generals, and left to the pursuit of his own puerile ideas of glory.

(From Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Charles Duke Yonge and published in 1890; at gutenberg.org)

Soccer's Golden Fleece

Given an interesting sleeping schedule I only watched a minute or so of Portugal vs. North Korea before nodding off on the sofa. Since I liked the Korean team in their first match, against Brazil,the seven goals against it would probably not have been an edifying spectacle anyway. Besides dancing on the grave of the vanquished has scanty charm; even Germany's 4-0 win against Australia was a little depressing for me.

When I woke up again Switzerland began its match against Chile, which I followed intently during the second half. I found myself hoping that the Swiss would win though the Chileans looked marginally better and, either because of the red card against the Swiss or for other reasons, the players in white kit were clearly on the defensive in a tacit admission of subordination. Even then the defense, though staunchly arrayed in its two rows every now and then, was not so agile and indeed dreadfully porous. Which may have been an "offside trap" (today's the first time I really took note of the term; I imagine it means that the defense loiters toward midfield so that any opposing players who break through are offside and may not attempt a goal). Either way the Swiss, even with one player down, doughtily preserved their 0-1 loss, as was the fate of the similarly disadvantaged Germans in their ridiculously, pedantically refereed game last week, so good for them. The Chilean team may be all right but I don't find it either very sympathetic nor brilliant, and the lovely fluent passing which distinguished its match against Honduras and was brilliant appeared to clash and vanish against the methodology of the Swiss, with the result that the game was a fairly unenlightening 90+overtime minutes of deconstructed brawling over a wide area.

***

Intermittently I played the final movement of Schubert's sonata D959 until 2-4 pages before the end. The theme is lovely but the rest of it is an example of what is commonly remarked, that Schubert can't bring himself to finish his sonatas at times. Why people don't say this more often of Beethoven compositions I can't fathom, and personally I haven't felt bored, precisely, by the three last sonatas of Schubert's. Besides I am unfairly inclined to grumble that whoever minds hearing out a Schubert sonata is deficient either in soul or in the elementary talent of tuning music out and daydreaming if you are bored. But in this case, considering that it was sightreading and therefore not the pinnacle of musical fluidity, I had to concede that enough is as good as a feast.

Three or four years ago I listened to Alfred Brendel's recordings and, though with the very last sonata Papa's and Clara Haskil's versions fortunately come to mind, and though at the time I liked his recordings, the memory of it in my ear is a tremendous obstacle to finding my own approach, and a hopefully characteristic approach, to Schubert. One thing that doesn't come out in recordings as much, I think, as in quotidian sightreading, is that Schubert can be immensely weird. The second movement of D959, which is in my view initially bitter and melancholic (I think that the saddest movements of Schubert are most faithfully rendered when they pluck at the heartstrings in a jarringly wrong and discordant way, though of course the composer resolves this with a happier movement or key soon afterward), but also uncomplicated and lovely, is tangled chaos by the second page.

* * *

Inspired by its match against Chile, and pending egregious displays of ineptitude or of poor sportsmanship, I have adopted Honduras as the World Cup team for whom to cheer. In the game against Spain, though they appeared overwhelmed at times, they gave a good battle. They passed well amongst each other and even did the billiard-like passes (which I love) where the ball deflects off the foot of one teammate to surely arrive at another's. Besides they were diligent and courageous about running for and through the ranks of Spanish defenders, and parrying for the ball with even multiple opponents, instead of just passing off the ball to a teammate in a freer position. And I have the impression that Honduras's goalkeeper is really quite good. Though evidently better than Honduras, I didn't think that Spain showed glimmerings of especial brilliance; yet its first goal was, to borrow from the British(?) vernacular, a corker. Fortunately the game was not sabotaged by silly refereeing, though the incident of the nose-stubbing of an Honduran by a Spanish player did suggest a yellow card, since neither player was near the ball and it was a disagreeable piece of aggression. But the nose didn't bleed, so the principal sanguinary spectacle was the split lip and spewing blood of a Spanish player.

It's not very saintly but I think that fouls have their place in soccer, if they aren't done with intent to inflict pain or debilitate (the jargon for debilitating fouls is evidently a "reducer"). It was funny in Spain vs. Honduras how the experienced players simply hopped over extended feet, etc., so that the shabby tricks were rendered ridiculous; what was even lovelier was the way the Hondurans and Chileans tumbled like acrobats during their game against each other, and gave as good as they got instead of one side victimizing the other. On the other hand it is simple to cause a nasty injury, so it's best not to tempt fate. And I really detest fouls as a risky, lazy shortcut in lieu of acquiring the ball through classic footwork and speed, and of running as quickly as possible to head off an opponent.

What I detest even more is the pretense of having been fouled. A little ankle-clutching now and then may have no further effects if the referee is unimpressed, and sometimes players who indulge in acting have really been fouled and are only seeking redress (though if the foul was really that bad they wouldn't have to act out suffering). And of course soccer players are genuinely injured and put at risk of losing their careers from time to time in a way which the casual television viewer cannot feel through the screen. But the dramatic facsimile of agonizing pain which would not look out of place in medieval paintings of inventive martyrdom — glass shards and heated iron grilles and all — is an insult to real injuries; it unfairly biases the game in favour of the ham; and depending on the circumstances it could give the other player involved a totally undeserved sense of guilt. Not to mention that it's unkind to deceive the referee and make him an accomplice to one's cheating.

Lastly, as a certain player who obtained the second yellow card which turned into a red card for Kaká proved, in the age of video and replays it is a stupid step, though it must be confessed that there are supposed fouls or handballs or so on which I watch over and over again and thereafter still don't know what happened.

* * *

Which brings me to the sorry quandary of France at the World Cup. The following may be entirely made up, partly because of the vagaries of reading comprehension and memory and partly because the press isn't always reliable, but here is a version of events:

Thanks to the gossip on the Guardian blogs I gather that Zinedine Zidane was really the coach for France during the last Cup here in Berlin, and that he and Raymond Domenech (who is himself sketchy as a coach also because he has used astrology to decide for instance which player is placed where on the line-up, like Louis XI in Quentin Durward, and in any case is not much respected by the team) are at loggerheads. Besides I'm guessing that it may have demoralized the team that they advanced into the World Cup because Thierry Henry's handball in the game against Ireland wasn't acted on by the referee. Before the game with Uruguay two players asked Domenech to change the formation to a different one and he agreed, only to find out that the formation had been suggested by Zidane, whereupon he rescinded. Then came the inglorious tie.

In the next match came the inglorious defeat against Mexico, in which Thierry Henry, punitively kept on the bench, sat in his thick dark blue jacket and crossed his arms in Achilles-like disgruntled exile from battle. So the France was deprived of a good striker and played with what I thought were flashes of genius and of effort for instance on the part of Franck Ribéry, but with a resignation to failure, middlingness, and a gaping lack of cooperation. I admit to feeling somewhat weepy after that game. And every time the camera went to Domenech, he just stood there, leaning against the pole and looking inscrutable, except for one time where he gestured in exasperation.

Afterwards, of course, it turns out that the striker Nicolas Anelka had flared up at the manager during halftime and indulged in a very rude sentence, which I imagine to be common if sadly unimaginative language in the sports milieu, even if directing it against a coach is unwise. For some reason French officials, though they hail from a nation which might be thought to view these things in blasé fashion, declared themselves shocked! and Anelka has been sent home. In the meanwhile, Patrice Evra, captain of the French team (I'm glad not to be in his shoes), professed himself understandably disappointed at the weak effort exemplified in the game against Mexico. Regarding Anelka's remarks both he and Zinedine Zidane stated to the press that they were out of place and that no one was seeking to defend them as proper behaviour, but that removing him from the French team was going too far.

And of course in the next training session the French team showed up but refused to train in support of their fallen banished comrade, leading to an altercation whereafter the field fitness coach (a self-appointed intermediary) stormed off in a huff and threw down his badge in the process. Then intervention of Sarkozy, and so on and so forth, and now they've trained again, though on an inauspiciously thunderous day where, according to the AP video footage I saw, the sky was about as lively in tint as the cellar of an Irish grey stone mansion. What is questionable is whether the team will appear in full number (aside from Anelka, of course) for the match against South Africa tomorrow. [Which, it seems, I'll have to mostly miss because of a summons to the bank. )c,: What rotten, rotten luck.]

*

Anyway, what I don't understand is the puritanical slant of the animosity against the French players. The World Cup is not a pristine event.

There is corruption and match-fixing, the betting around the game outcomes has its shadows like any other gambling, the staff are partly ill-paid, the funds expended on the stadium will hopefully bring joy to many South Africans but may also have deprived many others who live on welfare and so on, and it is to a great extent likewise a capitalist orgy of dubiously ethical companies seeking to put their brand on the "beautiful game." The fans are maybe serious devotees of the game; others seem like self-aggrandizers who expect people they've never met to live out their dreams, and some hound the players and deprive them of their right to privacy. Maybe they have enough money to buy tickets to the game without pain, maybe they are dipping into household funds or denying themselves better things for the privilege of taking chaotic transportation to an enormous arena and then taking their place on the hard and loveless benches of the modern amphitheatre. The soccer players themselves are on a strict training regimen, constricted in what they eat and what they do and where they go, and even if they are rich, wealth brings its own problems and I doubt if it is any substitute for freedom, uninterrupted schooling, and the time to develop other interests and skills. Besides they have to play so many games with their teams (Chelsea, Bayern München, Real Madrid, etc.) and then in regional competitions and then in the qualifiers and friendlies before the World Cup; after a while, why should they care? The commentators on the game may, like the fans, be serious devotees of the game; others are resentful pedants who are envious of the players or who look down on them as numbskulled pawns or who always believe that the players could and should have done something better.

If someone tires of the hypocrisy of the game, of their powerlessness to determine how they play even though they are the ones who must carry it out, or of the illusion that the Cup is of transcendent importance compared to different issues (even mundane ones of leading a reasonable life), I am glad that they have the courage to rebel, and I am glad if their teammates support them in this rebellion. I never thought I'd quote this approvingly, but after all the devise of France is Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

A Humming Piano and Soccer Stadia

Since the inaugural game between South Africa and Mexico I have determined to plunge wholeheartedly into the World Cup, and so have seen I believe at least two minutes, and read the entire minute-by-minute reports on the guardian.co.uk, for every game so far. J., Ge. and I have taken to reading the reports out loud, by turns, and intoning "Gooooaaal!" in unison whenever it occurs.

I find that it is not making me much wiser as to the rules of the game, strategy, etc., or indeed about soccer in general, but it is interesting nonetheless and I like observing everything. Today I woke up toward the end of the Holland-Denmark match and saw maybe the last ten minutes, watched the Japan-Cameroon game more, and then followed the Italy-Paraguay game for the first half before being forced to desist in the second half because someone thought that an episode of Tatort was must-see television. At which point I threw a play-tantrum and stormed off to find something else to do.

For much of the remaining time the computer which I prefer for internet activities was occupied (by T., unobjectionably dispatching university coursework and being an example to us all). So I nursed a headache with much holding of cool hand to forehead (like a Victorian lady with the vapours, come to think of it), drinking of salted water and a tiny glass of port, lying down, and at long last an aspirin. On the piano I went through the Kinderszenen, other little Schumann works, one of Chopin's Etudes ("Revolutionary," for the first time) and the Raindrop Prelude, a movement or three from Bach Partitas 1 and 3, etc. Last evening I watched music clips from medici.tv's YouTube channel, and even though they were samplers of perhaps three to four minutes' length at most, they were inspiring. (Though I will not be playing a keyboard arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" any time soon, and listening to the four-piano version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was like four tiny pneumatic drills taking up residence in my brain; you really need the varied timbre and flexibility of a chamber orchestra to render the music endearingly.)

Then I basted together more of the torn lace in the collar of a nightgown, prepared a fresh batch of homemade moth paper (letter-size printer paper left over from Canada + cloves + dried thyme leaves + considerable smashing so that spice/herb oils soak into paper, dusted off and folded in half and cut into strips to lay in between the clothing), and shook out a pair of pants which had lain in the moth-infested pile. I must find a clever way to store clothing. The best way has the disadvantage of being inelegant and musty, and I am still skeptical if it works; I have not seen a solitary moth in clothes when I bundle them into plastic shopping bags and hang them from doorknobs, our clothes-rack, etc. . . . On second thoughts, my quibbles are insane.

[Pause while I scramble off to remove some of the piled-up clothing into a bag and hang it up.]

Besides I've been going through Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin again, which was one of my projects during the year after high school graduation. I haven't made much progress yet, but most of this is mindless review; for instance the uses of the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and ablative are still present in my mind even if my knowledge of their endings even in the first and second declensions is faltering. Either way I'm still in the "equus laborat - equi laborant" stage. But I did reach a set of quotations from Latin literature, some of which I already memorized during the gap year and have been pompously citing to Mama when they seem apposite ever since. "Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant," is one, and "O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit, consul videt," is another. But "Verberat nos et lacerat fortuna" can be used in many situations too, and then there's a long one with "Interea Eos"* or something, from Virgil, which though a pain to memorize might replace the refrain of "Cast off the shackles of yesterday" from Mary Poppins as my all-purpose quotation a propos of toil.

*[*cough* I meant "Aurora interea miseris mortalibus," etc. The other quotations are from Tacitus, Cicero, and Seneca, respectively.]

Anyway, to return to the World Cup, I did find the Germany-Australia match last evening very good, and though it irritated me greatly when the ARD channel's commentator kept bemoaning the horridness of the Japan-Cameroon match (now that was a chaotic mess, and I thought it highly unfair that it wasn't a draw because they were both tremendously lousy) especially in comparison to the German performance yesterday, I have to admit that it did set a high bar. Its specific merits: the precision of the passes, intricate set-ups for goal attempts, way in which the players would not just roll the ball to the closest teammate when they were haplessly stuck in midfield but would really look for an opening and also pass the ball far across to a teammate if he was in a good position, clever footwork, and the absence of impatient kicks in the general direction of the goal whenever a forward became tired of fending off the opposing team's defence. It was also a pretty clean game where diving and fouling were concerned. The Australian team was clearly not as good but they didn't give up hope, were fast and reasonably agile, and played in a strong aggressive spirit without committing horrid fouls. (As far as I could tell.) But the straight red card for the Australian Tim Cahill did seem disproportionate and mean.

Where the teams are concerned, I am not "rooting" for any one in particular, though it would be highly reprehensible of me not to support Germany. The three teams which have impressed me are Germany and Argentina and Paraguay, though in the latter case it was admittedly because my expectations had been low. I still dislike Italy's team from the last World Cup, and specifically have not gotten over the resentment about the Materazzi-Zidane incident; besides which I am suspicious about their ethics regarding diving and the like. But if they prove a good team I wouldn't want them to lose unfairly. Altogether I tend to find myself being "for" a team in the course of a match, only to forget all about the preference when someone from the opposite team is launching himself on a good run for the goal.

As for the vuvuzelas, I can still hear them sometimes when I'm not watching the game at all, but for some reason am heatedly in their favour. Having lived in the countryside/suburbs I've been surrounded and menaced by my fair share of buzzing flies and wasps, and have felt a visceral dislike of the noise, but these horn-thingies sound benign and are relatively easy to ignore. Perhaps it's snobbish, but I've never been fond of the mindless colosseum roar anyway. If the horns seriously bother someone, though, I'll understand if they're banned. Anyway, as many others have pointed out, the "expert" soccer commentary on TV is all too often far more irritating, boring, and mindnumbing. And tediously condescending to Africa (which is evidently still considered as a country instead of a continent).

The Third Estate; or, a House Divided

It is the early morning again. I've spent much of the night reading the letters of Madame du Deffand, a booklet entitled Les prérogatives du Tiers-Etat, and the elucidations on proper attire in "Horseback Riding 101" (Suite 101.com), looking at photos from Brittany which are much beautified by the sunshine and the May flowering of the gorse on the cliffs, and listening to music in the background as usual.

The following is a reaaallly long discursion on what I've been reading in the way of historical source material, and if the boredom becomes overpowering, please feel free to skip it!

***

Les prérogatives du Tiers-Etat is an oddity, its stated author being an anonymous duchess who had been elevated from low birth to her title by virtue of fortune, and its actual author apparently being Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli. Published apparently in 1789, in the thick of the Estates-General, it is a heated defense of the Third Estate and its right to political representation. It begins with the narrating duchess's indignant statement that many noble houses have contracted marriages to commoners so that their dignity and possessions and lifestyle are shored up by the wealth which they previously did not possess, and that therefore the aristocracy has no right to distance itself from the supposed lower class.

In History 120, I think, we were told that while in the English aristocracy the law of primogeniture governed inheritances — which means that the property and title would pass on to the eldest son, while the younger sons had to become clergymen, officers, or something else respectable to earn their living, as any Jane Austen reader will know well —, in France the property was divided among the children. I had difficulties understanding how the French system works until I remembered fairy tales where for example the eldest son gets the house, the middle son the mill, and the youngest the donkey. So it may be absurdly untrue, but I'm guessing that over time properties were divided up until the parcels of inherited land were too little to generate much revenue to live upon. But I hadn't heard of marriages between aristocrat males and plutocrat females in this century and country at all, and at first found it difficult not to feel as if I had hopped into an Edwardian satire (or tediously lachrymose portrait à la Henry James) of marriages between crude but loaded Americans with useless but titled Britishers.

At times I found the Duchess character far too strident, but I did laugh at this scene:

[M. le Duc, mon cher époux] apprit dès ce moment à me connoître. Je commençai par lui prouver, d'un ton encore plus fier que le sien, qu'il n'y a de vraie grandeur que celle de l'ame; que nous sommes tous égaux dans le premier principe, & que l'incomparable Métastase n'a jamais mieux parlé que lorsqu'il a dit il nascere e caso, & non virtu: la naissance est une chose fortuite & non une vertu : je terminai la leçon par me faire apporter des sacs d'or, par en répandre les rouleaux avec profusion sur la table & les remuer à grand bruit, tout en disant, voilà mon aïeul, mon bisaïeul, mon quadrisaïeul, &c.

Le stratagème réussit, comme je m'y attendois [. . .].

In English: "[The Duke, my dear spouse] learned to know me from this moment. I began by proving to him, in tones prouder still than his, that there is no true grandeur but that of the soul; that we are all equal in the foremost principle, & that the incomparable Metastasio has never spoken better than when he said il nascere e caso, & non virtu: birth is a fortuitous thing and not a virtue. I concluded the lesson by having sacks of gold fetched, by profusely spreading the rolls on the table and stirring them with great noise, whilst saying, here is my grandsire, my great-grandsire, my great-great-grandsire, &c. The stratagem succeeded, as I had expected [. . .]."

After this the booklet, the author shedding the lusty persona of the duchess, takes a detour into a gentle allegory. A king is contemptuous of commoners (roturiers) until the day when he lands in a pool and is on the point of drowning, the gentlemen of the court standing about impotently since they cannot swim, until a couple of low-born men dive in and fish him out.

Much surprised to find that his valiant courtiers had not come to the rescue, he listens with interest as his jester suggests that the Third Estate does quite as much for him as the nobility, and decides to test this idea the following day. Of course the moment he awakens the servants are already pulling open the curtains, lighting the fire, bringing his clothes, cooking his breakfast, etc., and when all dressed he goes to conduct business with his two secretaries, of course these are commoners. Later he reads books and wanders in the gardens tended by, and hunts with the assistance, basks in the art and architecture and theatre, and listens to the music of commoners. In the newspapers, written by . . . commoners, he is instructed of the grand patriotic contributions of . . . commoners. When narrative expediency ignites a fire underneath the king's window, it is extinguished by . . . commoners. Etc.

Overwhelmed by the burden of empirical evidence, and not much impressed by any magnificent contribution on the part of his courtiers, the king is converted to an admirer of the Third Estate. But when during a hunt his life is imperilled at the tusks of the boar, a gentleman leaps in to save him, and the king recognizes that the First Estate likewise serves its purpose and has its merits. ("[ . . ] alors il reconnut que toutes les classes des citoyens sont également nécessaires; qu'il seroit absurde d'en rejetter une, pour en élever une autre.")

The narrator draws this lovely — and, in my opinion, very thought-provoking — tale to a close, and then goes on to paint a highly improbable (satirical?) picture of the saintly commoners, who are kinder to the impoverished aristocrat than many of his peers, etc. And then he describes the meek ambitions of the Third Estate and its absolute respect for the nobility:

il sait que la Noblesse a des priviléges incontestables auxquels les Rois mêmes ne peuvent ni doivent toucher. Eh! qui doute, que les Gentilshommes sont les remparts de la Monarchie, qu'ils l'ont toujours soutenue aux dépens de leur propre vie, & qu'il n'y a rien de plus respectable & de plus grand qu'une longue succession d'aïeux, qui, de père en fils, maintiennent la Couronne, & sont les suppôts de la Royauté. L'histoire se plaît à rapporter les epoques honorables pour la Noblesse, & le Tiers-Etat se plaît à les lire. Loin d'en être jaloux, il se félicite d'appartenir à une Royaume, où des noms consacrés par une antique bravoure éternisent sa splendeur.

In translation: "it knows that the Nobility possesses incontestable privileges which the Kings themselves neither can nor may touch. Well, who doubts that the Gentility are the ramparts of the monarchy, which they have always supported at the expense of their own life, & that there is nothing more respectable & greater than a long succession of ancestors who, from father to son, tend to the Crown & are the supports of the Monarchy? History pleases itself by reporting the honourable periods for the Nobility, & the Third Estate pleases itself by reading them. Far from being jealous, it felicitates itself upon belonging to a Kingdom, where the names consecrated by antique bravery immortalize its splendour."

It must be confessed that, while copying out this passage into my notes, in between the first sentence and the second, I inserted a note:

[N.B.: Choppy, choppy.]

Simply to evoke what precisely happened in the years after M. de Caraccioli or whoever published this effusion, and how the Nobility escaped this time without a hair on its collective head being hurt and with its inalienable privileges being preserved with utmost care.

Either way I like being made to think about the role of the aristocracy, and the role of the working class, and the ideal role of both. Besides which the booklet is an insight into the snobbery which characterized some of the upper class, and is in my view, though firmly entrenched in the mentality of the former, poised on the knife-edge where the Ancien Régime ends and the Republic begins.

***

I could go on and on. But I won't, for now. (c:

Euterpe and the Toad

It's late or early enough that the birds are twittering in great concentration and the sky has turned a bluer shade of midnight, and I guess that the volume of street traffic will swell soon.

This afternoon Uncle Pu came to visit, and to the accompaniment of chocolate and ice cream (I poured a little cognac over mine as an experiment and liked it) we all talked about matters political and otherwise for hours as usual.

Then Pudel and Papa and I had a chamber music session for the first time in months. First there were Haydn's trios in C, D and G major, and then a movement or so each of two Beethoven trios. Haydn went swimmingly and as far as I could tell we were easily and wholly absorbed in the congenial music. The portions where the piano has the melody didn't inspire as much terror because of the pressure to be note-perfect as they once did.

But the first Beethoven trio we tried was confusing. I don't know it well and didn't have the melody of the opening movement in my ear. Besides I found the theme of that movement a trifle meandering and boring. Whereas Papa and Pudel clearly like it. I guess that when playing chamber music it is harder to indulge one's enjoyable prejudices without trampling on the joy of other people. Zut alors!

Fortunately the Archduke trio is familiar. But in the Andante there are broken arpeggios in triplets or whatever they're called, which I had to painstakingly play through and couldn't fudge because the violin and cello were depending on me to keep the time (why are you asking me of all people to do that? was my unspoken question) and deliver the right cues.

In one of the Victorian/Edwardian-era books on music at gutenberg.org, I (mis)remember reading something to the effect that everyone has a scale or two which he plays unusually well. I like this positive outlook on the music pupil's capacities, meant to describe the humble beginner as much as the great performer, but it must be confessed that the reverse side of the coin is hopeless mediocrity in certain other scales. I am terrible at playing arpeggios, so they straggle along in ungainly manner and rarely if ever attain the dignity of melody. There is a Scarlatti sonata whose second half I often cravenly avoid playing just because the left hand is full of arpeggios and so it is usually twice as slow and half as delightful to hear as the rest of the piece.

Playing an instrument is a cycle of thinking and feeling the music, hearing the music as it is played, and the fingers carrying it out; one confirms the other, and problems that appear trivial can throw a decisive spanner in the works. As far as I can tell it doesn't matter if you are animated by the purest wellspring of inspiration which ever swelled the song of Euterpe, if your fingers are having a clumsy day; you feel the clumsiness, hear the clumsiness whereby it interferes with your guiding idea of the music and erodes your confidence, and so the clumsiness infects and muddies even your inspiration until everything is middling. Or, the other way around, if your fingers are nimble and ready, they can ignite an inspired mood even if you sat down at the piano with the soul of a disgruntled toad.

E.T.A.: The titles of these blog posts appear to be becoming very pretentious. My apologies.

A Mile-Long Essay by the Wayside

Over the weekend we celebrated J.'s and Gi.'s birthdays. The feasting comprised above all a chocolate chip cake, lemon cake, and marble cake, decorated with Smarties or M&Ms as the tradition demands.

Then I also spent much of Saturday baking Bienenstich, a pastry which is very popular in this household and which is concocted of a biscuity or yeasty dough, cut in half and filled with vanilla pudding, and topped with a caramelized layer of sliced almonds. I use the recipe in the Dr. Oetker Grundbackbuch. The pudding filling is too much of a fuss for me, so we always have pudding on the side. My preparation of the yeast dough (which intimidates me despite the dozens of times I've made it) was eccentric and would have struck horror into the soul of any professional baker, but once it was out of the oven the taste, texture and appearance were so perfect that they honestly did embody the Platonic ideal. We had no almonds so I substituted ground hazelnuts, which were equally delicious and looked like a baklava filling after they were mixed into the butter and sugar and milk.

***

At the piano I've been looking at Chopin's ballades and études and so on, but haven't so far managed to sightread the first pages or two with much justice, so I mostly give up and leaf on to the Raindrop Prelude and try yet again not to overpedal and to slur the chords in the left hand properly. Then, after coming across Schumann's Piano Concerto in a minor maybe a week ago (it's undoubtedly a major work, but I was ignorant of its existence) and bookmarking the recordings by Dinu Lipatti and Sviatoslav Richter on YouTube, I found a score in a pocket-book-sized edition on top of the piano, and played bits of it today for the first time. It is kind of fascinating seeing what all the other instruments are doing, especially because the scores for the other concertos I practice are all transcribed so that the orchestra's part is smushed into a second piano part. (Some day I'll have to learn the proper musicological terms for that.)

The reason why I've been playing the piano more than usual is because the attack on the Gaza flotilla knocked me for an emotional loop. After brooding about politics unhealthily during the Bush years I don't want to say or think hateful things, or lose sight of what actually goes on, or feel terrible every day again. So instead I played Beethoven's early sonatas, Chopin's Polonaise Héroïque, and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in g minor.

***

To return to politics, I thought a lot about writing to the Israeli government, simply expressing sorrow at what occurred, but vacillated too much and ended up not sending anything. Reading commentary on Gawker and Jezebel (especially the latter) lowered my blood pressure because it was often clear-eyed and sympathetic, and the news coverage in general reassures me that the press is fulfilling its task and that governments like the UK's, Spain's and Greece's are adequately defending the law. (Even the New York Times forbore from muttering about bad public relations in its first editorial on the subject, but instead wrote fairly and reminded its readers about the poverty and hunger in the Gaza Strip.)

But I am disappointed in the American and Canadian governments for suggesting that the Israeli government carry out its own probe into the incident. Practically no government could be trusted with such a probe at any level, and even the courts often fail with such cases. An example that comes to mind (though maybe there are extenuating circumstances I don't know about) is when New York police officers got away with shooting 50 bullets into an unarmed man (Sean Bell). So the suggestion is stupid, biased, and callous toward the people who died and their friends and relatives. It's not that I want to see revenge done; I just think that the propaganda must be effectively disproven so that the memory of the dead is not traduced, and perhaps some remorse instilled in the people who are responsible.

I'm surprised anyway that an Israeli voter would put up with the country's soldiers being ordered to commit outright piracy. But too many people evidently subscribe to the brainless belief that you can "ambush" soldiers who are illegally trying to take over your ship in international waters. Assigning the aggression to the people on board the Mavi Marmara is like walking into the wall of a library and then suing the municipality for building the wall there in the first place.

Which is not to say that I don't have huge problems with calling oneself a peace activist and then hitting someone with a baseball bat; I think if an activist does not decide to unresistingly endure imprisonment and ill-treatment should the situation befall him, he cannot call himself a peace activist. In this case I especially see a problem with hitting soldiers who are bearing weapons and boarding your ship but have not physically assaulted you (yet) or unequivocally signalled their intentions to do that. But maybe the "peace" label was fixed on the activists by someone else. Besides I don't quite understand why it takes 600 people to deliver the aid, except if they are trained in its distribution or if the principle was to have safety in numbers (that went well).

I think that a pragmatic approach to aid is best, basically acquire the supplies and make sure that they will actually be useful, find a direct and safe way to deliver them, deliver them, then leave. Besides I think that ordinary people can participate in cultural and other exchanges to relieve the isolation of those who live in the Gaza Strip. Political pressure has to go through diplomatic channels behind closed doors, I guess, and though I'm not sure if it has much of an effect in practice I think that unbiased reporting on events in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip is intensely valuable. But I think that personal pressure might work, too; if you're friends with an influential member of any government, I think that letting him or her know quite clearly and unaggressively what you've observed and which conclusions you've drawn, and if he really makes a wrongheaded decision making your disappointment succinctly but decidedly clear, could have a good effect on policy. Sensationalism and opinionmongering and righteous ranting are sometimes justified and effective but they do make something of a circus out of the suffering of others, the irony being that many people seem to like this circus and wouldn't care much about politics if that aspect were missing.

Anyway, I hope these thoughts weren't too inaccurate or offensive.

***

As for my French Revolution research (I could probably have led into this subject in some subtly clever way, but anyway), I've gone off on a tangent to read up on horses. It's reminding me of the two weeks spent in a children's horseriding camp with T. when I was ten years old or so, on the initiative of my grandmother. The camp was run a little like a cult: the trainers were hierophants, the older children or the ones who already had lessons the knowledgeable acolytes, and we the lowly neophytes. We had to navigate the intricacies of grooming and caring for the horses, and were threatened with dire anecdotes of wrongdoing which led to injury and death in the complex and fragile animals; I didn't like this fear-of-God pedagogy so much and would have liked friendlier explanations of how to treat horses kindly and without making honest and disastrous mistakes. What also played into the hierarchical character of the camp was the presumptive fact that many of the children were in private schools and wealthy, and rightly or wrongly I had the impression that they were a little snobby and spoiled and prone to Gossip-Girl-style backbiting, and frighteningly self-assured and well-educated, as the stereotype goes.

Either way it is unsurprising that I never caught the horse fever, though I did start drawing horses, diagramming the "tack" (saddle, girth, bridle, etc.), and borrowing a handful of relevant books from the library. Which effect even the moving literary travails of Black Beauty never had.

But considering how integral transportation by aid of horse was historically, I thought it high time to learn about it, and besides I still harbour fantasies of spending three to six months working on a horse or dude or cattle ranch in Australia or New Zealand or the US, or any kind of farm in North America or Europe outside of Germany (for reasons of the grass seeming more exciting on the other side of the border). Being jobless first of all it's difficult to grasp the reality of hard work, and secondly one feels the need to overcompensate for the inactivity. I've recognized to a degree that I genuinely prefer to sit around at home, but I think that this very preference is a problem in itself, though not one which I care for people to sit around in judgment on. The principal cause is that I don't expect to find anything worthwhile if I emerge from the apartment, because I've tried it and it wasn't fruitful; and until there is a job description or a job interview or anything that convinces me otherwise, that's the way it will remain.

An Epistolary Flower by the Wayside

Discovered this afternoon in the course of further French Revolution research:

Lettres de la Marquise Du Deffand à Horace Walpole, Tome III
(published in Paris, 1812)
Extract from a letter, CLXIII, written on Sunday, October 25th, 1773

Mon projet est de vous envoyer toutes sortes de rapsodies par M. Craufurd; je ne pénetre pas ce qui le retient ici [en France] si long-temps; ce n'est certainement pas parce qu'il s'y amuse. Il s'ennuie à la mort, et prétend toujours être fort malade; il n'y a jamais eu deux êtres plus différents que vous et lui. Je le vois tous les jours; je me crois un prodige de raison en comparaison de lui.

Source: Gallica.bnf.fr

Rightly or wrongly, Mme. du Deffand reminds me a little of my paternal grandmother. Certainly she is an ideal letter-writer and wit and warm friend to Walpole, even if the constant ego-stroking seems indelicate. When glimpses of sentimentality appear, it is neither sickly nor exaggerated.

I like the passage quoted above because it is so blunt but finely expressed, and does awaken some curiosity as to the personality of "M. Craufurd" even if based on the brief description his particular brand of recalcitrant obstinacy sounds like the petulance of a thoroughgoing bore.

But if he is (as a cursory websearch leads me to suspect) indeed Quentin/Quintin Craufurd, his life — spanning a sojourn in India, literary pursuits, and being a cook in the broth of the French monarchs' flight to Varennes — must have been lively.

In hasty, 18th-century-esque translation:

My project is to send to you all manner of rhapsodies by M. Craufurd. I cannot discern what retains him here [in France] so long; it is certainly not because he is well entertained there. He is languishing of boredom and always pretending to be greatly ill; never have there been two beings more different than you and he. I see him daily; I believe myself a prodigy of reason in comparison to him.

To Become a Birdbrain

While I'm still sleep-deprived and therefore less inhibited I thought I might as well announce my foray into the ranks of Twitter. Two weeks ago I hadn't the slightest intention of following in the footsteps of Twitter users who, according to the scathing stereotypes, inform their beleaguered friends and the world of such thrilling events as "Just had a sandwich!!1!" whilst littering these effusions with typos and horrendous contractions like "lol."

But Facebook is royally peeving. The reason I went on there was mainly so that people could keep up contact with me if they wanted to, and because I needed closure on high school. On the other hand it disturbs me that the information I give the website is so voluminous and personal in nature, and that access to it can be left wide open to the general public whenever a brilliant redesign of the privacy settings occurs; it disturbs me to know how much I could find out about other people, and so far I've religiously only looked at photos, etc., where I was wholly sure that the person wouldn't mind; and I don't like the compulsion to chase popularity just like in the high school I was trying to get closure on, nor the fact that a "Facebook friend" is a very different thing from a real friend. As therapy to overcome feeling despised and isolated in school, Facebook has been great, just because I have to confront it and because if someone picks up contact it seems like they can't entirely hate me, but I find it difficult to write updates or notes about links as naturally as I would if my Facebook friends were, let's say, my brothers. Besides it's depressing to be aware that the things that really interest and inspire me may be received as deadly dull and irritating clutter in the newsfeed of someone else.

On Twitter, by contrast, I am a total stranger and I (not being a celebrity or being connected to a network of friends there) don't have to prove anything to anybody. If the mood strikes to "tweet" something myself, I can practice condensing thoughts into short and entertaining sentences, which is especially good practice for someone who writes longwindedly and likes to qualify her statements. If people like what I write I earn their attention and (virtual) conversation fairly. Aside from that, and as importantly, I can keep up to date on magazine and newspaper articles, press releases and other information from charities, and publicly available videos and event announcements from cultural organizations, governments, etc. Besides I can remain in touch with the projects and thoughts of actors and other famous people whom I admire, and be certain that the information they are sharing is not unduly personal and is freely given to the world at large, and that I don't have to be a pain in the neck or support the tabloids and other intrusive press to find it.

So far among the people whom I follow on Twitter the most consistently amusing is Armando Iannucci; most gently didactic Martha Stewart, who is currently travelling in southeast Asia and whose reports and photos are National Geographic in miniature; most informative of events like a press conference with David Cameron and Angela Merkel is Downing Street 10 [Number10gov]; most filled with righteous indignation the Reverend Al Sharpton; and the most absorbed in peace and love and projects for furtherance of the same is undoubtedly Yoko Ono.

There are plenty of other interesting people, like Karl Lagerfeld who in resemblance to Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour writes brief declarations of his life and fashion philosophies with a humourlessness which in his case is imbued with what I consider as Eeyorish gloom; actors like Susan Sarandon or authors like Zadie Smith who have sadly tired of their Twitter accounts already; and pop culture entities who figure prominently in Gawker and Jezebel and whom I happily avoid like the plague in any other context, e.g. Perez Hilton (Paris doesn't annoy me, since I think she has a real sense of humour) and the Kardashians and Lindsay Lohan (whom I like in any capacity other than her tormented tabloid persona).

Much as I have loved to watch America's Next Top Model, despite the shame of it, I have not seen the last two seasons beyond one to four episodes, and even the lure of André Leon Talley (who is also on Twitter) did not cure my thorough disenchantment, and I am following neither OfficialALT nor Tyra Banks. But I am following Toccara Jones, a third-season contestant who had an understated manner subtly concealing a vast aplomb, and who had a spread in Italian Vogue's (*sigh* ) "black" issue.

Apart from that, the humanitarian organizations and NGOs which I follow include UNHCR and UNICEF and NAACP, and it feels jolting but very good (though of course I haven't lifted a finger to help anybody yet) to be aware of what is happening in the world at large again. Then, as a cultural calendar, I follow museums, musicians, symphonies and magazines.

I'm relaxing my death grip on Anglosaxonia and specifically American culture a little, but frankly Twitter seems far more developed on that continent and the scepter'd isle than in Germany and Europe on the whole. So while I can heartily recommend Twitter feeds for continental museums like the Prado and Rijksmuseum, I have limited my German followings to Tip magazine.

Anyway, I've enjoyed myself hugely so far, though trawling through the lists of people whom famous interesting people are following in order to find more famous interesting people to follow one's self can be not only an odd (and seemingly hoity-toity) thing to do but also a major pain. Fortunately I already know what hashtags, etc., are and how they work, and have no trouble on that count.

P.S.: One must be aware, of course, of imperfections like spam Twitter accounts and stolen identities. At least the stolen identities can be highly amusing and essentially benign, like "Mrs. Stephen Fry," whose bewigg'd daguerreotype already hints that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

A State of Rudeness

Whether it's interesting or not is (almost) impossible for me to say, but I feel like a ramble about the research I've been doing for the French Revolution story. I still don't anticipate writing the story itself for years. In my view literature, and art itself, are most worthwhile when they are the thoughts and experiences and knowledge of years, encoded (in a way) by the author or painter or musician, and then left to the reader or spectator or listener to decode over years with the help of his own thoughts, experiences, and knowledge. So, also because I like a finely wrought piece of work for the superficial immediate enjoyment of it, and out of undistilled curiosity, I am taking pains to build up a very thorough understanding of the state of France before and during the Revolution and possibly up to the exile of Napoleon to the island of Elba.

A priority is to understand where the revolutionaries were coming from. The more I learn [largely, I admit, from Wikipedia] the clearer it is that they fell into very diverse factions — the apparently bloodthirsty hébertistes, Montagnards, Jacobins; sympathetic clergy and aristocrats; ambitious and resentful minor aristocrats and lawyers and so on —and that certain ideas of the revolutionaries regarding the rights of man and the injustice of the tax system and so on were actually quite in vogue in higher circles. Honestly I think that it was the ambition and class resentment from those who were or felt snubbed by the upper class which had far more to do with setting the events of the Revolution in motion than the oppressed peasantry. In Brittany this seems to be even more the case, where the king was respected as a very distant entity, the Catholic church was strongly engrained in the fabric of society, and taxes like the gabelle (salt tax) were not as harsh thanks to the late accession of the province to France and I think to the favourable terms wrung out by Anne de Bretagne.

Personally I am skeptical as to the degree to which the droit du seigneur was exercised — it appears to be a propagandistic gimmick, like the much-touted "bra burning" of the 1960s and 70s which never happened once — and I think I read that the corvée, or mandatory labour exacted of peasants for the building of roads and other infrastructure, was essentially gone (at least in Brittany?) by 1789. But it is clear that the tax system was ridiculous and injust. First of all, that it was weighted so that the great majority of the burden fell on the poor. Secondly, that it was gathered by private contractors who apparently had free rein in exacting higher sums than the royal treasury would ever demand or receive. Thirdly that the taxes were so complicated; besides the gabelle there was the capitation (head tax), the vingtième (property tax), the octroi (I think the English term is market tax; it was levied of peasants entering cities to sell their produce), and the taille (church tithe), to name four examples. When this joke was rendered utterly humourless by bad weather, crop failure, and the shortage of bread and other staples, of course the fat was in the fire.

The monarchy itself was bankrupt thanks to decades (or centuries, depending on how one sees it) of warfare whether direct or indirect as in the case of America's War of Independence, Louis XV had squandered the prestige of the throne through his reckless spending and menagerie of mistresses and presumably his disenchanting descent into bawdy old age, and Louis XVI was an ineffectual figure whose questionable advisors quite overshadowed him on policy questions. In the course of the Enlightenment the superstition which may have propped up the construct of divinely appointed kings was eroded, new ideas arose on points of law and governance and the social hierarchy, and the staunchly successful Glorious Revolution (1688) in England and even the very fledgling American republic which the French king had supported pointed the way to a different course. Besides the system of buying positions in government invited nepotism, laziness, and a continuing or even expanding gap between the powerless have-nots and the powerful haves.

Anyway I imagine that drafting a virgin government in one's mind as the government one grew up and possibly suffered under edged closer and closer to obsolescence must have inspired feelings of considerable giddiness. (Kind of like when Obama succeeded Bush.) I am trying to follow the mental processes of those who did it back in the 1780s and later. So, aside from toiling through Rousseau, I want to read Montesquieu (I just found out about De l'esprit des lois and have downloaded it onto the computer to read at leisure) and other more contemporary or at least French philosophers, and go back to the Roman and Greek models of government as described in Plutarch's Lives and elsewhere.

Either way I have actually read documents on Gallica, the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in their entirety, and it's nice to have a goldmine of primary sources at my fingertips. Jacques Necker's history of the Revolution (which I have admittedly not read in its entirety by a longshot; but what I wrote about the causes of the Revolution above is largely informed by the book's opening chapters) is most approachable. Even though it's tied up with a tragic massacre in Avignon which prefigured the Terror in Paris, I enjoyed, too, a speech by the Abbé Mulot in rebuttal to a Sieur Rovère (a revolutionary who had apparently falsely masqueraded as a marquis), of which I copied out my favourite insults. He calls Rovère "one of those low intriguers who know the tortuous paths which lead to crime but not to the scaffold" ("bas intriguans qui connoissent les routes tortueuses qui conduisent au crime sans arriver à l'échafaud"), which strikes me as a truly lovely turn of phrase. Later, and less imaginatively, he exhorts Rovère to "Blush, then, once, sieur Rovère, for the impudence of your lies" ("Rougissez donc une fois, sieur Rovère, de l'impudence de vos mensonges."). Evidently what the church gained in Mulot, the eloquently hyperemoting tradition of lofty French tragedy lost.

[Disclaimer: the above translations from the French are obviously my own and likely inaccurate. And I hope the final remark does not sound unkind.]

Rousseau persists in being a pain in the neck. The quirky view which philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had of man in a state of nature rather amuses me — though if I had ever taken the pains to slog through the Leviathan instead of knowing of it through pleasant, civil, and short references this may not be the case — because it lines up so funnily with modern conceptions of prehistoric man. And because it's nonsense and at the same time a weird instinctive understanding of a scientific phenomenon, like the idea of the atom which certain ancient Greeks had formed millennia before Niels Bohr, or John Dalton, for that matter. [N.B.: We learned about Dalton in school, which is to say briefly and long ago, and if he did help determine our modern understanding of atoms it's purely a fluke that I vaguely remembered.]

But! I object to being called upon to glamourize the existence of Neanderthal man and to pretending that living In The Bosom of Nature is a beautiful experience. The tableau of Man in a State of Nature blissfully grazing on a fruitful and readily accessible supply of acorns is possibly the biggest tosh I've ever read. There have been much more entertaining and convincing accounts of the Pays de Cocagne or Schlaraffenland. Besides, now that anthropology is an established field of study Rousseau's ideas on the subject are just so blatantly invalid. Besides Rousseau's ideas, though I wouldn't call them fascist because the underlying airy-fairy touchyfeelyness is so disparate, are morally repugnant and essentially eugenicist. The possession of a paper copy of the Discours sur l'origine, etc., would I think be worthwhile just so that I can fire it at the wall as soon as I read, for instance, the part where he thinks that the Spartan practice of leaving "malformed" babies out in the cold to die is peachy. In the meantime I just play out violent fantasies of him being chased by a mammoth over the hummocky neolithic tundra or something.

Then his ideal of man in a state of nature is so hypocritically snobby, generalizing, callous, and totally brutish and depressing:

Alone, idle, and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who think but little, and may, in a manner, be said to sleep all the time they do not think: self-preservation being almost his only concern, he must exercise those faculties most, which are most serviceable in attacking and in defending, whether to subdue his prey, or to prevent his becoming that of other animals: those organs, on the contrary, which softness and sensuality can alone improve, must remain in a state of rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of delicacy; and as his senses are divided on this point, his touch and his taste must be extremely coarse and blunt; his sight, his hearing, and his smelling equally subtle: such is the animal state in general, and accordingly if we may believe travellers, it is that of most savage nations. We must not therefore be surprised, that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope, distinguish with their naked eyes ships on the ocean, at as great a distance as the Dutch can discern them with their glasses; nor that the savages of America should have tracked the Spaniards with their noses, to as great a degree of exactness, as the best dogs could have done; nor that all these barbarous nations support nakedness without pain, use such large quantities of Piemento to give their food a relish, and drink like water the strongest liquors of Europe.

Source: A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind [Gutenberg]

&$%*@#! Anyway, I know that his thoughts were influential and that the Discours does capture archetypes and trains of reflection which remain and always have been relevant, but I just hate being confronted with declarative statements that are misguiding and untruthful, i.e. being lied to, especially when couched in repugnant pseudohumane sentiment.

Vicissitudes of a Night Owl on a Tuesday

'Tis the day before St. Patrick's, and ever since I woke up at two-ish it has not been precisely springlike, but the cloud ceiling and light quantity are discernibly higher than they were a month or so ago. Last night I stayed up until around 6:15, then shivered miserably to sleep because the featherbed blanket had unfolded itself and I didn't want to bother doubling it up again so that its virtue of insulation would take effect. ("'Tis the voice of the sluggard," etc.) What was really irritating was when the feet tingled and itched as they warmed up again.

During the night itself I had amused myself among other things with updating Firefox to the 3.6 version, then troubleshooting for what must have been a good hour as YouTube's videos refused to load. After downloading and re-downloading Adobe Flash Player 10, restarting Firefox and the entire computer, etc., it turns out that I just had to click on the dormant Shockwave Flash in the list of plug-ins.

In the future there might be a music blog post, but in the interim I'll just say that I've been concentrating on violin music and that yesterday I went on a cello spree, and what especially leapt out at me were Yehudi Menuhin's recording of Bach's Concerto in E major, David Oistrakh's of the Concerto in a minor, Jacques Thibaud's and Jacqueline du Pré's of Maria Theresa von Paradis's (or von Weber's or whoever's) siciliana, and Jacques Thibaud's of Tomaso Antonio Vitali's famous chaconne. Besides I am fond of Pau Casals's versions of Max Bruch's Kol Nidrei and Camille Saint-Saëns's Swan, and also bookmarked the first Bach cello suite (Mvt. 1-3), even though we do have CDs of them and I played them often whilst doing homework or slacking off during the first year of university.

Besides I've been on an art spree. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's website has an art history timeline, named after one Heilbrunn, which provides thumbnails and actually useful informational blurbs of a large selection of the museum's holdings. They are classified by region, time period, etc., and what I just do is to click on a certain time period and go through all of them. During the night I went through the 20th and 21st century stuff, which was especially interesting to me because it feels peculiar to see what someone has decided are the important products of the times I've lived through.

The black-and-white photography sticks in my then befogged mind best, especially because I like what I've seen of Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was pleased when I recognized a photo of a cowboy leaning against a wastebasket on a New York street and smoking a cigarette in tight jeans, plaid shirt, belt, and a Stetson, because that one came up in a nytimes.com slideshow about an exhibition of Robert Franks's oeuvre.

Then there was fashion from the Costume Institute. I don't like flapper fashion very much, though as an aesthetic I can appreciate it as well as any other, because I like couture that celebrates curves, etc., rather than obscures them and because its limpishness is annoying. So Paul Poiret, whether his fashion is technically flapper or not, was not my cup of tea; neither was most of Coco Chanel's stuff, to which I perhaps shockingly prefer what Chanel turns out under Karl Lagerfeld in the present. On the other hand I thought that the Christian Dior frocks destroy the argument that fuller figures were in vogue in the day of Marilyn Monroe, etc., because the cuts and sizes suggest corsets and diets and a slender Grace Kelly rather than steak and muscles and a subtly plump woman. But maybe the patrons really wanted something that tiny-waisted, or people were thinner back then in general.

I kind of liked the Balenciaga and Madeleine Vionnet, and with the Givenchy it was difficult to imagine Audrey Hepburn out of the dresses. Speaking of which I think the adulation accorded to that actress on the grounds of her style is irritating. When people like Victoria Beckham tamely imitate it I'm disgruntled. Frankly I would not weep if I never heard of Breakfast at Tiffany's or saw the dumb cigarette-in-holder/pearls/sunshades photo again. And the "little black dress" is an obnoxious cliché; to quote and paraphrase Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, if the construction of that phrase could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity. The reason I like Audrey Hepburn is admittedly because she is beautiful but also because of her grace and interesting life and, above all, sensibility.

After that I went through the 1400-1600 A.D. period and was surprised to find that I didn't like the offerings from that time very much. Then I roamed through Wikimedia Commons in search of an illustration for an incipient Lighthouse blog post on Jane Austen's Persuasion. One problem is that I have an ideal portrait of Anne Elliot before my mind's eye, with gentle and intelligent eyes in a slender oval face, but I can't think of an actress or lady in a painting/lithograph/whatever who embodies that. Besides portraits of the time are often commissioned, and then they're of apparently self-important or blowzy or self-dramatizing (two words: Emma Hamilton, against whom I've had one of my one-sided feuds for years) women who are utterly unsuited. But I did come across portraits of well-known figures like the actor David Garrick, whom I've often heard about but never expected to see almost made alive again in a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds(?), and then hit the motherlode and was forced to reevaluate my stance on Caspar David Friedrich when I stumbled on the category of "Romantic paintings."

But what I'm mainly looking for is an illustration for a blog post about John Keats's "Pot of Basil," which I've been wrestling with for weeks and probably needs to be written afresh. Two or three Pre-Raphaelites had a field day with the poem, but I am not especially fond of the Pre-Raphaelites, since I think that their hyperstylized, immaturely moody saccharineness shows a weakspined unwillingness to cross lances with reality much like that of science fiction writers who, rather than sensibly learn to get along with other people as they grow older, prefer to premise their books on the nearly summary extinction of humanity.

Anyway, having been a total snob and trodden on many a foot, I'll just mention that J. presided over a batch of homemade marshmallows again, and we've eaten lots of them on their own and as a creamy melting mass on a cup of hot chocolate. J. uses beetroot syrup (Zuckerrübensirup) instead of corn syrup, so the marshmallows have a faint brown tinge and a nice distinctive flavour. Another option is to toast the marshmallows at our coal stoves, which works quite well as long as the coals are burning red and cleanly and not passively emitting gasolinish fumes.