The Oak Tree, The Holly, and Company

THOUGH given the last post, one might well expect to hear of one all too well-fed blogger, lying torpid, immobile and generally stretched out (like the boa constrictor in Swiss Family Robinson) in some less frequented corner of our apartment, I have in fact been reasonably much and well employed.

YESTERDAY afternoon uncle N. took the train back to his home, and the rest of the day was exceedingly quiet. I slept into the evening and feasted on turkey and chicken carcass, along with the remaining cranberry sauce; there is plenty of other food, too, so entering the kitchen is still like walking into an idyllic pays de Cocagne (or Schlaraffenland).

AMONG other things, I looked through the repository of writing on my laptop and found rather a lot of nice things, not only poems but also bits of screenplays and the like.

For one thing I wanted to concoct a musical for home performances based on Lord of the Rings; so I wrote a few rhymes to set to preexisting tunes. The fruits of the endeavour are below, and I hope it is all right that I am posting so much of it.

***

I'll sing a lay of the Shire-land
'Midst the calm rolling hillsides of Middle-Earth
Where all the view that one could command
Spoke of peace and of plenty — no sorrow; much mirth.

For hobbits are a tranquil folk,
Smallish and roundish and fond of a joke,
And near their green subterranean abodes
Not warfare nor danger have made much inroads.

*

Come, ye comrades, pluck your bow-strings,
Whet the blade of your dwarvish axe
Sing of hope until the wood rings,
For of hope the world now lacks.

Ride against the Eye of Mordor,
Ride against the fiendish orcs,
Ride against the goblins with ardour,
Ride 'gainst Sauron's evil works.

Come, ye comrades, swing your sword-blades
Big and small -- little hobbits, too,
So to fight the menace of the Ring-Lords
So to win our peace anew.

*

and:

Ring gently, o Elf-harp;
I bid thee to sing
Of elf-lore so old
Of our great elven-king,
When with his tall warriors
He went through the land
To counter the goblins
With his mighty band.
The sunshine was bright
Though the Mirkwood was deep
And sentries at nighttime
Made safe their sweet sleep;[*]
And one foggy morning
They made taut their bows
And with them they vanquished
Their fell mountain foes.

[A fairly direct quotation from "Away in a Manger," I think.]

***

PROBABLY after that effort had waned, I started this grumpy parody undertaking, with a reckless disregard for due rhyme and rhythm. Whether the fragments are intelligible to anyone who has not seen the film or read the books may well be doubted:

LORD OF THE RINGS
(Set to tunes of well-known Christmas carols)

ACT ONE

Scene One
Bilbo’s birthday party

Divers Hobbits: [To the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”]
"We wish you a happy birthday,
we wish you a happy birthday,
we wish you a happy birthday
and a happy eleventy-twelfth year.

"Good brewings we bring;
We love our drinking.
Let's toast to your birthday
and a happy eleventy-twelfth year!"

Speech, speech!

Bilbo: Thank you, thank you, my friends. This has been a memorable feast, and (he starts fumbling in his vest pocket) memorability has always been one of my favourite virtues, and I do enjoy your company . . . (Drat it, where is it?) . . . I have never been happier to be a hobbit living in this fine land of the Shire. Home, sweet home, and all that. . . . So, farewell, and . . . (He slips the ring on his finger and disappears. This can be represented by cloaking him in a black cloth and then making him exit the stage.)

Everyone in an uproar.

Frodo: Noooooo! (Sheds girly tears. Then finally has an idea, dignifiedly waves off the condolences of his neighbours, and prepares to leave the scene. Before he vanishes offstage, he pauses to say, sotto voce) If I know Bilbo well, this may just be another adventure of his. I shall head home and see if he has left a note behind.

Scene Two

In the hobbit-hole. Bilbo is stuffing his belongings into a bindle. Frodo enters, sees him, then fixes a look of reproach on him.

Frodo: [To the tune of "What Child is This?"]
Alas, dear Bilbo, you do me wrong
By thus discourteously vanishing.
You made me cry; I don't know why;
I had rather not do that again.

Bilbo: Shush, Frodo; it's no big deal
I'm bored and tired; I need a trip
Out into the world beyond
The Shire, which makes me sick.

*

Gandalf: (knocks on door, then opens it and strides in with bent head because of the low ceiling.) [To the tune of "Joy to the World"]
Joy to the world!
So you're not dead
As everyone has said!
I never thought you'd really croaked
But still I am a bit provoked
That you made me quite sad
Till I knew that we'd been had;
What is it that you have really been about?

Why, what's this ring?

Bilbo: Oh, that old thing.

Christmas Eve and Morn in Truly Exhausting Detail

For Christmas Eve we consumed turkey and chicken for dinner. The turkey was a seven-pounder, and something of a find since once we moved to Berlin we've encountered the beast far more often in piecemeal form. As far as its size goes, I did stare at it a little bemusedly, since the last time we had an entire turkey it must have been over 20 pounds as usual; and once we had a real leviathan. But even without the chicken there would already have been a heaping serving of meat for all, and in the inner cavity Papa crammed plenty of his delicious salty bread stuffing. On the side we ate mashed potatoes, the turkey and chicken jus, cranberry sauce, green peas, and Turkish flatbread, and we drank white wine.

During the following night I had a complex dream [Warning: almost certain to be terrifically boring; 'proper' blog post resumes beneath asterisk.] where T. and I roamed for interesting rocks on a low mountain on the Alps, where no trees but grass grew, and I turned over a coaly black boulder of sparkling-grained metamorphic rock to find mugs and other dishes in blue and white china. I thought it was an interesting archaeological find until I saw that one mug had the year "1937" written on it in the watery blue ink, and until the family which owned the land came wandering up for a picnic and reminded me that the terrain and by extension any objects in it were theirs. By that point the funicular which had brought T. and me up the slope had left for the valley again, and as the family informed me, it was the last of the evening. The stars came out and I even saw a meteor, but the rest of the dream took place in daylight; there was a modest beige palace of one or two levels which had been refurbished into a tourist centre and in whose colonnaded courtyard there was a garden, and I briefly peered inside it.

As we walked down to the family's home there was a deep turquoise lagoon among the cliffs which were the colour of dark clay, and one of the children lost his footing and fell off the clifftop into the water. Some of us dove in after him; I was closest but couldn't find him even in the crystal-clear water, since he had settled into the gravel at the bottom. Instead there were other men who had fallen into the lagoon and whose faces poked out from the gravel, as intact and immobile as those of the terra cotta soldiers in the Chinese emperor's grave; when we hauled them out of the gravel they became awake again. So I was reassured that the child was all right and that he would resurface in time. But then I was strangely pulled down into a clay element, to reemerge in a semimedieval kitchen, very dark and vaguely brown-walled, in the middle of a rectangular vat full of sluggishly boiling water, with a somewhat hasty cook flitting between her pots and stirring the water I was in with a big wooden spoon; and I felt doomed and damned.

I woke up in a much-perturbed and weighty frame of mind; and, to tie this all back into Christmas Eve dinner, came to the sleepy conclusion that if I wanted more lightsome dreams it would be better if I did not eat dinner so quickly and if, moreover, I had not eaten that additional slice of flatbread this particular time.

*

Besides we sang Christmas carols and in my case tried to sing bits of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, which I have YouTube'd frequently of late, before which I had nearly gone hoarse singing all twelve of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." Then J. and Ge. and I staged a dramatic reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Around 2004 I rearranged the short story into a three-act play; we kept rehearsing it without much success, and after a while I refused even to try. It became rather a joke as Ge. would needle me at random moments by hailing me with Watson's first line of dialogue, and the scripts buried themselves amongst my other papers. But yesterday I fished them out again and it went reasonably well. Even my "received" British pronunciation was slightly better. Mama came by toward the conclusion of the proceedings, around the time when J. was overwhelmed with giggles at a rather untimely juncture shortly before his character pops a cap at Watson, and critiqued us here and there. Earlier Uncle N. and I hung up ornaments on our Christmas tree; this year we went with straw stars and angels and other figures, brightly painted wooden figurines, gilt-painted stars, three or so metallic balls, a bell, etc., and ranged small animals around the Christmas card which Aunt L. sent us from England.

*

This morning, I woke up after 8 a.m. and

Regal Circumnatal Festivities

On Wednesdays the blog Jezebel provides synopses of the week's events as reported by tabloids; this time I found the portrait of the British Royal Family's Christmas traditions full of comedic merit.

So it inspired the following work of art:


which is much easier to perceive when you click on it to enlarge it.

*

Other than that I baked brownies with salted caramel according to the "Pioneer Woman" recipe.

I was going to take all or half of the brownies to share with my Greek class, which has that kind of atmosphere. (A classmate even generously gave us chocolate Santa figurines on St. Nicholas's Day.) But since I left them in the oven for too long they burned black around the edges and became granulated in the middle, and since they have cooled they have become hard as adamant. (Surprisingly they are still delicious, and can be pried apart by a fork.)

The caramel turned out well by a miracle, since it charred and recrystallized at one edge of the pot. I was dubious about putting in gelatine (I took one package of gelatine and the full quantity of water, which soaked up the gelatine powder entirely but made the caramel generally more fluid than necessary); but I surmise that it is used to prevent the caramel from becoming a thick hard crust or from squelching down into the chocolate cake.

I also washed dishes for the first time in weeks or months; but after one or two loads my enthusiasm tapered off, to no one's surprise. What I am looking forward to in terms of domestic activities is concocting an enormous bowl of eggnog. I have consulted different recipes depending on the year, and this year intend to prepare it according to Melissa Clark's recipe from the New York Times. (I would seek out and post a link to the webpage, but I selfishly don't want to lose more of my 20 free Times internet articles per month.)

*

TOMORROW I have 3 hours (τρις ωρες ?) of Greek, 1 hour and 45 minutes of Islamic history seminar, and 1 hour 45 minutes of Latin (all obligatory). While I have taken to napping in classes (for fun and profit) if I have slept too little and have found that a Napoleonic five-minute catnap can be helpful indeed, it is comparatively awkward in the seminar because it takes place in a small room with people sitting right next to me. Besides Latin is in the evening, by which point even my third wind should have exhausted itself. So I should get some sleep.

*

Today I had a Greek speech laboratory class, which went well. Much to my surprise each time I listen to dialogues from the past Wednesdays I understand a much greater proportion of them. The Vatnajökull — as I will henceforth denominate each laboratory computer since they operate as slowly as glaciers run — which fell to my lot started up fairly quickly. Last week or the week before one of the computers firstly took forever to start up and then secondly refused to transmit sound; I timed the process, and it honestly took half an hour until I had tried and abandoned the first computer and had managed to get the sound file up and running on an alternative computer. The professor has also had a great deal to say, though quite politely, about this masterpiece of technological efficacy. To be honest I rather like navigating the arbitrary waters of computer idiosyncracies, however, and growing up with Microsoft operating systems is a lesson in patience, the helpfulness of workarounds and modest little tricks, and the quiet whimsy of fate.

***

When I went home, I noticed that two orange-vested workers were fixing a slide of planks over the gravel and up the bottom of the embankment where the Fabeckstraße crosses the U-Bahn rails. Further along to the Podbielskiallee station, bright garbage bags were lying huddled at the concrete ledge beside the tracks, and I Holmes-ishly observed that they must be full of the leaves that were raked from the Prussianesquely overgroomed, long beige grasses on the nearby embankments.

At some point in the transit to or from the university, two contractors for the BVG (they tend to wear navy-blue jackets with 'Im Auftrag der BVG' written on the back and a white stripe or two running above the waistband, and hunt in pairs or gather in groups of five or so, and hold little devices like the ones for credit or debit card payments in stores or for signing for a postal delivery) entered the train and asked for our tickets. Sometimes they enter the train, sometimes they roam the platform and ask people to show their tickets, once one of them brigandishly asked us for the tickets as soon as we stepped out the train door and I walked past and thought (and must have looked like I thought) 'You must be joking.' Sometimes I think there are still plainclothes people who hop with somewhat irritating jubilant airs into the train and whip out their identification, then ask to see tickets. Anyway, this time I fetched out my ticket very, very slowly, hopefully in an inconspicuous way but I really wanted to buy time for anyone who didn't have a ticket; and the person wanted to see my photo ID so I took even more slooowwwly.

While my hypothetical moral inhibitions about working for call centers have almost dissipated, ratting people out as a "loss prevention expert" in a shoe store or as a ticket controller in a train or whatever is still infra a lot in my view. Still, I haven't found that any of the security contractors were personally objectionable; though to be honest I would have expected one or two to seem power-hungry or aggressive or condescending.

What I don't understand is whether they are there in case security concerns arise — like beatings or sabotage —; or to ensure that contrary to the words of the Bible the poor, i.e. the homeless, are not always with us; or to drive in cash for the BVG (a Christmas gift to self, as it were); or to provide jobs for individuals who have trained as security contractors; or for other reasons. Anyway, I have already expatiated upon my conjectures and observations to the family, so much of this will seem old news to them.

***

Now: sleep!

Vivat My Brother; and Latin

It's my brother's birthday today, and in honour of it we feasted: chocolate, marzipan and cake.

From 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. I was at the Rostlaube for my Latin class, wherein we were taught the perfect participle passive (e.g. arbor caesa est) and the 4th declension (e.g. manus, exercitus, senatus). We tamely cleave unto the textbook, so we read through and translated a reading from it as customary. This time it was a paragraph on Rome after Tarquinius Superbus — the father of the perpetrator of the Rape of Lucrece, I think, but it wasn't mentioned — was jettisoned and his friend, Lars Porsena, king of the city of Clusium, lay siege to the city. There were new words, like iussu (the ablative of iussus, and it translates I think as "by order of" e.g. the senate) and the aforementioned exercitus (army).

One of the sentences in the reading didn't appear to make sense, since it looked like a singular subject with a plural verb. So at home I asked J. (who has been toiling through school Latin for decades centuries years) how he would translate "field camp" into Latin. He said "castra," then took out his Stowasser German-Latin dictionary. It turns out that castrum, -ī means "fortification," and, as I just found out through a certain online encyclopaedia's dictionary, castra is pluralis tantum and means "camp."

Anyway, I arrived home rather grumpily, having waited too long for my uncertain temper to catch an U-Bahn train. Since then I have written a Lighthouse blog post, chatted with the family in the corner room perched atop the coal-fired stove, eaten and had tea and coke, and begun a little light reading.

In the U-Bahn, a busker sang something in Dylan mumble-English to the accompaniment of the guitar, and I was rather amusedly transported back to the 70s. I looked out for the moon on the way to and from my class, but none was to be seen, though the brightest star shone intently from its customary quadrant and I finally noticed the beautiful effect of the windows of the houses around the Rostlaube when it is too dark to see their façades. The interior illumination lends them a strange transparency — as in, you can't only see vaguely into the rooms, but the houses on the whole seem like modest two-dimensional shapes and as if there were a lot of room for trees and lawns and flowers behind them — and a lantern-like appearance. The effect even worked back at home, in the half-lit façades on our otherwise busy and loudly lit street.

Besides I stared into the cafeteria again, since the large area in the back where nobody sits except for the hundreds of chairs and tables and a couple palmetto plants inevitably creeps me out, and I keep expecting to see a corpse lying there, kind of in plain unseen sight, like in an early 20th-century factory or some other large building after hours in an Agatha Christie film. When I passed it at shortly after 6:10 there were still two or three people seated at the near corner; often there are more.

I've decided to skip the Foundations of Ancient History lectures, since I've lost the hope of gaining credit for them anyway, and they are sometimes worthwhile and sometimes not; and I didn't feel like learning about the philosophy of German idealism this week; so until Latin I had a free day to do nothing in particular.

A Discourse Upon The Ontology of Being

TODAY I dropped in on a lecture from a course entitled "Introduction to the Philosophy of German Idealism." We had not yet embarked on the full spectrum of Hegel, etc., but were sitting comfortably in Aristotle and then transitioning to Kant.

Presumably the subject of the lecture was ontology — the problem with philosophy as with many other disciplines, I find, is that one must be extremely careful how to use one's terms once one is no longer permitted the freedom of layman's terminology, just like I felt gingerly about the French language after reading a compendium of naughty idiom.

At any rate, the lecture was about how one describes what exists, i.e. is. There seems to be a fine distinction in that Aristotle does not bother to mention that we may not absolutely know or describe what truly exists, whereas Kant stresses that we know or describe only what we perceive.

There was a certain Socratean element, or rather an element of what I seem to remember my Uncle Pu introduced to my siblings and me when we were little: we would make a statement and he would ask us, "Why?" and then when we had answered ask us "Why?" again, etc. So in the lecture, rhetorically put questions like "What is whatness?" followed each other in quick succession, and I would be vaguely thinking, "This question is either very dumb or very clever, and I'm not always quite sure which."

Basically, however, we were looking at neat little lists of criteria by which one may define a thing, (relatio, modality, quantity, quality; universally or particularly; negatively or positively; etc.), which Aristotle and Kant drew up similarly yet differently; the professor was explaining to us what Aristotle and Kant meant by those terms.

My brain went on holiday part of the way through, and in its leisurely way ambled back again to the substance of the lecture, so it was all quite relaxed; and I'm not attending the lecture for credit or all that regularly. I have the creeping feeling that I will, however, need the knowledge from it.

Then I took the U-Bahn back to the bookshop and spent a quiet couple of hours wasting time on the internet. My first class was Foundations of Ancient History again, and this time the concentration in the spotlight was the Studies of the Ancient Orient, which in a weird roundabout way (which I don't feel like explaining) is like examining the wreck of the Tower of Babylon (Babel transposed to Mesopotamia) in linguistic terms.

Besides I've had two emails, confirming that my archaeology work course is from 10:15 a.m. - 3 p.m. on Fridays, and that I can join the History and Culture of the Near East seminar of my choice, namely on Thursday. So Monday from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. is free for the bookshop, lectures I might want to attend unofficially, or any desired variety of loitering. And I needn't take off for the work course at quarter after seven as previously feared! (c:

Occam's Razor and the Throttled Lion of Nineveh

This morning I slept in and snuck into my Foundations of Ancient History lecture over half an hour late.

It was a representative of Near Eastern Archaeology who was lecturing this time, and he quickly went over the archaeologists responsible for digging at Susa (where the Code of Hammurabi was found as part of 2nd-century-B.C.(?) loot) and at Çatal Hüyük. When I came in, he also mentioned the relief of the lion-hunt at Nineveh, presumably the one which T. and I quickly but thoroughly enjoyed looking at in the British Museum some five years ago. Heinrich Schliemann was mentioned and, surprisingly enough, there was no verbal hopping with rage. Indeed he suggested that the concept of stratigraphy, and of the information which may be gleaned from observing the contents of the layers relative to each other, was then not yet developed. On the other hand he stated that any archaeological dig in fact involves the destruction of that which it studies.

Another point on which I am inclined to be more critical than he is with regard to reconstructing ruins. For example, though it may be presumptive to find fault, the fakeness of the Gate of Ishtar in the Pergamon Museum gets on my nerves; and I found Saddam Hussein's government's reconstructions of ancient sites in Iraq butt-ugly because they were turned into huge blocks of characterless, unworn, glaringly indistinguished mudbrick. A proper ruin has gravitas — just like a proper painting, which if it was indeed painted 300 or 400 years ago should have a patina to make one wonder if our common ancestor was in fact a dark-dwelling mole. I (let's say partly; it was an unfinished fragment) wrote an essay on Sir Arthur Evans for my Classical Archaeology course at UBC, and I vaguely recall that he had reconstructions built at Knossos, to help along the publicity and funding, much like what is theoretically organized at Pompeii except that a wall recently collapsed due to improper maintenance, etc. I was willing to overlook it there, going from the premise that Evans is one of the protagonists of archaeology and thus worthy of greater critical latitude, but still.

Aside from that the professor had a great deal to say about matters political, which upon the hearing I took with a large grain of salt, but whose essential impulse was not, I think, unadmirable.

In this context, and also out of admiration for a goodly quantity of hard work, he mentioned an exhibition which came to the Pergamon Museum until late August. Max von Oppenheim had founded a Vorderasiatisches Museum and it was filled with statues from a monumental dig at Tell Halaf. A firebomb struck during World War II; the firefighters came, and it seems that the impact of cold water on hot basalt stone is explosive in its effects. So in 2001 a team began to painstakingly set together the 27,000 fragments.

"Das 27'000-Teile-Puzzle" (Basler Zeitung, orig. Tages-Anzeiger, February 3, 2011)

***

In Greek we were at the speech lab, where the computers cooperated, and so we listened to a dialogue being read out. Some words were easy to understand and I took a great deal of pains to figure out the meanings of the words as typed out in our textbook. But at times the sounds of the words and syllables shifted like will-o'-the-wisps, so that one time I would understand them perfectly and another time encounter gibberish. Before that I extracted my trusty dictionary and looked up the definite and indefinite articles as well as the conjugations of εχω and ειμαι. Not much has changed over the centuries, compared to what one would expect; on the other hand, I've difficulty recalling the Ancient Greek plural articles, which were generally given to my Ancient Greek class.

***

There is a vote on the extension of our student transit ticket arrangement being held by the student body. The prices are to be raised in the following years, but it sounded like they weren't negotiable, so I took to the ballot-box and voted in favour.

***

Besides I walked to the Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology to discover the sheet which is to advertise the times and dates of a work course; I didn't see one, so will email the professor again. On the way back I passed the Kenyan embassy and, much to my amusement, the smaller home to the Lesotho mission tucked beside it.

***

Then I went to a history seminar where we traipsed over a library and had to write a statement about why archaeology interests us. It was embarrassing particularly because I'm not sure if my interest in it isn't kind of lame and fanciful (though nice), like saying "When I grow up I want to be an astronaut." Certainly not something which one wants to expand on to an adult expert. Besides the class was overstuffed in the little villa. I felt guilty because I was not supposed to be there, according to the formal rules, at which a great deal of winking is done by students and docents alike. I guess I'll hope for the best.

***

Lastly I decided to stick around for an Introduction to Theoretical Philosophy. I was peeved when a surprisingly vast horde of us (young and old, students and guest auditors) was locked out of the room until after the hour. Given the institution of the "academic quarter," classes begin and end cum tempore, a quarter hour off from the stated time, so there were some ten minutes left until class began. But I had been lolling around on my feet for a long time and was eager for a seat inside the hall.

First of all we were told through a passage from Kant that philosophy is not the reading of the ideas of another, but the practice and personal application of reason on our own — the philosophy past is the rubble upon which we construct our own ideas. Then there was a long and repetitious excursion through Philosophy's FAQs, and the professor underlined that philosophers barely ever agree on anything, even as to who among them constitutes a proper philosopher. Then he said, with quotations from Karl Jaspers and a nod to Schopenhauer, that man becomes aware of himself as he reflects on the world around him, and that the portion of the world upon which he does not reflect does not exist for him. And so on and so forth.

I was hungry and grumpy; ensconced in a kind of superior eyrie at the summit of the lecture hall; and very much inclined to reflect on the world through an oneiristic (if the word exists) lens — which is to say have a nap; but I want to give the lecturer and lectures more of a chance. The philosophers intended to appear in this course: e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates(?), St. Thomas of Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, and Derrida. The course should generally be good for showing off — 'empirical' and 'Occam's razor' and 'straw man argument' are a start in terms of preexisting knowledge, and 'normative' would be too if I remembered what precisely it means or felt like consulting a dictionary; but there is no reason to settle!

*

P.S.: The wording "throttled lion" is cribbed from my sister.

The Year of the Elephant and Other Stories

This afternoon, before coming to the bookshop, I had my first Islamic Studies lecture, i.e. the prerequisite course to higher-level studies of the Culture and History of the Near East minor.

I had originally thought to skip it entirely this year because I like my Greek classes and there happens to be one at the same time, besides which the seminar would require a little schedule-cramming. But I sent an email to the Islamic Studies department and, though the response was helpful and its terms liberal, it did transpire that it would be best for me to take it.

So far I have not gone to a seminar. If the rooms in the large building wherein they are held are not too crowded, I am thinking of going to more than one. (I visited the building after class today so that I could figure out how to get there; or, in the worst case, how not to get there.)

***

THE PROFESSOR began with a more cerebral approach than customary. For instance he acutely and very quickly argued-without-arguing which historical approach is best — a social focus, political focus, or what-have-you; story, empiricism, or theory — and announced that (as the lecture title implies) he would focus on Islamic society at various historical points. A corollary of which aim is that he does not intend to take a strictly schematic, chronological or geological approach, rattling off what happened where in a list. — Since I haven't thought much about it, the only thing that came to mind by way of social history is George Macaulay Trevelyan's English Social History from Opapa's bookshelf. I looked into it and seem to remember finding far too vague to be of utility.

Nevertheless he began at the beginning and tried to portray for our benefit something of the Arabian peninsula before the birth of Muhammad and the spread of his prophecies. It was a nexus of the Byzantine, West Roman, and Iranian empires (re. 'Iran': Persia, he said, is in fact a smaller region) or more specifically of the traders who shuttled silk, gold, slaves, myrrh, balsam, etc. between them, over a land route to Syria and along the Red Sea to or from the Mediterranean and through the Arabian Sea, or over the Silk Road, to India.

There were orthodox Christian sectors who were in opposition to the state religion of Constantinople: the Nestorians and the Monophysites. The Nestorians are also denominated Duophysites because they believed that the spirit of God is separate from Christ, and the Monophysites comprised the Copts and others who believe that Christ is God and man in unity. In Iran there were Zoroastrianists, who were monotheistic on the one hand but believed in the dual presence of good and evil on the other. There were tensions between which trading points supported which state and consequently its religion.

Contrary to common belief, Islam is not a "faith of the desert," since only a relatively small part of the Arabian peninsula consists of dunes in which no plant may grow; and at the time of its inception the trade routes meant that there were thriving little towns and kingdoms like Sabaa (the Queen of Sheba — the professor emphasized — may not have existed, but her kingdom certainly did) all over.

Mecca, with its Kaʿba — whose provenance is rather vague, though it is now considered Abraham's toil, but significance great — was one of the trading points, and one of the places where poets met and talked and developed in a subtle long-winding way what we consider the classical Arabic language, ʿarabiyya.

It was ruled within the great Quraysh tribe. In the old sense of proper government, the chief of a tribe was, as the professor put it, primus inter pares. Every man who was a tribesman, not a slave or an outsider (for instance the Roma, or gypsies), was considered to have equal rights. The chief was the mediator and where necessary the representative of the tribe in negotiations and relations with other tribes; every tribesman had a right to protection. Slaves, who were widespread there as they were in Europe, had no right to protection.

One of the poorer men who was not happy under the heel of the fellow Qurayshes, despite this nominal equality and freedom, was Muhammad, who lived on the outer margins of Mecca. He was born around 570 AD (in this case I will say CE), which is a little subject to controversy because by others his birth is attributed to the Year of the Elephant — apparently the year in which what would become Yemen was conquered by Ethiopian troops — but the dates don't fit. He married the widow of a comfortably-off tradesman and ended up travelling up to Syria and becoming acquainted with the religious traditions of his neighbours. Then he was privy to enlightenment by God through his intermediary, the angel Gabriel; after running afoul of the authorities he retired to Medina. There he wished to form an umma, or community, with a Jewish clan in the area, which ended in blood and presumably tears. He decided that it was his aim to return to Mecca — he did, and (by this point in the lecture the end of class was impending — so 'tell-tale compression' of events, etc.) by the time he died in 632 CE his religion was officially observed throughout the Arabian Peninsula. It is this kind of state religion which a sector of Islam insists on endeavouring to reinstate.

That was basically the end of the lecture. I've left a great deal out and I'm happy that there is so much more, because I like having a whole pile of facts and thoughts to sort through at leisure. I think I've remembered everything reasonably well, too, but this blog post isn't fact-checked, so reader beware and all that.

He is incidentally the only one of my professors who seems to read out a lecture from detailed notes or even a text — so far it seems a pithier and more content-rich and a little less condescending method than PowerPoint presentations and other methods which involve ex tempore commentary. I also liked that he clearly had lots of opinions and a lively interest in politics and controversies — during the beginning of the Iraq War he would probably have been one of those of us who talked about it with everyone he knew, read as many magazine articles about it as he could lay his hands on, sent letters to the editor, etc. — but that he didn't feel impelled to inflict them on us. Sometimes I come across people and have the urge to haul them home to meet the family, and as far as I can tell, he is one of them.

***

My other classes were Greek (we're reviewing the sounds/phonemes, thank goodness, because I don't know all of them that well, and am sort of giving up on knowing when to use which pronunciation of ντ, for instance; today when I was gone we in the broad sense of the term we also learned "have" and "be," and the definite and indefinite articles, and maybe something I've forgotten) and Foundations of Ancient History. That class began with 19th-century Danish archaeologists who came up for instance with the three-period system (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age) and ended with the, er, Schicklgrubrian reinterpretations and politicization of German and Scandinavian prehistory research. At the very end the lecture slid into the inevitable post-war repentance, discarding of the ideas formed in the shadow of the short mustache, and the rise of new technology, for instance radiocarbon dating.

Greek, in Exhausting Detail

Please beware of and forgive all and any factual errors in the following:

This evening I have Latin again, but in the meantime I have returned from the morning's Greek lessons and am sitting comfortably in the bookshop. In the lessons we reviewed the phonetics of the past two days, which is highly useful, and read aloud example words for consonant pairs like κλ and γδ, which looks complicated but in fact isn't.

This time our professor took the time to tell us the meanings of words, which with πνευμα (air, breath, spirit) and ενεργειεα was simple enough; there were quite interesting ones in between. Ανθοσ (flower) and αμυγδαλια (almond tree) were familiar but I hadn't known the Greek stem-words.

Though I have left out the stress accents (in Greek, the accent is called the οξεια) on these Greek words until I figure out the html encoding, there should be an acute on each one. Since 1982, Greek has adopted the "monotοnikó" (μονοτονικο) system whereby every accent is stricken from the written language except for the οξεια. In the absence of the rough and smooth breathing (the little curling apostrophe which sits on the first vowel of a word and separates the "ho"s from the "o"s), and circumflexes and grave accents indicating changes in the pitch of the voice, written Greek has become much less fussy. I wonder where the changes in pitch went — whether they were artificially imposed on Ancient Greek when it became the scholar's preserve or whether they did exist but have fallen into complete disuse over the centuries.

Earlier the professor gave a leisurely introduction into modern Greek history.

She reiterated that the Erasmus system of pronunciation (e.g. οι = ahoy!, αι = might) is artificial and demonstrably historically inaccurate, Erasmus having designed it purely so help his students learn to spell the words. I was a little miffed, since I like Erasmus's system and moreover have used it consistently for Ancient Greek — though it is admittedly best suited for communication within the ivory tower. But Russian or French and certainly Greek universities — for example — seem to teach a different Ancient Greek system.

She went into detail besides about the Katharevousa — which is a formal language created after Greece shed Ottoman rule, spelled καθαρευουσα, and which like modern Italian hopped back in time not in this case to the Middle Ages but a little further for inspiration. But if I've understood correctly, it created an unsettling gap, by separating Greeks into the hoity-toity world of the official constructed language, and the hoi polloi world of the demotic tongue, Dimotiki — δημοτικη. The popular language had in fact acted as a reservoir to preserve Greek over the centuries and folk poetry had kept what the written word had discarded, but in a different form from the tongue of Aristophanes or Pericles, whose preservation fell to scholars who left Constantinople as it fell in 1453 and to their Arabic colleagues and later of course to scholars across Europe who would no longer have been privy to the spoken traditions (for instance pronunciation) which would hint at the ancient forms. Katharevousa took over some of the popular language, but otherwise was a little estranged. Besides the Katharevousa is apparently not held in good odour since it is associated with the military dictatorship and its organs.

What I had not heard before is that the administration of Greece in the early 19th century had been pedantic and quite foreign in character. It was guided by Philhellenes from the remainder of Europe, many of whom were shocked to arrive in Greece and find that it was not a nation of (as the professor put it) lofty-souled, tunic-wearing philosophers. Instead there were guerrilla fighters. She also pointed out that due to the four preceding centuries of foreign rule, and a brutal extirpation of the regional aristocracy at the time of the conquest in 1453, Greece does not have any aristocracy; its handful of modern kings were invariably imports or descendants of imports.

Apart from that she explained the construction of Greek last names, which were introduced as such under the Ottoman government to simplify taxation and the military. Papandreou would mean, I think, the child of Andreas; physical attributes like black hair also lent themselves to names.

Midweek

This morning I went to the Foundations of Ancient History Studies lecture and arrived in excellent time, in the very large and already familiar lecture hall with down-folding blond wood chairs and the technical booth in the back at the top and the ghostly glow of a PowerPoint slideshow in front. It has a clever windowy antechamber which presumably guards from noise and conspicuous intrusions.

As it turns out the Foundations course will introduce a cluster of specializations, like Prehistoric Archaeology and Classical Archaeology, and even the seminars will rotate between the various sub-disciplines and therefore various buildings.

The professor, who looked rather like General Wesley Clark, laid out the course itself, up to the exam; his associate described the electronic resources. The professor defended the three-year Bachelor system enthusiastically, whereat I metaphorically speaking rolled my eyes.

Then I had a long interval to the next class, which I spent in finding the right room and in looking up (in an English-Modern Greek dictionary which was I think bought accidentally) the words which my Greek class materials use as phonetic examples. Someone else asked me for directions.

Greek took place in the speech laboratory today, so we sat among the cubicles with fairly rotten computers; mine refused to start up properly so I never even glimpsed the user desktop. But we spent most of the time finishing the phonetics and reading the sample words out loud. Ν can sound unusual depending where it is placed, for instance, so we spent some ten minutes with the computers in the end.

Since there was no Ancient History seminar and no evening philosophy lecture, and the career preparation advisor whom I had wanted to consult about the archaeology work course, etc., seemed very busy, I had the rest of the day off. Despite the respite, I still feel really tired. So I will continue my Greek homework and then rest in preparation for the class at 8:30 tomorrow morning.

A Student's Odyssey

Today I had the first day of my Greek pre-language course. We learned how to pronounce the vowels, consonants, and diphthongs, and were introduced to the textbook and two potential grammar reference works, by a very nice professor who is an excellent teacher. Knowing some Ancient Greek was an advantage, but some of the counterintuitive sounds were thoroughly irritating.

e.g. β beta
- letter name pronounced "béta" for Ancient Greek purposes
- name pronounced like Latin "vita" for Modern Greek purposes

ντ nu + tau (nt)
- pronounced like "ant" in Ancient Greek, as far as I know
- pronounced like "d" ("dog"), "nd" (and), or "nt" (ant) in Modern Greek

μπ mu + pi (mp)
- pronounced like "imp" in Ancient Greek, as far as know
- pronounced like "b" (bar), "mb" (amble), or "mp" (imp) in Modern Greek

Besides "nu" is pronounced "nee"; "mu," "mee"; "tau," "taph".

AND all of these vowels or diphthongs are now pronounced like "eek!":

iota (ι), eta (η), upsilon (υ); (omicron + iota) οι, (epsilon + iota) ει

AND alpha + iota, αι, is pronounced like the epsilon — "meh."

THE professor argued that Greek is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get language because it has so many compound words (e.g. symphony = with + sound). But I find it quite ambiguous, as I told my father at somewhat obnoxious length today. Taking the example, "with sound" can as easily signify a modern "talkie" film, noise, or singing in unison.

*

ANYWAY, I think that the Rost-/Silberlaube is mad at me after the remarks I made about it yesterday; I spent maybe an hour trying to find a room in it that didn't exist, and after literally roaming over the rooftops I stumbled across the right room through mere chance since class schedules are posted beside classroom/lecture hall doors. But I do know where the Habelschwerdter Allee is now, from having to consult further maps.

Then I decided to pay my father a visit and roamed all over the wrong part of his building, dismayed and bewildered because none of the rooms looked familiar from a similarly peripatetic adventure last week. In the morning I also went for an, er, circuitous walk, which I will skip in this post.

The irony is that at least two people asked me for directions today.

T. HAS kindly and justifiedly bought me a very own alarm clock, which I should set soon, and one of the drawers around Papa's desk donated the battery. Tomorrow I have three classes, from 8-10 a.m., 12-2 p.m. and 6-8 p.m, if I decide to attend all. The important one is my Greek, from 12 to 2. As optional homework I have written out a good copy of part of my Greek course notes; besides I've sketched out a schedule for the next five university days, but it will require ironing out.

LASTLY, I like riding the U-Bahn, partly because I like the people-watching, and because I have not been packed into it like a sardine yet; but I like the stretch around Dahlem-Dorf best because it is overground, at the bottom of a green embankment.

A New Beginning

It's the night before my first day of normal classes at the FU — one is an art history lecture, and the other an introductory Latin course which I intend to audit this semester and properly take the next. So I will be gone most of the afternoon and evening.

On Saturday I sent an email to the professor in charge of a paleontology work course at the university; depending on the response I will be part of a group learning how to archive and preserve remains from a prehistoric dig every Friday. Since I have wanted to do that since before I was ten years old — and, if it isn't congenial after all, I'm happy to have a chance to test it — it is feverishly exciting.

In general I feel pleased, bent on getting my way (as in taking the courses I want to take despite scheduling obstacles), and nervous.

***

Updated:

The first lecture was a fizzle, since I left the bookshop in time, found the building without difficulties thanks to my habit of drawing little diagrams for myself (a habit inculcated by unhappy events relating to past job interviews), and found the proper room by a stroke of luck. It appears to be a fairly large lecture, too, which makes me happy because I like being an anonymous student and not having to do group work or talk to people unless one or both of us feels like it. But as the hour struck, a student came into the class and said that the lecture had been cancelled for that day.

So I went all the way back to the bookshop again and was there to greet Mama when her time came to take over. The prehistoric archaeology professor has answered my email and said that it would be fine if I participated in her work course, if I am really interested in washing and labelling finds. So I went to the campus in the middle of pleasant suburbia, via a "long and leisurely" bus drive through the incipient rush hour, to "scope out" the terrain. Instead I found, to my howling dismay, that there was a compound of some thirteen buildings in which the course could be held. In fact the identity of the building was revealed in the course index, but I had foolishly skipped it over as an irrelevant detail. One of the buildings I went into didn't have the tentative room number — it had the room number before and the room number after but not the one in between, which left me figuratively hopping with suspense. But now I know the right building and that was not it. The date of the first meeting is also unknown and will be revealed through an "Aushang," which apparently means an update to the institute's website.

Then, somewhat disgruntledly, I travelled back to the U-Bahn station Dahlem-Dorf and betook myself in search of the Rost- and Silberlaube for Latin. This is a huge building which appears to be the core of the campus in terms of teeming with students. I looked for the Habelschwerdter Allee in vain on the U-Bahn map, but being fairly certain that it was down the railroad tracks and then left, and being confirmed in this by a sign, I went down to the Thielallee (pronounced roughly teal ull-lé). I entered the Laube, still not knowing where the Habelschwerdter Allee is, though it must be admitted that it wouldn't be difficult to find out.

If the belt of a treadmill were ever stretched out to represent the true distance which one walks on it, the corridors of the Rost- and Silberlaube would correspond to it in terms of length and of the feeling of futility which it instills. The room numbers are e.g. xx/xxx, in which the first xx indicates which cluster of rooms is meant, and the first x of the xxx indicates the floor number (1, 2, 3). My cluster was for some reason dark. I may be exaggerating, but it seemed like the only light was coming from inside the rooms, the exit signs, and the neighbouring hallways. For some reason that also really peeved me, though from an environmentalist's perspective I salute it.

So my Latin class convened in a horseshoe of desks which filled, and filled, and filled some more. After minutes of entering, seating, chatting and finally befuddled silence, the professor arrived and said, bravely, that it was interesting how the computer system told her there were twenty-three students in this class and how it strangely appeared that there were rather more, and then cheerfully and I think a little nervously launched into her first lecture. She was wearing black jeans and a blazer, reddish hair loose, appears to be in her 40s, has a warmth which I think comes from Polish or Czech parents, and has quite a nice voice and interest-retaining teaching style though I find her grammatical elucidations rather confusing. But I was in a straight-out bratty mood and rather peeved that we were covering material I had already learned on my own; and the Domina ancillam vocat sentences were a base "homage," I indignantly thought, to the old German Latin staple Ludus Latinus.

Anyway, we learned the hoary basics — that one can play around with the word order in Latin, that the nominative case applies to the subject and the accusative to the object, and that many words ending in -us are part of the o-declension and that words ending in -a (except, I thought with dim recollections of textbook paradigms returning, for the neutral plural) are part of the a-declension. There was some interesting stuff about where to emphasize words, involving long and short vowels; it was altogether very close to the Ancient Greek quirks which I know and therefore love, and did not love all that much in the process of having to prod my brain into getting to know them. I want to make vocabulary flashcards but I feel tired. Maybe tomorrow — after my packed 8 a.m. - 2 p.m. schedule is over.

Then I went home in the pitch dark, which made me a very unhappy camper. But on the whole I figure that I will grow more of a backbone if there are petty daily discomforts to grapple with and the lesson learned how to deal with them with sense and some small measure of dignity, though grumbling has also been fun. I've taken a shower and made my bed, and now I intend to rest in it; and that feels inspiriting.

Phyla, Panini and Paperwork

To supplement the course of botanical inquiry I've been on lately — mostly reading a book on plant systematics which should help me keep the classes, orders, families, etc. of flora straight and enlighten me better about the tiny characteristics which distinguish them — I decided to look around YouTube and quickly found an apt lesson on classification and evolution from a course at Berkeley. So I spent roughly an hour on that, including the times I had to pause and repeat it so that my notes would be more accurate, and since then have begun copying down a diagram of the outdated higher orders of life, in the back of our Oxford English Reference Dictionary. We covered those quite thoroughly in Biology 11 and most of the evolutionary elucidations were already familiar from that class and previous science classes, but then I came across brachiopods (which were probably not brought up at all, probably because most species survive only in fossil form) and so have been launched on a certain-online-encyclopaedia session. I might review flatworms and nematodes, too, which quite lastingly put me off 1) ponds and 2) soil, if one grubs around in them without washing one's hands afterwards.

***

My sister purchased a panini grill, or a hot sandwich press if you prefer, and is very enthusiastic about it. As far as I have observed, it does not reach a very high relative heat because it is adapted to the conventional electrical outlets; secondly, frying things in fat and achieving a strong Maillard effect (if you'll forgive the pedantry) greatly improves their flavour. My sister presumably bought it because one thing she liked about the first two years of university, even when they were otherwise dire, were the grilled ciabatte with salmon and our choice of topping from the residence cafeteria. They were freshly assembled and if we liked grilled in a press with generous splashes of olive oil.

Anyway, I feel nostalgic about the cafeteria too, but we do have a cast-iron pan to 'grill' food on even if it leaves no stripes on the food. So what I feel more nostalgic about is, for example, having fish and chips, chicken fingers, enormous sticky cinnamon buns, Belgian waffles and nacho chips without having to bake them, and a salad bar though the time I assumed that what looked like feta cheese was feta cheese was frightful, and having several flavours of ice cream at hand at all times of the year if I feel like having some, etc. In fact I ate quite healthily but the possibility of eating sinfully was highly exciting. (The 'feta cheese' was tofu, by the way. In one of my Foods and Nutrition classes in school we had cooked it two ways to show that it isn't horrible; as I recall it we ended up with a tofu stir-fry and warmish slabs of the stuff inundated — purportedly 'fried' — in maple syrup, which indeed weren't terrible but gave the tofu all the dynamic interest of a flavourless piece of gelatinous white bread.)

Possibly the least delicious thing I had came from the prepackaged food section: a little tub of pineapple cottage cheese, which I tried as a novelty. Either I am genetically engineered not to like it or it is really abhorrent in a neutral sort of way. Once the wasabi sauce that went with the sushi packages also gave me something like stomach cramps (nothing worse) and I figure that was because though I'd eaten wasabi several times it was still too unfamiliar to my Teutonic digestion.

* (Continuation, in which I say a lot of tactless things:)

As far as university present is concerned, I have my student card and transit pass and e-mail account now, and soon I can register for my courses. That registration process is worrying me a little because the FU has regulations the way that the seashore has grains of sand, so it sounds terribly uptight and labyrinthine and I always worry about getting into trouble because someone in the university administration might not have enough common sense to see that even if I make a huge effort to research and ask questions at the right spot, there are some arcana or even obvious things which cannot be found out, deduced, intuited or otherwise perceived by the ordinary mortal who is not up-to-date on which office is handling what, how, and when this particular year. For instance, the structure for one of my minors has changed this year without notice, splitting into four specializations, and (though cautiously optimistic that it will turn out for the best) I'm hopping mad that there was no notice. Anyway, I'm grateful for many things, but even the mildest bureaucratic surprises (what a terrifying combination of adjective and noun!) tend to make me explode in irritation.

*

I know that I'll have to let go my idealizing allegiance to UBC and its administrative practices eventually and transfer it to my present institution. But the highest echelons of the FU also horrify me because of their blather about becoming business-aligned and 'elite,' etc.

If you have to talk about becoming 'elite,' you're not it; though to be fair a former president of Georgetown University was also recently dropping 'prestige' all over an article in the Huffington Post (?). I go to university to learn well, to train the mind and my ability to research and process information in a productive way, and (this time) to hide from reality for four or five years; and frankly I don't want to be a shining example of intellectual superiority or careerist ambition, either on my own behalf or on the university's, because that would make me a terrible person.

If the FU presidency has a monomania for the American university system, it could at least take a better and more astute look at how humanized as well as successful it is — and that what drives it are (as far as I can tell) not managerial acrobatics but the lashings of private money that flow into it.

For instance I think that UBC is good because of geographic position i.e. at a kind of nexus of Asia and North America, because of the somewhat exaggerated payment it extorts from non-domestic students, because of its liberal environment, because of its capacious endowment, and as far as I can tell because it treats its students and employees reasonably well.

I think it's more in backward states like Texas where troglodytes like Rick Perry are demanding that airy-fairy students have success in the business world and get jobs right away. I think it's incredibly dumb, too, to blame one's university on not getting a job. People who do get jobs right away probably do it through their own or their family's connections; and for people like me who'd rather jump off a cliff than acquire influence, I should gather job experience during the studies or the holidays or take extra pains to find positions where any university graduation as well as the ability to write well, informedly and coherently is already sufficient qualification. Frankly I think that employers who demand a diploma without a pertinent reason are snobs or lazyboneses who can't be bothered to test applicants' talents properly; but that's the way the world apparently works.

A Despatch from the Medico-Institutional Frontier

Papa is not home yet after all, and though he might have shown up on our apartment building stoop in the taxi around the same time as I reached the hospital, I decided to venture forth in case he was still there.

In the bag: a draft contribution to a periodical plus a lot of extra paper which had ventured into the pile, a magnifying glass for the infinitesimal print, two issues of the computer magazine CT, the newest Manière de voir (a magazine which comprises selections from the Monde diplomatique archive on a particular theme) still in its wrappings.

What I had not brought were the lab books of two of his tutoring students, which he rather touchingly wanted to correct so that it would be ready in good time for them. At least he isn't out of touch with his colleagues; he telephoned with two of them, which must have been fun: 'So, I have a really good reason for not showing up to work today.' . . .

On the whole I am fairly oblivious to symptoms of illness in other people and decided to treat my visit as dropping by and not as a medical inquiry. It felt like the right course, though visiting someone in the hospital and not asking about symptoms or about the hospital itself sounds weird; and though we both pitched conversational tidbits equally Papa didn't raise these subjects. My impressions were that Papa seemed tired and though he could walk well was still a little unsteady (since his balance had been physiologically affected). To be really frank he had a rather forlorn air. His interest in the field of medicine (balanced or fed by a horror of consulting doctors) had seemingly drooped in the institutional environment; rather than making philosophical observations he clearly really does not want to be there and would greatly prefer to convalesce at home and get back to work.

As for the hospital itself, it has a splendid view of the Berlin skyline, is conveniently located off the U Bahn line that runs past our block, and I thought the atmosphere was good. I checked in at the front desk, a dimly lit room in which two more or less disgruntled people peacefully sat, then took the elevator to the relevant floor; then checked in as advised with the nurse at that station's desk to see whether his room was still the same. He is in an oblong room with two other beds, in which two miserable and inert-looking individuals also lay; there are blue lockers for cleaning or other equipment at the door and tucked in that corner a sink surrounded by a white shower curtain with a monotint winter tree and geese motif; the bed was no massive electrically manoeuverable thingamajig but simply a bed; and there was a nightstand beside it with a foldable tray upon which one could eat, but preferably not cut anything more resistant than a piece of cheese, because putting pressure on it makes it bend like Anna Pavlova. In the aisle at the feet of the beds, there was also a table where Papa could likewise eat.

So we chatted along in the room and then wandered out into the lounge, which is an oblonger windowed room with a plain white table and padded blue chairs where one can eat or talk or read. Papa did have a copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to read, by the way, so he improved on my small elucidations of current events where he already has, to use the delightful German expression, his nose in the wind.

***

As for the Berlin city elections, do I feel guilty for not having voted? — Yes. — Did I feel I was well enough informed to make a responsible decision, rather than going with my gut? — No. I did the Wahl-o-Mat and it left me even more confused; for most of the issues I had to vote "neutral" because I had no idea what the projected consequences or the philosophical underpinnings were. As it is, I was politically scattered between the SPD, Grüne and Linke; fortunately, except for the CDU voting bloc and the people who voted for the Piratenpartei, it appears I had this befuddlement in common with the Berlin population in macrocosm.

A Sketch of the Wordthrift Bookshop-Tender

It's been an interesting time for the past day or two (counting yesterday afternoon) which, er, culminated in a hospital visit; it seems to be an "all's well that ends well" case that nonetheless scared us all. I'd rather not talk about it; it's not my story to tell and it's not at all entertaining.

I'm at the bookshop hoping that the phone call about Papa's arrival home will come, and in the meantime am doing various things on the internet as customary. I didn't sleep much but felt very alert most of the night, and quite as alert and prickly this morning.

Anyway, a customer came in and asked what would be read during the next weekly reading. I said I didn't know, and since she turned to look at the door where the information about the readings is posted and the information was likelier to be found, I dove back into the computer. Soon I looked up our website on the very slender chance that the information might be found there; it wasn't, so I didn't mention it.

Then, on the way back out the door, the lady paused to say with quiet indignation that I wasn't particularly forthcoming, and that if someone comes in with interest I might as well respond. I replied that I didn't have the information, and that it's my mother who does the readings; and then somewhat awkwardly and longwindedly suggested that people tend not to like to give out their telephone numbers and email addresses, but that if she wanted to leave one, my mother could contact her with the reading details once she arrives after 3 p.m.

So the lady (somewhat to my surprise) left an email address. First she interjected that my mother probably wouldn't be too pleased with me — to which I smoothly agreed, "Probably not," while thinking that I'm a little too old to be parentally chastised.

At any rate, I took the relevant notes and put up the piece of paper with the address, etc., on the laptop screen where it can hardly be missed. Soon a Swiss (?) woman came in to inquire after a specific book, and I was a little more extroverted than customary. Thirdly, of course I admire the lady's willingness to keep trying to talk and reach some kind of understanding in the face of a clash of temperaments or moduses operandi.

But — aside from that — I keep fishing for a germ of guilty conscience, in vain. Even more perversely I find the contretemps rather funny. This might not be a particularly grand or admirable example of the quality; but I like feeling cheeky. On the other hand, I don't know what Mama will think of the matter; so if she thinks that my taciturnity was a serious infringement of manners or of the reputation of the bookstore instead of a mild case of still-professional grimness I may repent.

Börsenblatt, Berlin Elections and the Billboard

Today I woke up a little in advance of when I had to be ready to go to the bookshop, and since then have arrived agreeably early, received a package of promotional bookmarks from someone pedalling by on his bicycle, leafed through the Börsenblatt (the weekly — I think — publication of the German booksellers' guild), and seen one pair of people enter the shop to look around. The weather is variable and chilly, owing to the west wind. The news hasn't been too compelling, though since a slow day is generally good news for everyone it's not a complaint; and later I will undoubtedly look at more slideshows from New York Fashion Week.

***

In three days the Berlin city elections will be held and though I have a vague idea of voting for the Linke party in at least one category, I am completely uninformed. On no solid grounds I'm assuming that the Green Party on this level is not particularly alluring, because of petty, snooping, egotistic self-righteousness and for instance the mentality that cyclists are a morally superior lot who deserve to have shelters for their vehicles in case of rain, etc. Most of the charm is being able to vote for a really lefty party that is better on some issues — like civil rights — than any other, in a context where I don't look nuts and communist for doing so. Besides, as long as I don't vote for the FDP everything is fine (which is pretty much the electoral motto in my family and its immediate connections). Speaking of which, also on no solid grounds, I think that the Newer, Younger, Shinier Wave in the FDP — on the federal level, so it must be admitted that it's irrelevant to the city elections — makes even Guido Westerwelle look like a noble character and well-rounded statesman.

***

Last night I tried to foray into the world of popular contemporary music again. Two of the main realizations were that (evidently having a heart of stone) I still don't understand the profound significance of Tupac Shakur or why he is treated as a martyr (though being shot full of five bullets as he was in 1994, if I recall the relevant Wikipedia elucidations correctly, must have been an unpleasant experience), and that to be honest I liked "Baby" as sung by Justin Bieber. Not because it is a great song and not because the singing by Ludacris wasn't far more interesting than the rest of it, but because one can hear clear and apparently unadulterated singing at length instead of the customary manipulated mix of nothing in particular (*cough* to use a self-conscious example, Black-Eyed Peas "Imma be" *cough*). Kelly Clarkson has a similar likeable simplicity, which is also why I was glad when she won American Idol years ago.

In spur of the moment judgments, Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" sounds far better than her "Born This Way," admirable though the message of the latter is; the song by Taylor Swift which I heard was pretty immature, twee stuff. Then I found out that one of the songs fellow students used to play during my studying in Vancouver was apparently "Yeah!" by Usher. Besides I listened to Dolly Parton; to be honest, I like her so much that she could sing terribly and I wouldn't criticize it, and in any case there was no danger of it. Unrelatedly, hearing Susan Boyle was also a possibility, but the same kind of horror with which my uncle Pu regards classical music competitions, I apply to competitions where the best of the crop are people like Paul Potts — whose "Nessun dorma" I did hear and found, though earnestly sung, not very profound and completely out of touch with the operatic tradition — and where the fuss surrounding them is more important than the music itself. (Though, to go on a further tangent, such distracting fuss is also offered up in the most prestigious continental opera houses, when the stage direction goes out on the town and produces what is pejoratively termed "Euro trash opera" in the States.)

Lastly I heard Adele, who is offered up as the grand contemporary exemplar of good singing and profundity; that is probably true, but I don't approve of adopting a singing tradition which has direct roots in slavery and segregation and a sense of homelessness when it expresses nothing more profound than middle-class pensiveness or romantic woes. Amy Winehouse sang in the same tradition, but she gave it an individual, sharp edge (to be honest, I find her singing hard to listen to at length because of this edge) which made it halfway her own. With Adele it is still the excellent imitation of something that older people who were born into the generation can, and do, do better. (I haven't heard Duffy, so couldn't compare her style.) At any rate "Rolling in the Deep" is a good song, and an improvement on "Chasing Pavements," though since I listened to a mixture of live performances and recordings it is hard to tell whether unreliable sound quality, etc., biased the impression.

One obstacle to this entire foraying procedure is that I am really bad at catching lyrics, so there could have been something Shakespearean in the way of songwriting and I would have missed it. What I wonder, too, is how much listening to opera singing once in a while qualifies me to understand which songs are full of thought, effort and inspiration, and ably sung, and which ones aren't. It was much easier figuring out which songs are generally well liked when I was still at school, though that was a totalitarian music appreciation environment and if people preferred edgier or older music than Ricky Martin or Britney Spears they had to keep it well hidden for fear of Being Strange.

Immatriculation, the Runway and Splendid Singledom

Since the last post I've been accepted to university, and have sent off the immatriculation paperwork and paid the fees, at least pro forma since I don't know how long the banks take to sort them out. I have laid excellent plans for preparing academically, because I am hoping to burrow into my studies and only crawl out of them for basic interhuman communication and for work (nature thereof to be determined).

At the moment I am sitting in the bookshop, after a not unproductive morning wherein someone appreciated the lovely wrapping papers which we sell at their full aesthetic value and someone else bought a book out of the window display. The New York Review of Books arrived this morning, so I retrieved it guiltily from our postbox and brought it along to the shop, and have skimmed over Michael Tomasky's political article when customers have come in because staring at the computer then would seem a trifle out of keeping.

Yesterday my sister T. prepared fudge for us again, out of cream and sugar and chocolate and beet root syrup and butter, and it turned out well. Then we had Leberkäs, which are rectangles of meat that taste quite good with sharp mustard of French provenance scraped over them with a fork and toasted in the oven, with mashed potatoes and apple sauce.

Otherwise I've been thinking about carrying on my "live blogging" of War and Peace for my books blog, though since Tuesdays are supposed to be about modern literature or premodern literature I meditated about riffing on an Aesop fable or one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales instead.

So what I did do in the end is look at more photos from New York Fashion Week. So far I have really liked Zac Posen's collection, which looked I thought like a very Parisian audition for the house of Dior, and Carolina Herrera's collection, which is inspired by the 1930s? and Bauhaus in a vivid way that reminds me of the costumes and buildings in Poirot, and Donna Karan's collection, which is inspired by Haiti and I thought dealt with the artisanal sources faithfully and self-effacingly, though of course she dropped in conventional monochrome pastel dresses for a better-rounded collection. As usual, liking collections is quite different from thinking that I could wear them well or would want to wear them, just as I think that admiring a painting is probably better than acquiring the original, firstly because it might not fit in with one's home or one's personal aesthetic and secondly because there are so many good ones that preferring one to the other is difficult to absurd and thirdly because familiarity breeds contempt.

Anyway, as far as work goes, I first of all want to connect my studies with very concrete skills, and secondly if I have more than 200 Euros in my bank accounts I will be greatly surprised. I have more money which is earmarked for clothes (from my aunt) and for piano lessons (from a friend of the family) respectively, which I tend to keep sacrosanct. But I have relaxed my rules for the latter enough to spend 10 Euros from it on a concert and consider using more to hear the singing masterclasses with Christine Schäfer at the Hanns Eisler music school at the end of the month, which is partly also intended to improve my background knowledge of the discipline in case the opportunity arises to write a Maria Callas-related essay for my Greek courses. The problem is having enough funds to pay for transit to and from such events.

But otherwise I am very happy with not having extra money. Firstly it is much easier to not spend money if it isn't there to spend; I never consider the money truly mine anyway because there are many rightful claims on it first of all by pitching into household expenses, secondly by paying health insurance and other necessary things, and thirdly by charities; and thirdly I spent my childhood and teenagerhood feeling uncertain about every single purchase I made (grocery shopping, present shopping, buying gummy bears and clothes and so on for myself during university) in case it was superfluous. Besides I don't much like going out, so if I do meet people I like I'd rather talk with them or play soccer or whatever than go to restaurants or lectures or whatever, and it gives me the perfect excuse to avoid even seeming like I am on the search for a boyfriend.

More friends would be nice and it is definitely dreary not being able to talk to people; but where a boyfriend is concerned I need to sort out my psychological messes, grow up and into myself — which includes beginning to work properly, and finally come across the proper person first. In school and university, the boys whom I admired the most were ones who were friendly (not to me but in general) and clever, and I called those crushes — really it was in a pretty sisterly way without the least bit of a spark. Besides I have an inkling that I am going to be the strong, reliable, and somewhat inscrutable person who knows how to do the necessary things (paperwork, plumbing, electrical repairs, etc.) and how to make people feel secure in an eventual relationship; that sounds rather nice to me now that I am no longer a needy teenager, and I have to be extra-well prepared. Partly I think about what is right for me in that respect because three of my Facebook friends from school are pregnant and six are married and one at least already has a child, but it was clear even back in Grade 7 that I have my own turtle's pace of leading my life, which is certainly odd but effective and, indeed, right.

Ramblings, From Trauma to Poor's

It's quite late but I am still very much up, and since my usual time-wasting experiences are temporarily out of reach, I was doing a little research for the story instead. As long as the reading about gunshot wounds was strictly theoretical and verbal, it was fine; even looking at the photos was fine. Then I looked at photos of other types of wounds, stitches, etc., and was for once subtly rocked to the verge of seasickness, as it were. So I decided to postpone the rest to a different day, and here is my blog post instead.

This evening my sister T. had an interview, and instead of having to go off to a complicated location, the interviewer came over to us! The rest of us were tucked away in our respective rooms and didn't traipse in to disrupt the proceedings. Anyway, it was a lovely change of pace.

***

The weather has been mixed, with a couple impressive gusts which bent back the branches on the oaks and even stirred the top of the trunk; in Dahlem a gust of over 19 m/s was recorded, which is not unusual but at any rate an 8 on the Beaufort scale and gale-force. The temperature fell and rose between 14 and 19 degrees Celsius; the humidity was generally I think between 60 and 70%. I like looking at the circum-British marine weather on the Met Office's website, too, and finding strong winds and learning the names of the different quadrants of sea. It's fairly useless for knowing the weather in Berlin except if conditions in the "German Bight" are similar.

At any rate the night sky is covered in clouds for the first time in several days, which I know because I have been watching for Perseid shooting stars before the moon becomes full. I can only point out the Big Dipper and the moon and sometimes Orion, but do recognize Cassiopeia because it is simply a sideways W, and so by luck I think I figured out where Perseus's constellation lies (i.e. mostly behind a neighbouring apartment building).

Though too impatient to watch stars well, I did take the time to sit in the open window of Ge.'s and J.'s room and watch the aperture of sky for a long while, and noticed that it is a slow process for the eye to accustom itself to the darkness and to glimpse more stars. Then of course there was the ambient city light, and even someone turning on the light in a room dimmed the stars further. I haven't seen the obvious blips of shooting stars which I saw (I think those were the Leonid showers, so in November) gliding over the sky in Canada once; but I saw one goldenish fizzle, which was strange and possibly something else, and I have never seen so many imaginary streaks of light in my life.

***

I have been following the riots in London with intense interest. On the whole, though I made a conscious decision not to read the coverage in the Telegraph much, I find the response of public opinion reasonable. The calls for police brutality and prompt military invasion are of course shortsighted and profoundly unintelligent on the whole, but as a verbal reaction at least they are to be expected and natural. What interested me is (for example) that there was so much of a focus on David Cameron handling the matter, rather than Boris Johnson; though admittedly Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (I read the whole name somewhere today and thought it was worth repeating) does not exude the air of the stern, noble arbiter of the socioeconomically afflicted.

Generally what I think is that living in downtown London is, depending on income level and the nature of one's immediate neighbours, in fact quite brutal and very monotonous; so without considering all of the looters as victims, and with considering setting fire to buildings as well as beatings of people as acts whose abhorrent nature should not need to be pointed out, I have a lot of sympathy for the rioters and looters. As for the theft, of course I am not comfortable with it; in pragmatic terms, it is clear firstly that destroying the work and savings of someone who has had to struggle for them (like the owners of the small businesses which have also been attacked) is unjustified, and secondly that the wealthy management of a multinational retailer are very likely to ensure that the brunt of financial losses falls on persons other than themselves. Thirdly I think it's true that the looting doesn't do much for the besieged economy; fourthly I don't understand why technology gadgets seem so essential to these people. As for the man who was shot and killed in Croydon, the phrasing of the incident is so ambiguous that I wonder whether he was shot by the police, and if the death was in fact related to the riots or not — doubts all the more justified, I think, by the improbity of public statements regarding Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, and more recently Mark Duggan.

***

As for the stock market crashes, I think that they are fairly stupid, and have been as inclined to mutter about Moody's and Standard & Poor's (also of course in connection with Greece, Portugal, and Italy) as many other people, though I need to read more business articles to know what precisely is going on. Becoming the agency that hammers the nail into the coffin of a national economy must not be very rewarding, and as Paul Krugman has pointed out, for instance, S&P entirely failed to identify the subprime mortgage problem before it burst onto the scene and so is something less than omni in its science. On the other hand if something finally gets Berlusconi out of the prime ministerial office and into the round of judicial proceedings which have been breathing down his neck, I don't mind if it is this period of economic malaise.

Possibly the Longest Navel in History

I've begun writing on my "lousy stories" again. It's an old tale which I felt was stupid and shallow the first time I wrote and finished it and have been revising out of a sense of shame ever since. The latest draft was begun June 21st-ish, and though I suspect that I must have left this latest draft open whilst wandering off elsewhere, Word says that I have spent over 85 hours on it.

What I've done lately to encourage writing endurance is set up an elaborate tea service at the laptop. I cleaned the secretary-desk a little. The ceremony involves brewing a pot of tea, arranging it on a large plate or today our tray, having a sugar pot and a rye cracker beside it, and then consuming it as the writing advances. I don't know if it qualifies as a slop bowl, but I even have a little fingerbowl in which I put today's teabags when they had sufficiently steeped. It feels very professional; the real business of literary endeavour is, of course, unconnected to the state of our teapot.

***

Though I was in the bookshop for a short while today as Mama's holidays begin to taper off, I have had endless time for the piano: Mozart's early sonatas and the concerto in d minor (20), Chopin's "revolutionary" étude and his "raindrop" prelude, Händel's "Harmonious Blacksmith" suite, the slow movement of Mendelssohn's d minor trio, Schubert's sonata in B flat major (D 960) and the two before, and Bach, for instance. I like having my sloppy pile of notes on both ends of the noterack and on the noterack itself, and pulling forward one of the previous notes to wedge in place the recently turned pages of the current score.

I really like Beethoven's cadenzas for the Mozart concerto, but that may be because of their familiarity from the Rudolf Serkin and Clara Haskil recordings I liked to hear at university. Clara Schumann's introduces (I felt when I attempted it today) too much of her own style and Carl Reinecke's is friendly but perhaps slavishly subordinated to Mozart's composition. In the fantasia-like tradition of cadenzas they are all rather weird; so with the very weirdest I am parochially inclined to prefer my own flavour of eccentricity. On the other hand canon compositions themselves are often hard to follow, as I had reason to observe again today in the thickets of Schubert; and I will likely concede in a couple of years that the problem lies not with the cadenzators but with the uncongeniality of my interpretation.

***

Yesterday it was Mama's birthday, and though she has never felt inclined to fuss about it, she took it upon herself for our sakes to indulge the mood for a bit of a splurge and shop for an elaborate set of repasts.

In the morning I spent an idle hour or so washing cutlery and cleaning the stove, with its extremely irritating freight of mistakenly loyal grease which was sort of like a glue stick when you try to rub the glue off of something and it only becomes more grey and streaked and stubborn. I wasn't the one who spattered the damn stuff after leaving a middling flame unattended on the largest gas burner. There were little creamy splatters on the inverted underside of our Römertopf lid, which I conveniently ignored.

Anyway, after lingering over that I prepared three "puddings surprises," this time with three types of pudding mixes, the ladyfinger biscuits, coffee, sherry, bilberries, raspberries, the berry juices and chocolate sprinkles. Due to different cooking times the puddings were fairly tepid by the time the dishes were achieved, as it were, but I woke up the others so that they could enjoy the pudding in residual warmth. I think the pudding would have been improved with more sherry.

Then Mama and T. laboured over fruit tortes, which were beautiful and delectable and their toppings compounded of mandarin and peach slices from a can, apricot halves, blueberries or bilberries, raspberries, and pineapple rings. There was whipping cream to go with it, and a bowl of yoghurt with the remaining fruit. To follow we had bars and squares of chocolate — nougat, milk, marzipan, and ginger marzipan — which were partitioned in the corner room as one of the Herbie films appeared for the millionth time, still charming, on television. In the evening W. came by with a bottle of prosecco, which I enjoyed likewise in a sampling this morning. Of course we had also sung Happy Birthday.

***

Anyway, I thought that I would write a thorough profile on Amy Winehouse for one of my blogs. But though I spent a good part of yesterday researching and I like her and find her interesting, I think that it would be best to have gathered a knowledge of the music industry and the historical background against which her songwriting and performances developed. Hopping on the bandwagon isn't a problem in this case, I think, because so much nonsense has been written about her that someone should do a nicer job of it — though I do like Russell Brand's commentary from his blog (it should still be available at Guardian.co.uk). Secondly, while the subject is still fresh there is less of a likelihood that stuff will be raked up that should be left forgotten. I was interested in her to begin with because I had never heard any criticism of her musical talent, whereas music of any genre brings out so much partisanship, envy, and nitpicking that this is impossibly rare; and because she did seem to fit so naturally and authentically into her jazz, rocker persona, old-fashioned groove.

As for Norway, I think that it is too easy to write something sensationalist or grandiosely sentimental, and it's doubtful whether one can write anything helpful or unprecedented. As little can be done in retrospect for the victims at the youth camp and in Oslo as for many other civil or military situations in the past year in which many (unarmed, young) people have died. What one can do is not to construct a perverse demigod out of the suspected murderer by discussing him more than those who died.

For News of the World I am completely uninterested, though why the straightforward tabloid rather than the tabloids in the guise of news-papers which compose the rest of his [= R. Murdoch] subjournalistic consortium should be the one under fire for its ethics is the question, and it is a pity that the employees were let go when it was closed down.

Where Somalia and northeastern Kenya are concerned, I still don't have the impression that there is much one can do as an individual abroad. What I do think is that the portrayal of the famine-stricken as brainless and helpless mouths to feed instead of as herders, villagers, etc., who would have been able to get along on their own and in their native soil had they been given the resources (wells, etc.) which a government or agency should have afforded them, and who need not only food but also some measure of protection and a dignified temporary shelter, is patronizing and denigrating. The closest I've come to reading about such a situation is in Laura Ingalls Wilder, and it is very clear that there is nothing one can do — hard work or intelligence or even wealth — against the weather if you rely on agriculture. The main difference in this millennium is that the infrastructure to develop and distribute technology has improved along with the technology itself, that where farming is done on a larger scale the risks tend to be better balanced out, and that governments are better at evening out the odds for vulnerable farmers if they accept the responsibility.

***

Last week I had an interview for a job at a restaurant. The transit and timing worked well, but the interview itself went badly. Either I didn't seem waitressy or the person was looking for an excuse not to hire me, because he said that without food industry experience he couldn't hire me, in fact nobody could hire me, in fact that at best I could do cleaning work; then was wroth that I didn't speak Italian though I could tease out the meaning of the advertisement; all things which were clear in the c.v. and letter I had sent him. He sent an email apologizing for being in a bad mood, since he is stressed; but I didn't think it was entirely sincere and everything felt a little "squicky" anyway and not a situation where I would be happy or make the employer so. So I turned down an offer to help with the website; it is on the face of it a dumb thing to do (beggars choosers etc.) but in this case my instincts were emphatically against it and I don't know much about web design so wasn't eager to have the bluff called. I consider it a bullet dodged, and was mostly irritated at the time because of the expenditure of time (esp. two words: S-Bahn delays), effort, and of hope that I would at last have work. Now I feel pleased because I have managed to be obdurate about not putting up with balderdash.

Negligees and Menacing Moons

Besides practicing again, I have been keeping up with the haute couture in Paris, which ended on the 7th. These shows are, I've learnt, put on by members of the Chambre Syndicale, which demands that a fashion house put on two per year. This year I liked all of the ones I looked at — as usual I looked at the slideshows on Style.com, which have the advantage of occasionally giving the names (and agencies) of the models, while Vogue proper's website has a little magnifying box so that one to look at the photos close up, so that the workmanship is visible and it is easier even to tell what the fabric is. But newspaper websites like the Daily Telegraph's have them too.

One of the dresses I remember is Azzedine Alaïa's last; it is (if I recall) made out of a black latticework-like fabric which reminded me vaguely of old Middle Eastern window architecture, it has a broad belt-waist with metallic rims, and it is tied up at the throat with thin black straps, and hanging from the waist there is a short overskirt which falls in a pattern of petals. The overskirt mimicked the "skating skirts" earlier in the show which — though if they are trimmed with real fur I am inclined to disapprove — had a lovely Victorian appearance, and one or two came in a dark red velvety shade. They reminded me of ostrich feathers because of their fringe and their laden droop.

Then I really liked Anne Valerie Hash's line, which was a masterpiece of modernist French subtlety, and it was a relief to see black models; I don't know how to say this tactfully, but here their inclusion didn't look like political correctness because I don't think the clothes — the satiny fabric and the creamy or black shades — would have looked half so well on anybody else.

I looked at Dior briefly, twice, and felt that the problem with it was that dress-wise John Galliano has a better rein on his imagination once he has indulged it; I don't remember him ever indulging in pastels much, though they're more of my own bête noire, and the choice of patterns would have benefited from a sober second opinion. But the way in which the costumes were thrown together was at fault, too, since pieces that looked busy and unwearable together would have done very well if they had been contrasted with something striking but plain. In one case I noticed that there was a quieter skirt; I think either giving it a broad hem at the bottom or a strip of dark colour would have helped, since it was beige and looked almost literally like the unglamorous gruel of office fashion. I don't think the collection was disastrous by any means, but not thought over enough (and the reasonably popular photo of the girl in the opalescent moon dress would have been less horrifying had the sickle not been wedged with such homicidal tightness around her face).

Elie Saab had a line of thin dream-dresses which had a bathroom colour theme going on, namely that I could imagine each tint in the handle and packaging of a feminine razor; and though like Monique Lhuillier's his dresses do appeal sentimentally I have been meanly inclined to think without evidence that he designs a little cynically for the unimaginative tastes of the rich and famous. With Givenchy I didn't exactly get the point, since it was essentially all white negligées, suitable if one is an opera heroine who wishes to die tragically of consumption (the riverside backdrop to the show lent another suicidal overtone, though perhaps too Canaletto summer and not sufficiently gloomy or house-overhung for the lantern-lit, Thames-dragging variety of old-fashioned demise) but otherwise a trifle beside the point of winter attire, or for that matter attire. The Valentino show was rich and cheerful, and I liked the bright congress of Natalia Vodianova, Anne Hathaway, and the other guests.

Jean-Paul Gaultier's show I've somehow forgotten, and Chanel's I don't think I looked at in the first place — which is absurd, of course, because they're very important and I tend to like Chanel.

Anyway, this was all kind of frivolous and what the point of reviewing it as I have is precisely, I cannot say, but perhaps it is amusing. What is more embarrassing sartorially is that I could stare at what Kate Middleton wears forever, and either photographers choose her photos very respectfully or she is incredibly photogenic; at any rate I tend to delay looking at slideshows for a few days so that I am not undignifiedly hanging onto her every snapshot, as it were. Kate Moss's wedding photos I skipped; and the royal nuptials in Monaco made me (like other meddlesome-minded hoi polloi) a little sad, so I went through one slideshow a little absentmindedly and decided to shroud the rest in a sort of imperfect individual privacy.