A Trivial Sidenote

Today I was looking for the piece of paper on which I had written the caramel brownies recipe, and found on its reverse the answers which I had scribbled down (based on what I know without looking things up, though looking things up is really the crux of the quiz) for this year's [Link in PDF] King William's College Quiz. Of course I mentioned having looked up the solutions for the quiz in the last post, since they have come out already, but hadn't known what my precise 'score' was.

Here are the questions which happened to coincide with my (sometimes peripheral, having only perused roughly a solitary page each of 1.9. and 4.1.) book-reading over the years:

1.9. In the year 1911: who silently portrayed Marguerite Gauthier?

4.Which tale or tales:
1. is all about Hester's badge of shame?
8. tells of how Dick and the outlaw dress up as friars?

7.7. in which Study did Sir James, disappointingly, marry Celia
instead of her sister?

8.10. what is essentially cheese on toast?

11.4. who received details of the School of Pain from her invalid
cousin?

12. Unmask:
5. Alexander Thomson
9. Newsom

The answers may be found here.

The Asinine Eyewitness

This morning Greek was a little boring, except perhaps to a person who considers the replacement of proper nouns as indirect objects by pronouns, and the conjugation of irregular verbs in their 3rd person plural active forms, wildly stimulating. I also came, er, a trifle late.

In the Islamic Studies lecture, the professor went through the divisions of the Muslim religio-polity into the (I may have invented some of these names) Hassanids, Ismailites, Nizarites, Idrissids, Qaramites, etc., which was like a laundry list. He runs through the groups so evenhandedly and factually that just when I have come to think, yes, that sect sounds like a right crowd of crazypantses, a moment later he mentions something about the group that sounds reasonable. Besides, from one end of a sentence to another, I've mostly already forgotten which imam they believed was the last legitimate one, who was descended from which uncle or cousin or associate of Muhammad, whether they leaned toward the Sunni or Shi'ite, who was the de facto leader of the group, and where the group lived. And I still don't know the difference between Sunni and Shi'a!

A bright spot were the Suetoniusesque antics of Al Hakim, caliph of Egypt when the Fatimids were governing it in opposition to the caliphate in Baghdad. (Apparently the Fatimids did not use that name to refer to themselves; it was bestowed upon them by outsiders whose reference to the Fatimids' veneration of Fatima — a woman! — was intended to approximate the label of "Girlie Men.") The Wikipedia page is comparatively dull. As the professor summed it up, this gentleman was rather a hardliner but in a flip-flopping manner, in that he forbade things and then un-forbade them. He forbade wine, which is not so abstruse given the Quranic traditions; but also forbade trade between Christians and Jews with Muslims, women from going out at all (but the Wiki only mentions that they weren't allowed to go out uncovered), and men from going out at night so as to prevent nocturnal hijinks, besides which he burned down a church or temple but then felt sorry and tried in vain to rebuild it. Thanks perhaps to the bad offices of his elder sister, he went out for one of his nighttime strolls in the desert one night and didn't come back; all that was found later were pieces of his bloody clothes. I thought the professor said that pieces of the caliph were found too, but may have misremembered that; at any rate, Wiki also places an abandoned donkey at the sanguinary scene.

The hashish-fuelled Assassins sounded interesting, too, but I'll presumably read up on them some other time. The Crusades are coming up in the lectures, and I admit that I'm looking forward to hearing about them, though most of the other warfare mentioned in this course has been hugely depressing.

Over the weekend I played the piano a lot and watched bits of the Golden Globe awards and even a crime show or two (not German, but American, since I like my crime unrealistic and full of shiny high technical production values), and checked my partially (3?) correct answers for this year's King William's College quiz, much to my content.

By the way, I have my Blackboard password now and everything's fine. Regarding the post below.)

In Which The Student Throws A Tantrum

N.B.: The following is rather self-absorbed and correspondingly boring.

On Wednesday evening I attended the philosophy lecture, which was about the question of what constitutes Self. What the lecture and the two others have proven is that I do explain the cosmos to myself in religious terms — which is comforting because I haven't been too stalwart of a defender either of religion or of agnosticism when I thought I was agnostic — and that it feels comfortable and, I guess, elastic enough to embrace all sorts of explanations.

Thursday was very long, with over three hours of Greek and one hour and forty-five minutes of my History and Culture of the Near East seminar and one hour and forty-five minutes of Latin. At the end of the seminar I asked the professor for the password to the online course material, which was evidently a faux pas, since I should have asked for it far earlier. He said that I should ask a fellow student for the password. Anyway, I summed this up as petty obstructionism and, interesting though I find the class, if it is even more difficult to do what I have to do to prepare for a presentation, catch up on readings which I hadn't figured out until that day that we had to do, and then put together material for a ten-to-fifteen page take-home assignment due at the end of February which I found out about by overhearing a classmate mention it to someone else who also didn't know about it, it won't work out. So I scheduled an appointment during the professor's office hours and will put forward the possibility of my dropping the seminar. Partly I am doing this to make it easier on the professor (certainly not for me, because the bureaucracy will most likely be a headache), and partly I admit I feel irritated and inclined to flounce.

In my defense, I had several courses at UBC which had online course materials, and often they were the professor's PowerPoint slides which I was there to see in person at the lecture often enough, and when they held important information this was explicitly brought up in class; so there was some reason for me to think that the maledicted Blackboard access was not such a big deal. As for asking a fellow student for the password, I think I will; but the atmosphere in the seminar itself would seem to indicate that they would be annoyed at me for accosting them and asking them the question — as I mentioned to my parents during my interminable complaints over the past few days, we wouldn't even know each others' names if they weren't written on the handouts which every presenter must distribute to the class in conjunction with their presentations. (And some students have another class together.)

On Friday evening I was still scourging myself with this tempest-in-a-teapot, so I dove into a sea of research for my presentation subject, and kept at it so steadily that, as the French (as far as I remember) say 'I did not see the hour pass,' and then I came late to Latin. (On the other hand, such lateness is not unprecedented, and was in this case exacerbated by the quick consumption of an extraneous bowl of yoghurt before I left, so it can't be blame entirely on scholarly vigour.)

But in the end it is unreasonable for me to expect to be happy at university every single hour of every single academic day, and my grumpiness and infantile impulses to dissolve into a burst of tears and so on are a rather 'clean' form of unhappiness — nothing depressive or guilty (I feel in the end that I might have done something unwise but not wrong). And as far as the seminar goes, even if I drop out on Tuesday, it and the accompanying lecture have given me precisely the kind of detailed material I can use to set forth medieval Islamic society in a future story and to provide a context which could be useful if I set a story in Europe (or Byzantium or Iran) at the same epoch. Which is part of the reason why I want to go to university: to learn to do good research so that I can use it to learn history out of curiosity, find material for stories, better understand the origins of things, and to write thorough and accurate non-fiction. So in the end I think I have it pretty good.

The Return of the Slog

This evening the academic week began again with one hour and forty-twoish minutes of Latin. Normally, in school and even in university, I spend the entire pedagogical session after the Christmas holidays mentally howling a dirge — of ennui and of fear of being despised by my fellow students and of discomfiture at the impending essay and project deadlines — as the deprived trees outside weep rain and hail and snow in sympathy. But this year I feel surprisingly unanxious and unbothered in face of the resumption of classes.

On the other hand much of the Latin class today whooshed over my head. As long as the Future I form looks like amabo I know where I'm at, but the passive forms and infinitive moods and the sinister transformation of ferre into tollere or whatever are an ineffable nuisance. Fortunately the verb tollere is at least familiar from the Lord's Prayer, where I always thought at first glimpse that it meant tolling of a bell somehow until I realized that no bell pops up in the text, and that I have never heard of a ringing lamb or of resonating sins of the world. We finished translating a truly gripping account wherein the Roman sheeple are confident at last that they will be saved from Catiline's vile and predatory schemes for the seizure of the reins of state.

Then the professor dismissed the class after we had completed what she considered a very apposite exercise, wherein we had to identify the future verb forms within a list of words, and determine a saying of Cicero's which was spelled out by the first letters of the verbs. The answer: Nihil agere delectat, which roughly translates to "It is enjoyable to do nothing."

On the way home the sky gave way for a gauzy glimpse of the moon (in an awkward transitional phase) and a star, like a mole, beside it; and a presumptive helicopter. On the ground I much admired the dark shapes of the mistletoe in the trees, the puddles, and the Christmas decorations which had been set up around the houses since I last visited. Somehow it made the houses seem like stations along the face of an Advent calendar, with the house numbers as the dates. There was a bang or wheeeeee of firecracker or firework here and there, too.

On the news ticker in the U-Bahn it was proudly announced that Berlin has 30,000 more tourist beds than New York. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, one of the major cultural centres of the world!!!

New Year's in Truly Exhausting Detail

For New Year's Eve we had wieners, potato salad emulating my godmother's recipe (potatoes, pickles, bacon, green apple, parsley, and this year fried onion), divers pickles on the side, two bowls of punch (mineral water, canned mandarin slices and peach pieces, Sekt, white wine and tonic water), and a bottle of Sekt to open at the turn of midnight.

This year the fireworks and firecrackers seemed more subdued and the streets emptier than ordinary. Besides the usual taxis and the lone car and a bus which ran the gauntlet of the artillery in the sulfurous haze, the passage of firetrucks and police cars seemed more noticeable. So it was a strangely sad New Year's.

I stayed up late into the night and woke up again after eleven, in time for the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert on television.

***

This year the conductor is Mariss Jansons, and I had the impression that, coming hypothetically from Amsterdam and moving toward Vienna, he landed somewhere in mid-Germany with the programming and the style in which he rendered Strauss. There was besides less Strauss than in some years; even Tchaikovsky made an appearance. There were many medleys — later also of Carmen — and I was inclined to be rather frowny-faced about those, especially since though I may have been too sleepy to identify it correctly I thought I heard in one of them that string opus of Haydn's which became Our national anthem, reinforcing what I thought were Anschluss-y associations.

As for the concert hall, the moderator informed us that the old wall paintings have been uncovered and, whether unrelatedly or not, their dark brown and cream were theme tones this year. The lighting seemed less severe than in past years, not as glitzily gold. The flowers were red and white this year, white lilies and red roses and white Gerbera daisies, with variations into orangey and yellowy ranunculus. On the one hand I detest the pink and red combination of past years and so am glad to have been spared it, presume that more intricate colour combinations might not appear well on film and that perhaps the range of flowers which could stand up to the physical demands of the role is limited, rather like the starry effect which intensely coloured flowers can have against an indeterminate background of almost black evergreens, and besides have never had anything nice to say about the flower arrangements at these concerts. On the other hand I dislike asparagus fern extremely, there was an anthurium which fortunately appeared only briefly and though it had a white base and a blush-red stamen looked surprisingly more tasteful than the commoner tints, and the red and white had a mediocre wedding banquet effect.

But the true horror of this year's concert was in subverting it into an unsubtle and unoriginal, romance-themed commercial for the Vienna tourist board.

***

I missed the opening of the concert, since during that interval I was still thinking of nobly forgoing the usual course of watching the gimmickry, taking notes, sharpening a quill into a deadly point and dipping it in bile, and then rendering the spectacle in print for the cruel amusement of others — and instead concentrating on listening to the music. That noble resolve did not last long.

During the first half of the concert, we were introduced to the Vienna Boys' Choir, who were participating for I think the announcer said the fifth time and who seemed to have to scream-sing to be heard in the hall. Besides Austria's president Heinz Fischer and Horst Seehofer (a right-wing German politician, who looks in my lefty opinion like a smug overgrown college football player), one was relieved to glimpse the actress Julie Andrews in fine Queen-of-Genovia fettle in a balcony-box in the audience.

***

I WAS especially grateful, however, for my two or three matutinal glasses of punch when we were subjected to The Intermission. It began subtly enough with a cheesy scene of musicians from the Philharmonic fake-playing a series of music from different classical composers in the bright sun in front of (or on top of, etc., in all of the permutations of the pedagogical French ditty "Sur, sous, dans") a series of tourist lodestones. Then there was a little girl who was awkwardly being 'pulled up' into the air by a red balloon above them (N.B.: profound metaphor expressing something something inspiriting and elevating, indeed ebullient, effect of music and culture and Viennesedom upon the psyche), never truly soaring due to obligatory safety harness in which the child actress was presumably anticking on a soundstage in front of a green screen, so that the range of motion stayed well within children's pop-up book pull-tab capacities.

But the heroine of the monstrosity was an enthusiastic young Tourist Everywoman with bounding antigravitational hair, glaringly pink top and a similarly skintight white skirt which curved well in at the bottom-cheeks. Since I am firstly oblivious to clothes in ordinary contexts, secondly oblivious to people's physiques, and thirdly straight, the fact that I noticed the skirt says a good deal about this style of sartorial architecture. After being ferried around a weirdly overlit and empty Vienna on the open-air top of a bus alongside possibly Japanese tourists wearing schoolgirl uniforms and making cute gestures with their fingers for the camera (a leap of imagination which does the film production proud), and taking to the air as awkwardly as the Little Girl, she arrives at her hotel at last.

Having checked into a very chic hotel lobby, despite the impediment of nil luggage and ninguno identification, she throws herself upon the mercy of the forthcoming receptionist and on some smartphone or whatever (the director is really "with it"!) displays a photo of a smiling young man, evidently her lost belovèd. The receptionist has sadly not seen this well-groomed individual. So she goes up to her very large and well-furnished and luxurious room, full of self-pity and still devoid of luggage; and to the tune of Débussy's "Claire de lune" (argh) assumes actorly howly-face No. 22 and drags herself around the floor a little. The director industriously demonstrates his incredible contempt for the television viewer by cutting to a shot of the full moon, thereby hitting us over the head with the musical reference with the finesse of a twenty-tonne asteroid crashing into the Mare Orientale. At some point there is also a heart-shaped locket with photos of the heroine's lost belovèd.

The thing is that I have seen one too many teeny romance films involving travel, and can confirm that the Brief (Tourist) Encounter and the Search in a City of Hundreds of Thousands or Millions Plus Tourists For One Person are an incredible cliché. The heroine's bobbing about with an umbrella might be a subtle reference to Mary Poppins, but ends up looking similarly like intellectual property theft, and a later scene in which lots of amateur aeronauts speckle the canopy over a strangely overlit touristy part of Vienna is cribbed from René Magritte. There is also some children's film about a red balloon or something which I never watched, and that song about 99 Luftballons, and an illustration in Winnie the Pooh — in short, there are too many people who have done this balloon or umbrella aloft thing, more sympathetically.

One redeeming aspect of The Monstrosity was a brief (though in its insights not particularly novel) excursion to the Middle East in terms of the music, and to the immigrant population of Vienna in terms of showing street markets, jars of olives, and such. Another redeeming aspect of the Monstrosity was the way the music was played, though I wondered why the musicians who had been hooked into the affair didn't run away screaming from the production; and I thought that it would have been more interesting to hear good folk music performers from the Middle East play the Middle Eastern music, since though the lilt and other characteristic effects were faithfully rendered, it sounded dampened. Besides I was wondering whether this was genuine in its motivations or an attempt to seem more tourist-friendly to the UAE, Qatar, etc.

***

AFTER the intermission came the dancing interludes. It seemed freer and more fluent than ordinary, since I don't like the stiff costumes, doll-like gestures, and the makeup-up-the-wazoo of most years, and the dichotomy of male and female dancers and pairs was not so severe; but the choreography was at times frankly pretty crummy. The costumes the first time around were a caramel colour, or at least the colour of caramel wrappers, and together with the tight pants of the men Papa remarked that they looked quite Bollywood. I thought, not nearly enough. For some reason the main pair of dancers was sniffing each other and I wondered aloud whether the choreographer by any chance bore the surname of St. Bernard (or Basset, or Schnauzer, etc.).

For the Blue Danube waltz (since it's the traditional encore, I anticipate, but still) the costumes were in shades of blue from turquoise through to purple. Ge. astutely observed that it must be in hommage to the waters of the Danube, I thought that the waters are probably not blue but that the title of the waltz indicates that they once were, and Papa and Mama were both underwhelmed and in favour of the monochromatic designs and the less shiny fabrics for instance of Valentino for 2010. What bothered me more was that it was framed as the fantasy of a Young Tourist Couple.

IN "Mac Flecknoe," Dryden's nod to his nemesis and so full of broad insults that I sort of wish that had I known it existed as a child, he writes:

All human things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey:

This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young

Was call'd to empire, and had govern'd long:

In prose and verse, was own'd, without dispute

Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute.

This aged prince now flourishing in peace,

And blest with issue of a large increase,

Worn out with business, did at length debate

To settle the succession of the State:

And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit

To reign, and wage immortal war with wit;

Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he

Should only rule, who most resembles me:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years.

Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he

Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,

Strike through and make a lucid interval

[From Representative Poetry Online, U of Toronto]

If the tourist film at the intermission is Shadwell, the third dance interlude is surely Flecknoe. Inspired by a painting of Gustav Klimt (whose 150th birthday is this year), a pair of ballet dancers begins embraced in a tableau, shrouded in a gilt sleeping bag like a Snuggie. It then parts to dance in a utilitarian white shirt and tan leggings for the gentleman, and the offspring of a brownish medical bandage and of a figure skating costume with a swirl of glitter for the lady. There were several rock-dumb moves in this pas de deux or whatever it is termed — one where the male dancer had to rest on the floor on all fours like a three-toed sloth, one where the dancer would turn the partner's head by grasping their skulls and dishevelling their hair, and others which I have thankfully forgotten. By the end the pair was shrouded in their blankie again for the final tableau; and in the most horrendously cheesy effect ever, the film production faded in a reddish frame to the top and right so that the resemblance to Klimt's red-framed painting was as plain as the nose on one's face. In any case I find the inspiration mildly dubious, since Klimt tip-toes rather close to kitsch.

***

For the Delirium waltz I paid more attention to the music and quite liked it — the Blue Danube Waltz was also a relief to hear since it was unselfconsciously gentle. The piece with the train effects was I thought far too literal. I rather liked it in a later piece when Jansons contributed to the percussion section by having two metal dealies propped up on either side of his podium, which he hit vigorously in tune to the music, looking like he was living out every essentially infantile dictator's dream.

As for the Radetzky March, which is my bugbear, I survived it — in spite of my loving family's decision to join in the clapping just to see me pull my blanket tighter over my head and hear me groan like one of the damned.

At the end of the caboodle, a little sentence at the top of the screen informed us that this programme had contained product placement. . . . No. Kidding.

***

The foregoing text may have contained inaccuracies. Please to forgive.