The Sybaritic Millionaire, etc.

This pastiche is inspired by a British romance novel genre I came across during light reading over the years. It is complete with the insights into the lifestyle of the wealthy, Mediterranean speech patterns in English, the emotional inhibition natural to the male, buried childhood traumas, martyring maternity, hidden offspring, and all the other appurtenances of modern living where humble femininity with no pretences to sophistication but with the possession of a well-intentioned heart encounters the fiscal patriarchy:

Sybaritic Millionaire, Excessively Patient Wife

Annie Petropavlokovskoulos noted without surprise that she was turning heads as she passed. It was not because of her Titian hair, which glowed like a traffic light as it curled to her coccyx; it was not because of her slender legs which appeared to stretch into the stratosphere; it was not even because of her elegant female stride. It was because of her muumuu, a billowing brown monstrosity that looked like a potato sack in an ogre's warehouse, and the classical leather sandals that clapped along the marble flooring of the Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises headquarter offices. She was a hippy.

All along the hallways lit like an upscale mall and bathed in stiflingly inoffensive pastel, immaculately dressed and coiffed men and women who were clutching monogrammed Blackberries and Hermès suitcases and exhaling discreet perfumes, turned to watch her druidic progress.

At last she swept past a shocked secretary through an enormous portal of a walnut door studded with bronze lozenges, and bearing in gold lettering: Dimitros Markos Georgios Petropavlokovskoulos, MBA (Harvard), President and CEO of Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises, Inc. As the portal swung heavily open she found herself opposite a set straight out of the architect Schinkel’s design for the original production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. From experience she knew that each careless starry twinkle in the canopy was an amorphous mass of Swarovksi crystals and that the desk sitting in the centre of it, and harbouring not the Queen of the Night but her problematic estranged husband, was made from the single golden mahogany tree that had ever been discovered in nature, and a tribe of Flecheiro Indios from the Brazilian jungles was now in contact with the outside world just because of Dimitros's pursuit of that rare plant.

Her problematic estranged husband now rose to his feet and stood staring at her in foreboding silence. They could see each other in the face. Naturally he ogled her bosom instead, before fixing on her mouth. She looked at the rugged planes of his face, remembering the day when she had given him a cucumber-ginger facial; saw his penetrating silvery-blue eyes, the tint of Mount Everest on a sunny day on a flank where it was not buried fathoms deep in snow; and peered at his flexing eyebrows, which looked as if they were harbouring fascinating secrets. She felt a shiver of electricity go through her.

"You might want to step away from the van de Graaf generator, pedhi mou" Dimitros commented in his gravelly Greek-accented English, finally looking her in the eyes.

"So that's why my hair was airborne," Annie replied and coolly stepped further into the room. "This room – it hasn't changed a bit," she said.

"Well, one thing has," Dimitros replied, and looked suggestively toward the windows, with their splendid view of St.Paul's Cathedral and the gut-wrenchingly distant heads of passersby on the asphalt below.

Annie only glanced at the sill before remarking coolly, "The Fittingsley orchid is gone, and you have replaced it with a bonsai Victoria regia lily. So the orchid is indeed extinct."

“Yes, well, that's why you're the botanist and I'm the businessman. Enjoyable as this conversation is, I must be in my limousine and on the way to a conference in Burj Khalifa in 4 minutes 58 seconds. Why have you come after eight years?"

"To ask for a divorce."

Dimitros’s eyes flickered, a muscle in his jaw twitched, his grip on his chair tightened, a hair at his temple danced a jig, and he felt a sudden and unaccountable surge of attraction which expanded his pupils until the irises nearly vanished into the Everest blue like the shadow of a moon vanishes from the surface of the Earth when the solar eclipse has passed.

He sat down in his chair again, twirled once, and propelled himself with his feet until the wheels rolled to a stop right on top of the hem of his wife’s dress. There was a terrible rip and he was titillated by the prospect of looking under the muumuu until he realized that she was wearing a Victorian nightgown and two – no, three, petticoats underneath.

"As you see I was well prepared," Annie told him wryly. "Now about that divorce."

She was horrified to see Dimitros dissolve into tears. "Please stay secretly married with no income or career or private life. You shall be my de facto mistress!"

In the Große Hamburger Straße

TO close the assembling of the Mendelssohn clan, there was a photography session and farewell at the old Jewish cemetery in the Große Hamburger Straße during the early afternoon. It proved quite short and sweet, so I won't write much about it, but let pictures cribbed from Wikimedia Commons speak for me:

The graveyard is largely empty, since the contents were destroyed in the 1940s; covering much of it there is a carpet of ivy growing amidst the trees and neat gravel paths, tall elderly apartment houses in excellent and neat condition and fences and walls around, and a couple of salvaged gravestones standing either in a proud pair at the entrance or along one wall. It is still considered as a religious site, so my brothers wore kippot.

IN one corner, standing on its own, is the gravestone of Moses — not the original stone, but its descendant. It has a German-language inscription on one side, and a Hebrew-language one on the other, which can be seen here:

    Source: Achim Raschka (photo uploaded December 2005), via Wikimedia Commons

The pebbles on top of the gravestone are, if I remember correctly, a Jewish symbol to mark that someone is thinking of the person who lies there. Since Moses's wife Fromet is buried far away, in Hamburg, one of the members of the Mendelssohn Society took the trouble to bring one of the pebbles from the top of her gravestone, so it could be lain on her husband's. There was a little ceremony surrounding that, and I thought it was a nice inspiration.

The photography session was given a touch of profundity as a cellist performed two sedate and echoing movements from Bach's cello suites; then came the speeches. These also commemorated the assassination ninety years ago today of Walther Rathenau, former German foreign minister during the Weimar Republic and friend of my great-grandfather, I think.

*

Then Mama, Ge., J. and I took the S-Bahn home again, together. (I was still showering and such when they left earlier today, so I set forth on my own. Having emerged from the Oranienburger Straße station, I went the wrong direction for a couple minutes and had to find my way with the assistance of a map in a bus station. It wasn't too bad and I still arrived early at the graveyard — indeed I wondered if I had come after the ship had sailed, so to speak, because it was fairly deserted — but I was sweating like the kosher equivalent of a pig afterwards. I was only pleased that this wasn't a job interview, because that's generally the reason for my wandering aimlessly around unfamiliar streets in mid- and eastern Berlin.)

***

LASTLY, here is an engraving for no particular reason of Moses and Lessing, as well as (possibly) Johann Kaspar Lavater:

Illustration: "Kupferstich nach einem Gemälde von Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882)" via Wikimedia Commons

A Boatload of 'Orare' and the Girl with Flaxen Hair

TODAY (Saturday) I decided not to go on a tour of a graveyard, which morbid but most likely pleasing activity is one of many offerings in the frame of a Mendelssohn descendants' family reunion being held in Berlin over this past week. I slept into the afternoon, that being the contingency that clinched it. Last evening, however, we went to a reception, which I intend to post about soon(er or later), with some two hundred other relations and, of course, the immediate family.

WHERE university is concerned, I took the day off. In my Islamic Studies seminar my group is preparing for a presentation, and I personally am beginning to prepare for the essay to be handed in much later. Then I have done extracurricular thingies for Greek and for Latin I have resolved to get all the noun declensions and verb conjugations and so on straight, which is an absurd enterprise but one which I feel is demanded of us.

The absurdity of this enterprise was particularly perceptible when I decided to write down all the tables for 'orāre,' taking 'amāre' as set out in my dual purpose Latin dictionary/grammar for my handy paradigm. The further I leafed in this dictionary and wrote out ōrō, orās, orat, orāmus, orātis, orant; orāre; orābam, orābās, orābat, orābāmus, orābātis, orābant; orābō, orābis, orābit, orābimus, orābitis, orābunt; oram, orēs, oret, orēmus, orētis, orent; orāvī, orāvistī, orāvit, orāvimus, orāvistis, orāvērunt; orāveram, orāverās, orāverat, orāverāmus, orāverātis, orāverant; orāverō, orāveris, orāverit, orāverimus, orāveritis, orāverint; oror, orāris, orātur, orāmur, orāminī, orantur; orābar, orābāris, orābātur, orābāmur, orābāminī, orābantur; orābor, orāberis, orābitur, orābimur, orābiminī, orābuntur; orārem, orārēs, orāret, orārēmus, orārētis, orārent; orer, orēris, orētur, orēmur, orēminī, orentur; orārer, orārēris, orārētur, orārēmur, orārēminī, orārentur [N.B. Apologies for any transcription errors; I wasn't feeling enterprising enough to doublecheck all my handwritten verb tables against the dictionary's.] — the more moods and tenses sprang out of the woodwork. Having reached the subjunctive pluperfect passive I had it 'up to here.' Much inclined to shoot the dictionary out to sea from a cannon, I closed it instead and haven't attempted to review further until now. In hindsight, though, we haven't looked at all of these mood-tense combinations; so I might be off the hook.

SINCE, at any rate, I wasn't going to be doing any of that, I looked through more photos in a Flickr account which has proven rather addictive, especially the abandoned train yards and sheds and signage and so on — "Forest Pines". Besides, having begun to watch physics lectures on YouTube and having found, much to my surprise, that watching them feels uncommonly relaxing and enjoyable, I watched more of the third.

The key to enjoying these videos is that I don't expect to understand everything, or anything at all. Instead I piece together what I can and either drop or ask about the rest. In the absence of this pressure to understand everything, physics are a sort of thrilling new field; and when I have questions, Papa can answer them quite easily and point me to the relevant books.

For example, I was wondering why an electric charge isn't transferred to a capacitor at a steady rate; rather the charge rushes over to it at first but then slows down. Papa explained that the electrons are being 'pushed' to a degree by their repulsion from each other; and that just as people fill an U-Bahn train easily when it is relatively empty, a crowded train is an entirely different matter.

One resource Papa recommends highly is the online lectures of Richard Feynmann, and the books written by the same; I intend to look at these when I'm done with these other lectures, but I'd rather have dipped my toe into the discipline properly first.

These videos point, I think, to the potency of well-chosen language. Finding precise nouns and verbs which suggest precisely the associations and the meanings which one intends to convey, economically, is, I think, not only useful in instructing students in the sciences, but in many other areas as well.

WHAT I also like is that sciences are relatively 'truthful.' In the humanities, bad research and weak premises and thoughtlessness seem much easier to cover up. Lies, opinion and unverifiable statements are presented without cautionary labels, and where there are no sound observations to give them an empirical underpinning one can't even redeem the occasion by coming up with a better interpretation. Political Science is the absolute worst in this regard. I may hate it when someone misses the point in an analysis of Jane Austen, but no one is carpet-bombed as a result. So I think that while it may not be in the power of humans to know Truth absolutely — and in this respect I'd like to dust off Pope's maxim, "Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man." — our approach to truth and to applying the truth are very important.

BESIDES I completed the grand feat of reversing a jam jar so that the jam is wedged into the top half. I proudly announced that I had 'defeated gravity,' to a mixed reception from the family, which was assembled for the repast of pancakes where this occurred. The scenario seemed familiar to me, and I realized later that one of the websites I visit now and then, Boing Boing, had an article about hover-jelly a long time ago.

LASTLY, I played a boatload of Chopin and excerpts of our score of Die Zauberflöte transcribed for the piano. Among the Chopin there was the Polonaise Héroïque, still a long slog and an unlikely prospect for pleasing the neighbours; and the Military Polonaise, in which the tempo is still a trifle irregular; and a nocturne or two, which I still can't do very much with. I've complained about them before, but I think that these nocturnes are like TV musicians whose glossy appearance, soulful air, elaborate gestures and sentimental flourishes are (as far as I can tell) cynically gauged to sucker in people to presume that their music expresses honesty, profundity, broad understanding and sensitivity. Thankfully I am very fond of everything else in the volume which contains these nocturnes, so I have no real bone to pick with Chopin generally.

I did think when I was younger that playing his waltzes and nocturnes were deleterious to one's fibre as a musician, because of their extraordinary indulgence, which is also something that annoyed me a bit with Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. But counteracting the very ease with which one can make these songs sound expressive is my anxiety not to fall prey to this lazy route and instead to work against the grain of the music and find irregularities and nuances in it. So, for instance, the only way I use rubato is if my tempo is faulty, and I already resolved nine or ten years ago to only insert rubato when I have reached some dignified age and have learned to play the piece properly without. Even rubato has, I think, its rules; and whether rightly or wrongly I have heard or read that it should be like an elastic which is expanded but also relaxed again — so every slowing down should be followed by a proportionate speeding up.

What I didn't play today is Debussy's "Fille aux cheveux de lin," which is kind of familiar because I used to listen to Jacques Thibaud's recording on the violin. I think I understand intellectually what Debussy was going for, but I haven't really transferred it to the keyboard yet; the jazz and Javanese(?) influences are obviously there, though, and I have to learn to do justice to them. As for a mental image, I thought of a kind of dainty 19th-century mock castle hidden in the treetops in Fontainebleau — the realm of the impressionists — wherein a vaguely blotted face of a lady stands in the tower window with her long Rapunzel-esque tresses flowing over the stonework. And that the man who sees this picture in his fantasy has imbibed or smoked a little of something frowned upon by the police. I have no idea if this is close to what inspired Debussy, but I'll keep that image in mind until it no longer serves a purpose.

Generally I think I'd have absolutely nothing in common with Debussy if I'd ever met him, but it is sort of fun to try to clear one's mind and to play him without bias. It demands that one step out of one's accustomed zone and rely on intuition, and especially since I want to do this sincerely and unselfconsciously (without any arrière-pensée as the French might say, or Hintergedanke as the Germans do), it feels kind of like acting. Much like Chopin, though, I think one obstacle is that I haven't concentrated so much on removing shortcomings of technique that the facility which the composers expect of their music exists.

The Corruption at the Heart of Greece

INSPIRED by insights of foreign politicians, website commenters, and bank officials, I have gathered that this is the course which led Greece into its present fiscal crisis:

It began when, in a series of policy papers, a teacher in a village on the Dodecanese island of Kos forced a course of exorbitant public employee retirement packages on the state. A priest in Zakynthos instituted a raise in the age of retirement, and a homeless person in Thessaloniki negotiated a high unemployment insurance rate. To finance these terrible measures, a consortium of the children of Aegean fishermen fraudulently hit up divers banks for enormous loans while their parents were busily withholding their fiscal largesse from the tax bureaucracy. Coffee shop owners negotiated a minimum wage of (for adult workers) €1,832 €1,801.49 €1,558.18 €1.456,20 €1,398.37 €1,387.49 €915.20 €641.40 €584.29 per month. Transit workers in Athens accumulated fleets of 30-ft. yachts, and olive oil production workers built palatial rural residences, which they then failed to declare to the tax authorities.

Through a system of collusion, corruption, and above all a gross misuse of their staggering powers as private citizens, the middle and lower classes have formulated and executed Greece's economic policy over the past decade.

In the meantime, government employees, lender institutions, and the foreign commentariat urged the populace to moderate their demands and accumulate less debt. Bankers refused to proffer monies which could not be repaid until their entire family (up to relatives in the third degree) was kidnapped at gunpoint. The upper socioeconomic class meanwhile declared its property, work and investment income, with thrilling veracity and an overarching and steadfast sense of its duty toward the polity as a whole.

***

THEREFORE, to save the country and future generations from summary collapse, we must plumb the endless fiscal resources of all except the upper-class-earners who (although now impoverished and suffering) have done their duty by the country all along.

In order to do this, the salaries of public employees have been cut in half, benefits (luxurious frills such as health insurance) withdrawn entirely whether through purposeful policy or neglectful non-payment, and why private companies must leave Greece for greener shores. The guiltiest 22% of the Greek population is now jobless and the guiltiest 33% now lives below the poverty line.

But the harm which these brigands have done extends beyond the shores of privately-owned Greek islands. They should bow their head in shame, too, at the havoc they have wrought in the finances not only of their own fiscal and political elite, but also in the finances of the fiscal and political elite in the entire European Union and banks everywhere.

The upper management of the Deutsche Bank and Angela Merkel, have been so impoverished by Greek hotel receptionists' non-payment of the national debt that they are living in cardboard boxes on the streets of Frankfurt and Berlin. They dine in soup kitchens set up by their states and rely upon the generosity of more fortunate relatives and private charities. Through anxiety for the welfare of Europe, and their zealous wish to set the right economic course for all, they have not slept in years.

TOUCHED to the heart by their plight, German citizens are voluntarily and personally handing over our incomes to our Hellenic counterparts, even though we are thereby reducing our gross domestic product to such a painful extent that in two more months we will have reached a North Korean standard of living.

***

Against the mafioso Greek small businessmen, alas, we can still do nothing; nothing, too against the corruption and tax evasion which are still bubbling up like swamp effluvia among the pecuniary bigwigs and influence-peddlers in homeless shelters as well as the foyers of private charities, etc., across the country. Nothing will do but for the noble Nordic businessmen to construct, from the foundation up, that Eiffel Tower of integrity, duty, and humility which characterizes our own economic system — in the hills and beaches of Greece.

We must look to the ancients who once carried Greece to such glory — and bid the Greeks emulate the examples of such as Socrates, who got by without a swimming pool, and who — upon being told that he was bringing about the summary moral collapse of his own society — duly imbibed his cup of poison hemlock so as to get in nobody's way.

Fin.

From Olives to Football

LATELY I have found university a trifle boring, though this perception may be influenced by a heavy streak of truancy, so I have plunged into all kinds of projects at home. Lately these have taken a scientific turn.

Inspired by a Guardian article about a new generation of fastidious child-size gourmands, I decided to read scientific literature about the reasons why children are picky about food (with an interesting side tangent on propylthiouracil and phenylthiocarbamide, which I may have misspelled). As a child I didn't think it was because adults are more polite, heroic, or self-sacrificing, and as an adult this skepticism is borne out. One obvious example: grapefruit tasted like pure poison when I was little except under a mountain of sugar, but now I can tolerate the acidity perfectly; and olives tasted awful and now I can gobble them up easily though from an aesthetic perspective I find the pallid green ones with the sad mush of lemon creme or even cubic pimento bits in them somewhat disturbing. I can eat strawberries without sugar and still taste something besides acridity, and drink Cointreau without being overwhelmed by the alcohol fumes. This early aversion to acidity must not be universal, however. When one of my brothers was little we would pile all the lemon quarters which garnished our fish-and-chips in restaurants onto his plate, and he would eat the insides of each one after the other and with great enjoyment.

Anyway, old-fashioned or not, the trick that worked best for me is to eat lousy-tasting food one spoonful or forkful at a time and to pretend that each spoonful is a kind of toast to a different relative or friend of the family. But the older I get the more ridiculous I think it is to eat food which one really can't enjoy, so if I am ever a host to children, I would have pretzels or other food which is familiar and practically impossible to dislike. (Based on what I've read, statistically speaking, starchy foods tend to be liked by most people.) As for changes in attitudes over time, I must admit to mentally snickering when children in 19th-century fiction suffer under the delusion that apples are candy.

Before that, I watched roughly half of the Venus transit and idly listened to the commentary from a NASA team at Mauna Kea, which may in retrospect have kicked off the scientific interest.

The other thing is that I am rewriting a lousy thriller and one of the figures is a postgraduate oceanography or marine biology student, so I have begun a crash course of reading in a textbook each on biology and limnology (which I hope to tie into oceanography). Since my characterization and plotting and so on are still hopelessly terrible, though improving very slowly over time, I figure that it's best to do what I can already do well now — namely, research. Thereby I can not only grow my brain but also find more fuel for the imagination as well as better habits of observation and mental pigeonholing. Besides, our field of work does play a role in our lives, though maybe not the role which is likeliest to land up in a Hollywood biopic, so the better I know the careers of protagonists the better I can render their aforementioned lives.

Then I remembered that MIT has free online courses, so I began the biology course for that. This led me to a YouTube video wherein a professor gives a biology student's introduction to chemistry, and I highly recommend it (though not so much for its cinematographic quality). What helps is, of course, that I took and liked Biology in high school. In Grade 11 we went through the kingdoms one by one, which had a nice sweeping quality in terms of the organisms and the progression of time from the emergence of the simplest organisms from the primordial soup to the emergence of the simplest human from his stony retreats. In Grade 12 we did biochemistry and human biology in general. In our all-purpose Science class in Grade 10, we had learned about cell organelles; and in Grade 9 we had learned the very basics of human biology and nutrition, which insofar as explaining to us e.g. that amino acids are the building blocks of protein, did lay a biochemical foundation.

Besides the sister had a special tutorial session today, which I attended. Since I didn't understand much of it, I worked on my artistic marginalia as well as on my information-technological notes, but it was still enlightening. It's a bit like pinning-the-tail-on-the-donkey, where a piece of solid comprehension is a tail, and its context remains vague.

Departing from the scientific realm, I went to a Greek class which never happened (more about that fiasco, perhaps, at another time) in the morning and in the evening went to Latin. I admit that I was inclined to wonder at Cornelius Nepos's writing style when he wrote with an atypical precision of detail that Hannibal had snakes gathered into clay jars. The detail that these snakes were live and poisonous was easy to interpret, but the attribute 'of clay' less so. I was also wondering why one would put snakes into jars when crates or baskets containing figs (or, depending which Grimm fairy tale ending one is reading, barrels or pits full or empty of simmering oil and presumably cellar-temperature toads) seem so much more common and intuitive. As it turns out, these jars were catapulted onto an enemy ship, and the clay must have been brittle enough to unleash them once they made their impact.

In this same battle Nepos also tells of a mean stroke of genius in which Hannibal wanted his ships to attack the enemy king's at once. The question was, whose ship was the king's? To find it out, he sent a messenger on a little boat wielding a letter, and the enemies duly guided this messenger to the king's ship so that the king might inspect what they presumed to be a peaceful overture.

On the U-Bahn on the way to the university that third time, two passengers were excitedly retelling the Italy-Spain match of the Euro Cup, including Italy's 3-5-2 formation and a spectacular foul. On the way home, today's France-England match was apparently still taking place, so at the beer garden at Dahlem Dorf I caught a glimpse of the outdoor TV screen through the heavy leaf. Still exhausted from the World Cup two years ago, and inclined to curl into a protective ball at the revived notion of vuvuzelas, I have not been watching the 90-minute games. I have reduced them probably by half or more by reading the minute-by-minute reports on the Guardian, instead, and using my imagination. When Germany played Portugal, it was easy to determine the score based on the neighbourhood sound of firecrackers, etc., and divers triumphal tootery. I wouldn't recommend these oblique experiences for everyone but it is enough for me at present.