An English Afternoon Tea

Since it is my mother's birthday, we decided to make an English afternoon tea, which she has suggested every now and then as an idea for dinner, but which I'd been dodging due to a frustrating experience with scone-baking.

First of all, however, Ge. and I went on a leisurely stroll to Tempelhofer Feld. It was a stifling atmosphere when we emerged from the cool apartment and stairwell, and I thought that it might have been wise to wear sunscreen, since it was around 1 o'clock and "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." But there were leisurely fields of clouds, too; as the Bard noted, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd." Besides there was a breeze.

Then, at the invitation of Mama, I went to the bookshop to pick up my Farsi-German dictionary. In the front of the book it was helpfully that written Farsi consists of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as four more; so I was pleased to find that it looked familiar and also interested that the letter names (shin, for instance) are sometimes like Hebrew ones. Then Mama and I talked outside, with little glasses of mallow tea and a saucerful of pretzels and trail mix.

After that came the grand journey to Edeka for the groceries.

***

The grand repast:

Platter, smoked salmon, gouda, cucumber sandwiches, radish sandwiches

Canadian wild sockeye salmon in rolls, with capers and horseradish on the side and eaten with dark bread; gouda in slices to be eaten with the same; cucumber sandwiches closed and radish sandwiches open-faced.

Ramekin of radishes

Glass dish of sliced cucumber

Scones

with

Lemon curd

Clotted cream

or

Orange marmalade

(which is made in England and which we, er, 'sourced' in the chain grocery store)

or

other

Orange pekoe

or

Assam tea

Red currants

Chocolate-marshmallow kisses

After Eight

Vanilla ice cream

Popsicles

Bilberry compôte

***

I made the cucumber sandwiches, as usual, by toasting white bread so that it would be firm on the outside and soft on the inside; cutting the bread lengthwise with a large bread knife so it is half as thick; buttering the insides of the toast carefully so that it protects the bread from sogginess; sprinkling salt and pepper on the two halves; placing thinly sliced cucumber between the halves; today, cutting the toast into four triangles.

For the radish sandwiches, I didn't cut the toast but left it thick, then butter and salt and pepper, then the sliced radishes. Since this household is fond of having liberal amounts of butter with radishes, I put a tiny dollop of butter on top of some of the sandwiches.

Probing an Examination and Pitiful Learning Endeavours

On Friday I took the day off from the bookshop and had a holiday-holiday, wherein I did pretty much nothing, and it was a very nice experience. Saturday and Sunday are relaxed in any case, so it was only this morning where I set off somewhere, namely to the university to write my Latin exam.

Last night I felt overcome with guilt for not preparing for the exam carefully. After the 'orare' thing I decided to try something else. So I began reviewing the textbook from last semester so that I could tell apart the declensions, conjugations, and parts of speech more swiftly and therefore finish the exam more swiftly. But I hadn't gotten far.

During a massive case of guilty anxiety, I tend to keep on reading things on the internet to keep my mind off of it late into the night, as the guilty feelings keep gnawing and gnawing away, conscious all the while that I should go to sleep soon and set the alarm clock so that I wake up in time. The process ends in my going to sleep in the early morning hours, 'worn to a frazzle.' This case of guilty anxiety was comparatively light but unpleasant per se.

I did not expect the Latin exam to be massively difficult in terms of vocabulary, but the syntax is a crapshoot; either I know what's going on or I don't, even after knowing what each word in a sentence means individually. So there wasn't so much more preparation I could do aside from finding a reputable side-by-side Latin-English text with accurate grammatical elucidations (which I don't expect to find easily) and gradually gathering experience with the differences between the languages (which would also take two or three months, I think). Which I didn't do.

After a shower and a little internet time I set off twenty minutes early, and therefore had plenty of time to reach the class and study more of the textbook. Since the confluence of students to the campus has diminished, the Nollendorfplatz-Krumme Lanke U-Bahn line has shortened trains now, so I awaited it at the front of the platform. At Dahlem Dorf station the strawberry vending shack was shuttered. In the streets between Dahlem Dorf and the Rostlaube there was no discernible difference in the quantity of people, though.

At the room where the exam was to take place, the door was locked and nobody was waiting in front. Overzealously I went to the Latin/Greek department to inquire, to be rightfully advised to wait in front of the room and hope that people would start coming by and by. So that was what happened, and after we had (presumably) all gathered, the professor showed and apologetically herded us to a different classroom wherein we wrote our exams. It was one sheet of paper, with a very slightly simplified text of Cicero wherein he brings the matter of Verres and Sthenius to the attention of all. To assist our feeble minds there were fortunately commas added into the text to separate the main and ancillary clauses, as well as a summary of events in German above the text; the professor even read out the text to us once so that we could hear the groupings of the words. And we were allowed to use our dictionaries. Nevertheless it was a task which took up at least an hour for me, and I was the first person done.

As soon as I got home I found a professional translation on the internet, and saw that I had made a key error but hopefully not one that obscured the elegance and fairly accurate nature of my text as a whole.

As one can tell from the self-praising tone of the previous sentence, I feel quite smug, not only because I came up with logical if inaccurate translations by the end, but particularly because I was also so happy that Latin is over for this first pair of semesters. It was a six o'clock to eight o'clock p.m. class which swallowed up even my Friday evenings in the first semester, riddled with naps as unslept nights avenged themselves, and on one hot evening made into an extra penance by my feeling sick for two hours straight. In one or two weeks' time I need to stop being smug, though; otherwise I won't learn from the mistakes I did make, and otherwise I'll have a nasty surprise once the marks are in. (c:

***

Aside from following current events exhaustively through my new overlord, Twitter; and reading books and other things for enjoyment; I am planning to go on long bicycle rides to explore Berlin. (I feel like cycling to the North Sea, though that wouldn't work since I'd be borrowing my brother's or mother's bike.)

As far as amateur journalism is concerned, it's been a relief to find that either the media have been on a good streak lately, or there really is a lot of profound and good stuff in existence as long as one strikes on a worthy publication. My crusading spirit has been a little appeased. I will say, though, that purely going from instinct I think that the reporting about Syria in the mass media has been completely misguided, and that the revolution going on now will be the absolute worst thing that could happen to the country and to American/European interests. While I supported even the invasion of Libya, I think that the situations in Tunisia and Egypt could have been solved better if they had been dissociated from each other entirely and not interfered with by Western interests; conversely I think that the suppression of protests in Bahrain was absolutely shameful and that here the moral equivocation of e.g. the EU was clear. Syria is something else altogether, and is being turned into a frontier of armed groups, government forces which are presumably splintering off to something else, local fighters, population groupings (e.g. the apparently de facto autonomous Kurds near the Turkish border), and intelligence agencies which is a wild west without any guarantees for civilians' security. Of course the massacres and mistreatment of children in custody must be investigated and legally prosecuted in Syria, but I think that it could be done under the existing government as long as the state military and police apparatus are held out of the investigations. Basher Assad is, at least, neither deranged nor bloodthirsty. As for Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, etc., I have absolutely no clue what is going on in those countries but I think we should have a clue.

Anyway, since I haven't been writing blog posts about these things, I have been weakly attempting to supplement my courses of university study until my bad conscience wears off.

One of these weak attempts is a learn-one-Arabic-word-per-day thing. Though I will not need Arabic for my specific Culture and History of the Near East programme, it seems like a waste of opportunity not to pick up a bit on the occasion. So I come across an Arabic phrase or word on the internet, copy and paste it into a translator to find out what it means, and write it down into a notebook; then I take each letter and copy and paste it individually to see what it looks like in its main form, to come up with a translation. The Arabic alphabet is full of phenomena like the Greek sigma, which looks like σ except if it is at the end of a word ς. So this way I am very, very slowly learning the alphabet as well as words like talib, Misr, and arabiy (I'm not too sure about the transliteration). But I feel like doing something adventurous and challenging and of having some kind of knowledge which is relatively rare rather than redundant, so I've ordered a Farsi textbook through the bookshop and have taken down the ISBN, etc., for a course in colloquial Urdu. We do have materials for learning Hebrew and Russian, too; but I worry that I will mix them up with Greek (I've already mixed up the 'Η' and 'Ν' at least once), whereas visually Arabic and Farsi look different. Besides the unsuccessfulness of past attempts at engraving the Hebrew alphabet on my memory is discouraging me a little; I remember what aleph and gimel look like and that's pretty much it.

Besides I want to read the Koran in Max Henning's German translation, and am presently bogged down in Annemarie Schimmel's quite valuable introduction. Even in the Bible I haven't read much at one stroke. One night in 2003ish when T. and I were collaborating on a Spanish project I had lots of free time and so tackled long segments of it, and another night I was trying to find out if Job's story was as senseless as it sounded (I decided to ignore it in my personal theology); and for some reason I was quite interested in the Book of Esther. In fact this may also be connected to the compulsion I felt to go to church again around that time — Mama was attending one and so I went along a couple weekends, before finding out that as usual the people and building and so on are distracting, and that I only become neurotic about things like eating fish on Good Friday rather than deepening the spirit of religion, so I don't feel good-er, if I go to church. In any case I don't consider theological texts easy reading. But it seems dumb to study Islamic Studies without reading the Koran, and I might need the knowledge of it in my Moorish Science Temple essay due October — it would be good to be able to discern the evidently great differences between the MST's religious text and the 'orthodox' Koran without needing to rely entirely on a scholarly treatment by someone else.

The Peripatetic Future of the Gemäldegalerie?

The Frankfurt am Main-based daily newspaper FAZ, in a ringing denunciation of the relocation of Berlin's foremost collection of paintings by the old masters:

Ohne Not soll diese weltberühmte Gemäldesammlung, eines der kostbarsten Güter der Nation, Kernstück und Kronjuwel des preußischen Erbes, das im Jahrhundert der Katastrophen verborgen, verpackt, ausgelagert, geplündert, verschleppt und nach dem Krieg zerteilt wurde und erst nach 1989 seine glanzvolle Zusammenführung und Wiederauferstehung erlebte, nach nur vierzehn Jahren Dasein in einem maßgeschneiderten Neubau wieder eingepackt, zerschlagen, ins Depot verfrachtet und nur als Torso zwischen die Skulpturen des Bode-Museums geschoben werden.

                — Eduard Beaucamp

In the absence of any necessity, this world-famous collection of paintings — one of the most precious possessions of the nation; heart and crown jewel of the Prussian legacy; hidden in the century of catastrophes, packaged, outsourced, looted, kidnapped; and divided after the war; and only after 1989 experiencing its glorious reunion and resurrection — is to be, after only a fourteen years' existence in a custom-tailored building, packed up again, broken, freighted into storage and to be wedged as a scant torso in between the sculptures of the Bode Museum.
(Translated with the help of G*e Translate.)


***

There must be some compelling reason for this prima facie cheek of the highest order, but I haven't found one yet.

Pink Mousse, Yellow Cards and Feminism

After a long day at university, I have just eaten some of the windfall from a neighbourhood restaurant whose owners have gone on holiday, passed on to us by a second neighbour who can't possibly consume it all. Yesterday it was a slaw of cabbage, carrot, parsley, and fennel or celery stalk; tzatziki; and a dreamy cloud-like pink mousse which rumour declared contained a kind of fish and which most of us treated with respectful distance. Today it was a carton with a green bell pepper, eggplants and zucchinis, cucumbers, and a head of lettuce. So Mama sliced the eggplants and zucchinis, fried them in olive oil, and whoever wanted some had some.

Besides I have been able to try smoked almonds for the first time, thanks to our English aunt (as I like to think of her): the first three almonds are good; the fourth flips a switch where they become nearly irresistible.

***

À propos of nothing, the weather is kind of terrible. It is not uncommonly hot for this time of year — hardly impressive in fact in any way — but this degree of humidity drags one down like a gourmand albatross. Two days in a row one finds one's self covered in a fuzzy layer of moistness if one is cursed by the need to ride in the U-Bahn. (By 'one' I am obviously thinking of 'me.') I catnapped through much of the Latin lesson and admittedly found that it went by with rather enjoyable swiftness.

Over the weekend we had a lightning storm which raised the worry that someone somewhere in Berlin had offended God in a very thorough manner. I had managed to go to sleep by 2 a.m. perhaps when I was woken up by a series of tremendous tearing sounds from overhead which ripped away until they abruptly stopped, then there came great barely perceptible booms which echoed from the very foundations of the soil, and lightning so bright and so encompassing in its brightness that it was like daylight at dawn. There was torrential rain, too. I wasn't the only one who woke up in the family; the neighbours overhead were also thumping presumably to the window and back. It turns out (from the U-Bahn televisions' news on Monday), that there were 8000 lightning strikes and two fires — fortunately no injuries.

***

As for the Euro Cup final, I hadn't thought much of Italy's team from what I'd heard of it. I detested it with a fiery hatred after the World Cup 2006 final because of the Zidane-Materazzi incident and because I had the impression that most of the team were cheats and that the team captain had a Mussoliniesque fascist air. During the World Cup in 2010 I repented because they mounted so much of an effort in their final game. Now Materazzi is nowhere to be seen, I have a good impression of the team generally, and rightly or wrongly I thought their game against Germany (which at first I was convinced they'd justly lose) showed skill and also a fairly clean way of playing.

During the World Cup 2012 I hated, instead, Spain's and the Netherlands' teams. I didn't think much of the players's personalities — though I made an exception for Spain's goalkeeper and the head coach — and the style of playing on both teams was a contrast to the fireworks of talent, inspiration, and 'soul' which were shown even by teams which didn't make it to the finals. I probably made clear which teams I liked at the time — for instance Uruguay and Chile, except for the latter's foul-spree tendencies. But Brazil's team, except if I am overidealizing it, was the most impressive. One did have the idea that it was a remnant of glory past. But first of all the greater heights of the players gave them a kind of dignified movement and loftiness. Secondly the attitude toward the game was so different: not the product of training regimens it seemed so much as of living the sport from a very early age, so that much of the technique was in fact second nature and not calculation, and it felt as if they were in their element and didn't really need a coach telling them what to do. This is where, though I've come to like Spain's team much better, I object to Spain and the Netherlands' team (though it appears to have changed a little) and to a lesser degree to the German team, which plays with conscientious strategy but tends in my view to falter if they are losing instead of rising to the challenge and battling as well they can.

This quality of courage, I think, characterized Italy's playing in this year's final. After Thiago Motta left the field, it did fizzle, but considering what they did since it was clear from the outset that Spain had the upper hand, I thought it was good. The fouls were not too bad, and the diving was less melodrama and more naturalism. As for Spain, I thought that the third goal was one of the most uninteresting ones I've seen in my life, and didn't know why the goalscorer looked so pleased until I read that he has won the Golden Boot.

So the game did make me grumpy, but when the tiny children of the soccer players came out onto the field, it defused my resentment a little. Besides the team which played better did win. I only wish it hadn't been darn Spain again.

***

Since I have no interest in Wimbledon, the Tour de France, or that costlier sport, the inquiry into the rate-fixing scandal, I have moved on to the haute couture week in Paris.

I said scathing things about Givenchy's collection the last time around (or the time before that?). But much to my surprise it did appear to catch on, and long, impractical gowns which are practically translucent except for strategically located stitching showed up on actresses at film premieres and so on. (At which point I will mention that I am glad that Katie Holmes is apparently casting off the fetters of Scientology forever.) This year I liked the collection better.

As for Raf Simons's Dior collection, it was more in the combined aesthetic of the early days and of John Galliano than I'd expected. I still pigeonhole the designer as a minimalist with a predilection for shapelessness and disagreeable colours — though, to be fair, some of the blues and reds in this Dior collection were lovely — probably unfairly. It irritates me a little that commentators on fashion are trying to pretend that Galliano's disagreeable views detract from the quality of his fashion; they do no such thing. You can't put in any designer, say 'He isn't anti-Semitic,' and expect him to come up with something wonderful and original based on that qualification — and maybe it is the very offensiveness with which Galliano could act which made him barrel ahead and produce the flamboyant things which made him a striking and not servilely conformist contributor to fashion weeks. That said, I am obviously not privy to the inner workings or finer points of the fashion world.

I remember Galliano's aesthetic generally, and though I don't think it's one of his most influential collections, I really liked the one he did which was inspired by flowers (and the models had upside-down cones of transparent plastic popped over their heads in homage to florists' wrappers). Having spent a great deal of time in our garden when we had one, it was a very nice experience to see how, in an alien but wonderfully observed way, the shapes and tinges and so on of the flora were being celebrated in cloth. It seemed clear that he and his design team loved flowers as much as I do.

***

Yesterday two classmates and I gave a presentation on black and Islamic feminism in the US. I concentrated on the second topic, and though it is very interesting, I think there is in fact a great deal more scholarship to be done. That said, the number of Muslim women in the US seem to number from 500,000 to 3.5 million (since the US Census is forbidden from asking about religion, the number of Muslims in the country is unknown except as extrapolated from surveys and so on), dispersed fairly widely around the states, so it isn't maybe a very visible group.

A theme I went into is that many of the restrictive practices attached to Islam are, in fact, practiced in specific sects and countries only, and secondly often arise from local cultural traditions rather than the Quran or even the core Sunni or Shi'a philosophies themselves.

Anyway, I had so many points that I had to stop maybe four-fifths of the way through; but I felt that it was good this way and that I didn't leave essential things out. But I mostly covered immigrant Muslim communities, left out the Nation of Islam and the hijab because these were covered in other presentations, and only had a short blurb about the Five Percent. And I still feel like talking on and on about what I found out during my research.