Nonsense About Ottoman Cyprus, Etc.

IT'S past 3:40 in the morning and I should really be going to sleep. My schedule for tomorrow looks like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., shower, clean up a bit; go to university; spend 6-8 hours at university depending on whether I'll come home during the 2-hour break; clean up a bit more; and prepare for the weekend since I don't seem to have classes on Fridays yet.

*

THE Latin class may have to be dropped because both tutorials clash with Greek classes, but I finished a worksheet except for two questions this evening, and it was rather a monumental undertaking. First of all, hopping between Wiktionary, a paperback English-Latin dictionary, a German treasury of Latin vocabulary, and a German-Latin website, to search out the mot juste for the German-to-Latin translations and verify the declension or conjugation took a while. Besides I buried myself in the Latin grammar, where it explains when to use an ablativus cum infinitivo construction, which constructions to use to replace nonexistent future conjunctives, etc., and that non dubito pairs with quin instead of quod or ut or ne. It's like trying to learn the rules and 'plays' of chess. I played this little sport every Sunday morning last semester, to submit the worksheet per email as obligatory, so at any rate it's not unaccustomed.

THEN I read a few brief paragraphs which were assigned to us from a history (an introduction to the Ottoman Empire which also stood on last year's Ottoman history lecture reading list) to illustrate the realities of Ottoman rule. For instance in Cyprus, this rule began when it was conquered from the Venetians who had held it since the 15th? century in 1571, despite the victory of the inimical Spanish and Portuguese(?) in the Battle of Lepanto in the same year. (The author wrote that this battle was 1571, but someone crossed out the 1 and wrote a 3 in its place. Perhaps I must consult Wikipedia to decide whom to believe.) Cyprus was muchly interesting to its various occupiers due to its cotton and sugar-based agricultural industry. In the late 16th century (?) the Ottomans began resettling Anatolians to Cyprus. But the Orthodox Church remained on the island, and aside from things like the non-Muslim head tax, the religion was mostly allowed to peacefully coexist with the Empire's Sunni faith. The island was not in the 'core' of the Empire — which was mentioned in this afternoon's Ottoman history lecture, — where the Ottomans felt comfortable ruling completely. (Egypt was, for example, recalcitrant and stood outside of the core.) Since the details are most likely askew, I will copy-edit them tomorrow.

SADLY (?) the second article we were to read for the Cyprus seminar has refused to load itself, at least in timely fashion, so I can't read it. Tomorrow morning I must decide, also, whether to print out 50ish pages of Latin vocabulary. I definitely do not feel like it. (Think of the trees! And the time spent when I would prefer to do something else before the epistemic — if that is a word — onslaught.)

An Incredibly Long Post Which *No* One Could Be Expected To Finish

ON MONDAY we began reading M. Karagatsis's modern revision of the Odyssey. My family has a copy of a volume of the original text, an old-fashioned one, and I tried translating the first page or two. So I still remember that it begins, "Andra moi ennepe, mousa, polytropon" . . . "Tell me of the man, o Muse, who is resourceful" . . . (To translate it a little badly.)

In the modern version, Mr. Karagatsis excises the preamble and plunges into the middle of the matter, explaining that amongst his comrades, Odysseus had the longest journey back from Troy, comprising twenty years [ETA: Actually, it's ten years. The additional ten years refer to the duration of the war at Troy.]. The Ithacan had been privy to a presentiment that he would be landed in such a mess if he went to Troy, when the rest of the kings allied with Menelaus had reminded him of his promise and tried to haul him off to help rescue Helen. (I admit that I was thinking, rather cheerfully, that Tennyson really does seem to have read Odysseus wrong by casting him as an easily bored person, unfond of his home, in "Ulysses," though perhaps the underlying notion is that persons and their aims change in the course of life. But, then, my opinions of that poem are prejudiced, as evidenced by a certain lousy parodic couplet of my manufacture, to this effect: 'It little profits that an idle king / Should be so fond of whining.')

At any rate, Odysseus does his best to pretend to be too crazy to go, by determinedly striding down to the coast with salt in hand, leading a horse and an ox, whom he straps in front of a plough and sends down the sandy shore, following them to sow the salt where they wandered. Which reminded me a bit of Malcolm X's tale in his autobiography of getting out of military service in the 1940s.

MALCOLM X is occupied with his hustling life in Harlem and does his best to evade the informants of sundry branches of the Armed Forces who are doing their best to round up anyone who could be sent off to fight, and personifying the bristling, accusing finger of Uncle Sam. He is caught and summonsesed,* and gets into the spirit of things by acting erratically around his acquaintance a few days beforehand.
(* well, 'summoned,' but I like the supernumerary syllables)

Then on the glorious day, he enters the office to find himself before a psychiatrist, and prepares to be evaluated.

I kept jerking around, backward, as though somebody might be listening. I knew I was going to send him back to the books to figure what kind of a case I was.

Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I'd entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. "Daddy-o, now you and me, we're from up North here, so don't you tell nobody. . . . I want to get sent down South. Organize them ninja* soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill up crackers!"

That psychiatrist's blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake's egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First [the African American receptionist] when he said, "That will be all."

[N.B.: *obviously the word in the book starts with 'ni' but isn't 'ninja.' The passage is from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, pp. 106-107.]

*

ANYWAY,

Grumpy Prognostications Recalling Pope's Dictum

On Monday the first classes of the new university semester will begin, so I have registered for one course and just selected the tutorial, and seen that the rest of them 'carry over' from the winter semester.

I will have:

Greek:
* Oral and Written Language
* Modern Greek Language System
* Conversation
(three classes with the same professor)

* Erotokritos and the Literature of Crete under Venetian Rule
* History of Cyprus and the Cyprus Problem

Latin:
* German-Latin

History and Culture of the Near East:
* Lecture: Literature and Sources
(i.e. surveys of Arabic and Semitic literature)
* Seminar: Genres of Arabic Writerdom

These all sound more impressive than they are. The real description should probably read: Greek: miserably dragging myself through incomprehension in Greek; reading things in the Cretan dialect which I couldn't translate in a million years except when the professor feeds us each word; finding out how much I don't know about Cyprus and never really will. Latin: writing really, really difficult exercises and trying to figure out how long I can hide the fact that I couldn't reproduce a single Latin declension paradigm correctly if I'd have to walk off a plank into a sharky sea for getting it wrong. History and Culture of the Near East: feeling generalities go in one ear and out the other, because if I've ever read a whole page of Arabic literature I'd be greatly surprised and I've no context in which to understand the development of the literary genres; feeling really, really ignorant and trying to gird my loins for the inevitable class presentation what with its necessity of bringing my knowledge on a subject from 0 to the point at which I can write a well-rounded, knowledgeable, and reasonably variably sourced essay which is respectable in the undergraduate university level about it.

The point is that I don't feel unusually stupid or unusually delinquent in attending to what is taught, but all of this makes me really aware that somehow I still couldn't sustain an intelligent conversation about any of my courses because there are so many sinkholes of ignorance strewing the terrain.

Pope's dictum, as mentioned in this blogpost title, is this famous one:

A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring

Die Musik - Mein Leben

Two weeks ago, or thereabouts, my brother Ge. and I went shopping for music scores at a small music antiques shop in Charlottenburg, and as a 'thank you' we received secondhand books: one by Joachim Kaiser, another evidently a philosophical reflection on Bach, and the third a memoir by Daniel Barenboim, which was published in English originally and in German by Ullstein in 2002. Since I feel too hyperactive to sit down and read a book without hopping to the computer now and then, it seems best to write about the process of reading and then nip over to one or two other websites (Pinterest, for instance, which I have finally officially joined since mid-March) intermittently.

1:35 p.m. One thing I've wondered is when Barenboim's family came to Argentina, since it is (after all) a newish country for European references. The book explains that his grandparents on both sides fled there from the Soviet Union in the 1900s.

1:49 p.m. When did he begin to play? — Barenboim has no Arthur-Rubinsteinesque tales of consummate ability at the age of two* with which to bowl over his reader, or perhaps he modestly withholds them. He grew up in a musical family, and his mother taught him piano first, and soon his father took over.

* I don't have his autobiography at hand, but a certain online encyclopaedia provides the details.

2:20 p.m. In Argentina, he writes, musicians visited the house of Ernesto Rosenthal in Buenos Aires. One of the visitors was Sergiu Celibidache, the conductor from Romania who also for instance taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in the USA. (It's where Hilary Hahn went, and from what Papa tells me it seems like a rather hippieish and freewheeling place instead of a musical barracks for the next generation.) He is easy to find on YouTube, for instance in this video with the Dutch National Radio Symphony Orchestra: Ravel's Bolero, in the early 70s.

2:40 p.m. As a seven-year-old, Barenboim gave his first concert in Argentina, where he had already been going to school. He writes that even when he became a teenager school was a priority insofar as he didn't go on long tours, so that he had a 'quite normal school education.' I think 'quite normal' is being stuck in there for the grim duration and not having much during the holidays and after school to take one's mind off of it, but anyway. (c:

2:47 p.m. In the early 1950s his family moved to Israel because his mother, in particular, as well as his grandparents on her side, were highly excited by the formation of the new homeland. His father's piano lessons continued, and Barenboim writes that this was quite convenient insofar as he didn't have to hop back and forth between different teaching and musical philosophies. Also, he was taught to think of music and technique as integrated concepts, so that there wasn't undue emphasis on scales and other technical exercises and undertakings in isolation. An important thing was to be taught what was needed by the scores, let's say of a Mozart piano concerto.

This really rang a chord, but rather because I always mess up scales and do better when they are part of a piece of music. Unlike with Barenboim, I don't know if it can objectively be said to be the only possible philosophy or the best didactic method for me. But at least it keeps me happy and keeps me in good humour with the music. Also, even under these conditions, it is nice to feel that a piece I work on for a while on can send me forth into the world again with a new piece of the technique puzzle, even if I haven't tracked down the relevant finger exercises or scales for repetitive formal drills.

To translate back into the English, Barenboim writes,

"I often meet musicians who begin by trying to solve specific problems in a technical, mechanical way, so that they can wedge in the 'musicality' afterwards — like whipping cream on a cake. But these things — technique and interpretation — should be connected from the outset [...]".

For me, I think it is perhaps rather a failing that (as far as I know) I don't want to resolve technical problems or look at music analytically for its composition, for fear of losing the charm and emotional roundedness of the music. If I were really a musician and weren't a shallow person, shouldn't it make no difference? But perhaps it is the case as with academic work, where I think the worst possible thing is to engage with the subject shallowly and then become convinced that one knows everything because it is too easy — whereas diving into learning and researching, and pushing past mental barriers, produces a degree of thought and emotional development which doesn't make one flippant or cold.

3:22 p.m. Well, I'm only on p. 17, which is the disadvantage of a reading liveblog when I'm the one in charge of writing it; but I think I'll take a break and look at Easter crafts, etc., on a certain pinning website now.