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.[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.]
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."
*
ANYWAY,
displaying an odd masculine disregard for feminine and underage chattels — similar to Odysseus's in parading his feigned insanity in front of his distressed wife, who is not 'in' on the subterfuge —Palamides (who has come to inspect the hurly-burly) lays the baby Telemachus on the sand in the path of the father's ploughshare. Odysseus, not a homicidally inclined father, mounts a herculean effort and, by turning the plough a little aside, misses dissecting the imperiled infant. Palamides takes this as a final sign that the Ithacan is not nuts after all, roars with laughter and tells Odysseus to 'give it up.' And that's about where I've stopped translating the modern Greek version.
***
For dinner today we had a grand repast of Charolais beef, a little sirloin tip, celeriac, long-sliced carrot, and firm-boiling potatoes, in red wine and butter and herb, all oven-cooked in the broiler. With it we had a Tuscan red wine and the remainder of the chocolates which were also of Papa's purchase. He also bought pear liqueur of a kind which he had been used to partake of at a friend-of-the-family's house. It was definitely opulent, and beats the diet of porridge, carrots, plain sandwiches and tea with which I've been feeding myself between classes this past week since I was too tired and limp to do something proper.
Though, to be fair, we had a lovely pot of chili con carne which astonishingly lasted overnight without being consumed in its entirety, along with iceberg lettuce and yoghurt and cheese and rice and wedgy tomatoes and tortillas in which to wrap all of these, recently. Amongst other things . . . But today's dish was really princely.
*
I HAVE avoided saying so in the past because nobody wants to hear it, but growing ever thinner as I have fairly steadily over the past two years is a little disconcerting. I don't mind losing it at a rate where the adipose tissue is replaced by muscle. But presently I have effete, thin arms where I feel childlike; I become grumpy if I don't have as much food as will keep me the same weight; I don't feel that I exude as much aplomb as formerly; and I think that I used to have the digestion of a horse and now petty food intolerances (uncooked garlic, onion, spice, tonic water and junk food) which are perhaps a side effect of growing older and can surprisingly be stopped a bit by sort of fighting back at the discomfort in one's mind. Above all, I have never disliked being fat in the first place.
It was when I lost weight at UBC where it was miraculous and I liked seeing bones reappear from beneath the flesh like crocuses from snow in winter, and fitting into clothes which I had kept in storage because they were too little, and feeling like I was not doomed to have disordered eating traditions for the rest of my life. Now it's old hat and no longer bound up as much in self-esteem, particularly since European attitudes to fat seem to be kinder if blunter than North American ones, though I think the 'I'm not fatphobic, just concerned for your health' line is still a complete crock and as likely to be heard on this side of the pond. I had a dream last night where a health specialist of some sort pinched my tummy in her hands and said, 'You're a bit overweight,' and I thought, 'Meh. It's obvious, and I like my pot-belly and I think it's cute. Tell me something else.'
The 'trick' to losing weight, I have discovered, is to eschew heroics and embrace the boredom of eating a little less on average and having three quarter of an hour's or at least a quarter hour's exercise per weekday, for months on end. It also helps not to be locked in a frenzy of predestination-believing guilt. But it drives me nuts to read the 'food is evil' stuff which people write when they are trying to lose weight. Clean and palatable food is a gift of God (or whomever/whatever you believe in), and I still think that starvation is a far greater problem in the world than being too much fed.
*
Before the grand meal, at any rate, I played the piano. Today the 'menu' (to tie together this blog post thematically) was Schumann's Kinderszenen; part of Bach's first violin sonata, second movement, (which is fairly well suited for playing on the piano with two hands); bits and pieces of Chopin's études including the thoroughly fudged entirety of the 'revolutionary' étude; and late Beethoven sonatas.
Since I learned the 'Sonata appassionata' by scrambling through the notes as completely as possible and also had the version of Myra Hess and others on the Art of Piano DVD in my head; and have a harder time puzzling out how to interpret Beethoven's mature sonatas from the Waldstein onwards; I haven't figured out an own interpretation yet and don't play it that kindly. So this evening I 'walked through' it very slowly and tried to find nuances and small inspirations. The other thing I did was to strike the keys more clearly than usual, to avoid a strange disembodied sound; the timbre of the piano has its own character in tone, to give the music more interest, besides which I judge that Beethoven should be played with a bit of a (what I think of as a) 'what you see is what you get' tone, like any other classical-era piece. I still find Beethoven very sympathetic, since the Teutonic touches and rebellion and determination to appear profound are things I find relatable.
Speaking of which it drove me nuts (an expression I've used often by now, but anyway) to read that 'Haydn' (or was it Beethoven or Mozart?) 'pretty much invented classical music' somewhere. 'Classical-era music, you fool!' I thought, rather intemperately — wroth that Bach, Händel, Purcell, and all the other very worthwhile predecessors and contemporaries, and Gregorian music and madrigals and all the rest of it, were jettisoned in this manner.
As for Chopin, I don't find his music intimidating any more except where I am unsure how to render the character of it. But I find that I am dissatisfied with playing him like lounge music, a fault into which I sometimes slip. Secondly, sometimes the apparent superficiality of the music could be a reflection on the musician and his or her interpretative shortcuts. Thirdly, though I don't think he is the profoundest of musicians at least all of the time and that his mazurkas and strongly Polish-folklore-inflected pieces are about the 'real'est pieces in his repertoire, I think it is in fact worthwhile to try to exploit the aestheticism in the other music and to make it as beautiful and natural as possible — instead of worldweary or merely brilliant. It does feel a little uneasy because I tend to think that I want to play music the way it was composed instead of superimposing my agenda, my approach, and my preference; but I've told myself that I would be playing the super-actualized, transcendent character of Chopin, which he would have striven to be in his lifetime but of which he lost sight. At which point it becomes clear that egotism and rash feelings of superior understanding are probably not qualities of which I am short.
Anyway, I read bits about composers' lives when I was young and then hung on for dear life to the vague impressions I formed of them, fairly certain that I wouldn't have the opportunity or motive to become much more informed about them for a long while. Now this has changed a little, since I've finally got around to reading more and opening more of the volumes from our music library. So maybe it's time to let go or at least to qualify the idea that Chopin was a socializing, neurotic man who was intent on impressing everybody and considered the salon his natural habitat. Besides, the limitation of this biographically influenced interest in composers is clear in cases like Schumann's, where knowing something of his life doesn't really help me get a better understanding of his music except insofar as I see the Teutonic, biedermeierish aspects which he subverts even in his Kinderszenen by making them more interesting and grown-up. (Though I think that the Waldszenen and some of his Album für die Jugend pieces, like the famous Horseman, etc., are characteristic yet also pretty conventional.)
Another thing I thought about is that, as I think I've mentioned on the blog before, it does not feel particulary good to play something 'perfectly.' It is just boring, and I think that lots of pianists can play piano music perfectly. When I play mediocrely or even terribly, or weirdly so that I don't know whether my interpretation is awful or brilliant, I have the pleasing consciousness that nobody has played it quite that way before and that I am contributing originality to the discipline. On the other hand the way one hears one's own playing seems to be 'objectively subjective' because the ear hears things differently when one sits at the keyboard and has contact to the strings indirectly through one's fingers on the keys and hears through the aperture under the noterack and so on — than a listener would who is further away, or than a listener would who has a recording of it. Also, because if one is in a certain mood one interprets one's own interpretation differently than one might in a different mood, or than the listeners interpret one's interpretation. If that makes sense.
Certainly — to give a nicer example — I've listened to myself play when I was littler and felt that it was a waste of time to be so miserable about feeling like an awful piano player, because in fact it wasn't all that bad. I think this is a reason why one should give the music a break once in a while and really leave one's self-esteem or ego out of it if possible; it only makes you miserable and it is in fact quite impossible to control what one plays and what others play, completely.
*
Finally, I am not really reading anything about music at present. At university and in transit I've been reading the Pickwick Papers and beginning Black Like Me. I like the latter quite a bit though I think it could use 'more showing and less telling' in the phrasing of one of my high school English teachers. I still think The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I read for a seminar last year, is just about the best book ever, so all else in that genre pales before it. This is an opinion I've also formed for the Pickwick Papers, since at this stage in my life I'm reevaluating my opinions as to Dickens's gormless sappiness and finding him a magnificent and highly intelligent Colossus of an author after all. The contemporaneity of the book also strikes me, since scraps of dialect are sometimes an approximation of the modern idiom ('catch your attention,' for example) and I think that with a little rewriting it could portray present-day society just as well. I also like the flow and ebb of the little plots, which works quite well when I can only read a paragraph or a chapter or three chapters at a time. The idea of looking at society in its entirety, instead of shuttering it away from sight or whitewashing icky portions of it, as one would expect of the Victorians, is also very progressive (though Dickens does draw a veil over some things and work more by force of suggesting truths which we know than by blunt delineation); and I must say that I don't think we quite work up the nerve to do it very often now. What bothers me most about the Pickwick Papers is the bottomless sea of various liquor which is consumed in the course of it, because for the sake of verisimilitude I have to picture a dramatis personae's worth of badly cirrhosed livers becoming ever cirrhoseder.
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