Omama's Advent calendar, c. 1987, is in the background.
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Friday, November 27, 2015
Thoreau in His Winter Walk
(If I wrote this post perfectly, I'd never get it done. So I hope that there are no mistakes, and that the rather random choice of picking pieces of Byron's verse to offer the contrast to Thoreau is not too bothersome!)
There are few essays that have delighted me so greatly that I will think of them again years afterward and look forward to recommending them to others — but Henry David Thoreau's "Winter Walk," an essay that describes a day after heavy snow in his New England habitat, is the rarity that lives up to this unexpected bliss. (It is not to be confused with Walking, which is a general essay about sauntering, etc.)
I don't know if philosophical meaning is the aim of the essay, aside maybe from the usual tension between nature and man that I doubt Thoreau meant to address here. (Even when the trees, birds, etc., are resting, the chimneys of his neighbours send up their flags into the air, doubtless emanating the ghosts of lumbered trees.) At the end of it, I think we might be left, too — for instance — with the illusion that a theoretical appreciation of nature is an enrichment to the world at large. In practical terms, of course, the illusion might not be easy to 'prove'; but perhaps Thoreau and his neighbours were indeed stewards rather than robber barons of their lands. Later, of course, since a few plums of morality are still dropped in the pudding of this essay in the final paragraphs; and I think in the end he has virtually adopted a kind of Socratic method whereby a dialogue between nature and man has taken place during the walk, leading to some kind of conclusion that the questioner had held all along; I will mention what 'lessons' there are in the text.
There are implicit 'themes' in Thoreau's approach: in a way Thoreau is a 'socialist' about nature-worship in this essay. Ignoring the fact that he is depicting a solitary protagonist walking, as (after all) this protagonist meets others along the way, he seems firmly convinced that any man can feel the same things on this journey. It makes no difference whether they are Transcendentalist Philosophers or street sweepers — even the pickerel-fishermen whom he depicts as numbed, physically if not mentally, by their freezing wintry sentry-posts. (In that respect he is widely different from Lord Byron's Childe Harold,* for instance, for whom the remainder of humanity seems rather an unappreciative nuisance on the face of nature. I think that other writers can — though at the moment I can't mention other examples — be aristocratic about the level of intellectual or emotional refinement needed before Nature deigns to 'reveal herself' to the observer.)
WHEN walking and watching things, without external distractions (at least) and — due to the snow — left with nowhere else to be, perhaps we can evolve our own philosophies quite naturally; and Thoreau is merely here to show us the way, like a signpost. In that sense his text is undemanding. Of course it isn't strictly observation, since he describes things we wouldn't see on a walk — "The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed." — but like to imagine, anthropomorphically. (Like — to put it unpatronizingly, since after all more grown-up animal illustrations like the Capitalist Pig are also the fruits of imagination — in children's books.)
***
Of course 'Nature' is a mirror of sorts, to ourselves and our human environments, when we write about it like this. When Byron, for instance, writes of
"The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,"
I gather that not every visitor of the waterfalls will have seen the same degree of terror in his subject; and even there, there is a contrast to Byron's own Weltanschauung (if Childe Harold is his alter ego in this aspect too) as a child. It's particularly clear at the end of Canto IV: he writes of the ocean, not a waterfall, in fearsome terms. Then he surprisingly drops in a childhood scene that in tone almost fits in Stevenson's Garden of Verses:
"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear."
Many might have looked at Thoreau's tranquil snows and unearthed or imagined a substratum of horror, benign though it might have looked to Thoreau; but it's also Thoreau's selection of nature to look at which reveals something about him as a human being.
Thoreau's watercourses are not at all like Byron's; they're malice-free metaphors of latent life and energy.
Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left, where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces. The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost. The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone. The streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring, because nature's work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find their level so soon.
***
While it doesn't seem like any thundering waterfalls were threshing through Walden Pond, so Thoreau wouldn't have described them anyway, I think that clearly everyone is more comfortable in some phases of nature than in others. And, if I remember correctly, Thoreau himself had little use for the cedar, spruce and fir forests of the far West.
*
At any rate, Thoreau acts like a pacesetter as well as like a 'signpost.' He renders each scene he finds or imagines so roundly before he progresses to the next, that it is practically impossible not to read the text whilst 'slowing down' a little, too. I like mentally laying excerpts of the text side by side with my early memories of waking up on a snowy day — which were special events to me particularly since they were rare in our warmer corner of Canada. In that respect, reading "The Winter Walk" is like curling into a window-seat and looking through the pane every now and then to find a sight that verifies and illustrates one's text. This makes the reading a little longer and nicer, and furnishes time needed for things to sink in. Of course Thoreau knowingly draws the reader into his journey; he writes it in the first person plural and the present tense.
And Thoreau's neutral way of not preachingly proving anything — not even necessarily proving Thoreau's way with words or thoughtfulness, because a perceptible drip of self-regard would shatter the atmosphere like a smidgen of meltwater the surface of a pond — makes this essay an easy Philosophy to read. (Walking has a divergent aim, and a glance at it shows that it is far more filled with didacticism and literary references.) At the end of the "Winter Walk," of course, he can't resist:
At any rate, I think the inspirations here are brilliant. At the beginning, for instance: "[I]nward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship" is a Victorian-era phrase that I would be tempted to skim over. But it's merely part of a variable and either tangible or esoteric series of thoughts. And oddly enough it is coherent. Ceres, the product of the Greek Mediterranean and summery symbol of fertility, is an interesting inspiration; and in 18th-century poets I have found it terribly distracting to keep track of all the references to nymphs, hills, and hunters; but when Thoreau writes, "But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields," I am not taken out of the atmosphere at all, nor driven to a Dictionary of Mythology for footnotes. These are piffling examples, of course.
In fact the biggest 'vexation' I have had in writing about the "Winter Walk" is narrowing down the handful of quotations that I want to share. This, for example — "The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow." It expresses exactly what everyone, I think, feels when they wake up and see the mysterious trails and traces of different animals outside. Or this lovely description of a merely half-veiled world underneath the glassy river ice:
A warming acknowledgement in his "Winter Walk," too, is not that life still statically exists in winter; but that rather life is developing, and that there is a purpose and continuity to it:
In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a hortus siccus. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,—and anon these dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the heavens.
Lastly, I think that the "Winter Walk" is also so charming because it renders the sense of safety that we feel in winter when we are lucky, and we are sheltered from wind, rain, snow and frost; fed and warmed. — It may be a trite thought; art and music and even commerce in the Christmas phase of winter are all adjusted to create precisely this feeling. — And still, of course, winter might be terribly lonesome and Hadean if so many other beings, human or not, weren't triumphantly doing exactly the same thing beyond our walls.
***
Sources:
Winter Walk, in Excursions and Poems at Project Gutenberg.
Walking, also at Project Gutenberg.
1 Though every prospect pleases - Quotation from Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains.", at Wikiquote
2 The fall of waters! - Quotation from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV Stanza LXIX, p. 128, from an 1886 edition at Archive.org.)
3 And I have loved thee! Quotation ibid., p. 162. Canto IV, Stanza CLXXXIV.)
All other quotations, of course, from Thoreau's Winter Walk. (Here in the volume Excursions and Poems at Project Gutenberg.)
***
* "Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain." To be fair, Byron also insists, "I love not Man the less, but Nature more," when he communes with Nature.
The rest (Canto IV, Stanza 177) is — I think — partly serene and beautiful . . .
There are few essays that have delighted me so greatly that I will think of them again years afterward and look forward to recommending them to others — but Henry David Thoreau's "Winter Walk," an essay that describes a day after heavy snow in his New England habitat, is the rarity that lives up to this unexpected bliss. (It is not to be confused with Walking, which is a general essay about sauntering, etc.)
I don't know if philosophical meaning is the aim of the essay, aside maybe from the usual tension between nature and man that I doubt Thoreau meant to address here. (Even when the trees, birds, etc., are resting, the chimneys of his neighbours send up their flags into the air, doubtless emanating the ghosts of lumbered trees.) At the end of it, I think we might be left, too — for instance — with the illusion that a theoretical appreciation of nature is an enrichment to the world at large. In practical terms, of course, the illusion might not be easy to 'prove'; but perhaps Thoreau and his neighbours were indeed stewards rather than robber barons of their lands. Later, of course, since a few plums of morality are still dropped in the pudding of this essay in the final paragraphs; and I think in the end he has virtually adopted a kind of Socratic method whereby a dialogue between nature and man has taken place during the walk, leading to some kind of conclusion that the questioner had held all along; I will mention what 'lessons' there are in the text.
There are implicit 'themes' in Thoreau's approach: in a way Thoreau is a 'socialist' about nature-worship in this essay. Ignoring the fact that he is depicting a solitary protagonist walking, as (after all) this protagonist meets others along the way, he seems firmly convinced that any man can feel the same things on this journey. It makes no difference whether they are Transcendentalist Philosophers or street sweepers — even the pickerel-fishermen whom he depicts as numbed, physically if not mentally, by their freezing wintry sentry-posts. (In that respect he is widely different from Lord Byron's Childe Harold,* for instance, for whom the remainder of humanity seems rather an unappreciative nuisance on the face of nature. I think that other writers can — though at the moment I can't mention other examples — be aristocratic about the level of intellectual or emotional refinement needed before Nature deigns to 'reveal herself' to the observer.)
 |
| Julien Alden Weir, "The Ice Cutters" 1895; Oil on canvas; via Wikimedia Commons |
WHEN walking and watching things, without external distractions (at least) and — due to the snow — left with nowhere else to be, perhaps we can evolve our own philosophies quite naturally; and Thoreau is merely here to show us the way, like a signpost. In that sense his text is undemanding. Of course it isn't strictly observation, since he describes things we wouldn't see on a walk — "The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed." — but like to imagine, anthropomorphically. (Like — to put it unpatronizingly, since after all more grown-up animal illustrations like the Capitalist Pig are also the fruits of imagination — in children's books.)
***
Of course 'Nature' is a mirror of sorts, to ourselves and our human environments, when we write about it like this. When Byron, for instance, writes of
"The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,"
I gather that not every visitor of the waterfalls will have seen the same degree of terror in his subject; and even there, there is a contrast to Byron's own Weltanschauung (if Childe Harold is his alter ego in this aspect too) as a child. It's particularly clear at the end of Canto IV: he writes of the ocean, not a waterfall, in fearsome terms. Then he surprisingly drops in a childhood scene that in tone almost fits in Stevenson's Garden of Verses:
"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear."
Many might have looked at Thoreau's tranquil snows and unearthed or imagined a substratum of horror, benign though it might have looked to Thoreau; but it's also Thoreau's selection of nature to look at which reveals something about him as a human being.
Thoreau's watercourses are not at all like Byron's; they're malice-free metaphors of latent life and energy.
Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left, where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces. The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost. The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone. The streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring, because nature's work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find their level so soon.
***
While it doesn't seem like any thundering waterfalls were threshing through Walden Pond, so Thoreau wouldn't have described them anyway, I think that clearly everyone is more comfortable in some phases of nature than in others. And, if I remember correctly, Thoreau himself had little use for the cedar, spruce and fir forests of the far West.
*
At any rate, Thoreau acts like a pacesetter as well as like a 'signpost.' He renders each scene he finds or imagines so roundly before he progresses to the next, that it is practically impossible not to read the text whilst 'slowing down' a little, too. I like mentally laying excerpts of the text side by side with my early memories of waking up on a snowy day — which were special events to me particularly since they were rare in our warmer corner of Canada. In that respect, reading "The Winter Walk" is like curling into a window-seat and looking through the pane every now and then to find a sight that verifies and illustrates one's text. This makes the reading a little longer and nicer, and furnishes time needed for things to sink in. Of course Thoreau knowingly draws the reader into his journey; he writes it in the first person plural and the present tense.
And Thoreau's neutral way of not preachingly proving anything — not even necessarily proving Thoreau's way with words or thoughtfulness, because a perceptible drip of self-regard would shatter the atmosphere like a smidgen of meltwater the surface of a pond — makes this essay an easy Philosophy to read. (Walking has a divergent aim, and a glance at it shows that it is far more filled with didacticism and literary references.) At the end of the "Winter Walk," of course, he can't resist:
In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney-top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney-side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skillful physician could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams.Perhaps, too, this essay is the pleasanter for not being about the manmade environment. Without thinking that the world is beautiful only "Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile," there is nothing in the essay that requires criticism or roused moral outrage. And that freedom from irritation is also one reason to celebrate Christmas; at least if one gives everyone else some respite from reasons to distrust human nature. — Thoreau: "Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer's hearth, when the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering panes, sees with equanimity 'the mansion of the northern bear,' for now the storm is over," [...].
At any rate, I think the inspirations here are brilliant. At the beginning, for instance: "[I]nward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship" is a Victorian-era phrase that I would be tempted to skim over. But it's merely part of a variable and either tangible or esoteric series of thoughts. And oddly enough it is coherent. Ceres, the product of the Greek Mediterranean and summery symbol of fertility, is an interesting inspiration; and in 18th-century poets I have found it terribly distracting to keep track of all the references to nymphs, hills, and hunters; but when Thoreau writes, "But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields," I am not taken out of the atmosphere at all, nor driven to a Dictionary of Mythology for footnotes. These are piffling examples, of course.
In fact the biggest 'vexation' I have had in writing about the "Winter Walk" is narrowing down the handful of quotations that I want to share. This, for example — "The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow." It expresses exactly what everyone, I think, feels when they wake up and see the mysterious trails and traces of different animals outside. Or this lovely description of a merely half-veiled world underneath the glassy river ice:
With one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately "the mower whet his scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow-grass.
 |
| "First Snow Along the Hudson River" (1859) by François Régis Gignoux via Wikimedia Commons |
A warming acknowledgement in his "Winter Walk," too, is not that life still statically exists in winter; but that rather life is developing, and that there is a purpose and continuity to it:
In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a hortus siccus. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,—and anon these dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the heavens.
Lastly, I think that the "Winter Walk" is also so charming because it renders the sense of safety that we feel in winter when we are lucky, and we are sheltered from wind, rain, snow and frost; fed and warmed. — It may be a trite thought; art and music and even commerce in the Christmas phase of winter are all adjusted to create precisely this feeling. — And still, of course, winter might be terribly lonesome and Hadean if so many other beings, human or not, weren't triumphantly doing exactly the same thing beyond our walls.
*
The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls.
Sources:
Winter Walk, in Excursions and Poems at Project Gutenberg.
Walking, also at Project Gutenberg.
1 Though every prospect pleases - Quotation from Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains.", at Wikiquote
2 The fall of waters! - Quotation from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV Stanza LXIX, p. 128, from an 1886 edition at Archive.org.)
3 And I have loved thee! Quotation ibid., p. 162. Canto IV, Stanza CLXXXIV.)
All other quotations, of course, from Thoreau's Winter Walk. (Here in the volume Excursions and Poems at Project Gutenberg.)
***
* "Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain." To be fair, Byron also insists, "I love not Man the less, but Nature more," when he communes with Nature.
The rest (Canto IV, Stanza 177) is — I think — partly serene and beautiful . . .
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar;But he does depict Man as an antagonist, 'Though every prospect pleases':
Man marks the earth with ruin(Stanza 178.)
 |
J.E.H. MacDonald, "Morning after Snow, High Park"
Oil on canvas, 1912; via Wikimedia Commons
|
Friday, October 09, 2015
Refugees and a Reckless Driver
Yesterday, after waking up in the early afternoon, I had an errand in Moabit — a quarter of Berlin that is a little north of Mitte, or the city centre. Generally I go there through the S- and U-Bahn station Zoologischer Garten, which is to say the sprawling commuter node at the edge of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, itself in the left bottom corner of the sprawling central park of the Tiergarten. This time I was running late, so instead of taking the buses and risking the delays inherent in the heavy traffic, I walked as briskly as I could; it took 37 minutes to reach the U9 U-Bahn line platform.
THE errand was by the campus of the Landesamt for Gesundheit und Soziales, or the Berlin state office for Health and Social Welfare. It is a heterogeneous mixture of ancient brick buildings, parking niches, low mid-20th century edifices that have an ad-hoc air much like the prefabricated 'portables' in which my siblings and I had our classes when the school buildings weren't large enough for all of the students, and landscaping with shrubs and a park full of loosely planted trees that shade it but that also permit the light to reach the grass freely. The asylum seekers — who are registered and then distributed to housing in the rest of Germany or to the communes of Berlin there — were either gathered under overhanging first floors of buildings, or the awning of a restaurant or bar, or streaming about in leather jackets, rain jackets or transparent rain ponchos.
Lately the 'LaGeSo' has frequently appeared in the Berlin evening news. Firstly, because it is a main setting in Berlin's share in the refugee crisis. But, secondly, because it reports the inevitable irregularities in the government's handling of the refugees. One such irregularity: in order to be distributed, the refugees are asked to come to the campus on a certain day. Then they have to wait until their call numbers appear on a digital signboard — outside the building. There is no shelter or warmth to shield them from the rain and from the cold, which is expected to set in over the weekend, with the first 0° temperature at nighttime. Lastly, there is a safety issue — for example, a child seems to have been kidnapped from the campus.
At any rate, yesterday, at House R. a handful of volunteers — freelance volunteers as well as practiced volunteers from the neighbourhood group Moabit hilft, I think; but the Johanniter and other organizations as well as the Landesamt itself* are on the campus, too — was huddling in the roofed porch. At the foot of the entrance path, there was a thin barricade of benches and red-and-white tape. On the other side of a barricade, a handful of people in rain ponchos (asylum-seekers, I guessed) was wordlessly standing as if waiting to be let in. 'We have nothing for you here,' said one of the volunteers loudly. I thought it was a rather poignant scene.
(*Also, the medical personnel that volunteers through the Ärztekammer. I still haven't quite understood who the green-jacketed people are who seem to be in charge of the campus — they also stand at the entrance to the campus, for example, in pairs, and seem to offer low-level security.)
Later there was a happier touching scene. A small boy and — I think — his brother, were walking together across a little lawn. His rain poncho reached his feet, overlong, and it had a neat gnomey peak on his head; and altogether the stumpy figure was rather like a pre-schooler in costume as a ghost for Halloween. I almost had to repress tears of emotion at how cute he was, and at how nicely he and his brother seemed to get along; and then thought that I am getting sentimental in my advanced age.
*
I entered the bus east of the U-Bahn station Turmstraße, and then left it after an entertaining ride — made entertaining by the 'colour commentary' of the driver — and walked from the Ernst-Reuter-Platz on the way back.
Indicating (one of) the reason(s) for the traffic congestion, I passed the barricades that are securing the Straße des 17. Juni. There will be a mass demonstration against the trade agreements TTIP* and CETA. As far as pedestrians went, while the square at Zoologischer Garten, as well as the Wittenbergplatz, were teeming, rain and all, the Siegessäule (Victory Column) in the Tiergarten park was fairly abandoned.
It was tranquil in parts of the Hofjägerallee, too, amongst the acorns and the fallen chestnuts, the underbrush, the older oaks and plane trees, the setts, rain dripping and dropping into a half-overgrown ditch, and the sand of Berlin. Many birds, it appeared, have migrated south of Berlin — or perhaps were taking shelter. Just the grey-and-black 'storm crows' were neither perturbed by wind nor rain.
In the lesser streets, at any rate, the road traffic scarcely improved. As I was walking along the sidewalk, I had almost reached an intersection, when a car ramped up on the sidewalk right behind me and rode along the middle of it a few metres to reach a driveway. It was like Grand Theft Auto, or a miniature Hollywood thriller.
* TTIP = Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (United States - European Union)
CETA = Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Canada - EU)
THE errand was by the campus of the Landesamt for Gesundheit und Soziales, or the Berlin state office for Health and Social Welfare. It is a heterogeneous mixture of ancient brick buildings, parking niches, low mid-20th century edifices that have an ad-hoc air much like the prefabricated 'portables' in which my siblings and I had our classes when the school buildings weren't large enough for all of the students, and landscaping with shrubs and a park full of loosely planted trees that shade it but that also permit the light to reach the grass freely. The asylum seekers — who are registered and then distributed to housing in the rest of Germany or to the communes of Berlin there — were either gathered under overhanging first floors of buildings, or the awning of a restaurant or bar, or streaming about in leather jackets, rain jackets or transparent rain ponchos.
Lately the 'LaGeSo' has frequently appeared in the Berlin evening news. Firstly, because it is a main setting in Berlin's share in the refugee crisis. But, secondly, because it reports the inevitable irregularities in the government's handling of the refugees. One such irregularity: in order to be distributed, the refugees are asked to come to the campus on a certain day. Then they have to wait until their call numbers appear on a digital signboard — outside the building. There is no shelter or warmth to shield them from the rain and from the cold, which is expected to set in over the weekend, with the first 0° temperature at nighttime. Lastly, there is a safety issue — for example, a child seems to have been kidnapped from the campus.
At any rate, yesterday, at House R. a handful of volunteers — freelance volunteers as well as practiced volunteers from the neighbourhood group Moabit hilft, I think; but the Johanniter and other organizations as well as the Landesamt itself* are on the campus, too — was huddling in the roofed porch. At the foot of the entrance path, there was a thin barricade of benches and red-and-white tape. On the other side of a barricade, a handful of people in rain ponchos (asylum-seekers, I guessed) was wordlessly standing as if waiting to be let in. 'We have nothing for you here,' said one of the volunteers loudly. I thought it was a rather poignant scene.
(*Also, the medical personnel that volunteers through the Ärztekammer. I still haven't quite understood who the green-jacketed people are who seem to be in charge of the campus — they also stand at the entrance to the campus, for example, in pairs, and seem to offer low-level security.)
Later there was a happier touching scene. A small boy and — I think — his brother, were walking together across a little lawn. His rain poncho reached his feet, overlong, and it had a neat gnomey peak on his head; and altogether the stumpy figure was rather like a pre-schooler in costume as a ghost for Halloween. I almost had to repress tears of emotion at how cute he was, and at how nicely he and his brother seemed to get along; and then thought that I am getting sentimental in my advanced age.
*
I entered the bus east of the U-Bahn station Turmstraße, and then left it after an entertaining ride — made entertaining by the 'colour commentary' of the driver — and walked from the Ernst-Reuter-Platz on the way back.
Indicating (one of) the reason(s) for the traffic congestion, I passed the barricades that are securing the Straße des 17. Juni. There will be a mass demonstration against the trade agreements TTIP* and CETA. As far as pedestrians went, while the square at Zoologischer Garten, as well as the Wittenbergplatz, were teeming, rain and all, the Siegessäule (Victory Column) in the Tiergarten park was fairly abandoned.
It was tranquil in parts of the Hofjägerallee, too, amongst the acorns and the fallen chestnuts, the underbrush, the older oaks and plane trees, the setts, rain dripping and dropping into a half-overgrown ditch, and the sand of Berlin. Many birds, it appeared, have migrated south of Berlin — or perhaps were taking shelter. Just the grey-and-black 'storm crows' were neither perturbed by wind nor rain.
In the lesser streets, at any rate, the road traffic scarcely improved. As I was walking along the sidewalk, I had almost reached an intersection, when a car ramped up on the sidewalk right behind me and rode along the middle of it a few metres to reach a driveway. It was like Grand Theft Auto, or a miniature Hollywood thriller.
* TTIP = Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (United States - European Union)
CETA = Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Canada - EU)
Thursday, August 27, 2015
What's for Dinner
'Penne Bolognese.' The ingredients were,
1.5 Slender sausages
1 Clove garlic
3.5 Onions
5 Celery stalks
6 Mushrooms
3 Dabs of tomato paste
2 Tins Tomatoes, in juice
1 Box of diced tomato pieces
1 Vine tomato, fresh
1 kg? of Ground beef
1 Bay leaf
Enough hot water with beef bouillon powder to rinse out the tomato receptacles
Dried basil and oregano and rosemary, ground pepper, salt, and sweet paprika
1 kg of penne
N.B.: We only needed 0.5 kg.
As I had feared, after an experience cooking a bacon-laden formal bolognese sauce recipe years ago, the porky sausage flavour 'outshouted' the beef. (Much like the fragrance of a pig farm overwhelms the ambient countryside, albeit far more agreeably.) It was not bad, although I think that beef that tastes like pork has a Frankenstein's-monster-like quality; the meaty flavour of the sausages was pleasingly savoury and tempting. In fact, if I had just made lentil soup or made a fried meal of the sausages, onions and mushrooms, it would have done them justice.
But, as far as taste went, the tomatoes turned into a dominant paradox. Though I theoretically believe in making the frying fat from the beginning of a recipe absorb and carry the flavour, and I mixed the tomatoes and other ingredients well, they were watery-tasting tomatoes. I even let the bottom of the onions, garlic, celery, sausage and ground meat burn, thereby having caramelization and the Maillard reaction increase the flavour, and it made no apparent difference. The perfidious tomatoes — again, having little flavour in themselves — dominated everything except their own wateriness.
So my experiments with bolognese sauce — after a lengthy and frustrating history of watery-tasting sauces — are not yet completed.
1.5 Slender sausages
1 Clove garlic
3.5 Onions
5 Celery stalks
6 Mushrooms
3 Dabs of tomato paste
2 Tins Tomatoes, in juice
1 Box of diced tomato pieces
1 Vine tomato, fresh
1 kg? of Ground beef
1 Bay leaf
Enough hot water with beef bouillon powder to rinse out the tomato receptacles
Dried basil and oregano and rosemary, ground pepper, salt, and sweet paprika
1 kg of penne
N.B.: We only needed 0.5 kg.
As I had feared, after an experience cooking a bacon-laden formal bolognese sauce recipe years ago, the porky sausage flavour 'outshouted' the beef. (Much like the fragrance of a pig farm overwhelms the ambient countryside, albeit far more agreeably.) It was not bad, although I think that beef that tastes like pork has a Frankenstein's-monster-like quality; the meaty flavour of the sausages was pleasingly savoury and tempting. In fact, if I had just made lentil soup or made a fried meal of the sausages, onions and mushrooms, it would have done them justice.
But, as far as taste went, the tomatoes turned into a dominant paradox. Though I theoretically believe in making the frying fat from the beginning of a recipe absorb and carry the flavour, and I mixed the tomatoes and other ingredients well, they were watery-tasting tomatoes. I even let the bottom of the onions, garlic, celery, sausage and ground meat burn, thereby having caramelization and the Maillard reaction increase the flavour, and it made no apparent difference. The perfidious tomatoes — again, having little flavour in themselves — dominated everything except their own wateriness.
So my experiments with bolognese sauce — after a lengthy and frustrating history of watery-tasting sauces — are not yet completed.
Saturday, August 01, 2015
Cordoba and Current Affairs
Earlier today, I came across a livestreamed discussion panel from the Teatro Colón in Argentina. Normally, of course, the theatre would play host to classical music concerts, and this evening Daniel Barenboim was discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alongside four others. There were Daniel Goldman, Guillermo Marco and Omar Abboud — religious leaders in Argentina as per Barenboim's Facebook page; and the fourth was Felipe González Márquez, former president of Spain. The moderator was Hugo Sigman, who (says an online encyclopaedia) is the CEO of pharmaceutical and chemical companies in Argentina.
González approached the Israel-Palestinian issue by referring to the caliphate of Córdoba in the 12th century and drawing comparisons to the present. He offered that tolerance is less than perfect if it means arrogantly ignoring the Other and failing to understand him. He talked of the risk that the decline of Córdoba could recur in the present day, but I couldn't understand who would be the Isabella in this new scenario. Historically of course the multiculturalism of Moorish Spain ended in the Reconquista* by a fanatical contingent of Catholics. The allusions to Averroës, Aristotle, Maimonides, etc. went a little beyond my frame of reference.
I was wary that he would start talking about how bleeding-heart liberalism bares us to the risk of underestimating the true fanatical darkness of Muslims. This pessimism is perhaps a severe side-effect of hearing the American political debate too much. Maybe if I understood the finer shadings of his comparison of the past with the present, without the barriers of language, I wouldn't have been so worried.
Next Sigman asked Daniel Barenboim a question, which was if I remember correctly about the key moment as a child or a young man that made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so important to him. He quickly despatched that with a description of himself as an apolitical child largely interested by 1) music and 2) soccer. Then he argued that the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a political conflict, whether over water rights or land or borders or any such cause. Instead it is a failure of human interaction, in which neither party is ready at all to try to understand (even without needing to agree with the thoughts of) the other. Nor do they feel the first curiosity to do so.**
If I understood correctly, he added that ideas like Pope Francis's were needed. I.e. that of asking leaders from both sides to the Vatican City to pray together, as the Pope did when he visited the Middle East recently. The leaders would meet as persons and at least in that sphere practice coexistence (convivencia; but maybe 'conviviality' is too agreeable a translation). Abstract in a way the gesture might be, too. But other ways to address the problem haven't worked beautifully well; and using the spiritual or the human element might be an effective novel approach.
The other three panellists, I'm afraid, I mostly ignored. (I was playing a computer game at the time.)
(Therefore I'm not sure how great a documentary value this blog post will have. But I thought that at least it might contain a few references to worthwhile things.)
*I once read an article in the New Yorker which describes quite well that all was not fine in Andalusian Spain before Felipe and Isabella arrived on the scene, which also explains the gap between the 12th century and the 15th in this narrative. It is a review of a book by Bernard Lewis, against whose post-2001 leanings I had a grudge whose reasons I have repressed. So at any rate I'll offer a warning that maybe the article isn't completely as nice as I remember it. ("A Better Place," by Joan Acocella.(?) February 4, 2008 issue.)
** Daniel Barenboim's ideas, verbatim, are also replicated in this article in the Guardian from 2008: "Bridging the Gap, part two," by Ed Vulliamy.
González approached the Israel-Palestinian issue by referring to the caliphate of Córdoba in the 12th century and drawing comparisons to the present. He offered that tolerance is less than perfect if it means arrogantly ignoring the Other and failing to understand him. He talked of the risk that the decline of Córdoba could recur in the present day, but I couldn't understand who would be the Isabella in this new scenario. Historically of course the multiculturalism of Moorish Spain ended in the Reconquista* by a fanatical contingent of Catholics. The allusions to Averroës, Aristotle, Maimonides, etc. went a little beyond my frame of reference.
I was wary that he would start talking about how bleeding-heart liberalism bares us to the risk of underestimating the true fanatical darkness of Muslims. This pessimism is perhaps a severe side-effect of hearing the American political debate too much. Maybe if I understood the finer shadings of his comparison of the past with the present, without the barriers of language, I wouldn't have been so worried.
Next Sigman asked Daniel Barenboim a question, which was if I remember correctly about the key moment as a child or a young man that made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so important to him. He quickly despatched that with a description of himself as an apolitical child largely interested by 1) music and 2) soccer. Then he argued that the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a political conflict, whether over water rights or land or borders or any such cause. Instead it is a failure of human interaction, in which neither party is ready at all to try to understand (even without needing to agree with the thoughts of) the other. Nor do they feel the first curiosity to do so.**
If I understood correctly, he added that ideas like Pope Francis's were needed. I.e. that of asking leaders from both sides to the Vatican City to pray together, as the Pope did when he visited the Middle East recently. The leaders would meet as persons and at least in that sphere practice coexistence (convivencia; but maybe 'conviviality' is too agreeable a translation). Abstract in a way the gesture might be, too. But other ways to address the problem haven't worked beautifully well; and using the spiritual or the human element might be an effective novel approach.
The other three panellists, I'm afraid, I mostly ignored. (I was playing a computer game at the time.)
(Therefore I'm not sure how great a documentary value this blog post will have. But I thought that at least it might contain a few references to worthwhile things.)
*I once read an article in the New Yorker which describes quite well that all was not fine in Andalusian Spain before Felipe and Isabella arrived on the scene, which also explains the gap between the 12th century and the 15th in this narrative. It is a review of a book by Bernard Lewis, against whose post-2001 leanings I had a grudge whose reasons I have repressed. So at any rate I'll offer a warning that maybe the article isn't completely as nice as I remember it. ("A Better Place," by Joan Acocella.(?) February 4, 2008 issue.)
** Daniel Barenboim's ideas, verbatim, are also replicated in this article in the Guardian from 2008: "Bridging the Gap, part two," by Ed Vulliamy.
Thursday, July 02, 2015
The Thriller of the Pumpkin Stem
"Secret Agent Jones": A fragment from 2007. When I came across it yesterday, I thought it was so endearingly dumb that I might as well share it, in a slightly emended form.
Secret Agent Jones was the consummate man of mystery. He had a smiling round face, a cheery and open manner, and a small stature, but in his pockets was always the cold steel of a revolver, and he did not work in a store or in an office nor yet in any other conventional business but – in the British Secret Service.
He had been with the government agency for decades. Such had his service been, that his employers had granted him the prestigious License to Bill, which permits the bearer to charge MI6 for extravagant costs incurred during his work on behalf of the government – even hotel room service, up to the sum of 100 pounds.
Jones — after being kicked out of Britain's finest institutes of higher learning, one by one, (beginning with Eton) —, entered MI6 to help one of his friends. This friend, it turned out, was in the pay of the Russians. When one day Jones inadvertently shredded the wrong letter, and humbly took a document that left no doubt of his friend's iniquity to a vigilant superior, he became a hero and rapidly rose in the ranks. His friendliness and charm helped him along the way, as did his wise habit of saying as little as possible, which much magnified the appearance of his intellect.
So, one day, he found himself on a yacht with other luminaries. His face was unusually red because his tie (MI6 issue) was much too tight for him, having been prepared in Bond Street according to the measures given in a dusty old folder from the eighties. But he was glossy and neat and dark as the feast required, and he had put on sunglasses to lend him a modern chic. He fit in perfectly to the glittering crowd.
On Hallowe'en, just a month before, a jovial office party had taken place at MI6 headquarters in the heart of London. In the darkness an enormous pumpkin had sidled up to Secret Agent Jones, who was dressed as a bat. The pumpkin pretended to trip on one of Jones's great dark brown wings (a refurbished curtain with black pipe cleaners stuck onto it). Jones courteously lifted the pumpkin back up by the stem. In the stem there was a piece of paper. Jones took it; then the pumpkin whispered into his ears (which were greatly enlarged and tipped with great tufts of black bat fur) to read the paper carefully, then to destroy it by popping it into one of the jack-o-lanterns. The secret agent flapped into the bathroom and read the following:
Secret Agent Jones was the consummate man of mystery. He had a smiling round face, a cheery and open manner, and a small stature, but in his pockets was always the cold steel of a revolver, and he did not work in a store or in an office nor yet in any other conventional business but – in the British Secret Service.
He had been with the government agency for decades. Such had his service been, that his employers had granted him the prestigious License to Bill, which permits the bearer to charge MI6 for extravagant costs incurred during his work on behalf of the government – even hotel room service, up to the sum of 100 pounds.
Jones — after being kicked out of Britain's finest institutes of higher learning, one by one, (beginning with Eton) —, entered MI6 to help one of his friends. This friend, it turned out, was in the pay of the Russians. When one day Jones inadvertently shredded the wrong letter, and humbly took a document that left no doubt of his friend's iniquity to a vigilant superior, he became a hero and rapidly rose in the ranks. His friendliness and charm helped him along the way, as did his wise habit of saying as little as possible, which much magnified the appearance of his intellect.
So, one day, he found himself on a yacht with other luminaries. His face was unusually red because his tie (MI6 issue) was much too tight for him, having been prepared in Bond Street according to the measures given in a dusty old folder from the eighties. But he was glossy and neat and dark as the feast required, and he had put on sunglasses to lend him a modern chic. He fit in perfectly to the glittering crowd.
On Hallowe'en, just a month before, a jovial office party had taken place at MI6 headquarters in the heart of London. In the darkness an enormous pumpkin had sidled up to Secret Agent Jones, who was dressed as a bat. The pumpkin pretended to trip on one of Jones's great dark brown wings (a refurbished curtain with black pipe cleaners stuck onto it). Jones courteously lifted the pumpkin back up by the stem. In the stem there was a piece of paper. Jones took it; then the pumpkin whispered into his ears (which were greatly enlarged and tipped with great tufts of black bat fur) to read the paper carefully, then to destroy it by popping it into one of the jack-o-lanterns. The secret agent flapped into the bathroom and read the following:
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
A Third Round of Grammar
From the First Book in English Grammar by George Payn Quackenbos (1868).
p. 66
THIS is my attempt to "parse" the first sentence, with a format like the one that the First Book in English Grammar's writer has set forth:
*
I, simple personal pronoun, first person, singular number, masculine or feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb were.
If I were, intransitive verb, subjunctive mood, imperfect tense, first person, singular number, and it agrees with the subject I.
You, simple personal pronoun, second person, plural number [in those days], masculine or feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb were.
(— Rule, (from p. 34), "A verb that has no object takes the same case after as before it, when both words refer to the same person or thing.")
I, ditto; the subject of the verb would be.
would be, intransitive verb, potential mood, imperfect tense, first person, singular number, and it agrees with the subject I.
a, indefinite article, and it relates to girl.
girl, common noun, first person, singular number, feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb would be. (Rule above.)
better, common adjective; good, better, best; in the comparative degree, and it relates to girl.
*
Finishing the questions is still a little shaky. After I guess the answers, I leaf around in the textbook frequently to verify them. — It brings me back to the Christmas-time King William's College Quiz motto: the better part of knowledge is knowing where to find it. (If that is indeed the motto, remembered correctly.)
EXERCISE.
Parse all the words:—If I were you, I would be a better girl.—Try [agrees with its subject you understood] to do your duty.—Blessed be the peace-makers.—Love all men, hate none.—To steal is base.—To tell the truth, if you were to fail, I should be glad.—Take care lest thou go astray.—What care I whether thou stay or go?***
THIS is my attempt to "parse" the first sentence, with a format like the one that the First Book in English Grammar's writer has set forth:
*
I, simple personal pronoun, first person, singular number, masculine or feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb were.
If I were, intransitive verb, subjunctive mood, imperfect tense, first person, singular number, and it agrees with the subject I.
You, simple personal pronoun, second person, plural number [in those days], masculine or feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb were.
(— Rule, (from p. 34), "A verb that has no object takes the same case after as before it, when both words refer to the same person or thing.")
I, ditto; the subject of the verb would be.
would be, intransitive verb, potential mood, imperfect tense, first person, singular number, and it agrees with the subject I.
a, indefinite article, and it relates to girl.
girl, common noun, first person, singular number, feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb would be. (Rule above.)
better, common adjective; good, better, best; in the comparative degree, and it relates to girl.
*
Finishing the questions is still a little shaky. After I guess the answers, I leaf around in the textbook frequently to verify them. — It brings me back to the Christmas-time King William's College Quiz motto: the better part of knowledge is knowing where to find it. (If that is indeed the motto, remembered correctly.)
Saturday, May 09, 2015
A Second Morsel of Grammar (and Thoughts)
SECOND PERSON.
| . | Singular. | Plural. |
| Nom. | Thou, | you, ye, |
| Poss. | thy, thine, | your, yours, |
| Obj. | thee; | you, ye. |
I'M FINICKY ABOUT using language properly in professional contexts — newspaper articles and non-self-published works, especially, and there I might even be particular about specifics like using 'data' as the plural form — only the plural form — of 'datum.' ('Professional contexts,' I think, must be stressed, since it would be rude and mean to scrutinize the merest text message of everybody and exclaim "'Tis an illiterate!" at every tiniest flaw, simply since I am personally so fastidious that I even purposely avoid contractions sometimes.)
But it's also grating when high-faluting language, ironically or not, is misused. That's why I think it's important to further the right kind of high-faluting language, and find it helpful to have this table at hand. (Besides, if I write historical tales for amusement, I want to have a scientifically right approach to the language of the time. But I wonder in this case how much the written and vernacular grammar changed from the Middle Ages to the 1860s, when the textbook that I am reading and where I found this grammar table was published. A 15th-century 'thou' might be quite different.)
**
Naturally I make mistakes of ostentatiousness, too; and perhaps there is an unnecessary element of elitism in the claiming of language by the ivory tower, which is also why I think that my education de-emphasized it. (I do still like the idea of thinking of language consciously, in particular contexts.) Thirdly, I think it's often true in my experience that anyone who tries to rectify someone else's orthographical mistakes or grammatical deviations, makes a mistake themselves. Maybe it's a part of Murphy's Law,* or maybe it's instant 'karma.'
Lastly, I think that rules of grammar generally are a half-lost cause, at least for a generation or two. With the retirement of copy-editors and subeditors from the newspaper and publishing industry structures, there may be fewer models of 'proper' language in perpetuity. Although, as I read somewhere, the anarchy of spelling presently can hardly be worse or really different at all from the anarchy that existed in Samuel Johnson's childhood. As I learn about old 'listed buildings' in parts of England, I've read lots of examples of different spellings for the names of towns and people — which might be an archivist's and historian's headache, but tends to be sorted out in the end — and maybe today's similar kind of chaos will be built into a temporary Tower again — if only for reasons of practicality — after all.
*****
Source: First Book in English Grammar, George Payn Quackenbos (1868). At Google Books.
[Revised May 12.]
Edited to add: * (In fact, it is called 'Muphry's Law,' which I've learned in this comment thread.)
Monday, April 27, 2015
A Grammar Tidbit
Lately I've been hoping to learn formal English grammar to help me in my more formal writing. Now I've strayed upon this piece of information, which I'm liable to forget if it isn't written somewhere where I will see it. (I apologize if it's tedious.)
***
Explanation: "Than" isn't only a preposition. It is also a conjunction. If there are two pairs of subject and verb in a sentence, then clearly it must be separated by one, if not by punctuation. For example (as is written in Wiktionary): 'she is taller than I am.'
It is clear that it is treated differently in that function.
As a conjunction, it takes the nominative case. Again, quoting Wiktionary:
"You are a better swimmer than she."
is right because it is an abbreviation of the phrase,
"You are a better swimmer than she is."
As a preposition, it takes the oblique case. Therefore,
"They like you more than her."
is right because it abbreviates
"They like you more than they like her."
*
(Thank you for your indulgence!)
***
Explanation: "Than" isn't only a preposition. It is also a conjunction. If there are two pairs of subject and verb in a sentence, then clearly it must be separated by one, if not by punctuation. For example (as is written in Wiktionary): 'she is taller than I am.'
It is clear that it is treated differently in that function.
As a conjunction, it takes the nominative case. Again, quoting Wiktionary:
"You are a better swimmer than she."
is right because it is an abbreviation of the phrase,
"You are a better swimmer than she is."
As a preposition, it takes the oblique case. Therefore,
"They like you more than her."
is right because it abbreviates
"They like you more than they like her."
*
(Thank you for your indulgence!)
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Sunday Devotions
After a hiatus since last December, I finally wrote out a line from the Greek New Testament again, and added the King James and Martin Luther versions beneath. If I relied on random passages from the Bible for my emotional and ethical formation, however, I would be a spiritually impoverished individual. For the pearl of wisdom written out today was the following:
For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
Monday, February 02, 2015
The Superb Owl (XLIX)
Last night the Super Bowl livestreamed from 0:30 UTC +1. I was fortunately awake anyway, though determined to begin watching at halftime, worried that the game might be frustrating and therefore better watched in moderation. In the end I enjoyed watching it, though I had wanted the Seattle Seahawks to win for no greater reason than that the players were halfway familiar from the last Super Bowl and relatively sympathetic, and that having lived a few kilometres north of Seattle instills a parochial loyalty.
Even if I had paid attention all the time, I am not acquainted with the rules of American football yet, and can't pretend to an informed view on Katy Perry or Lenny Kravitz or Missy Elliot and their performances at halftime, didn't watch any of the advertising except maybe in excerpts afterwards, and missed even the national anthem as sung by Idina Menzel. So there is nothing much worth writing on my part.
STILL, a vignette of fleeting glory —
RUSSELL WILSON (I think), the Seattle Seahawks' quarterback, fires the ball at a teammate — Jermaine Kearse — on the far margin of the Patriots' half. The ball slips into the air from Kearse's fingertips, falls, and skips off his thigh as he himself falls. He tries to trap it with his hands; it glides through the pincers of his arms. It flies off his hand a third time as he twirls — still lying on his back — in a half-circle to trail its trajectory. Finally, he cups it safely in his hands as if it were a holy grail and he a Knight of the Round Table.*
The first nearby Patriots player has fallen even flatter. Another Patriot is trying to rise far away from the Seahawk's head. I think that announcers at the time said that the Patriots were neglecting the ball since they figured that it had already been invalidated. Watching the playbacks I'd say there was little time to think much of anything, and that avoiding a gnarly injury in the melée was rightfully a first consideration. (Which is perhaps why I am not an athlete, or a sports announcer.)
At any rate, the Seahawk sits up again, gets to his feet and gradually runs off the playing field in a tiny tangent. His team can remain in possession of the ball, almost a jump away from the Patriots endzone.
We all know how that ended. But for a shining instant I was really looking forward to another Seahawks touchdown. It would have brought them, as far as I can follow the rules of the game, to a 31-28 lead over the Patriots in pretty much the final minute.
***
Detailed observations from: "Jermaine Kearse's Insane Super Bowl Catch, In Extreme Slow Motion" (Deadspin)
* I was going to write Percival, but I hated Percival after reading his legend (rewritten and abridged) as a child.
N.B.: The 'Superb Owl' anagram is courtesy of Stephen Colbert.
Even if I had paid attention all the time, I am not acquainted with the rules of American football yet, and can't pretend to an informed view on Katy Perry or Lenny Kravitz or Missy Elliot and their performances at halftime, didn't watch any of the advertising except maybe in excerpts afterwards, and missed even the national anthem as sung by Idina Menzel. So there is nothing much worth writing on my part.
STILL, a vignette of fleeting glory —
RUSSELL WILSON (I think), the Seattle Seahawks' quarterback, fires the ball at a teammate — Jermaine Kearse — on the far margin of the Patriots' half. The ball slips into the air from Kearse's fingertips, falls, and skips off his thigh as he himself falls. He tries to trap it with his hands; it glides through the pincers of his arms. It flies off his hand a third time as he twirls — still lying on his back — in a half-circle to trail its trajectory. Finally, he cups it safely in his hands as if it were a holy grail and he a Knight of the Round Table.*
The first nearby Patriots player has fallen even flatter. Another Patriot is trying to rise far away from the Seahawk's head. I think that announcers at the time said that the Patriots were neglecting the ball since they figured that it had already been invalidated. Watching the playbacks I'd say there was little time to think much of anything, and that avoiding a gnarly injury in the melée was rightfully a first consideration. (Which is perhaps why I am not an athlete, or a sports announcer.)
At any rate, the Seahawk sits up again, gets to his feet and gradually runs off the playing field in a tiny tangent. His team can remain in possession of the ball, almost a jump away from the Patriots endzone.
We all know how that ended. But for a shining instant I was really looking forward to another Seahawks touchdown. It would have brought them, as far as I can follow the rules of the game, to a 31-28 lead over the Patriots in pretty much the final minute.
***
Detailed observations from: "Jermaine Kearse's Insane Super Bowl Catch, In Extreme Slow Motion" (Deadspin)
* I was going to write Percival, but I hated Percival after reading his legend (rewritten and abridged) as a child.
N.B.: The 'Superb Owl' anagram is courtesy of Stephen Colbert.
Monday, January 12, 2015
End the Sanctions?
READING in the Monde diplomatique again after a hiatus, I was pleased to find that this magazine's relative mildness since the Ignacio Ramonet era is temporarily banished.
In the last lines of a praise-filled and still tough article on the United States's lifting of the Cuba embargo, for instance —
After quoting the insight that President Obama stated last year — "Moreover, it does not serve America's interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse. Even if that worked -– and it hasn't for 50 years –- we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos."*—
The White House: "Statement by the President on Cuba Policy Changes" (December 17, 2014)
Mr. Halimi writes,
(My rough translation: "The only thing left is for Washington, Berlin, London, and Paris to apply this lesson to Russia. Perhaps without waiting fifty years to do it?")
In the last lines of a praise-filled and still tough article on the United States's lifting of the Cuba embargo, for instance —
After quoting the insight that President Obama stated last year — "Moreover, it does not serve America's interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse. Even if that worked -– and it hasn't for 50 years –- we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos."*—
The White House: "Statement by the President on Cuba Policy Changes" (December 17, 2014)
Mr. Halimi writes,
Il ne reste plus à Washington, Berlin, Londres et Paris qu'à appliquer cette leçon à la Russie. Sans attendre cinquante ans?
(My rough translation: "The only thing left is for Washington, Berlin, London, and Paris to apply this lesson to Russia. Perhaps without waiting fifty years to do it?")
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