Cogitations while Shopping for Christmas

This morning I walked to the KaDeWe department store again, the streets almost kitschily full of Christmas cheer: families with young children no longer cloistered in schools, highly decorated windows in shops that were doing a heavy traffic, winter sunlight falling over everything between the apartment buildings and their shadows, and even Santa Claus on a bicycle.

In KaDeWe the black-suited security guards were solemnly standing like magazine advertisements amongst the expensive jewelry and beyond them there were perfumes, cosmetics, and handbags. Although I tend to buy a scented candle from a French fragrance company once a year, and the saleswomen give me a sample per candle of incredibly expensive perfumes I otherwise wouldn't buy (which, to be honest, I consider as a major perk), this time I am still well supplied from last year.

So, I wormed through the throngs and past individual amateur photographers who were  touchingly forgiving of the doubtful aesthetic of massive sculptures that stood in the lobby; they photographed themselves or others standing in front of the figures. There was a massive orange sculpture of someone I presumed to be a youth actor with a great resemblance to Timothee Chalamet. A tall man entering his fifties stood there, like an army officer forced to pose smilingly next to an enemy soldier who has taken him prisoner, maintaining his dignity, while a woman tried to catch a snap of him. The crowd was so thick and slow-moving that the refrain Getmeoutgetmeoutgetmeout began repeating in my head and my blood pressure shot up.

Then I went up to the men's fashion level. After seeing that the socks were far too small for my brothers' feet, and that the scarves were 80 Euros apiece and not likely to survive the laundry machine (although I have to confess that the amateur knitter in me took notes because I liked the cable-knit patterns), I quickly went up to the women's fashion level.

Being in a department store women's clothing section makes me even more unhappy than a men's clothing section. The fashion labels were fancier than I remembered from the last time I went to KaDeWe. It also felt like all the woolly sweaters were made in Italy, hand-wash only, which made them less practical as gifts for someone who doesn't love fabric care or live on first-name terms with their neighbourhood dry-cleaner. But I liked simpler-designed cardigans and pullovers from a Scandinavian-sounding label that didn't have any of the aggressive, dazzling edge of many others. As a hazard of my job, I recognized a Polo Ralph Lauren Christmas sweater with a bear on it from work.

What cheered me up was the fashion excellence amongst some of the shoppers themselves. There were great and original outfits (sharply cut coats, large and whimsical scarves, rare combinations) there that I've grown to appreciate after seeing mass-manufactured things. The clothing seemed not just expensive, and not flashy, but well-chosen and well-loved. But of course it would have been rude to stare, so I didn't soak in the style as much as I was tempted to. And there were many hoodies, as well, which was fine in the mix although a little monotonous if that's all you get.

Still, I reflected grumpily, as I surveyed the racks, that this clothing that we were all thronging like hungry piranhas to buy was probably made in terrible labour conditions. And I questioned again why I hadn't gone to shop in a small, sustainable, ethical-minded shop.

After wandering around like a sad and lonely little goldfish, I found more or less what I wanted and was just carefully examining it — when a canny saleswoman pounced on me like a hawk and managed to "upsell" me into getting two items instead of one. As I told Ge., I was fairly sure I saw a piece of her soul shrivel and die when I put the merchandise into my grubby synthetic-fibre shopping bag, after politely declining her offer of a neat new KaDeWe paper bag. But, although I respected her professional standards, I felt that I'd done a good turn for the environment. (You're welcome, Greta.)

In the upper floors of KaDeWe, the tea and other china services, white and blue like willow-ware or speckled with flowers or peaceful traditional Japanese, were much more restful to look at because there was no compulsion to buy, choose, or look stylish.

I largely ignored the silverware, crystal, vases, and Christmas decorations, although I like the intricate pale wood candle pyramids from the Erzgebirge that cost a fortune. But I might have bought egg cups had they not been 11+ Euros apiece, which offended my sense of what is called in German the 'Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis (the price-to-performance ratio).

I adore the cooking section: the Le Creuset dishes, for example the little lidded pots, made me squeal happily inside. Although I heavily suspect that not all of Le Creuset's ware is geared toward professional chefs; it capitalizes on the popularity of the brand. Anyway, I also love seeing the shining arms of the ladles and mandolins and garlic presses and whisks and nut crackers and spatulas, even if we have enough at home.

At last I went to the "Fress-étage" or Food Floor. It's been renovated, too. Now, instead of there being just shelves and bins, there are also hanging baskets of Lindt chocolate bars, Niederegger marzipan in myriad forms, Italian cantuccini and amaretti, Reese's peanut butter cups, candy canes, etc. I no longer saw a meat counter nor a fish counter, nor did I see a fruit section or an American food quarter. That said, my tour of the Fress-étage wasn't exhaustive. What I'm pretty sure of is that the newspapers and magazines have moved elsewhere, to another floor, and diminished.

As I perambulated along the staffed food counters that are a popular feature of the Food Floor, KaDeWe employees were handing out cheeses and breads and truffles and cakes to customers from behind the glass guards. People were, as usual, eating the food at tables in intimate groups.

I think the emphasis of the Food Floor is more on luxury than before; the potato chips and the regular noodles and other things that were once there were either no longer there, or no longer prominent.

Anyway, emerging from the shop into the street again was one of the happiest moments of the day. I turned my face toward the sunlight, also hoping that absorbing the vitamin D would help me get rid of the blood iron deficiency that has reared its head again lately. (This time I'm trying a syrup instead of pills, which is more agreeable, but it's no substitute for a balanced diet and also making sure that I have the other nutrients I need as catalysts to make sure the dietary iron actually stays. Which I've partly done, but I'm a little tired of eating whole grain rye bread.) It was a great feeling to have energy again, and bounce up stairs, because I'd been feeling like my legs are like sticks or straws a lot lately, and for one or two days had headaches and nausea.

***

Part II of my shopping trip was more ethical, if only because I visited an independent shop. But I cannot divulge details because they might be revealing to family members!

Part III took me to Dahlem-Dorf, where I popped into Schleichers Buchhandlung to browse the German-language books, admire their English book section in a shelf at the end of an aisle, and skim through every classical music CD.

I also retraced my memories of studying at the university. There was a lovely sunset over the train station's thatched roof, very like a Caspar David Friedrich painting in pink against squiggly trees, that faded gently into a deep royal blue, so the campus offered itself in a flattering aspect again despite the grim winter.

Families — young, old, and middle-aged — were curving around the gardens and the farmyard shop of the Domäne Dahlem farm to reach the Christmas market. Usually the Domäne Dahlem showcases agricultural engineering and parochial history, as far as I'm aware. But for this season it has opened its doors and courtyard to the market.

The market is fancy-pants and tasteful, although I reflected rather grimly that it is likely financed by the exploitation of the proletariat. (Yes, I do become more Marxist-Leninist by the Thanksgiving shopping weekend at the latest.)

Anyway, I was quite amused about the entrance fee. I have heard complaints about the 1 Euro entrance fee to the elegant Gendarmenmarkt Christmas market in Berlin's centre. The general refrain is that we should not be asked to pay to spend money. So I was shocked when I and everyone else in the two short lines meekly paid up the 3 Euro entrance fee in Dahlem.

Inside, sellers were staying as warm as they could in white tents, offering hand-decorated white-and-gilt mugs and jewelry and straw stars that have been bedazzled with sparkling beads. There were three or so stalls with beanie hats and scarves, in a colourful spectrum of warm and cold hues and tints, fuzzy wool; there were jars with amaryllis shoots glamorously rising from the blood-red glass; there were finely decorated cartons in pastel colours.

There was Glühwein (mulled wine, of which some people partook too much), Teutonic sausages, wooden Christmas tree decorations, bottles of unfiltered olive oil that glowed summery green, a veritable artillery of jam jars or pestos or sauces, and so on and so forth.

If you added the wooden stalls and benches and log fires and evergreen twigs of the Kulturbrauerei Christmas market from Prenzlauer Berg to this market, and perhaps tasteful live music, and even more varieties of handmade things, I think it would have been more or less the beau ideal of a Christmas market.

***

After a long while I figured out (as I headed back home from the Dahlem-Dorf train station) why the U-Bahn train signage puzzled me so much: Back in the day, the U3 only went as far as Nollendorfplatz, but now it goes on to Warschauer Straße.

A man was busking with a guitar and singing in the line I switched to later, while in the U3 another man who looked like Tony Robinson from British television (Blackadder or Time Team) was walking around the platform of Dahlem-Dorf selling a street magazine.

I don't know his story, but in general I was reminded that around Christmas in Berlin you tend to see people asking for change in the U-Bahn and S-Bahn and the streets whom you've never seen in the neighbourhood before and who don't seem dirty, smelly, or desolate.

But while some of the people asking for yuletide money have the happy, well-fed glow of unrepentant scammers, which is a blatant contrast to the clear desperation of vulnerable, demon-ridden people whom I see more regularly, I think that a few of these are legitimate.

(For example, I've come to believe that sometimes mothers who are not entirely poor but certainly not rich, dwelling in the 'precariat,' beg for money just so that they can get Christmas presents for their children. If you see a woman who looks like a careworn parent — it makes me angry when I see a mother (of a baby or a young child) who looks thin and gaunt and like the lifeblood has been sucked out of her by parenthood; I think that the other adults around her must be horribly neglecting to help her — with a half-remunerative creative job like the ones in your own city block, whose facial expression screams that this is the most humiliating day of her life, it doesn't take an overly fertile imagination to start putting two and two together to make ... perhaps not four, but at least three point five.)

I was also thinking that even if people are scamming by asking for spare change, selling things in a regular brick-and-mortar store or per advertising can also be a kind of scam. So it would be a double standard to frown on this too one-sidedly.

The Autumn Season and Rimbaud's Season in Earthly Purgatory

It is the cusp of autumn, and while the days have grown markedly shorter, the heat has intensified again and with it the humidity. We expect a campaign of thunder and lightning that will defuse the onslaught, but not tonight, yet. Russet tones are appearing in the maple leaves, golden clumps underneath the fresher foliage of the linden trees — which are also shedding a sap that renders the leaves that cloak their trunks chalky and glossy like the hardened silvery trail that is left underneath the passage of a slimy snail. Fat red and orange rose hips throng in the bushes, and the raspberry and blueberry and blackberry and strawberry bushes, as well as the peach and apricot, are shedding the last of their intensely sugary summer crop in the grocery stores. And the first husks and nuts of Turkish filbert and chestnuts that are planted along the street are falling to the sidewalks and bursting apart.

On Friday I made it out of the apartment early, ambling down the sidewalk through the late summer morning to the next train station. So, for once, I bought the New York Times's international edition from the kiosk down the street. It was thin in comparison to the newspapers I remember from ten years ago. But I enjoyed reading it in the train; it was fresh news, beautifully perfect in terms of its photography and writing, and reassuring. The black-and-white photograph of Lee Krasner standing in her studio bowled me over. Even manoeuvering the huge broadsheet leaves as the train became more crowded made me pleasantly nostalgic. Anyway, I was chipper.

On other days I've been reading Arthur Rimbaud: an essay on him, and extracts from his work. Of course the big deal with him was that he was a gay or bisexual man in 19th-century France, and lived with the famous poet Paul Verlaine, who appears to have been a huge piece of work and also shot Rimbaud in the arm with a bullet, and published breathtakingly original and rich poetry at a very young age before becoming exhausted and spending his twilight years in a desk job in the French colonies of the Middle East.

I stopped reading a volume of Paul Verlaine's poetry because the man sounded so ghastly in his private life. But although Arthur Rimbaud does not appear to have been a cozy figure, like Albert Camus's main character in L'Étranger I feel him to be weirdly sympathetic. Even when he was a jaded man of middle age who wrote what I thought were self-absorbed, jaded and acerbic letters to his friends and relatives. (Not that he didn't have indisputable reasons to complain.)

I don't know why, but I find it cute when French poets of the 19th century, like Rimbaud, think that they're dangerously mad and bad. In my understanding of God and humanity, after the millennia of men have existed, it must be hard to be impressively and uniquely venal at this point. And I don't think that turmoil or profanity are a sin, taking a religious viewpoint again, except perhaps toward one's own happiness. What frightens and depresses me is men's power to perform bad actions toward other men.

In that vein, it is another 19th-century poet whom I've been reading whom I find less endearing and more disturbing. I can follow Constantinos Cavafis's obsessions with the history of Alexandria and Greece and Rome, and his attempts to inhabit a private world outside of his desk job. But I detest reading Cavafis's 'love' poetry. He wrote it as an adult man in what I gather was the midst of an intense Victorian midlife crisis. The objects of the poems are always 'nubile men' (aged 17 to 23) who die young, in what I think is a metaphor for harmful sexual relations, or were just met briefly after a street pick-up. They are never people in their own right, only projections and ghosts of Cavafis's own lost youth, whose only distinguishing character trait is remoteness.

Since I have a romantic ideal of how relationships should be, I try to imagine that Cavafis had a reasonable attitude, based on consensus and mutuality, in his real-life relationships. But with all the evidence piling up on the other side, I keep giving up. It is just creepy and each poem is like a foul-tasting madeleine that reminds me of the few middle-aged men who chatted me up in the street when I was in my twenties here in Berlin. This type of harassment was at times almost the only social interaction I had outside of my family, and it was appalling after a lifetime of being around men and women who were protective of younger people and had rigid ideas of right and wrong, to realize that people could genuinely see other people as tools for self-gratification.

Maybe Rimbaud was not remarkably upright. Maybe he was just mostly the exploited young man in the equation, and that was why he does not come across to me as a creep. Whatever the cause, at any rate, I don't remember any poetic passage where he seemed what I'd call predatory, except when he campaigned to make Paul Verlaine backslide from his return to Catholicism. (I think it's wrong to meddle with people's consciences. But perhaps Rimbaud was mad at what he might have seen as Verlaine's use of formal religion for whitewashing his own drunken offenses against his wife, child, Rimbaud, etc.)

Rimbaud was obsessed with his idea of poetry and reaching his truths, i.e. his understanding of nature and religion, at high cost to himself, rather than with exploiting other people for status and gratification. Although his ethic as an employee during his final years was perhaps not grandly altruistic or devoted; at least, I had the impression from his private letters that he expected a large salary for his brilliant intellectuality and aimed to get it without great expectations of his own job performance. So I'm not sure if he didn't exploit people for his financial upkeep. But at least I find the first part (paying the emotional costs for his artistic vision himself) laudable, although I am a little unhappy that, in pursuit of his truths, he subjected himself to a vagrant life in Paris — also a hazardous place because the Franco-Prussian war was raging in 1870 and 1871 — as a teenager.

I am pleased if I grasped more than two tenths of each of Rimbaud's poems. The vocabulary is beyond my range; and at times he invented new words. Like Van Gogh's art, I had to view each bold brush-stroke in the broader picture to figure out what the subject was. I never grasp what he meant by the 'snowiness' of cobblestones or pavements, for example, and I might lack the experience of hashish and absinthe required to decode other poems.

Also: It was weird but enjoyable reading my grandmother's notes in the margins, in French and (rarely) in German. The jottings did help explain a few things and reading them was like attending a secondhand undergraduate lecture — at least I'm fairly sure she wrote these scribbles in a French course at university.

But I also found in Rimbaud an emotional kinsman to the French revolutionary period. It was a nice surprise because I'm obsessing about the Revolution as much as ever after reading fragments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Man. (After reading the Discourse I feel, immodestly, as if I have a key to the zeitgeist at last.)

Experiments in Iron Pills

Three weeks ago I wasn't feeling well, waking up with cramped muscles in the back, not having much of an appetite, so weak that a fifteen-minute walk was a daunting prospect and I had to go slowly, and sitting at my desk tormented by nausea and headaches. In addition to that, of course, I was under mental pressure from things that were happening at work. The weekend before that I'd been taking long naps during the day. On the Monday afternoon I left work early because I felt too poorly, and the U-Bahn ride home was one of the worst travel experiences I'd had. But then I fell into bed and felt much better after two hours' sleep.

In the end, after thinking intently about what might be wrong, I went with the hypothesis of anemia. It was a more enticing explanation than my first thought: endometriosis. During a lunch break, I bought iron supplement pills from the organic food store. (I happened to see them there; it's not that I think that nutritionally useful iron derived from plants is chemically all that different.)

After I started swallowing an iron pill every morning, and regularly eating whole grain bread and apples at work, there was a marked improvement. By now I feel more or less like my normal bouncing self, even if I want to reintroduce myself to intense physical effort like beach volleyball and running only gradually.

Weather: heat, humidity, etc. were likely also exacerbating symptoms that might otherwise have been far less perceptible. In any case I thought that it's not like I was seriously ill, but that my 'quality of life' and ability to work were temporarily dented.

Yet: I do not like popping pills if they are not prescribed by a professional, and they remind me of illnesses that my grandfather had, or when as a teenager I needed to take antibacterial medicine and pain pills for a tooth infection and then had horrible back cramps. Also, the last two or three days I've felt nauseated after taking these. (Although when I then researched iron intake on the internet I found that, at 14 mg of iron per daily dose, the pills are arranged to be within the 18 mg ideal intake per US government guidelines.)

I do want to finish the package. But after that, on the other hand, I want to begin eating kidney beans and white beans, lentils, spinach and sardines regularly, so that I'm really just absorbing iron from food.

Anyway, I doubt if this is interesting! and in the end, whether the unwellness was caused by psychological factors more than physical factors or not, I'm just glad it's diminished.

Cannoli, a Concerto and Duolingo

Yesterday I took the train to Treptower Park, in the east of Berlin on the banks of the Spree River, and to an old container harbour that is sandwiched in beside the bricks of a railway bridge. I had my hand stamped after paying an entrance fee, held open my bag for a security man who was sitting on a stool, and then under the midday sun went straight for a booth that sold cannoli and tirami su from a table with a glass frame filled with both.

It was an Italian Street Food Fair, thin strips of white and red and green fluttered from a line draped across the entrance, and the booths sold pasta, hamburgers and pulled pork, and wines, amongst other things, as music played in the background. At the pastry booth I was offered a taste-test of a triangle of cannoli pastry with a pale creamy hazelnut filling that was practically foamy with all the air that had been beaten into it, and I bought one at once.

Wooden picnic tables and benches, the colour of a fishing pier on which the sun has beaten for decades were standing in the courtyard beside an angular pool. I sat down at one of the benches and read more of The Hate You Give, which I decided to buy from Dussmann in paper form to keep because I liked the audiobook so much.

After that, it must be confessed, I walked to the office and put in about one and a half hours of work. The office was dark except for lights that had been mistakenly kept on in the hallway, which I then helped save the planet by turning off. One of the managers sent me an email to re-book a meeting; I presumed that he was just working on a Saturday too, but wondered if he could 'see' that I was at the office. Although I think I shall need to work on Saturdays more often in future, I'd prefer to do so without fanfare or extra payment.

*

I love the route near Treptower Park, with its wildflowers (yellow-flowering mulleins and red poppies, green unripe blackberries, and roses which you can smell sometimes, and so on and so forth) and trees and old brick buildings and even the monkey in a soldier's uniform which is one of the few pieces of graffiti that I think it would be pretty criminal to destroy. The newly hatched residential buildings, the cyclists, the flat waters of the Rummelsbucht and its mess of boats and the tent colony, the long curve of the bridge at Ostkreuz, and the fragrance of freshly sawn wood and poured concrete at the glass-façaded colossus they're building with the lonely chatter or odd clumping about of a leftover construction worker. Also the vast blue sky and the sweeping clouds and the threateningly spiry black water tower that used to store water for steam locomotives in the 20th century. And all the fresh air. I save it as a treat for myself after work, sometimes, rather than forging into the urban dys/utopia of the Frankfurter Allee, and the capitalist temples of Mitte, in the other direction.

*

This morning I woke up disgruntled because I'd dreamt that I'd been asked by the manager to come in for a meeting on a Sunday, together with my sister and the Greek colleague. It took a long time to shake off, because the past week has been incredibly stressful at the office and I suspect that the fact that I've had grey hairs again lately is a physical after-effect of it.

So I 'spilled my guts' to Ge., J., and Mama over the breakfast table. They listened with more patience and sympathy than I deserved. It was a breakfast of coffee and bakery goods: sesame seed bun, pumpkin seed bun, croissants, a Schrippe roll, and a long pretzel bun.

Then I worked away at the piano. Last week I finally bought a score for Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. Since then I have been tackling my distaste for the piano part — I like the orchestral parts best, and in any case think that the Violin Concerto is far more musically rewarding. Either that, or I'm just in a bad mood and the innocent piano concerto is its first victim.

Also:

Granados - Danzas Españolas, 1-6, 12

Bach - Concerto in d minor, 1st movement (partly)

Schumann - Piano quintet, first 2 movements, Op. 44

Beethoven - Waldstein Sonata

Anton Karas - Third Man theme

Claude Daquin - The Cuckoo

Brahms - one or two of the Hungarian Dances, 1-10

Rachmaninov, Prelude in c# minor

Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D major (2nd movement in piano transcription)

Mozart, Concerto in G major (KV 453), 2nd movement

*

At noon I went to Tempelhofer Feld per bicycle with Ge. It turns out that sore leg muscles, gauging when to shift from 1st gear to 2nd and vice versa, a cyclist who wanted twice as much space as he needed (as I grumbled to Ge. 'I didn't even infringe on his precious lane!'), the broiling sun on my skin, etc., were even better distractions from work than the mammoth piano program.

Recently I saw a documentary about mountain biking in Iceland and now I want to work toward doing something like that. The problem would be acquiring a mountain bike and the athletic ability. 1 hour on flat terrain is tough; 4 hours on hilly terrain likely impossible at present.

I also practiced languages on Duolingo. But it might be wiser to focus on improving my Spanish and maybe reading something in French again. Because of a faux pas I recently made in Greek to a Greek-speaking colleague, i.e. pronouncing Dimokratia 'Demokratia,' I've also been shamed into wanting to pick it up again and improve greatly. I don't know how my English-/German-as-a-Second-Language-speaking colleagues do it, by which I mean speak other languages fluently without having spoken them as young children.

Spring Flowers and Medieval Roof-Beams

Lately I've had what I think is the flu rather than a cold since last Monday, and on Friday I gave in and stayed home from work. I'm stronger than I was during the flu last year. But I have felt weak and overheated, congested and not able to smell things (including the food that I eat), have coughed at length, and am recovering more slowly than I hoped — things that are all irritating.

It turned out that staying home on Friday was a great idea, because I was more exhausted than I'd realized. I believe I haven't taken a whole day's holiday since September. But mentally accommodating many people under time pressure and failing at the tasks I'm supposed to do, for so long, has led me to the point at times where I can't think or say or explain anything any more. It feels pretty hopeless. That said, the colleagues are very comforting.

Although I'm still forging through the footnotes of Naomi Wolf's feminist Beauty Myth, and read the weekly local magazine Zitty in the train, mainly I'm engaged in reading Ronald W. Clark's biography of Albert Einstein at present.

Zitty had a touching article about city pigeons. It was inspiring especially because a mother pigeon is nesting with two chicks outside the office building where I work. Animal observation is much more action-packed and fascinating than I'd realized as a child...

Weather: Green is scattered everywhere now, as well as blossoms that have partly burst and begun to litter the pavements, the earliest tulips and the crocuses are already overblown but many more flowers are springing from the nooks. It is a relief not to see a metaphorical graveyard to everything, every time I go to work and look out the train windows. Also, the long daylight hours are pleasant.

Today the Mueller Report was released. I guess I should read it. But it worries me to think that perhaps the energy put toward reading it, should be put into learning about the grave social and economic issues that pervade the US nowadays instead. I'd have to doublecheck, but I think the report just confirms that gross impropriety is the Trumps' normal mode of operation; and that no special malice, no special (to borrow a term from the Victorians) base cunning, and no special criminal intent went into their attempts to fish advantageous elections material out of Wikileaks and Russian government circles.

As for the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, it did grieve me to see it burn. What grieved me was that this unusual building — these medieval timbers, craftsmanship and idiosyncratic Gothic experimentation, and potentially the enormous old stained-glass windows — was disappearing from one minute to the next. Also, the risk of the walls collapsing outward and causing even greater damage. I was not shedding tears for the Vatican or for the French government's coffers. And at no point I did think that using the term 'agony' — as a few commentators did — to describe the experience of watching the church burn on live TV, or the experience of French citizens watching it, was not exaggerated, compared to many other human tragedies.

Anyway, that's enough 'Last Week in a Nutshell.' I'm looking forward to the Easter weekend.

Scribbling Poems and Seeing Periwinkles

It's been a while since my last post. I've experienced an urge to crawl into my shell like a snail, partly I no longer have the inspiration of Terre des hommes to help breathe words onto the screen, and partly I suppose I have been in a prosaic mindset so prosaic that, paradoxically, I did not want to write prose about it.

At work, M.'s birthday present of a notebook is handy, and so is the quill pen and extra ink bottle that the British Colleague gave me. Whenever I remember, perhaps once a day, I scribble down a poem about whichever thoughts are passing through my mind: the sky, the kentia palm and the peace lily and other plants on or near me, late hours at work, friendship, etc. I don't worry much about metre or rhyme, but these structures are such an engrained habit that they occasionally appear in the verses.

Reading Konstantinos Kavafis's poems has been a spur. His poems are (as far as I can tell) brief scraps of thought, study and imagination written during breaks from a daily schedule, telling in lucid language of things that are borrowed from the universal experience, or telling anybody something about things and images one broods about in private. I believe, however, that I love my day-job far more than Kavafis liked his. Also, it should be admitted that the comparison does not hold true for many other reasons, e.g. most obviously, the gulf of quality that separates my scribblings from his works.

*

I've been reading more of Aristotle's Politics in the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. Also, the biography of Marie Curie by her younger daughter, in an English-language translation of the original French. (This biography is the successor to The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, i.e. the representative of the scientific realm in my book bag.)

I have many thoughts about these two books that I'll perhaps mention in the books blog.

But I've also finished listening to Toni Morrison's audiobook reading of Beloved and I'm still trying to finish Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth.

Perhaps then I can finally move on to reading Morrison's anthology Mouth Full of Blood (British title), other feminist books, James Baldwin and other authors.

***

The trees mostly look as austere as they did in December. But I've seen white blossoms on a shrub perhaps in the plum family, and crocus leaves in the wild, and tiny green leaves on trees. The florists' shops are bursting with daffodils, anemones, tulips, hyacinths, pansies, etc., and the plants at work have begun to look sprightly and a beautiful living green because of the increased sunshine. In the southeastern tip of Berlin where colleagues and I had a walk on Sunday, there were genuine, purple crocus flowers, wrinkled little chionodoxa in the hedges and hollows of the church grounds, and olive-green leaflets forming on the branch ends of lilac bushes across the cobblestones in front of a private home. Swans were swimming on the lake and one was flapping, very unwieldy-looking, through the breezy air. I think I've seen periwinkles crawling along fences nearer our apartment, too.

The songbirds are chirping everywhere; the wind is bringing warmth, hail, clouds, gaps in the clouds, and rain. And it is invigorating to see that the sky remains bright for ever longer hours until, as Shakespeare put it, "thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west [...]".

We are keeping the coal stove burning, but I hope that its term will soon expire for the year.

*

Last week the company I work for had a Team Event, which was a guided tour of a reconstructed air raid shelter from World War II in northern Berlin, and secondly a trip to the Georgian restaurant that I adored when we visited it the Christmas before last.

The tour led me to reread part of one of my grandmothers' memoirs. I last read it at the age of 16 or so and remembered that she mentions an aerial bombing that levelled her parents' Berlin home in 1942. It's probably the least bad thing that happened during World War II because nobody was hurt or killed, at least.

In general, while reading these memoirs, I was glad that I have not lived at any point in the early 20th century. I detest the rigid social hierarchy that she describes, and have rarely appreciated my own social, educational, professional and fiscal mediocrity more. I am afraid she'd hardly have intended this, so I should probably ask her pardon. But after all, as Tennyson put it,

Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

Saint-Éxupéry: Men and Earth

In the U-Bahn and S-Bahn I have been reading more of Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry's Terre des hommes.

I guess the first part of it depicts him as a young man, attempting his first proper pilot's job as a carrier of airmail from Toulouse to Senegal, in awe of the pilots who flew before him. A second part explains something of the airmail routes in the Andes. Part of this is the story of a pilot, Henri Guillaumet, whose airplane is trapped in the Andes. Despite the deadly frost, the inimical terrain and lacking food, he walks for days and manages to make his way to his family and his fellow pilots, although he had to be hospitalized. A third part is about Mohammed Ben Lhaoussin: a man who, after being captured and then enslaved in the Sahara desert, is freed and flown back to his native Morocco by Saint-Éxupéry and his French compatriots. (I found the depiction of slavery and its emotional/mental effects rather disquieting.)

Perhaps I am misremembering bits — if so, I'm sorry.

Later, Saint-Éxupéry narrates a hairsbreadth brush with death that he faced alongside the mechanic André Prévot in the 1930s. They crash in their plane in the eastern Sahara, vaguely between Libya and the Red Sea. In the crash, the water reservoirs are damaged and the liquid spills into the sand. The two men nearly die of thirst. They walk hundreds of kilometers trying to reach the sea, an oasis, or anything, but along the way fata morganas mislead them much as Saint-Éxupéry was misled by stars that he thought might be lighthouses in an earlier story.

Terre des hommes, and this tale in particular, is written so well that I felt sympathetically thirsty as the tale progressed. The grimness was veiled, too, in elegant prose-poetry and an impressive philosophical — not quite detachment, but at least analysis. But despite the muting elements, the adventure was so gripping that I kept thinking of the tale again during the working day. In general, Terre des hommes is one of the books where I figuratively hop up and down with admiring enthusiasm, although it's silly to think of that when the topic is so grim.

***

Recently I have thought about generating beautiful things from a personal hell or the darkness of the grave. Is it possible to beautify the world by reappropriating elements of bad experiences?°

A bush or a fruit tree or another plant takes food from the rotten plant matter in the worm-eaten soil, or from lifeless-looking bulbs. It works this food into petals that appear, beautifully, to the rest of the world. (Apologies for the time-worn metaphor.) But I don't know if it's this easy for humans.

I thought of this because of the saint's legend of St. Dorothea of Caesarea:

Dorothea of Caesarea suffered during the persecution of Diocletian, 6 February, 311, at Caesarea in Cappadocia. She was brought before the prefect Sapricius, tried, tortured, and sentenced to death. On her way to the place of execution the pagan lawyer Theophilus said to her in mockery: "Bride of Christ, send me some fruits from your bridegroom's garden." Before she was executed, she sent him, by a six-year-old boy, her headdress which was found to be filled with a heavenly fragrance of roses and fruits. Theophilus at once confessed himself a Christian, was put on the rack, and suffered death.
[Wikipedia]

[I am not quite sure whether this fragrance of roses and fruits is a saint's way of saying 'I told you so,' or if Dorothea's gesture was intended to be more high-mindedly generous. Generally, it's likely best if generous deeds don't end in people being 'put on the rack' and 'suffering death.']

[° It turns out that Saint-Éxupéry was writing about a similar line of thought just where I'd left off reading, so these ruminations are even less half-original than I'd imagined...]

*

Returning to Terre des hommes, I think that Saint-Éxupéry must have worked over his experience for years. I have crises over writing about simple grocery shopping trips; it's mind-boggling to think of the work he put into his descriptions of thirst, abandonment, and triumphant return to the comforts of human society.

Spring Cleaning: Quotations Written Down in 2018

I am clearing my desk, a little, and à la Marie Kondo, I am looking to see if my old bank statements 'spark joy.'

In the trains to and from work, I sometimes scribble down quotations. I'll share a few of last year's scribblings below, because they were amongst the papers on my desk.

***

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
p. 12

Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.

*

Andromaque
Racine
p. 39 (Bordas, 1979)
Act. I sc. i
Verses 121-122

Il peut, Seigneur, il peut, dans ce désordre extrême,
Épouser ce qu'il hait et punir ce qu'il aime.

(Rough translation: He may, Sire, he may, in this extreme disorder, espouse that which he hates and punish that which he loves.)

*

Trumpian Fallacy:

Politik
Aristoteles, transl. Franz F. Schwarz
Stuttgart: Reclaim, 1989

p. 219

Doch man ist gewöhnt, die Verfassungen, die sich mehr zur Demokratie neigen, Politien zu nennen, aber die, die mehr zur Oligarchie neigen, Aristokratie, weil den Wohlhabenderen eher Bildung und edle Geburt folgen. Dazu aber scheinen die Wohlhabenden das schon zu besitzen, weswegen die Rechtsbrecher Unrecht tun. Daher bezeichnet man diese als ehrenwerte und anerkannte Leute.

(Rough translation: Yet one is used to call those constitutions, which incline toward democracy, polities; but those, which incline toward oligarchy, aristocracy; since education and noble birth are likelier to follow the wealthy. Moreover the wealthy seem to possess that already, for the sake of which lawbreakers do unjust things. Therefore one defines these as venerable and respected people.)

p. 220

Bei den meisten beinahe scheinen nämlich die Wohlhabenden den Platz der ehrenwerten Leuten einzunehmen.

(Rough translation: Almost for the majority of people, the wealthy seem to occupy the place of the venerable.)

*

p. 456 (Footnotes)

Der hl. Thomas sagt zu Anfang von De ente et essentia: "parvus error in principio magnus est in fine."

(Rough translation: St. Thomas says at the beginning of De ente et essentia: 'a small error in the beginning is large in the end.')

Stars and Bars Before the Weekend

We've had a glimpse of March in February, and the world was positively bathed in sunlight this morning, so that I saw hundreds of details during the morning train ride that I had never seen before. It has been delightfully warm — happily, not so warm that I was fearing that global warming would kill humanity forthwith.

I have made progress in The Structure and Evolution of the Stars. Martin F. Schwarzschild is winding down and concluding his findings, rather than assailing my brain with further mathematical formulae.

In the evening, after work, I went to a 'Späti' — the Berlin answer to North America's 7-11, except that the Berlin shops are independent and seen now as endangered jewels of our neighbourhoods ('Kieze') — with colleagues. We were saying farewell to a departing colleague. I bought, to be honest, two bars of chocolate, while the others were drinking beers; and have to admit I felt tremendously uncool.

Because it is winter and the benches outside the Späti are not capacious, we walked on to a bar after almost everyone had two or three beers.

It has rude sketches hanging as decor which I hadn't noticed before, which a woman colleague pointed out to me this evening. But the bar has been pleasant whenever I've been there: dark-blue couches and stools, tea lights in glass holders and flowers (e.g. a golden daffodil, very Wordsworth) in a glass jug on the tables, red-speckled lighting, and antiquated architectural 'bones' like the peri-19th-century doorways and passages, with a semi-Gothic atmosphere.

I was in an awkward mood: my nose was congested, I was too quiet to be heard often, and I felt selfish because I had my back to half of the colleagues. But the colleagues made kindly and sincere efforts to 'include' me, also at the Späti earlier. And I hope I was able to say goodbye to the colleague in this way, to his satisfaction.

I took leave early, and I walked two train stations further, which took half an hour, before taking the train and reaching home. Especially on the bridge at Ostkreuz station I saw the Orion constellation, more stars, the moon, and trails of airplanes; rectilinear patches of building window lights, red lights along the train tracks, headlamps and taillights of cars, dipped paler beams of street lamps, sparkling Christmas lights, watery reflections of the building lights on Rummelsbucht, and the white flares of bicycle lights heading toward me in a covered construction passage. Not that I noticed all the terrestrial nights today with precision; I had catalogued them yesterday or the day before.

The starry night suggested Terre des hommes to me. It is hard for me to read because of its enigmatic language and its recherché vocabulary. But as I have an airplane mechanic brother it takes on an immediate interest. I'd read an anecdote at the beginning: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and a navigator (?) are lost over the sea at night, during a postal delivery flight in the 1920s or so. They cannot see the coast or the water, which lie in deep fog, and keep steering for stars that they think are Earth lights. The airplane is running out of fuel, drop by drop.

I liked reading about planets in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at eight years of age, but I'd lost that enthusiasm over the years, although I considered taking Astronomy as my science elective course at UBC. This enthusiasm is coming back to me. I think there's something pure and lovely about outer space; and I find its workings more reasonable and less fantastical to read about, than the workings of terrestrial chemistry, physics or biology.

Along the way I also bought organic groceries. At home, later, I made sautéed spinach with onions, cut up beetroot to eat raw, divided up a bar of milk chocolate, and also put black beluga lentils to boil. Needless to say, I am not always this socio-ecologically conscientious or nutritionally punctilious.

After all this, I reached home after 9:30. One of my uncles had invited me to a family meeting nearby. But I felt it was too late to cross the road and see if the relatives, including two of my uncles, were still awake, present, and chatting with each other. Mama had been studying intensively at home, so I couldn't gauge by her presence or absence whether the party was ongoing, and wouldn't have had her morally bracing proximity to mitigate my timidity.

Stars and Pastures in February

Fortunately I'm on the mend from the cold. This evening, because it was a Friday and I was thinking of walk-running tomorrow, I didn't walk to the next train station. Instead, I stepped right into the one near the office and tried to read The Structure and Evolution of the Stars again, still hoping to finish it soon. Right now it is about white dwarf stars, in which the hydrogen has mostly been burned up except for a radioactive shell, which remains (if I've understood correctly) around a helium core in which the warmth is evenly distributed. But I did not focus well; I felt groggy and the work day was repeating itself in my mind.

In the morning, Berlin was bright and sunlit. So I neglected the book and I looked out the glass doors to absorb the landscape outside the S-Bahn. Apparently I am not too grown up to love a real-life Richard Scarry book, with a hundred human machines and habitations and activities, when it appears in front of me.

***

I think that trying to find new hopes and ideas, as we head into spring, is going well. There are verses of Milton's that I like to pair together and that seem to breathe this spirit:

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

from Paradise Lost (quoted in Goodreads)

as well as

And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

from "Lycidas" (quoted in Bartleby)

I wish — just a little bit, because perhaps there are compensations — that in my life I'll reach the point again where winter does not sink so harshly into my mind just because of the weather.

Germs, Sunshine, and Literary Travel to Russia

On Friday I felt quite 'woozy' at work, and even lay down on the sofa in the lounge. Then I had a sore throat for two days over the weekend, and presumed more or less that this would be the end of it. But the past two days I've had barely any voice. I think part of this is due to little sleep — the last time I had this much trouble feeling sleepy was in around 2012, so I've been spending a great deal of time reading and listening to audiobooks. Which, of course, has certain compensations, i.e. feeling rather smug about how much contemporary non-fiction I'm reading. I've also finished listening to The Hate U Give, a young adult book about life in the suburban southern US, and found it tremendous, and today I began listening to On the Come Up by the same author.

Yesterday afternoon I decided that it would not be kind to risk spreading the germs by exposing my colleagues to them for eight hours. So I attended work only during the first half of the day, and in the early afternoon set off in direct sunlight to go for a walk and take the train home two stations further. I wasn't fragile as a result of the cold, I told myself, although it did take about 20 minutes' walking time for me to begin feeling good with the exercise and the fresh air. There was so much to see: construction workers, the river, brick buildings, concrete buildings, cyclists and joggers, trains and trucks, birds and railway maintenance workers, and trees and old houses half-hidden amongst them.

I feel chipper anyway, even if my voice is horrendous whenever I manage to growl out an intelligible word. A host of co-workers and family have brought me hot drinks and cough candies, expressed boatloads of sympathy, deluged me with friendly advice, avoided (whenever they could) asking me anything that would force me to speak, and altogether been terribly kind. As many people are sick lately, I'm surprised they can spare the energy!

In the train, I've begun reading Die Russland-Expedition, the account of Alexander von Humboldt's travels to Russia in the early 19th century. It includes letters by Humboldt that paint almost everything in cheerful colours, while a person who accompanies him contradicts this sanguinity by painting grim scenes of acres of mud, slushy rivers, ice, collapsed boats, and so on and so forth. They haven't even travelled past modern-day Latvia yet.

Ramblings on a January Weekend

It is becoming clear that I do not handle Berlin winters well. Technically I should have gone running again yesterday — my heel feels as fit as a fiddle again after the long rest since the 29th of December — but I suspect that my running clothing is not warm enough and honestly the frigid rainy weather was not inviting.

I've been going on walks and to the weekly ballet class, instead. On the walks I've seen that heroic joggers have been striding along the Frankfurter Allee with snow flying in their faces, wearing regular hoodies and leggings to keep warm — no professional gear. But if I were to emulate them, I'd just end up with more disturbing feelings that a strip along my heel has been overextended, more hobbling, more going down train station stairs step by step holding onto the railing, etc., more worrying dramatically if I would ever dance ballet or run more than a kilometre again, and more biting pains at my ankle even when I have been sitting down and exerting nothing. In other words, I'd just end up replicating the emotional experiences (note: that is an overdramatization) for the first week or so of this month.

It's true that I was asked today how my life is going and I was able to say that it's going happily and to feel that this was not a lie — in the moment it certainly felt right. But, aside from feeling like the gloom of winter is permeating my bones and bringing with it the unhappiness I've learned to dread since I was a teenager, I've also reached a nadir of confidence at work.

I am finding it harder to get out of bed in the mornings; and I no longer find work the most interesting and most productive part of my day. Listening to the three feminist audiobooks that I 'reviewed' for the books blog, for example, was far more engrossing, or even staring out the train at frozen Berlin rivers and 'seeing short stories' in the trains and train stations.

That said, I think I am just going one from one phase to another, and need to give up some of the hopes and aims of the old phase to find new hopes and new aims. — Like spring!

Re. hopes and aims: I've been reading more Structure and Evolution of the Stars, which I actually appear to be finishing quickly now that I've weaned myself cold turkey off fiction on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. I am concentrating on non-fiction because I don't want to tote this textbook and Aristotle's Politics around for another two years. (My intended project of becoming less ignorant about the natural sciences and mathematics should begin to diversify away from this one book, too.) Then I am reading books and listening to audiobooks for the sake of writing more 'book reviews.' But I do want to read up on MySQL and GitHub work, as well, so that I can be far better positioned to help along my team in the kind of professional development that one of the managers would really like us to do.

Unrelated to work, I also want to start supporting more charities, and need to decide how to go about this most wisely. It's purely selfish; feeling useless is the worst feeling.

Then, the piano: Right now I desperately want a new project — playing short pieces as I've been doing is not the right process to help me improve much, and I do still want to 'sink my teeth' into Beethoven's sonatas again, but I should go shopping for new scores again too. I haven't played Tchaikovsky's or Rachmaninov's piano concertos properly, for example; I've been yearning to play these for a decade at least and I've heard them reasonably often. That said, I think that Tchaikovsky is not the composer I play best; it seems too comfortable to play him without intellectual rigour, and I think that I am so short of this rigour that I need to be forced into applying it a bit. I am also a little worried about sitting down at the piano because it requires becoming absorbed in my feelings, at least the way I approach it, and there are feelings one just doesn't want to fall into.

A propos of that, in the Berlin evening news today, a Holocaust survivor replied to a television reporter's question about how she 'felt.' She said, paraphrased, 'I deal with facts; and my feelings aren't necessarily anything that the whole world needs to know about.' Afterward, I realized that it is perhaps what I worry about with this blog — that I describe too many insecurities and worries that people with other mindsets would find self-indulgent. Ignoring for a moment the fact that any parallel of her harsher experiences with my own is impossible, and that she is speaking as a half-public figure of the general public, I think that hers is a worthwhile point of view, and a hundred percent understandable in her circumstances. But I cannot 'connect' with other people and cannot begin to fix things that are bothering me without being open. Also, stoical silence was far easier before I began working at my present job, because then I was absolutely convinced that nobody cared about my feelings, or that if they did care, it would have been a huge burden to them instead of just something that everyone deals with some time or another.

Much of the drama of my life seems to happen after the real interactions — the real annoyances or grievances that everyone speaks of freely. It happens in my brain. So that's why I rarely complain about pleasingly concrete things. I can't complain of what a person did at once, because I don't want to be judgmental or to assign the blame without finding out why he or she did it, why I reacted as I did, and if it was right to react that way. It is less the interaction itself that is painful; it is the thought process afterward, if I don't find a good reason why the other person did something, or if I presume that I was in the wrong somehow. That is one reason why I think that being mean to people is almost unforgivable: it usually drips a poison into the system instead of making a quick and easily healed wound, and one can't guess how much damage it will do.

I also miss Papa because he discouraged, I think, going through life imagining yourself to be the innocent sufferer of the terrible perfidy of everyone else's behaviour (for example, of schoolmates). At some point, one probably needs to accept responsibility for something, too. At the same time, if I told him about a way someone had hurt my feelings or wronged me, he would trust me to be in the right so fully most of the time, that it made me want to be extra-fair to the 'villain,' so that his indignation was not awoken on false pretences.

But I wrote to a colleague about a work-related gripe (that was not about anything he'd done) last week, and his reply helped me to realize again that there are different kinds of openness and honesty, some that I should practice more than others... He replied that venting feelings can be done by pounding the keyboard (for instance!) or by talking to the people involved, instead of mentioning feelings to third parties. That was painful, because it made me worry that I have become passive-aggressive to the point of devious, and that, all questions of principle aside, I'd really annoyed him. Also, it's been a longish while since I've been so worried that I've been doing something genuinely terrible, so I was rusty at the self-examination, and brooded most of yesterday rather exaggerating how perfidious I'd been. But the more I think about it, the more his suggestion makes sense as something to think about whenever I have grievances in future. He has done me an immense favour!

A Very Long Overview of the New Year's Concert

[Apologies for any factual errors or exaggerations]

A few minutes before the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert began broadcasting on television, the doorbell rang, M. came to visit, and I woke up. We ate doughnuts, or Berliner as Mama would insist I call them, and drank rose hip tea as well as coffee, M. had brought his lovely homemade cookies as well, and I had a little of the leftover punch with mandarin oranges and peaches from last night.

This year the Vienna Philharmonic's guest conductor was Christian Thielemann. I associated him slightly with German right-wing nationalism, and Mama associated him heavily with Wagner. At any rate he is not Austrian and indeed regularly conducts the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden. So (after I played a silly game I've often indulged in since we moved to Germany, of sorting people I briefly see on television into CDU, SPD, Linke, FDP, Grüne or CSU politician personality types, with him, and decided on SPD) we began listening with trepidation.

But there was no galloping nationalism, no heavy Wagnerianism or portentous Beethovenianism in the music he produced — and I felt that with him he was not merely there to let the orchestra express themselves, but was purposely steering the concert and music — whereas some of the repetitious Viennese flourishes that are often emphasized in the Strauss family's music fell by the wayside. To be honest, I welcomed this as a temporary change.

Thielemann clearly wanted to try a mildly different approach, and I didn't feel I was hearing a twice-told tale. The music lacked some of its energy and sparkle, as M. also remarked, but it had gemütlichkeit and I thought Thielemann was adept at making the music tell a tale or describe scenes. I didn't need the hovering camera shots of Austrian pastoral scenery that overlaid some of the music in the televised version to be transported somewhere else.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Opera House's opening. So in the intermission, we were transported from the golden rectangular hall of the Wiener Kunstverein hall, with its blingy chandeliers and coffered frescoes, to a stone-walled-and-bronze-roofed birdcage with a grand central staircase, pale sculpture and gilt decorations, other frescoes, and other chandeliers. There was so much opulence that my inner Marxist emerged fully fledged. The Marxist wondered, firstly, where the money for the building came from (banking? exploitation of the peasantry? colonial labour?); and, secondly, whether the original builders could have ordered fewer decorations and redirected more expenditures to food and shelter for the poorer classes.

But the cameras did not only roam in the lobby and amongst the opera-goers. It was nice to peek 'behind the scenes' of the Opera House, even if backstage it was unconvincingly tidy. I think that the traditional aspects of stage work were also played up a little; for example, I don't know how often the crew at the Opera House still use rope made of natural fibers, but they showed one coil of it that happened to have survived, anyway.

Also, when we had left the trolleys and pulleys and washing clotheslines of the towering opera sets briefly behind us, there was an interlude in the room where the ballet troupe was 'practicing' its pairs dancing. Their cute summery garb — the women dancers often wearing what I'd call 'sleeveless crop tops' at work that made me rack my brains trying to figure out how they stayed on — did not look like something dancers would normally practice in. And in the middle of winter the sight of that many bare limbs suggests painful cramps, muscle strains, and breakages, unless the dancers have had a good warm-up; but I'm sure it was filmed earlier in the year.

Anyway, at some point in the intermission, I figured that it might be more interesting to be pushing around backdrops and nailing down canvas onto wooden frames than to be one of the singers on the stage, or to be a musician like the ones trying not to look enervated when the camera crew blocked the exit from the greenroom where they were just practicing.

Chamber music groups taken from the ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic also performed arrangements of opera music by Mozart and Strauss and others, during the intermission. They were scattered inside and outside buildings, yet blessed with the same acoustics whether they were contending with the breeze and traffic noise on a roof overlooking a busy Vienna street, or perched at ease in a serene, lofty hall adorned with white marble sculptures. A quartet of cellos played at the head of the staircase — having watched a lot of Agatha Christie adaptations, I expected one of the four cellists to meet a vertiginous (and not very accidental) death at any moment. A pianist and other musicians were gathered in a room like one of the committee meeting rooms in the British Parliament, surrounded by a choir as if by ranks of courthouse visitors. Sometimes I much preferred the idea of the orchestral originals; but I warmed to the way the Rosenkavalier waltz was adapted for a smaller group of instruments.

Two interludes during the intermission made my hair stand on end.

The first interlude was a 'rehearsal' of an "Uhren-Duett" from Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus. An Anne-Sophie-Mutter-esque soprano sat on a round seat in old-rose plush, dressed in a pale tulle tiered skirt and a black top skin-tight at her bosom. (Her chest is such a significant part of the narrative that I imagine that, in a fairer world, it might have received third billing.) A Roberto-Benigni-esque tenor fiddled around with his fob watch. Then he expressed the most polite annoyance when the soprano filched it and dropped it into her bosom. From a practical standpoint I worried that unless the soprano had an all-encompassing bra, the watch might slip further, wriggling down her skin like an ice cube. Sacrifices must be made for art, however, and either she is an excellent actress or no mishap occurred. Needless to say, my inner gender studies theorist just pretended I didn't see this. Although I felt that there was such an absence of genuine lasciviousness or elementary romantic attraction in the scene* that despite the noxious concept it wasn't as sleazy as it could have been.

The second horror: a soprano and tenor's duetting from the Magic Flute, as Philharmonic musicians with poker faces that would be the despair of Las Vegas stood around them and pretended that all of this was sane. The soprano (Pamina) wore an A-line dress, as plumy and golden as Big Bird from Sesame Street with feathers dribbling off her chest and tufted in her hair, and her demeanour like an irritating version of Zoë Wanamaker. The tenor (Papageno) wore a matching Sesame-Street-yellow suit. In a worse vagary of artistic judgment, both of them wore rope nooses around their necks. Of course the first associations that came to mind ran the gamut from keel-hauling and suicides to lynchings. In fact these ropes were part of a life-saving apparatus that later lifted them into the air above the stage (as the Philharmonic musicians, imperturbable as ever, remained in position); but it takes a battle-hardened soul to find the nooses less than weird.

Of course there were ballet interludes. My inner amateur womyn's studies theorist emerged again: I found the gender politics — the froofy tulle skirts in which the tiny-waisted women were clad as inexorably as if it were the 1950s and Coco Chanel had never designed a pantsuit, and the tendency to treat each man-woman pairing as a romantic pairing — reductive and behind the times. Only a man-man pas de deux, although it had no kissy elements in the least and therefore did not disturb the heteronormative bias, warmed my cold theorist's heart.

The first round of costumes was not bad, I thought. Just a spotted, bustier-style dress paired with affrighting black-speckled white tights underneath unsettled me a bit. But the second round, in which the dancers wore primary colours à la Fisher Price, and the women's tunics ended high above the knees, as if the costumer believed that a glimpse of butt-cheek aesthetically uplifts any balletic effort, was weird. I'd never have thought of dressing ballet dancers in blazers that must restrict their arm movements or of risking their necks by suggesting that they dance on cobblestones, either. Hip-hop dance was woven into the choreography, so that whenever this happened it was neither good hip-hop dancing nor good ballet, but just a middling mixture. The artistic concept of flailing around long limbs and awkwardly seizing the hand and feet of one's partner was a little outré as well. The choreography didn't lack naturalistic moments, like the pas de quatre legs to which we were treated: two dancers sat in niches, hidden from the screen except for their feet and shins, and wiggled their limbs. But at times the choreography felt counterintuitive with regard to how the human body moves, how people gesture when they interact, and to how ballet dancers should use their finely trained muscles to produce something fluid and beautiful.

[Also, there are only so many times that a dancer can rest hands thoughtfully on the balcony of an old Austrian palace, gazing at a view that is never shown (so that we never see how many cars and Edekas there are); can appear in a doorway and stop in amazement at the sight of a fellow ballet corps dancer whom they've known for years; and can rest their hands on a window sill and peer at another colleague beneath them, without running the risk of looking a trifle unoriginal. But this is hardly the choreographer's fault; it is, rather, a hazard of working with the Vienna New Year's Concert format.]

Anyway, although I do dance beginner's ballet, I felt that it has given me no greater insight into the dancing whatsoever, except to make me worry more about dancers injuring themselves. So the previous paragraphs are not at all the result of professional observation.

Returning to the music, there were no 'gimmick' instruments this year, as far as I noticed. That said, the orchestra — not all the musicians; some were tactfully silent — sang 'La-la-la-la' during the 'Egyptian' piece by one of the Strausses. (I could picture Edward Said in the afterlife, whipping out his pen and drafting a new chapter of Orientalism, but it wasn't bad from a musical perspective.) I enjoyed the zither last year, because it required being quiet and attentive and appreciating an instrument that usually only comes into its own full power and glory in the framework of folk music. And, of course, because the music itself was lovely. But I think a year without gimmicks is nice, too.

Lastly, the video footage of castles, ruined or intact, on the banks of the Danube, was a nice accompaniment to the "The Blue Danube." I found the Radetzky March more easy to endure than usual, too.

Prosit Neujahr!


* I googled it, and it looks as if the tenor sings:

Dieser Anstand, so manierlich,
diese Taille fein und zierlich,
und ein Füsschen, das mit Küsschen
glühend man bedecken sollt',
wenn sie's nur erlauben wollt'.

Based on the romantic chemistry, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd sung: 'Excuse me, Madam. I believe you have left your wrap on the staircase, and I almost tripped on it. Please guard your belongings more carefully next time.'