A Winter's Peroration

Snow is falling again, but this time as a dust. The tree branches are still highlighted in white, curves of snow slide along the street lamps, icicles hang from the radiators of cars, and many cars bear a fleecy hood. Along the streets it has been threshed into grey lumps, and on the sidewalks either stomped into an uncomfortable hard carpet or marked sparingly in footprints and lone tire treads, or scraped and mixed with gravel and sand. It has slumped on the apartment roofs and left the topmost tiles half-bare, crowding at the gutters.

I've been here at the bookshop for an hour or so, and so far have had little to do except pull out a letter from the mail slot and record its arrival in my chronicle of events. There is a bag of gummy bears which accompanied a past shipment from the book delivery service which we use, and I have been profiting by that, and I read a small portion of The Age of Napoleon, lit a cone of incense, and began revising the beginning of a blog post about Persuasion. Altogether I have done a lot of draft work for the Lighthouse blog, but after spending much time over The Canterville Ghost yesterday decided that it would be best to write about it when I'm older, because my insights seemed neither very original nor very profound, I wasn't quite reading the story in the spirit in which it was written, and besides the draft post itself didn't correspond to my ideal of a book review. Whether rightly or wrongly I have had the sense in the past months of having to write anything I write ex cathedra, as it were, and not to publish anything which I wouldn't still find reasonably accurate, good and worthwhile in ten years. What this partly means is to write a good deal and follow trains of thought as far as they go before deciding to remove unimportant or imperfect passages and to boil down the rest, or to abandon it entirely as a sacrifice on the altar of literary judgment.

Where writing is concerned the historical tales are dormant. The newest incarnation of the one set in the time of Henry VIII began well, but I felt that I had reached not the 16th century but rather an odd intermediary point, and besides there were still a great many details to research and character traits to figure out. Only the plot could come on its own, since I have blatantly filched the outline from elsewhere and as for the rest have no reason not to think that the story will come of itself as I write, which has been the case in the past and is much more enjoyable through the element of surprise than most things my plodding brain could evolve. Recently I started a scientific book by Marat, in which he describes the origins of the modern understanding of electricity, and though not disposed to like him politically found myself liking the book. Other than that I have done precious little for the French Revolution research. The Age of Napoleon has reached the Age of Napoleon and mostly left behind the Revolution, so its continuing pertinence is slight.

Yesterday evening Ge. and Papa prepared a large dinner of Indonesian noodles, as it is termed in our family, and I helped cut up the leeks for it. My latest method is to remove the outermost layer or two, rinse the leek, chop off the stalk to be sliced, then to remove the outermost leaf or two, rinse it, chop off the stalk, and so on and so forth, and if it falls apart to "reconstitute" it. I was worried that the purple-silvered leaves would be tough, but they melted away. It was delicious and I had two large portions of it. Other than that I made carrot cake twice in the last week of November, once with a cream cheese, butter, and icing sugar frosting which was to my dismay yellow and fluid instead of white and stiff, and once with thick icing concocted of icing sugar, warm water, vanilla extract, and Cointreau. The second icing was fiendishly saccharine but I had no objection.

The next project I am meditating is a dulce de leche coffee: hot coffee, dulce de leche dissolved in it, kahlua, sugared whipping cream, and grated chocolate. I believe that would be called "moreish" in the British jargon. I found it on the website of a famous cooking blogger from, I think, Oklahoma, whose website is recommended on Jezebel quite often and which quite reliably has recipes for things my siblings would actually eat. Then there is a butterscotch eggnog recipe from the New York Times's food section. Besides I have been thinking of cooking a Scottish meal with a cranachan for dessert, and a medieval banquet with beer and things served on our wooden cutting boards (to be rechristened "trenchers"), and a French breakfast with croissants and delicate meats and brie and jams and hot cocoa (er, chocolat frappé) or tea or coffee or a combination thereof. But since the dishes have been piling up into a species of kitchen Mordor and I am still very antsy about washing the dishes in wintertime after the way my hands blew up and sprouted hives three or so winters ago, these may remain daydreams.

This year the Christmas season has been relaxed and low-key. St. Martin arrived quickly in the midst of other occupations, so I didn't even think of working on a lantern until the day had arrived and pretty much gone; the first Advent Sunday came in with some fanfare; and we celebrated St. Nicholas on the day before, which is to say that I slept in while some of the others had breakfast, and showed up in the early evening to find a lot of chocolate on my plate. When Papa was travelling in the U-Bahn a BVG Nicholas was on his rounds and so he ended up with a teddy bear key chain, and at work Mama received a package containing the Ferrero triumvirate of Rocher, Küsschen, and Mon Cheri. I've been thinking that maybe Christmas is more a holiday for children, which to put it baldly makes theological sense because of the "child" in Christ Child; but though in past years I have felt that I could hear the creaking and groaning of the industrial Christmas machine winding into gear around September and then cranking out a deluge of advertising into January, this year I am an insider at least in the book industry and therefore don't find it so artificial or overwhelming. So I'm not particularly grinchy and, though still inclined to be gloomy about selfconscious, intentional (the German word "vorsätzlich" popped into my head; can't think of the right English term for now) dogoodery and benicery, don't devote that much time to thinking about it.

On television in the past week there was another cooking documentary on Arte, one of my favourite genres. This time the protagonist was a French woman who hunts for truffles with her pig — quite a nice, tidy-looking pink pig as pigs go — and makes black truffle omelette, truffled boiled eggs, chicken stuffed with truffles, and rabbit, and serves the latter to a round of friends each in their own way carrying on a local tradition, for instance hunting truffles with hounds (more expensive than pigs, since they must be trained, and prone to distractions, whereas as long as there are no acorns nearby pigs are apparently exemplary in their devotion to the task at hand) and tending the rabbits.

On the piano I have been looking at Schumann's piano concerto again. I liked it and didn't love it at first, and maybe the same holds true now, but the more I work with it the more I like it and the deeper I dig into its substance. It is teaching me to take time with the music, to tie the notes together better in a legato and to tackle specific scales, and so on. Of course there is a value in playing it as slowly as I am, because it leaves me more time to notice things and because it is much easier to solve problems that crop up at a mild speed than at a furious one, though one can play absentmindedly as easily in one mode as in the other, and I think it is good mental exercise to find enough in the music that one isn't frustrated by the length. I think playing a passage quickly and discovering a macrorhythm or macrophrase is more of a trick than a true enrichment of the music, though of course it is often integral to the music, in composers like Liszt and Bach (where the melody is sometimes very well hidden amid the counterpoint, I think) the music is practically devoid of sense without it, and if one wants to play professionally people demand that one observe it.

I revisited Bach's Concerto in d minor recently, too, and enjoyed it much more than before, because though this is an undignified metaphor it feels like a very meat-and-potatoes sort of music, nourishing and strong and warm, though I still find the second movement desolate — and technical difficulties no longer interfere so much with this quality. Revisiting a Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt was not as uplifting, though the tedious clinkery of the Friska and so on went reasonably well for sightreading, and I didn't play through to the end. Then I came across the Satie "Gymnopédie" which I remember playing for an exam, and arrangements of The Nutcracker, and the Christmas songbook which I am playing through a couple of songs at a time. Besides there is a Haydn sonata, and anything else which recommends itself at least for a glance.

On the reading front I began to read romance novels on the internet again. It was much easier to do it bravely and cheekily when the only alternative was to do dutiful things, be bored, and become depressed again, and less easy to do it now. It was a little intimidating when we were forced to pay 500 Euros for bit-torrenting (which has also killed some of my enjoyment of YouTube, because I still fear the day when a long letter of twenty-something pages will come listing all of the films I've watched in violation of copyright and extorting a bullshit — pardon the language, but it is suited to the context — sum for each of them) and when a host of viruses, Trojan horses and rootkits and spy agents, ran riot on the computer where I mostly read them. On Sunday, I think, I copied our files onto a USB stick and then (also with Gi.'s help) reinstalled Windows on that computer, and since then there have been protracted searches for the CD required to install the network driver, the printer, and so on and so forth. The whole has inspired me to learn more about computers and the internet, though so far I have read only a measly handful of pages in a JavaScript textbook from 1997.

I have become so paranoid about the internet that it isn't funny, somewhat justified by a recent problem with Facebook in which my account was purportedly accessed from Munich and I'm not sure whether that is just indirectly our computer or not, and being shut out of my risky Gmail account (which is no longer my risky Gmail account since I used it for Facebook and don't want all those details getting out). I'm sure it takes all kinds to make a world, but I find it increasingly difficult to understand why hackers are willing to waste their time to waste the time of billions of others, in a very invasive way, and to endanger the livelihoods of people who must finish something on their computer for work in a given time, and so on. Even sociopolitical hackery like 4chan's on VISA or whoever in retaliation for barring donations to Wikileaks is in the end a pain in the hindquarters for everyone besides the executives who promulgate such decisions. I find it darnedly tedious to change passwords so often and can't be certain that information recovery, etc., isn't phishing. Besides I hate the laxity with which the sphere of internet privacy is regarded by governments and courts.

Reading the news, listening to music, drawing things, writing things, corresponding with friends and businesses and so on, commenting on things you see and hear or do, are all profoundly private things. Crime, politics, and the intentional offer of goods and services are public things, and even there one has more choices in real life — for example, if one has a shop one can choose its neighbourhood and therefore have a manageable category of customers whose seriousness one can gauge in person, instead of being open to any customer, spurious, honest, or otherwise. Though I admit that here at the bookshop there has been non-virtual spam, too, some of it well-meaning and some of it truly not kosher.

Anyway, this has become a long and fairly indiscriminate ramble despite the ex cathedra principle. But I'll call it stream of consciousness and send it.

*

Words are like leaves, and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

(Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism)