Carrot Cake and Dictionary Extracts

This morning I woke up when the alarm clock went off at around 7:15. I considered it too early, turned it off, and then went back to sleep. A while later I became conscious again and decided to skip my Greek prelanguage course class; then I slept through all the way until 1:50something.

Since then I've opened up the Wikipedia article for Rumi and written down a few more words of Farsi along with their transliteration and German equivalents, for university, and have otherwise been pleasantly not doing much in particular.

Isn't Arabic a fairly lovely script? I imagine that there are many different iterations, like print versus cursive writing in the Latin alphabet, so the kind which I am reading in the Farsi-to-German dictionary may be a more utilitarian specimen. Here is an example in my rudimentary scribbling:

***

J. and Ge. went shopping for Ge.'s birthday and since then I have baked a round tin and a very long rectangular tin of carrot cake for the birthday lad. The recipe may be found here.

It turns out that the ingredients for the frosting were a trifle incomplete; the butter-and-cream-cheese frosting rarely turns out well for me anyway. So I softened a little butter over the stove, mixed it in with a slender tub of cream cheese, and added vanilla sugar and plenty of icing sugar. Then I made a second frosting with icing sugar, a drop or so of lemon extract, the bottle's cap full of brandy, milk and water. Since rosemary has a lemony taste and it was there, I took a dried leaf and crumbled it in. The family came to eat the result and made insulting remarks about ants (well, not really insulting — more funny) at the sight of the nondescript dark bits of rosemary, and then tucked in quite happily.

Besides I've been reading some news and meditating a grand journalistic effort again with a great deal of skepticism

An Excursion on Butterscotch Eggnog

Two cups of whipping cream.
One cup of whiskey.
Half a cup of brandy.
A cup of sugar.
Twelve eggs.
Two cups of milk.
Flavourings.

These things, in Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe (which I already mentioned a year or two ago) make me very happy. The quantity is large enough for my brothers, sister and parents too. (c:

America!: Election Night (Liveblog)

12:36 a.m. Have decided to stay up all night to follow the presidential elections and possibly the death penalty abolition amendment in California as well as other initiatives. I think I will do it a bit impersonally, though not 'journalistically,' because I like reading about the experiences of people who really are Americans instead of the secondary recipients of the joy or the reverse of American politics overseas.

One of my favourite stories so far: A Fox news channel show analyses 'voter intimidation' in Philadelphia. It consists of one member (apparently) of the New Black Panther Party standing at ease before a voting place, and opening the door for an elderly white lady.

Everyone seems to have voted:

From: @MarthaStewart on Twitter.

Those who also voted included Maria Shriver and her daughter, who both happily voted for Obama; Solange Knowles, Whoopi Goldberg, Carmelita Jeter, Chelsea Clinton, RuPaul, etc. Also, Donald Trump; though whether this is an overall loss or gain for democracy it is impossible to tell.

To put it in historical context, the actress Anika Noni Rose reminded people to treasure their voting rights — that her own great-aunt "was the first Black person to cast a vote in her Fla. town. She was cursed and spat upon."

Apparently journalists become caught up in everything, too:

From @campbell_brown on Twitter.

There have been many blunders made, and strange rules or rumoured rules, for instance that one isn't permitted to publish photos of one's voting ballot in twelve states. There are also strange voting initiatives; according to a commenter on Jezebel, Nebraska is voting on an amendment to "declar[e] hunting and fishing a constitutional right." (iammonsterface)

3:21 a.m. To make some use of my education (hopefully without making errors in the English-to-Greek translation), behold η ακμη της δημοκρατίας :
The Huffington Post's rather depressing summary of voter intimidation and other small catastrophes throughout the country.

3:53 a.m. Some schadenfreude may have been felt (by me) now that Wisconsin, the home state of Paul Ryan and host to the collective bargaining rights fiasco under Gov. Scott Walker, has been projected to be for Obama.

3:56 a.m. Out of idle curiosity I have consulted the New York Times's website's former election maps — I was glued to the 2004 map during my first year at UBC so I remember it well — and here is Wisconsin's recent presidential voting record:

2004: 49.76% Kerry / 49.36% Bush
2008: 56.3% Obama / 42.4% McCain

Wikipedia helps with the 2000 and 1996 elections. Based on the figures given I have hastily calculated (warning: not reliable) that in 2000 Bush had 47.69% as opposed to Gore's 47.91%; in 1996 Dole had 38.48% versus Clinton's 48.81%. So it is definitely a Democratic-leaning state.

It also makes me happy that Claire McCaskill has apparently beat Todd Akin for a senator's seat in Missouri. The defeat couldn't have happened to a lovelier soul. In the words of @AlexCarpenter:

"The Rape guy lost" "Which one?" Your party has serious issues if people have to ask "Which one?" #GOP #itstheTwentyFirstCentury

The Greek newspaper I follow on Twitter is keeping up to date, too. It reports, thanks to ABC, a Νίκη Ομπάμα στη Μινεσότα — Minnesota, which Obama did win heavily in 2008 too.

In Colorado, a voter initiative is attempting to legalize weed . . .

4:55 a.m. Michelle Obama writes, reconcilingly: "More than anything, I want to thank you all for everything. I am so grateful to every one of you for your support and your prayers. –mo" (@MichelleObama) She posted the message 16 minutes ago (as of . . . now) and it already has 7,118 'retweets.'

5:17 a.m. Barack Obama has possibly won? (Taking into account votes in California?) He has written:

This happened because of you. Thank you.

At the same time there are early reports that he has conquered in Ohio. And now:

We're all in this together. That's how we campaigned, and that's who we are. Thank you. -bo 

and

Four more years.

5:33 a.m. CNN and other outlets seem to be saying that Obama has won, too . . . !!

5:39 a.m. Defense correspondent for NPR, @larrybarnaby, reports the scene from Romney's headquarters:

Mood funereal at Romney Hq, people hugging, crying.

6:33 a.m. The New York Times online (apparently) calls the election for Obama. Still no concession speech of Romney; the Republicans are, per C-Span feed, watching CNN dourly while the Democrats are dancing, waving flags, holding up four fingers ('four more years!') and listening to music.

6:37 a.m. Worth celebrating: America's first openly gay senator, and a lady, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

6:52 a.m. Chant of "Mitt!" at the Republican headquarters, with whistles. Now "U-S-A." CONCESSION!

6:56 a.m. Mitt Romney is eerily cheerful. "Besides my wife, Ann, Paul is the best choice I've ever made." All righty then. Wives of his sons are apparently all home-tenders while their husbands campaign . . . Now he reconciles with teachers.

"Job creators." Oh, there's the old Romney.

"Governor Romney is conceding the race with a classy speech," writes the NAACP.

7:02 a.m. Loud cheers amongst the Democrats. "Four more years!" is their chant. A video of Edith Childs and the "Fired up? — Ready to go!" chant is played.

7:22 a.m. I'll have to go to university so I can't listen to Obama's speech. But it's been well worth the white night, and I am going to rest contented that the US and the world are safe again for four years! I hope this is not exorbitantly optimistic but rather a prediction of nice things to come — though the absence of new wars and so on is already a very good thing per se.

An Unpleasant Event

This afternoon, when I was sitting in the bookshop, a lady from the Tempelhof district came in and asked whether I knew about the attempted honour killing down the street. I had seen candles and flowers beside the door but didn't know it was about that (and had felt it would be sensationalist and snooping to examine it further). She said that she wanted us, as the neighbours of the woman, to write a flyer condemning the attempted honour killing, which had already been written up on a website which tracks such honour killings in Germany.
Basically what I said was that any murder or attempted murder is already condemned by me and by most other people — that it is condemned generally, condemned under much of Islam, and condemned I thought also in countries like Afghanistan where it is culturally rooted. (I had read up on this issue, admittedly not in depth, for my class presentation on Islamic feminism in the USA. But I also felt a bit antagonistic because I don't like pointing at other countries and cultures and talking about how backward and savage they are, particularly if it is completely undeserved.)

I also said that I didn't see that it was possible for me to do anything, particularly unasked by those most concerned — unless the family asks for support — and that at best I could post a sign from a women's organization (which she named) directing possible future victims to a helpline or other resources in the window. Much of the time I was in the uneasy position of arguing that I am not my sister's keeper; the woman was generally dissatisfied (though reconciled by the end of the conversation, I think) with the responses of me and of other people she'd talked to as well. In hindsight I wished I had asked her what interested her personally in the case so much, because I think it is far better to engage in a cause when one has a specific personal knowledge or connection to it, and I am certain that she must have one.

When I read up on the case, it was that a young Iranian woman had been attacked with a knife by her former boyfriend in her apartment a week ago; the little daughter is under the care of youth services and she herself was operated on so that she survived. It was so biblically brutal that I understand why the label of attempted honour killing was affixed to it, but I think it is brutal entirely because the man was psychotic.

It does feel unsettling to live around the corner from a near-homicide, but after living here for six years I know that most of my neighbours would never even think of doing anything like it and that, God willing, it won't happen again.

Persian Literature, Phanariotes, and Plaints

The Greek classes haven't become much easier, but that perception is partly also because the conversation class took place on Friday.

On Thursday evening there was the Byzantinian folk literature course; we read part of Digenis Akritas (often known as Akritis), a Byzantinian epic which coincidentally enough was written around the time of Beowulf and has apparently since then been reinvented into a national epic. The emir's song which starts the whole thing is the most unmitigated twaddle I have ever read in that line, being tremendously sappy and at the same time gruesome; it seems to have little originality or depth to recommend it. I find it hard to believe that it wasn't invented in the 19th century when it was discovered in Trabizond (and seems since to have been conveniently lost, only to resurface in Italy and in Madrid's Escurial during the 20th century as divergent copies), because it has a generic, ahistorical quality to it which one tends not to find in most folk epics, which are distinctive, weird, and frequently digressive. On the other hand, obviously this opinion shouldn't be taken as my final one since it is not based on a very profound acquaintance with the text. Anyway, the professor mostly spoke in German, and it was only when the classmates were talking in Greek when I didn't understand anything.

Before that the Persian literature survey course took place, as mentioned in the last blog post, and it was mostly an overview of the evolution of the language (Dari; Farsi being the Arabic for Parsi, which in turn derives from the name of a southwestern province of present-day Iran; etc.) and of different verse forms. Just as it is difficult to present Elizabethan verse by stating that sonnets have fourteen lines, grouped together according to the poet's approach, and containing either the Spenserian or other rhyme schemes — without providing any examples —I think it would have been more relatable if snippets of Persian verse had been given. But there is not that much time to do that; besides I copied down two of the titles from the reading list and looked up the first; this led me to read up on al-Mutanabbi, but he is not, I think, Iranian. What did interest me particularly is that the Persians seem to have been using rhyme since before the 9th century AD, whereas if I remember English literature properly it only popped up around the time of Chaucer (so the 14th century) in Britain.

On Friday morning there was the Greek prelanguage course, where we read the first chapter of a book which I remembered from last year, and a classmate from that year and I held a discussion about the difficulties of the other Greek courses. I still tend to be rather sleepy (because the classes usually take place at 8:30) but it is a nice class and it's reassuring that it isn't in Greek.

Then I went to the bookshop, where I wrote the professor an email setting forth the practical impossibility of pursuing the Greek studies this year according to suggestions which the professors and the department have made.

Then I returned for the first year Greek conversation class, which was largely in Greek. A fellow student read out a summary of a text, which she had written, and I didn't understand a thing except "1941" and "Mussolini"; and then the professor talked about Macedonia and also mentioned 1941, and that was basically all I understood in that hour. If there are proper nouns to latch onto, I can figure out what the subject is, but everything else is doubtful. Some words I wrote out and then looked up in the dictionary. Then we were given a satirical poem which she read, and the more experienced classmates understood it and found it funny, and I only knew what was going on when she went through it and translated the unknown words one by one. Then she gave two different homework assignments, one for the experienced (maybe four or five) and another for the inexperienced (another three or four) students. It was confusing and I didn't like being shut out of much of the class; while on the other hand I had to recognize that the professor was making an effort to accommodate us. It's not that I don't remember and didn't learn a great deal last year, it's only that I would have to know three times that vocabulary to get along.

In the evening I had the modern Greek history class, where we were given texts in German and Greek, specifically about the Phanariotes(?) who rather precariously climbed into the elite and served as interpreters and even margraves(?) in the Ottoman Empire, named after the city quarter Phanar in Istanbul. I came in a little late, and the class switched from Greek to German after I entered, but if the other students were irritated by the necessity they didn't show it. Sometimes the professor talked in Greek with the other students, if they asked something in the same language, but he was often comprehensible to me and would switch back eventually anyway; besides I guess it is comforting to feel considered and not feel dumb.

Anyway, it's all been kind of stressful

A Happy End and Halloween

I finished my essay on Monday, in the evening, and since then have been taking it easy because I was quite exhausted. There are certain advantages to finishing these things before the start of the new semester, observed Papa, and I agree.

Yesterday evening we celebrated Halloween well. J. and Ge. dressed up, and I wore my Scottish tartan skirt which is more of a compromise than a costume; and five groups or so came by and were allowed to dip into the enormous bowls of candy which Ge. and J. had bought. (I had bought some too, but the licorice spirals and vitamin fruit gummies, for instance, were consumed last evening.) There was plenty left for us, which rounded out the experience.

Other than that, it's been quite cold and the really dark skies with thick clouds and a charcoal-grey colour at their bases have begun pulling through. The plane trees are still quite green, and so are a couple of the trees, even if they have lost most of their leafery.

Soon I will have a lecture on Persian literature, so this is a very brief blog post. (c: