Yesterday I went to work for the morning of Christmas Eve. It was a quiet group of 8 colleagues that I joined, one of them my sister and two of them from the same team, so that was nice. I stayed 20 minutes late because I went out shopping in between — the grocery stores around the office closed by the time I would have gone home otherwise.
When I arrived home, Mama had begun plucking the parsley for our Christmas Eve dinner: radicchio and green lettuce salad with parsley and a vinaigrette à la Toto, green broad beans with olive oil and aceto balsamic and salt and pepper (I find this irresistible), lamb cutlets flavoured with butter and sage and garlic and broiled in the oven, couscous and Turkish flatbread, a bowl each of yoghurt and tzatziki, and our Wedgwood platter of antipasti: humous, artichoke dip, dolmates, sun-dried tomatoes, a tabbouleh of couscous and red pepper (/tomato?) paste and parsley, and three other dips of red pepper or tomato paste heated by varying intensities of spice. We also had a bottle of Spanish red wine and, on my insistence, Turkish delight.
It was not, in other words, too unlike what we've eaten every Christmas Eve for the past 15 years or so, and as delicious as ever.
***
I am not relaxed and indeed tense this year, because Christmas, New Year's and work are not cleanly separated. But at any rate I went for a run-and-walk in the half-deserted streets an hour or so after yesterday's dinner, after wasting time on the internet and never managing to achieve peak idleness. This week and (theoretically) the past one I have been running 50 seconds and walking 20 seconds, and yesterday I had to run for half an hour.
It was funny how buildings that are often shut were open, and places that are often open were closed. It reminded me of the paradox: make low the places that are high, and high the places that are low, from somewhere in the Bible. (In the German hymn "Mit Ernst, o Menschenkinder" it is written rather harshly as: "Bereitet doch fein tüchtig den Weg dem großen Gast; / macht seine Steige richtig, lasst alles, was er hasst; / macht alle Bahnen recht, die Tal lasst sein erhöhet, / macht niedrig, was hoch stehet, was krumm ist, gleich und schlicht." I don't think that crookedness is intrinsically bad, and do think God shouldn't hate; but the phrase 'macht niedrig, was hoch stehet' was what I was thinking of.)
Light shone from the Baroque church (at the kernel of an old town where the Seven Years' War led to death and destruction, and which is encircled now not by fields, trees or townhouses with Dutch façades, but by peaceful yet not very beautiful post-war apartment buildings); and from the police station in its 19th- or early 20th-century villa.
The post office, charity secondhand shop, clothing retailer, rope and pulley, pharmacy and other stores were dark and forlorn. Except a florist that sold flocks of tulips, despite the specks of snow and the frosty air. Turkish or other families gathered in the handful of cafés, restaurants and kebab stands, run by Muslim or agnostic neighbours, that were not closed for the evening.
The buses roamed alongside the sidewalks and gathered up a few lost souls at the stops; stray couples walked along together; and when I went past the barricades and earth heaps at a construction site, I thought that a mouse scuttled past.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Friday, December 21, 2018
Christmas and Lux Aeterna
It was quiet today (i.e. Friday); the U-Bahn and S-Bahn refreshingly ran as planned, it did not rain (much), and it was not especially cold. At work we went ahead and tried to remain concentrated, as we exchanged the last presents before Christmas and the office was emptier because colleagues had already gone on holiday.
I was so tired at the end of the day that I almost fell asleep, standing in the U-Bahn. Theoretically I was reading more of Aristotle's Politics, i.e. about the easy transition between, or affinity of, an aristocracy and a monarchy. I could admire the hollowness of my own Christmas goodwill, too: when a seller of the street newspaper came by I donated nothing, and when I saw a woman standing at the street corner at the U-Bahn entrance asking for spare change, the same thing happened. Nor have I donated lately to any organizations that provide food, medical assistance, and shelter.
At home I revived again, did a crossword with Mama, helped demolish a gingerbread house, read news, ate a reheated piece of Georgian khatchapuri, chattered about work, and played the piano. ("In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Grieg, the arrangement of "La Vie en rose," and Granados's Spanish Dance No. 5.)
Despite the proximity to Christmas, I feel that there are cards, letters, and even a present or two that I should prepare. Whether or not I will manage to prepare over 50 handmade holiday/New Year's cards with unique motifs by January 6th remains to be seen. I don't know if I have enough material and I certainly need more cardstock.
At least we already have a tree in the Corner Room: small and endearing, if not likely to hold much of our enormous Christmas tree decoration archive.
(In the morning I dreamt about my father — I am thinking of him often. I have a photo of him on my desk in the office, and felt a little worried when, after putting the photo back into a notebook for safekeeping, I felt almost like crying when I'd forgotten and saw a few hours later that it wasn't on the desk as expected. Anyway, almost always in my dreams Papa is quiet and sad or says nothing at all; but in this one he was happy, looked at me with a smile and said, 'I have been here all along.' Then I woke up, comforted by that, my stomach still pleasantly full (to be honest) from visiting a restaurant the day before, warm and snuggly, and fully aware that I needed to get dressed and ready for the work day ahead. So life is still quite good. But lately I've been far more worried about my ability to steer ahead in moral quandaries without him as a guide. Of course Papa often had an unexpected, principled perception of a situation, or a way of reminding one to be true to one's self, that is difficult to replicate. And sometimes I do feel a chilling sense of loneliness that, to be fair, has long pre-dated his death.)
I was so tired at the end of the day that I almost fell asleep, standing in the U-Bahn. Theoretically I was reading more of Aristotle's Politics, i.e. about the easy transition between, or affinity of, an aristocracy and a monarchy. I could admire the hollowness of my own Christmas goodwill, too: when a seller of the street newspaper came by I donated nothing, and when I saw a woman standing at the street corner at the U-Bahn entrance asking for spare change, the same thing happened. Nor have I donated lately to any organizations that provide food, medical assistance, and shelter.
At home I revived again, did a crossword with Mama, helped demolish a gingerbread house, read news, ate a reheated piece of Georgian khatchapuri, chattered about work, and played the piano. ("In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Grieg, the arrangement of "La Vie en rose," and Granados's Spanish Dance No. 5.)
Despite the proximity to Christmas, I feel that there are cards, letters, and even a present or two that I should prepare. Whether or not I will manage to prepare over 50 handmade holiday/New Year's cards with unique motifs by January 6th remains to be seen. I don't know if I have enough material and I certainly need more cardstock.
At least we already have a tree in the Corner Room: small and endearing, if not likely to hold much of our enormous Christmas tree decoration archive.
(In the morning I dreamt about my father — I am thinking of him often. I have a photo of him on my desk in the office, and felt a little worried when, after putting the photo back into a notebook for safekeeping, I felt almost like crying when I'd forgotten and saw a few hours later that it wasn't on the desk as expected. Anyway, almost always in my dreams Papa is quiet and sad or says nothing at all; but in this one he was happy, looked at me with a smile and said, 'I have been here all along.' Then I woke up, comforted by that, my stomach still pleasantly full (to be honest) from visiting a restaurant the day before, warm and snuggly, and fully aware that I needed to get dressed and ready for the work day ahead. So life is still quite good. But lately I've been far more worried about my ability to steer ahead in moral quandaries without him as a guide. Of course Papa often had an unexpected, principled perception of a situation, or a way of reminding one to be true to one's self, that is difficult to replicate. And sometimes I do feel a chilling sense of loneliness that, to be fair, has long pre-dated his death.)
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
An Early Christmas Dinner on the Canal
Since Black Friday came and went, my team has had so much time to do our regular work that it's challenging to adjust to the comfort and lack of pressure. In fact, I think I'm falling back to an old tendency to brood about things once my mind has little other food for thought to chew on.
The cold temperatures of the early Berlin winter have given way to cool rainy days. It's a relief to have some rain because November seemed dry; even before then I've only felt uncomfortable twice or so walking outside without proper rain-gear. The relative drought is likely not good for all the plant and animal life in Berlin and in the countryside surrounding it.
Today my colleagues and I went to our annual Christmas dinner. This time it was held on a freshwater barge on the Spree River, and it started in a dock at the Treptower Park in former Eastern Berlin. It was dark when we arrived.
City lights were glimmering across the water and (if I remember correctly) sparkling in the trees where fairy lights were hung, and stark brown tree branches scoured the sky Wuthering-Heights-esquely against the mottled backdrop of the general light pollution. Large white clouds with apertures and fissures between rushed across the sky. Aside from the docks; a stationary restaurant boat with turquoise keel, beer label flag, mainmast that appeared to contain a ventilation system, two booms that folded down from the masts, and a Christmas tree in the rigging at the bow; and our own boat; there was a tall building that looked vaguely 19th-century-esque remaining from that industrial era of Berlin. Black waves with glassy bright reflections swapped at the concrete shore, carrying schools of fallen tree leaves on their bosom.
We entered the boat down a firm gangway, to find a red-carpeted space with glass windows, pinky-beige curtains, cylindrical lights between the windows, plants and other bric-a-brac, and a round mirror with a white life ring around it at the wall. A white door that swung both ways led to the washrooms and to the deck. Chairs were draped in pale satin-like cloth, and the tables were decked with red napkins, two sets of cutlery (a fork and knife to either side, and a tinier fork and spoon for dessert at the top) per person, and an evergreen branch decoration with a red reindeer tea light as well as pinecones in the centre.
We were handed a bread basket per table, which included a bowl with a dip that looked like a mushy, pale olive green baba ghanoush (I didn't try it). Also, we ordered our drinks: Merlot, white wine, hot chocolate spiked with Baileys, sparkling water, etc. A bottle of Moet et Chandon would have cost 120 €, and none of us were cheeky enough to order it.
I went out on deck, and saw more of the Mitte district especially, and was rather unsettled by the unequal distribution of money for chic buildings, etc. through the city. There was the funnel nose of the Bode Museum, there the tower corners of the Reichsgebäude where the EU and German flags fluttered from the stonework as a maelstrom of little humans spiralled down the walkway in the glass dome, there the Fernsehturm. The Holzmarkt, the Jannowitzbrücke; Zalando building, Ver.di workers' union building and Kanzleramt: dramatic stages that were all lined along the riverbanks.
It was breezy, rain droplets sprinkled, and I wasn't warmly dressed. Yet I was happy to be out on water again — whether it's insalubrious freshwater in a European metropolis or the sea off Canada appears to make little difference. And it was nice to talk to the colleagues.
(And, to finish describing the menu: we ate either a meat 'entrée' of goose drumstick with dumplings and a slice of orange and green cabbage; or a vegetarian course of mixed rotini and tagliatelle with sundried tomatoes, arugula, eggplant, olives, and a balsamic vinaigrette reduction. For dessert, we had a scoop of vanilla ice cream on plum compôte, a half-moon of persimmon for the garnish, and whipped cream.)
It was after 8 p.m. when we had returned to the dock. We disembarked in (I think) a happy frame of mind, split into different groups heading back to the S-Bahn stations Plänterwald or Treptow according to our destinations, and perhaps more conviviality was to be had in a group I didn't join.
The cold temperatures of the early Berlin winter have given way to cool rainy days. It's a relief to have some rain because November seemed dry; even before then I've only felt uncomfortable twice or so walking outside without proper rain-gear. The relative drought is likely not good for all the plant and animal life in Berlin and in the countryside surrounding it.
Today my colleagues and I went to our annual Christmas dinner. This time it was held on a freshwater barge on the Spree River, and it started in a dock at the Treptower Park in former Eastern Berlin. It was dark when we arrived.
City lights were glimmering across the water and (if I remember correctly) sparkling in the trees where fairy lights were hung, and stark brown tree branches scoured the sky Wuthering-Heights-esquely against the mottled backdrop of the general light pollution. Large white clouds with apertures and fissures between rushed across the sky. Aside from the docks; a stationary restaurant boat with turquoise keel, beer label flag, mainmast that appeared to contain a ventilation system, two booms that folded down from the masts, and a Christmas tree in the rigging at the bow; and our own boat; there was a tall building that looked vaguely 19th-century-esque remaining from that industrial era of Berlin. Black waves with glassy bright reflections swapped at the concrete shore, carrying schools of fallen tree leaves on their bosom.
We entered the boat down a firm gangway, to find a red-carpeted space with glass windows, pinky-beige curtains, cylindrical lights between the windows, plants and other bric-a-brac, and a round mirror with a white life ring around it at the wall. A white door that swung both ways led to the washrooms and to the deck. Chairs were draped in pale satin-like cloth, and the tables were decked with red napkins, two sets of cutlery (a fork and knife to either side, and a tinier fork and spoon for dessert at the top) per person, and an evergreen branch decoration with a red reindeer tea light as well as pinecones in the centre.
We were handed a bread basket per table, which included a bowl with a dip that looked like a mushy, pale olive green baba ghanoush (I didn't try it). Also, we ordered our drinks: Merlot, white wine, hot chocolate spiked with Baileys, sparkling water, etc. A bottle of Moet et Chandon would have cost 120 €, and none of us were cheeky enough to order it.
I went out on deck, and saw more of the Mitte district especially, and was rather unsettled by the unequal distribution of money for chic buildings, etc. through the city. There was the funnel nose of the Bode Museum, there the tower corners of the Reichsgebäude where the EU and German flags fluttered from the stonework as a maelstrom of little humans spiralled down the walkway in the glass dome, there the Fernsehturm. The Holzmarkt, the Jannowitzbrücke; Zalando building, Ver.di workers' union building and Kanzleramt: dramatic stages that were all lined along the riverbanks.
It was breezy, rain droplets sprinkled, and I wasn't warmly dressed. Yet I was happy to be out on water again — whether it's insalubrious freshwater in a European metropolis or the sea off Canada appears to make little difference. And it was nice to talk to the colleagues.
(And, to finish describing the menu: we ate either a meat 'entrée' of goose drumstick with dumplings and a slice of orange and green cabbage; or a vegetarian course of mixed rotini and tagliatelle with sundried tomatoes, arugula, eggplant, olives, and a balsamic vinaigrette reduction. For dessert, we had a scoop of vanilla ice cream on plum compôte, a half-moon of persimmon for the garnish, and whipped cream.)
It was after 8 p.m. when we had returned to the dock. We disembarked in (I think) a happy frame of mind, split into different groups heading back to the S-Bahn stations Plänterwald or Treptow according to our destinations, and perhaps more conviviality was to be had in a group I didn't join.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Misery in November
Today was a strenuous day, where I did intense work and also had to analyze how and where things went wrong, answered questions as usual (which was mostly enjoyable), and compiled reports on our progress on various tasks until 6:30 or so, which wasn't terribly late. I ate lunch and talked with the colleagues in my team, and even read a little news during the lunch hour; and because I ate only for 20 minutes also drafted an appeal letter related to an Amnesty International 'urgent action.' The hard, environmentally unfriendly and humanly exploitative work of preparing for the frenzy of Black Friday has made me so uneasy that I feel the need to do something in between just to rebalance my senses of proportion and of worthy aims, and to connect to a real and humane need.
In the evening I realized that a task I thought was done was not done. After standing at the window in the kitchen to gather myself and think how to tackle the task independently, I decided that I was rational and strong enough to ask for advice from the older-brother-ish colleague. In the end, the discussion will be postponed to tomorrow.
That said, I felt guilty in retrospect because of a remark I'd made earlier today to 'my' team: we were speaking of the weather, and I said (more or less) that doing work for the task-that-was-not-done-after-all client more or less replaces the necessity of seeking warmer climates amid these winter days, because being in hell is warm enough. It was perhaps more truthful than professional. And perhaps I was tempting fate.
At 6:55 p.m. I went outside in the dark to do the 30 minutes of walking and running for this week. Now I am at intervals of 30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of walking. It was snowing, and at first my spirits lifted, but then I realized that the snow was melting in my hair and that I was cold; also, I had relatively low energy. Like drinking alcohol liberally, I suppose, endurance sports (if one can dignify my beginner's training by that name) are more terrible and painful if one's spirits are already drained or made aggressive by negative thoughts. Toward the end my run, the knee that I bruised falling on the sidewalk on Mehringdamm hurt, but so little and it could have been so much worse that I pitied myself just half-heartedly. There were many other joggers out, so I wasn't alone.
It has been bad for my morale to think that no matter how hard I work before Black Friday, what I have to anticipate after that is a forensic inspection of my team. It is suspected of being inefficient by the management. The inspection is being postponed until afterward because everyone is so busy. It feels like one harrowing ordeal will be followed by another. While I always feel insecure about whether I'm doing things precisely and enough, in this case I'm not certain the inspection is deserved or if it's based on misunderstandings. I don't like to defend myself, especially because I don't want to force people to take my word when the facts speak for themselves, and because I don't want to justify myself if it might mean throwing doubt on other colleagues' descriptions of the situation; and I don't want to waste brain power on that drama when I could be making sure that the workload is done instead.
Anyway, as I told myself during the run, there are things in life that you can comfortably know that you can do; you just need to realize that at the same time you shouldn't expect them to be easy and be surprised if they aren't.
Before I left, the only other two colleagues in the office left together and wished me goodbye, but I had the distinct impression they were displeased about something, which is awkward because they were the managers. Then I went out into the cold, too. The U-Bahn had a Betriebsstörung, I left the warmth to walk to the nearby S-Bahn station, the S-Bahn came promptly, I missed the connecting train by 20 seconds or fewer, and therefore walked the last ten to fifteen minutes home rather than wait 9 minutes in the frosty temperatures. It was not my day. I have to admit that I am also cranky and angry in general. But I did make progress in the Sartre.
Also, Ge. had cooked cream of wheat pudding for dinner, Mama and I watched (in my case) excerpts of Miss Fisher's Mysteries, and an ex-colleague wrote me a beautiful email that I just discovered this evening. And I'm really glad to be at home, but trembling in my boots at the thought of tomorrow. I also need to make sure that everyone in the team has plenty to do, because today there was speak of being at a loss, and I definitely get in trouble if people are at a loss for things to do even if we are supposedly buried under work. The problem is just that there are tasks that are so intricate that sometimes I don't even know if it's 'my' team that should be working on fixing them.
In the evening I realized that a task I thought was done was not done. After standing at the window in the kitchen to gather myself and think how to tackle the task independently, I decided that I was rational and strong enough to ask for advice from the older-brother-ish colleague. In the end, the discussion will be postponed to tomorrow.
That said, I felt guilty in retrospect because of a remark I'd made earlier today to 'my' team: we were speaking of the weather, and I said (more or less) that doing work for the task-that-was-not-done-after-all client more or less replaces the necessity of seeking warmer climates amid these winter days, because being in hell is warm enough. It was perhaps more truthful than professional. And perhaps I was tempting fate.
At 6:55 p.m. I went outside in the dark to do the 30 minutes of walking and running for this week. Now I am at intervals of 30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of walking. It was snowing, and at first my spirits lifted, but then I realized that the snow was melting in my hair and that I was cold; also, I had relatively low energy. Like drinking alcohol liberally, I suppose, endurance sports (if one can dignify my beginner's training by that name) are more terrible and painful if one's spirits are already drained or made aggressive by negative thoughts. Toward the end my run, the knee that I bruised falling on the sidewalk on Mehringdamm hurt, but so little and it could have been so much worse that I pitied myself just half-heartedly. There were many other joggers out, so I wasn't alone.
It has been bad for my morale to think that no matter how hard I work before Black Friday, what I have to anticipate after that is a forensic inspection of my team. It is suspected of being inefficient by the management. The inspection is being postponed until afterward because everyone is so busy. It feels like one harrowing ordeal will be followed by another. While I always feel insecure about whether I'm doing things precisely and enough, in this case I'm not certain the inspection is deserved or if it's based on misunderstandings. I don't like to defend myself, especially because I don't want to force people to take my word when the facts speak for themselves, and because I don't want to justify myself if it might mean throwing doubt on other colleagues' descriptions of the situation; and I don't want to waste brain power on that drama when I could be making sure that the workload is done instead.
Anyway, as I told myself during the run, there are things in life that you can comfortably know that you can do; you just need to realize that at the same time you shouldn't expect them to be easy and be surprised if they aren't.
Before I left, the only other two colleagues in the office left together and wished me goodbye, but I had the distinct impression they were displeased about something, which is awkward because they were the managers. Then I went out into the cold, too. The U-Bahn had a Betriebsstörung, I left the warmth to walk to the nearby S-Bahn station, the S-Bahn came promptly, I missed the connecting train by 20 seconds or fewer, and therefore walked the last ten to fifteen minutes home rather than wait 9 minutes in the frosty temperatures. It was not my day. I have to admit that I am also cranky and angry in general. But I did make progress in the Sartre.
Also, Ge. had cooked cream of wheat pudding for dinner, Mama and I watched (in my case) excerpts of Miss Fisher's Mysteries, and an ex-colleague wrote me a beautiful email that I just discovered this evening. And I'm really glad to be at home, but trembling in my boots at the thought of tomorrow. I also need to make sure that everyone in the team has plenty to do, because today there was speak of being at a loss, and I definitely get in trouble if people are at a loss for things to do even if we are supposedly buried under work. The problem is just that there are tasks that are so intricate that sometimes I don't even know if it's 'my' team that should be working on fixing them.
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Sartre and Communist Party Plots in Fiction
After finishing Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne extracts from the Larousse volume, I've begun reading Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd never heard of it before.
The premise of Sartre's play is intensely interesting: The client king of Illyria (~Yugoslavia) bypasses his weakening Nazi hegemons to reach across political lines to the establishment liberal democrats and even to the communists. The communists partly wish to ally themselves against the Nazis with the other political parties, as the king requests, but other communists resort to assassination to prevent the alliance from forming.
A young communist party member who has grown tired of his prosaic work as a writer for the party's newsletter, and wants to emulate the violent activists amongst his comrades, becomes the instrument of this faction. He is the protagonist of the play.
While the plot, as described, has far-reaching historical and political implications, the scene starts small in the utilitarian lodgings of Olga, a devoted female communist party member, with various conversations about ways and means. As Sartre was a member of the French Resistance movement, I wonder how much the conversations and plottings of his fictional characters reflect the methods and discussions of his experience.
Sartre published this play in 1948, I think, about imaginary events in the previous five years. His exploration of contemporaneity is not made vague or distorted through excess subjectivity, and his matter-of-fact lack of reinterpretation or emotional overlay in his depiction of wartime political agitation is something that I think most filmmakers, etc., began to lose in the 1950s as one began to kitschify, retouch, or moralize more.
And the 'tableaux' are scripted with perfect tension — Agatha Christie might feel envy. The words (each, at times, seems to let fall a new insight or a new turn of the plot) have even greater weight because of his basically worded yet impeccably aimed French. The film is ripe for a film adaptation; I could imagine one in the vein of Witness for the Prosecution. I think Sartre's conscious exploitation of suspense verges on the sensationalistic, but the play is not a chore to read.
I haven't greatly enjoyed Olga's character. She is superficially tough. But whether Olga is an 'idealized' figure who sets forth Sartre's wishes or whether she represents an observation of gender roles in that milieu and at that time, either way this idea that a woman is a handy party-political tool is depressing.
The main gripe I have is that 'disappearing into the 1940s' in imagination before and after work, is a weird feeling and not a nice thing. To be both preachy and prim, the murder and mayhem should not be enjoyable because the playwright repeatedly raises and gratifies curiosity about these intrigues that take place as part of an especially gruesome moment in history. In Sartre's time, people would have lived this world firsthand, but through the buffers of the intervening decades I think it is too easy for the reader to feel detached, as if these things didn't happen to people like you and me. Sartre's fictional Illyrian communists also make use of death squads, however, and in the year of Jamal Khashoggi's murder this is as immediately nauseating and grim as ever.
Lastly, I suppose it is a commentary on the twists and turns of history that the only other time I've read a play or any work set in Illyria, it was a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night?). And, riddled with poverty and the Armada and other strife though Shakespeare's era was, his Illyria was infinitely more cheerful and innocent.
The premise of Sartre's play is intensely interesting: The client king of Illyria (~Yugoslavia) bypasses his weakening Nazi hegemons to reach across political lines to the establishment liberal democrats and even to the communists. The communists partly wish to ally themselves against the Nazis with the other political parties, as the king requests, but other communists resort to assassination to prevent the alliance from forming.
A young communist party member who has grown tired of his prosaic work as a writer for the party's newsletter, and wants to emulate the violent activists amongst his comrades, becomes the instrument of this faction. He is the protagonist of the play.
While the plot, as described, has far-reaching historical and political implications, the scene starts small in the utilitarian lodgings of Olga, a devoted female communist party member, with various conversations about ways and means. As Sartre was a member of the French Resistance movement, I wonder how much the conversations and plottings of his fictional characters reflect the methods and discussions of his experience.
Sartre published this play in 1948, I think, about imaginary events in the previous five years. His exploration of contemporaneity is not made vague or distorted through excess subjectivity, and his matter-of-fact lack of reinterpretation or emotional overlay in his depiction of wartime political agitation is something that I think most filmmakers, etc., began to lose in the 1950s as one began to kitschify, retouch, or moralize more.
And the 'tableaux' are scripted with perfect tension — Agatha Christie might feel envy. The words (each, at times, seems to let fall a new insight or a new turn of the plot) have even greater weight because of his basically worded yet impeccably aimed French. The film is ripe for a film adaptation; I could imagine one in the vein of Witness for the Prosecution. I think Sartre's conscious exploitation of suspense verges on the sensationalistic, but the play is not a chore to read.
I haven't greatly enjoyed Olga's character. She is superficially tough. But whether Olga is an 'idealized' figure who sets forth Sartre's wishes or whether she represents an observation of gender roles in that milieu and at that time, either way this idea that a woman is a handy party-political tool is depressing.
The main gripe I have is that 'disappearing into the 1940s' in imagination before and after work, is a weird feeling and not a nice thing. To be both preachy and prim, the murder and mayhem should not be enjoyable because the playwright repeatedly raises and gratifies curiosity about these intrigues that take place as part of an especially gruesome moment in history. In Sartre's time, people would have lived this world firsthand, but through the buffers of the intervening decades I think it is too easy for the reader to feel detached, as if these things didn't happen to people like you and me. Sartre's fictional Illyrian communists also make use of death squads, however, and in the year of Jamal Khashoggi's murder this is as immediately nauseating and grim as ever.
Lastly, I suppose it is a commentary on the twists and turns of history that the only other time I've read a play or any work set in Illyria, it was a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night?). And, riddled with poverty and the Armada and other strife though Shakespeare's era was, his Illyria was infinitely more cheerful and innocent.
Monday, November 05, 2018
Pumpkin Cookies and a Pas de Chat
This morning I went to work as usual, and for lunch we had an Asian-style dish of pudgy udon noodles with chicken or beef (I can't remember which), perhaps ginger, and certainly miso, with a few curls of spring onion on top. That said, I don't think I know what miso even tastes like. There was also a salad with spinach and beet greens in it, and I really like the colour and the earthy flavour of beet greens. They also remind me of the time (a really long time ago) when one of my grandfathers grew beets in the garden. They looked like overgrown radishes and they had a real, fresh, lively, comforting flavour, and you could also taste a hint of the dust that they were caked in before they were washed and cooked.
Anyway, in the evening I went to the ballet class. Thanks in part to the rush hour train traffic, I arrived over 15 minutes late. The preliminary floor exercises had ended, and so I began with the barré. We practiced tendus, pas de cheval, ronds de jambe, and glissades; then went over to the floor exercises that were less about turnout directly and rather for strengthening the abdominal muscles and the muscles along the insides of the legs; and finally performed the usual sets of four pliés followed by four jumps. Today was one of those rare but appalling days where I jumped like a potato sack, and did not suggest springiness and grace in the least. We also ended the class by trouping across the floor diagonally, two at a time, in a sort of Noah's Ark of pas de chat, and it would require time and consideration to determine where I disgraced myself less.
Either way, I'm afraid that I consider that my inflexibility and un-ballerina-like stature give me a carte blanche. I try not to bring my teacher to tears with how horrible everything looks, and to achieve technically what I am capable of doing. But in return, I happily suppose that nobody demands that I become a new Margot Fonteyn.
Then I went grocery-shopping, almost weepy with gratitude at having the leisure to do this given the schedule of the past weeks. And I bought frozen berries with quark; eggs and bacon and other ingredients for a quiche lorraine; as well as dark chocolate to chop up and add to vegan pumpkin-and-oat cookies that I am thinking of trying to bake for a colleague.
In the U-Bahn I read more of the Politics and De la littérature. Altogether I felt that this day was an islet of peace and sanity in the ocean of Black Friday.
Then, of course, tomorrow (or the day after, due to the time zone differences and the length of time it takes to count ballots) we will know what happened in the midterm elections in the USA...
Anyway, in the evening I went to the ballet class. Thanks in part to the rush hour train traffic, I arrived over 15 minutes late. The preliminary floor exercises had ended, and so I began with the barré. We practiced tendus, pas de cheval, ronds de jambe, and glissades; then went over to the floor exercises that were less about turnout directly and rather for strengthening the abdominal muscles and the muscles along the insides of the legs; and finally performed the usual sets of four pliés followed by four jumps. Today was one of those rare but appalling days where I jumped like a potato sack, and did not suggest springiness and grace in the least. We also ended the class by trouping across the floor diagonally, two at a time, in a sort of Noah's Ark of pas de chat, and it would require time and consideration to determine where I disgraced myself less.
Either way, I'm afraid that I consider that my inflexibility and un-ballerina-like stature give me a carte blanche. I try not to bring my teacher to tears with how horrible everything looks, and to achieve technically what I am capable of doing. But in return, I happily suppose that nobody demands that I become a new Margot Fonteyn.
Then I went grocery-shopping, almost weepy with gratitude at having the leisure to do this given the schedule of the past weeks. And I bought frozen berries with quark; eggs and bacon and other ingredients for a quiche lorraine; as well as dark chocolate to chop up and add to vegan pumpkin-and-oat cookies that I am thinking of trying to bake for a colleague.
In the U-Bahn I read more of the Politics and De la littérature. Altogether I felt that this day was an islet of peace and sanity in the ocean of Black Friday.
Then, of course, tomorrow (or the day after, due to the time zone differences and the length of time it takes to count ballots) we will know what happened in the midterm elections in the USA...
Sunday, November 04, 2018
Aristotle and a Few Sonatas
This weekend I did overtime work again, so I have to squeeze as much weekend into one day as possible. The weather is not particularly holiday weather. It is as if a watercolour grey is soaking the sky, and the absence of light that manages to get through the clouds has made it gloomy even at quarter to 4 in the afternoon. In contrast the tree leaves are very bright and steeped with colour, but there aren't too many of them left.
Because I have been playing a lot of shorter pieces on the piano in the past few months — Spanish Dances by Enrique Granados, Hungarian Dances and waltzes by Brahms, the theme from the Third Man arranged for piano, children's pieces by Tchaikovsky, an arrangement of "La Vie en rose," ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin, Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King," etc. — I decided last weekend to begin playing longer pieces again.
Beethoven's later sonatas are less approachable, as I've said before, than his earlier ones. I think it is easier to plumb the young and confident Beethoven who had in some respects a popular conventionality; it is harder for me to figure out what he was thinking of when he composed his later music, which feels more abstract and personal or introverted. At times his later music still has elements of the 'classical' style. But it is classical through the lens of romanticism, or nostalgically classical: so I feel that to really understand it, one needs to scrape beneath the surface and capture the ambiguity in one's interpretation.
Today I tried passages of his 'Halloween Sonata' (i.e. his last sonata; I might be the only person who thinks of it as Halloweenish, but I think it has aspects of the magisterial and gothic Bach organ toccata about it) as well as the Sonata appassionata and the Waldstein Sonata. The last time these I looked at these sonatas regularly must have been around 2008 to 2010. I think I was finally able to hit on a reasonable, original approach today, aside from stumbling over the notes; whereas it quite annoyed me a decade ago that I could only manage bad imitations of excellent performances I had heard on YouTube. When I was a turbulent teenager I found Beethoven's early music quite soothing as it reflected what I felt, and his twilight music might become a friend and companion now.
I've slowly reached the point where I think I need to go 'underground' with my current dissatisfactions in life. It would be too boring and annoying to keep filling people's ears with them; and generally a good way to avoid that is to 'talk' with composers and instruments, instead of with family and friends, and to transmute those thoughts into harmless art.
The other thing is that I have a strong sense that I just need to keep going, and things will become better, and I'll be annoyed in future if I give up now.
Tackling the intellectual culture of Beethoven's sonatas reminded me of reading Aristotle in the U-Bahn lately. Their breadth and gnomic style are, at least, traits that the composer and the philosopher both have, and I suppose that Beethoven's art partook of the political. In Aristotle's Politics he is of course trying to cover a vast subject: political organizations and history in the Greek city-states. He might get a few things wrong. Despite his systematic method, other people might arrive at radically different interpretations from his own; there is more than one truth. It is clear that he is writing as one of many theoreticians that he knew, and not expecting anyone to accept his version as the only version. In that respect I think that 18th-century and other interpreters did him a great disservice in taking his Poetics as dogma rather than suggestion. Not to over-interpret, but this is one reason why I adore what I know of Greek culture much more than what I know of Roman culture: Greek culture often acknowledges that one might be wrong about things, and that even the gods don't always know what they're doing.
In the Politics, in my view, Aristotle even begins to contradict his own words after the first three books or so: I find that he undermines the orthodoxies he has set up about the aristocracy's superiority to the rabble in the first book, by being a passionate advocate of the relative wisdom of the people and a passionate critic of oligarchs' and tyrants' abuses in the later books. Also, the more he tries to define what a polity is, or an aristocracy, etc., the less I am sure what his definition really is, and if he has actually kept the same definition that he used earlier in his work or has changed his mind about it. It makes me feel stupid because I cannot remember his exact thoughts for comparison.
As for Madame de Staël's De la littérature, I have to admit that in weak moments I did agree with her argument that Aristotle's work is partly more a synthesis of accumulated wisdom than a development of own ideas.
One weak moment occurred when I was reading these pearls of wisdom:
Rackham's English translation is much more lucid than the German one from Reclam, if one fills in the places where I've put ellipses; so here is a disclaimer: I'm doing his text a disservice.)
Beethoven's later sonatas are less approachable, as I've said before, than his earlier ones. I think it is easier to plumb the young and confident Beethoven who had in some respects a popular conventionality; it is harder for me to figure out what he was thinking of when he composed his later music, which feels more abstract and personal or introverted. At times his later music still has elements of the 'classical' style. But it is classical through the lens of romanticism, or nostalgically classical: so I feel that to really understand it, one needs to scrape beneath the surface and capture the ambiguity in one's interpretation.
Today I tried passages of his 'Halloween Sonata' (i.e. his last sonata; I might be the only person who thinks of it as Halloweenish, but I think it has aspects of the magisterial and gothic Bach organ toccata about it) as well as the Sonata appassionata and the Waldstein Sonata. The last time these I looked at these sonatas regularly must have been around 2008 to 2010. I think I was finally able to hit on a reasonable, original approach today, aside from stumbling over the notes; whereas it quite annoyed me a decade ago that I could only manage bad imitations of excellent performances I had heard on YouTube. When I was a turbulent teenager I found Beethoven's early music quite soothing as it reflected what I felt, and his twilight music might become a friend and companion now.
I've slowly reached the point where I think I need to go 'underground' with my current dissatisfactions in life. It would be too boring and annoying to keep filling people's ears with them; and generally a good way to avoid that is to 'talk' with composers and instruments, instead of with family and friends, and to transmute those thoughts into harmless art.
The other thing is that I have a strong sense that I just need to keep going, and things will become better, and I'll be annoyed in future if I give up now.
Tackling the intellectual culture of Beethoven's sonatas reminded me of reading Aristotle in the U-Bahn lately. Their breadth and gnomic style are, at least, traits that the composer and the philosopher both have, and I suppose that Beethoven's art partook of the political. In Aristotle's Politics he is of course trying to cover a vast subject: political organizations and history in the Greek city-states. He might get a few things wrong. Despite his systematic method, other people might arrive at radically different interpretations from his own; there is more than one truth. It is clear that he is writing as one of many theoreticians that he knew, and not expecting anyone to accept his version as the only version. In that respect I think that 18th-century and other interpreters did him a great disservice in taking his Poetics as dogma rather than suggestion. Not to over-interpret, but this is one reason why I adore what I know of Greek culture much more than what I know of Roman culture: Greek culture often acknowledges that one might be wrong about things, and that even the gods don't always know what they're doing.
In the Politics, in my view, Aristotle even begins to contradict his own words after the first three books or so: I find that he undermines the orthodoxies he has set up about the aristocracy's superiority to the rabble in the first book, by being a passionate advocate of the relative wisdom of the people and a passionate critic of oligarchs' and tyrants' abuses in the later books. Also, the more he tries to define what a polity is, or an aristocracy, etc., the less I am sure what his definition really is, and if he has actually kept the same definition that he used earlier in his work or has changed his mind about it. It makes me feel stupid because I cannot remember his exact thoughts for comparison.
As for Madame de Staël's De la littérature, I have to admit that in weak moments I did agree with her argument that Aristotle's work is partly more a synthesis of accumulated wisdom than a development of own ideas.
"Ce qu'il écrit en littérature, en physique, en métaphysique, est l'analyse des idées de son temps. Historien du progrès des connaissances à cette époque, il les rédige, il les place dans l'ordre dans lequel il les conçoit. C'est un homme admirable pour son siècle; mais c'est vouloir forcer les hommes à marcher en arrière, que de chercher dans l'antiquité toutes les vérités philosophiques; [...]" (pp. 75-6, Paris: Charpentier, 1860, via Google Books)=~ 'His writing on literature, on physics, on metaphysics, is the analysis of the ideas of his time. A historian of the progress in the various types of knowledge at that time, he edits them; he places them in the order in which he conceives them. He is an admirable man for his century. But searching in antiquity for all the truths of philosophy, is wanting to force men to regress.'
One weak moment occurred when I was reading these pearls of wisdom:
"Es müssen entweder alle über alles, das genau unterschieden ist, urteilen, wobei sie entweder durch Wahl oder durch das Los eingesetzt sind, oder alle über alles, einerseits durch das Los, andererseits durch Wahl; oder daß eben im Hinblick auf einige identische Fälle die einen durch das Los eingesetzt sind, die anderen aber gewählt. [... Und] entweder sind die Richter über alles wiederum aus einigen bestellt durch Wahl, oder einige Gerichte sind über dieselben Angelegenheiten aus durch das Los oder einerseits durch das Los, andererseits durch Wahl, oder einige Gerichte sind über dieselben Angelegenheiten aus durch das Los Bestimmten oder aus Gewählten eingesetzt."* (p. 243, Book IV, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989)I felt like dashing my brains out on the walls of the U-Bahn train to end the torment, after trying to understand all the grammatical and logical twistings and turnings, in that terrible and intellectually unfruitful paragraph.
(* In English: "[...] they must either appoint from all by vote, or from all by lot, or from some by vote, or from some by lot, or partly in one way and partly in the other—I mean partly by vote and partly by lot [... F]or here again the judges for all cases may be drawn by vote from a certain class, or for all cases by lot from a certain class, or some courts may be appointed by lot and others by vote, or some courts may be composed of judges chosen by lot and by vote for the same cases."[Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1944. via Perseus.tufts.edu]
Rackham's English translation is much more lucid than the German one from Reclam, if one fills in the places where I've put ellipses; so here is a disclaimer: I'm doing his text a disservice.)
Sunday, October 28, 2018
A Late-October Run and Walk
Yesterday I spent time playing the piano, reading news on the internet, eating breakfast with Mama and the siblings, and filling out crosswords with Mama, but I have to admit that through most of it I was still feeling self-pity related to work.
That said, in the early afternoon, heavy grey clouds were hanging in the sky, and it looked like it would rain, but I saw that the chance of precipitation was only 15%. So I borrowed a pair of shorts and a wristwatch from Ge., ate a banana for fuel, put on my running shoes and a t-shirt, and did the run/walk that was on my training schedule. I've been trying to reach a point where I can run for 5 km without walking or stopping in between, and this past week was my third. The point of the whole exercise was at first to take part in a charity race. Now I just want to train the discipline to learn to do something long and arduous in a sensible way that makes it not uncomfortable — perhaps this will help me write novels in future — and just to explore the technique of running a little. Moving through unfamiliar and familiar streets in a not-too-fast way and looking at the scenery has also been a side benefit.
I went 7 km from our house, past Brandenburger Tor and along the Street of the 17th of June, around the traffic circle at the Siegessäule, and to the nexus of the Technical University at Ernst-Reuter-Platz. A cold autumn wind blew down the broad streets; lot of trees are losing their leaves, and it was fascinating to see the smaller trees lining the parking lanes at the Street of the 17th of June, which were mostly barren except for a sprinkling of pale leaves (like stars in the night sky) in the branches that were closest to the warm street lamps. The fallen leaves were rustling on the pavements, of course, and at times crushed or ground to a fine, pale powder. Also scattered over the sidewalks were tourists, and other joggers, who often wore neon yellow or pink outfits with long sleeves, and whose leggings were also warmer-looking than what I had on.
A man in a trench coat stood in front of the Soviet memorial, figuring out how he wanted to take a photograph with what looked like an analog camera, rather like an escapee from a John Le Carré novel. A brightly painted carriage powered by foot pedaling rolled along the margin of the Street of the 17th of June, full of young people in their late teens or early twenties, singing in a language I didn't know. Whether it was Russian or not, it somehow reminded me of droshkies in tsarist Moscow, especially against the bleak, almost wintry background of the twiggy trees and the lanterns.
Altogether I felt so fine when I reached the 6.4 km mark that I'd originally intended to reach that I decided to go what I thought was another 200 m. What I didn't know at the time is that I was actually going another 600 m. But then I did get into the U-Bahn and ride home, instead of walking all the way back. When I'd eaten a banana-and-strawberry fruit bar before the train arrived, I slowly began to feel so mellow and happy that it became clear that, instead of exhausting me counterproductively and worsening the stresses of the week, this outing was more or less the best thing I could have done.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Turning A Page in the U-Bahn Reading
Earlier in the week I finally finished reading the last pages of Andromaque, as well as the endnotes, and then — reading more of Aristotle's Politics in between, where he tries to define the oligarchy and the polity — began reading a collection of extracts from Madame de Staël's De la littérature and De l'Allemagne that Larousse published in a purple paperback edition in 1935.
My grandmother must have picked it up in Canada, because her name is recorded on the first page in her writing, and there is a price stamp '$0.50' on the same page.
Biased as I am, perhaps, by the editor's notes — Mme. de Staël's sweeping assertions in De la littérature about ancient Greek playwrights and philosophers (e.g. 'the Roman philosophers were better') make me cringe.
Perhaps they make me cringe all the more because they hold up a mirror: I too have made plenty of "sweeping assertions" about many subjects throughout my life!
My grandmother must have picked it up in Canada, because her name is recorded on the first page in her writing, and there is a price stamp '$0.50' on the same page.
Biased as I am, perhaps, by the editor's notes — Mme. de Staël's sweeping assertions in De la littérature about ancient Greek playwrights and philosophers (e.g. 'the Roman philosophers were better') make me cringe.
Perhaps they make me cringe all the more because they hold up a mirror: I too have made plenty of "sweeping assertions" about many subjects throughout my life!
Sunday, October 21, 2018
A Few Pages From Racine and Molière
In a way there's little to add to the previous post. It feels like my life has taken four focuses lately: working, reading in the train, sleeping, and training to run without having time or leisure to eat and sleep properly. I still haven't written to an ex-colleague in the US who left the company a month ago. It's not a hard life I'm leading now, compared to those of others, but it does not make much sense.
I think there are strong moral arguments in favour of doing the extra work on Saturdays, sometimes, in the microcosm of my work group. But I think this extra work in itself has no special idealism or reason that ennobles it.
***
In the S and U-Bahn I've been reading Andromaque by Racine and L'École des femmes by Molière. Previously I had read Le Cid by Corneille. It turns out that, as is often the case with the two French tragedians, I am a fierce partisan of one and a fierce critic of the other. I can't stand Le Cid and Corneille's stodgy verse, the kitschy metaphors, and the 'logic' of his 'reasonable' and 'noble' characters. It is the one play I'd read where I felt let down — as the tension shifted from excited tension into bored tension as to when this work was going to end — that no other characters died by the end.
Not only I have a bone to pick with Corneille — so did some of his contemporaries. I found this passage in L'École des femmes funny — Molière's antagonism with the Corneille brothers seemed fiercer than any antagonism between them and Racine:
Footnote: (ed. G. Sablayrolles, Paris: Larousse, 1959)
*
As for Racine: Before I read the introduction, I couldn't tell who Andromache was because I confused her with Andromeda and Antigone. I was hoping for Antigone because I find that legend touching. But, of course, Andromache is Hector's widow, and the Greeks captured her in the fall of Troy.
In Racine's version, Pyrrhus (')loves(') Andromache. She resists him, since she still loves Hector as much as ever. That is my interpretation, at least. The play's notes in the edition that I am reading mention that others have read Andromaque and believe that she does love Pyrrhus, and that duty causes her to resist her yearnings. Anyway, the way that I interpret it, even if she did decide that she wants to leave her marriage with Hector in the past, which to be honest I think no self-respecting ancient Greek playwright would have permitted because it doesn't suit their idea of women as being sentient property rather than human beings with their own right to determine things, she does not wish to marry Pyrrhus. It is even more repellent because Pyrrhus killed her father-in-law Priam and her sister-in-law Polyxena.
(The Pyrrhus-hounding-Andromache aspect of the plot reminded me of L'École des femmes, although of course this play is a comedy. Arnolphe is Molière's character; he has tried to force marriage on a woman whom, in a dependent situation, he has deprived of interaction with and knowledge of the outside world, and who loves another man. He is hopping mad that she refuses to love him or agree to belong to him. Faced with that opposition, he discards his dignity with disgraceful protestations and demonstrations. I found the play very uncomfortable to read as a young woman, because it feels partly true. But, of course, since this is Molière, we do feel sorry for Arnolphe despite his malfeasance.)
In Racine's portrayal, Hermione herself — who is Greek and hates Andromache for being her rival — denounces Pyrrhus for murdering elderly and female 'non-combatants' at the end of the Trojan War. He replies that he is remorseful, but that this slaughter was done to avenge Hermione's mother, and that in fact he could be nagging Hermione about the deaths except that he's able to get over such petty impulses.
Also, in an earlier passage, he tells his True (Unrequited) Love that the feelings of most the people she knew and loved when they were killed are a mere bagatelle, compared to the feelings he feels pining after her:
Hé quoi? Votre courroux n’a-t’il pas eu son cours ?
Peut-on haïr sans cesse ? Et punit-on toujours ?
J’ai fait des malheureux, sans doute, et la Phrygie
Cent fois de votre sang a vu ma main rougie.
Mais que vos yeux sur moi se sont bien exercés !
Qu’ils m’ont vendu bien cher les pleurs qu’ils ont versés !
De combien de remords m’ont-ils rendu la proie ?
Je souffre tous les maux que j'ai fait devant Troie.
Vaincu, chargé de fers, de regrets consumé,
Brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumé,
Tant de soins, tant de pleurs, tant d’ardeurs inquiètes…
Helas ! fus-je jamais si cruel que vous l’êtes ?
Mais enfin, tour à tour, c’est assez nous punir.
Nos Ennemis communs devraient nous réunir.
Source: Wikisource
Spelling modified to comply with modern norms.
Needless to say, I do not find his character much of a charmer. I think this effusion of hyperbole also reflects a trait that literary critics and that Racine himself have acknowledged — that Racine's 'Greek' characters are anachronistically well-versed in high-flown sentimental absurdities of 17th-century French courtly literature.
Racine's characters are aware of their flaws of thinking, of course. So their missteps are less enragingly stupid. But, in the midst of plotting murder and involuntary marriage, blackmail and infanticide, etc., I do think the heroes and heroines might have taken this spirit of self-criticism far further.
Specifically, perhaps Pyrrhus might have sympathized with Andromache's grief. Perhaps he, Hermione or Orestes might have accepted the idea that their 'love' would have been more credible if they had tried to make their Beloved happier, instead of making their Beloved a hundred times more miserable/dead. I think that Orestes comes off best — the Erinyes are hounding him, so he is less responsible for what he does, and he even manages to balk at murder.
In Andromaque, fiddly shadings of moral sentiment are the least of the characters' worries, in the face of greater quandaries. But I do think that in a less dramatic situation, the characters would also feel that it is unflattering if a man or woman is inspired to show the worst sides of his (or her) character 'on one's behalf.' In the peaceful and kinder realm of literary 18th-century domestic England, I suppose that it's neatly expressed in the first marriage proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet is irritated and offended that Mr. Darcy portrays marriage to her as a necessary but degrading step that he would never have planned for himself.
Of course — when I suggest that people in love could be nice and thoughtful and that people in a tragic play could kill each other less, perhaps I am grossly ignoring the essence of love and of theatrical tragedy. Perhaps I am being as absurd as Caroline Bingley is in the scene where she and her brother disagree over his hosting a ball:
Nevertheless, I'll perpetrate more absurdity: I think that the plot of Andromaque would have been far more pleasant if Andromache had had the opportunities of a modern-day Hollywood action film. She could have doctored the wine of Pyrrhus's guards to temporarily send them to sleep, or trained in martial arts, or asked for the aid of a noble mercenary-for-hire. Then whisked her son out of the room where he was being held, shipped him to an island-state where no one knew about the Trojan War (or at least had no strong feelings about it), and raised him to be a kindly philosopher who did not care about avenging his ancestors.
I think there are strong moral arguments in favour of doing the extra work on Saturdays, sometimes, in the microcosm of my work group. But I think this extra work in itself has no special idealism or reason that ennobles it.
***
In the S and U-Bahn I've been reading Andromaque by Racine and L'École des femmes by Molière. Previously I had read Le Cid by Corneille. It turns out that, as is often the case with the two French tragedians, I am a fierce partisan of one and a fierce critic of the other. I can't stand Le Cid and Corneille's stodgy verse, the kitschy metaphors, and the 'logic' of his 'reasonable' and 'noble' characters. It is the one play I'd read where I felt let down — as the tension shifted from excited tension into bored tension as to when this work was going to end — that no other characters died by the end.
Not only I have a bone to pick with Corneille — so did some of his contemporaries. I found this passage in L'École des femmes funny — Molière's antagonism with the Corneille brothers seemed fiercer than any antagonism between them and Racine:
Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre=~ 'I know a farmer named Gros-Pierre who — although he owned nothing except one field — ordered that a marshy ditch be dug all around it, and took the pompous title Lord of the Isle.'
Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre,
Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux,
Et de Monsieur de l’Isle2 en prit le nom pompeux.
2. Allusion précieuse au frère du grand Corneille, Thomas, qui avait pris le nom de Corneille de l'Isle. Les frères Corneille furent vexés de l'allusion.=~ 'Allusion, in the "precious" style, to Thomas — brother of the great Corneille — who had taken the name of Corneille of the Isle. The brothers Corneille were vexed by the allusion.'
Footnote: (ed. G. Sablayrolles, Paris: Larousse, 1959)
*
As for Racine: Before I read the introduction, I couldn't tell who Andromache was because I confused her with Andromeda and Antigone. I was hoping for Antigone because I find that legend touching. But, of course, Andromache is Hector's widow, and the Greeks captured her in the fall of Troy.
In Racine's version, Pyrrhus (')loves(') Andromache. She resists him, since she still loves Hector as much as ever. That is my interpretation, at least. The play's notes in the edition that I am reading mention that others have read Andromaque and believe that she does love Pyrrhus, and that duty causes her to resist her yearnings. Anyway, the way that I interpret it, even if she did decide that she wants to leave her marriage with Hector in the past, which to be honest I think no self-respecting ancient Greek playwright would have permitted because it doesn't suit their idea of women as being sentient property rather than human beings with their own right to determine things, she does not wish to marry Pyrrhus. It is even more repellent because Pyrrhus killed her father-in-law Priam and her sister-in-law Polyxena.
(The Pyrrhus-hounding-Andromache aspect of the plot reminded me of L'École des femmes, although of course this play is a comedy. Arnolphe is Molière's character; he has tried to force marriage on a woman whom, in a dependent situation, he has deprived of interaction with and knowledge of the outside world, and who loves another man. He is hopping mad that she refuses to love him or agree to belong to him. Faced with that opposition, he discards his dignity with disgraceful protestations and demonstrations. I found the play very uncomfortable to read as a young woman, because it feels partly true. But, of course, since this is Molière, we do feel sorry for Arnolphe despite his malfeasance.)
In Racine's portrayal, Hermione herself — who is Greek and hates Andromache for being her rival — denounces Pyrrhus for murdering elderly and female 'non-combatants' at the end of the Trojan War. He replies that he is remorseful, but that this slaughter was done to avenge Hermione's mother, and that in fact he could be nagging Hermione about the deaths except that he's able to get over such petty impulses.
Also, in an earlier passage, he tells his True (Unrequited) Love that the feelings of most the people she knew and loved when they were killed are a mere bagatelle, compared to the feelings he feels pining after her:
Hé quoi? Votre courroux n’a-t’il pas eu son cours ?
Peut-on haïr sans cesse ? Et punit-on toujours ?
J’ai fait des malheureux, sans doute, et la Phrygie
Cent fois de votre sang a vu ma main rougie.
Mais que vos yeux sur moi se sont bien exercés !
Qu’ils m’ont vendu bien cher les pleurs qu’ils ont versés !
De combien de remords m’ont-ils rendu la proie ?
Je souffre tous les maux que j'ai fait devant Troie.
Vaincu, chargé de fers, de regrets consumé,
Brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumé,
Tant de soins, tant de pleurs, tant d’ardeurs inquiètes…
Helas ! fus-je jamais si cruel que vous l’êtes ?
Mais enfin, tour à tour, c’est assez nous punir.
Nos Ennemis communs devraient nous réunir.
Source: Wikisource
Spelling modified to comply with modern norms.
Needless to say, I do not find his character much of a charmer. I think this effusion of hyperbole also reflects a trait that literary critics and that Racine himself have acknowledged — that Racine's 'Greek' characters are anachronistically well-versed in high-flown sentimental absurdities of 17th-century French courtly literature.
Racine's characters are aware of their flaws of thinking, of course. So their missteps are less enragingly stupid. But, in the midst of plotting murder and involuntary marriage, blackmail and infanticide, etc., I do think the heroes and heroines might have taken this spirit of self-criticism far further.
Specifically, perhaps Pyrrhus might have sympathized with Andromache's grief. Perhaps he, Hermione or Orestes might have accepted the idea that their 'love' would have been more credible if they had tried to make their Beloved happier, instead of making their Beloved a hundred times more miserable/dead. I think that Orestes comes off best — the Erinyes are hounding him, so he is less responsible for what he does, and he even manages to balk at murder.
In Andromaque, fiddly shadings of moral sentiment are the least of the characters' worries, in the face of greater quandaries. But I do think that in a less dramatic situation, the characters would also feel that it is unflattering if a man or woman is inspired to show the worst sides of his (or her) character 'on one's behalf.' In the peaceful and kinder realm of literary 18th-century domestic England, I suppose that it's neatly expressed in the first marriage proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet is irritated and offended that Mr. Darcy portrays marriage to her as a necessary but degrading step that he would never have planned for himself.
"I might as well inquire [...] why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character? Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil?"Source: Pemberley.com
Of course — when I suggest that people in love could be nice and thoughtful and that people in a tragic play could kill each other less, perhaps I am grossly ignoring the essence of love and of theatrical tragedy. Perhaps I am being as absurd as Caroline Bingley is in the scene where she and her brother disagree over his hosting a ball:
"I should like balls infinitely better [...] if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day."[Source: Pemberley.com]
"Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball."
Nevertheless, I'll perpetrate more absurdity: I think that the plot of Andromaque would have been far more pleasant if Andromache had had the opportunities of a modern-day Hollywood action film. She could have doctored the wine of Pyrrhus's guards to temporarily send them to sleep, or trained in martial arts, or asked for the aid of a noble mercenary-for-hire. Then whisked her son out of the room where he was being held, shipped him to an island-state where no one knew about the Trojan War (or at least had no strong feelings about it), and raised him to be a kindly philosopher who did not care about avenging his ancestors.
Wednesday, October 03, 2018
A Long Lament About the Effects of Overconsumption
Lately I've been distressed for a few reasons, but I think an underlying one is really a lack of proper rest. The trip to Canada was lovely in many ways. But aspects of it were harder than I expected, e.g. going to places where Papa used to take us when we were children; and also meeting with friends and relatives whom we last met ten or more years ago sometimes made me feel that in some ways I'd become sterner, older and harder. Well, the 'older' part is obvious and not necessarily bad. For the first two days or so after the trip I was in a bit of a fog, like a variant of Robert Burns's 'My heart's in the highlands' — in spirit I was taking walks along the seashore and gazing up at Douglas firs and surrounded in the rainy mist of autumn on Vancouver Island, which made me feel happier and more relaxed but also remote. So I had trouble readjusting my mindset to work.
The heavy workload ahead of America Thanksgiving is intermittently bearable now. But it is still more than we can do. This time I don't have much reason to blame the project managers. They have tried to accommodate the team I am in after I raised my protest — indeed have been awkwardly tip-toeing around me for a while, and one of them has (for reasons best known to herself) been making a beeline for a colleague who is roughly as stressed as I am — and understand that the work is too much. They are under pressure themselves and cannot change the influx of clients, which as the manager has said is a good problem to have. The other teams are also all suffering now; I have to make sure that I am not demanding special treatment.
We have been asked to come in if we wish on Saturdays for overtime work (paid double) to help tackle the work. I feel that this is not right for me. First of all, whether accurately or not, I feel rather fragile, and I have to respect my boundaries. As the Black Friday season piles on additional pressure, and five days per week of Black Friday pressure are already too much for me, I don't need six. For the past month or two, whereas at one point I could leave at 6:30 p.m. often with an easy conscience, I have done about 9 to 13 hours of overtime per week whenever I was not in Canada. I count on Saturdays and Sundays to 'decompress' so that I can return to work on Mondays with renewed spirits and a sharper brain. Now I need them especially. I don't care to earn extra money for stunts like Saturday work. I have the income I need to cover the basics, and want any pay raises to be allotted if I develop more skill at my work generally.
But being a team leader, of course, requires pitching in alongside the colleagues in the team and being a decent example. So I agreed to come in every second Saturday. Also, I had the feeling that saying that I couldn't handle coming in because it was too exhausting — which I more or less did — was seen by the manager as an indulgence of weakness rather than as a statement of fact. So I felt that my pride was challenged to show that I wasn't completely fragile.
So I came in this past Saturday. The way I felt during and after bore out my reservations, and not because I went into it so skeptically that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Working on a Saturday for 3 hours on a whim as I described in the last blog post is, indeed, nothing like working on a Saturday for 8 hours out of obligation. I was also worried because of bad news I'd had unrelated to work. At any rate I was grumpy, sad or giddily cheerful by turns, had wobbly legs at times when I stood up from my desk, and cried more than once. (Hidden from the view of others, and silently.)
One of the managers had also come in for noblesse-oblige-y reasons, alongside more than a handful of colleagues including Gi., and they didn't look like they were overflowing with happiness either.
Besides I feel less sure of properly listening and responding to colleagues, or handling anything that requires intelligence, because I'm too saturated to think straight.
Aside from objections on grounds like health and poorer job performance, I am also opposed to this from a moralizing and religious perspective. Thanksgiving — if one abstracts it from the historical context of invading the Americas — is about being thankful for immaterial goods and material necessities, not about exploiting human labour and the environment in a reckless orgy of spending (and returning). The Christmas season is also not just about 25% sales. And I want to be able to telephone people if I want to, see my family, dance ballet, and look at trees and grass and flowers in daylight instead of crawling home after dark.
Anyway, today was a day off because of the Day of German Reunification, and next Saturday is a day off. Also, I should not let one aspect of work make me miserable; and I should take things more easily, also because people do generously worry about me and don't enjoy witnessing self-destruction.
The heavy workload ahead of America Thanksgiving is intermittently bearable now. But it is still more than we can do. This time I don't have much reason to blame the project managers. They have tried to accommodate the team I am in after I raised my protest — indeed have been awkwardly tip-toeing around me for a while, and one of them has (for reasons best known to herself) been making a beeline for a colleague who is roughly as stressed as I am — and understand that the work is too much. They are under pressure themselves and cannot change the influx of clients, which as the manager has said is a good problem to have. The other teams are also all suffering now; I have to make sure that I am not demanding special treatment.
We have been asked to come in if we wish on Saturdays for overtime work (paid double) to help tackle the work. I feel that this is not right for me. First of all, whether accurately or not, I feel rather fragile, and I have to respect my boundaries. As the Black Friday season piles on additional pressure, and five days per week of Black Friday pressure are already too much for me, I don't need six. For the past month or two, whereas at one point I could leave at 6:30 p.m. often with an easy conscience, I have done about 9 to 13 hours of overtime per week whenever I was not in Canada. I count on Saturdays and Sundays to 'decompress' so that I can return to work on Mondays with renewed spirits and a sharper brain. Now I need them especially. I don't care to earn extra money for stunts like Saturday work. I have the income I need to cover the basics, and want any pay raises to be allotted if I develop more skill at my work generally.
But being a team leader, of course, requires pitching in alongside the colleagues in the team and being a decent example. So I agreed to come in every second Saturday. Also, I had the feeling that saying that I couldn't handle coming in because it was too exhausting — which I more or less did — was seen by the manager as an indulgence of weakness rather than as a statement of fact. So I felt that my pride was challenged to show that I wasn't completely fragile.
So I came in this past Saturday. The way I felt during and after bore out my reservations, and not because I went into it so skeptically that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Working on a Saturday for 3 hours on a whim as I described in the last blog post is, indeed, nothing like working on a Saturday for 8 hours out of obligation. I was also worried because of bad news I'd had unrelated to work. At any rate I was grumpy, sad or giddily cheerful by turns, had wobbly legs at times when I stood up from my desk, and cried more than once. (Hidden from the view of others, and silently.)
One of the managers had also come in for noblesse-oblige-y reasons, alongside more than a handful of colleagues including Gi., and they didn't look like they were overflowing with happiness either.
Besides I feel less sure of properly listening and responding to colleagues, or handling anything that requires intelligence, because I'm too saturated to think straight.
Aside from objections on grounds like health and poorer job performance, I am also opposed to this from a moralizing and religious perspective. Thanksgiving — if one abstracts it from the historical context of invading the Americas — is about being thankful for immaterial goods and material necessities, not about exploiting human labour and the environment in a reckless orgy of spending (and returning). The Christmas season is also not just about 25% sales. And I want to be able to telephone people if I want to, see my family, dance ballet, and look at trees and grass and flowers in daylight instead of crawling home after dark.
Anyway, today was a day off because of the Day of German Reunification, and next Saturday is a day off. Also, I should not let one aspect of work make me miserable; and I should take things more easily, also because people do generously worry about me and don't enjoy witnessing self-destruction.
Friday, August 31, 2018
A Self-Indulgent Rant After A Week of Overtime
Last Saturday I went to work for the first time on the weekend, sitting in the empty office tapping on the computer and eating snacks at regular intervals and even doing the traditional exercise routine at 11:30 a.m. by myself. It was only for three hours.
Generally I am a great believer in the separation of weekday from weekend, which is fortunately possible at my job (in theory!), and which I think helps keep one's mind keener and fresher, and one's feelings happier. So I was worried that this sacrifice of a Saturday morning would take a psychological toll.
Fortunately it did not — what I did not know, though, is what a small hell the week would become. Surely coming in to work on Saturday would be enough? — it was not.
On Monday I went to my ballet class exactly when the working day officially ended, so that I would arrive on time. (I was on time, but not early enough to get changed into my ballet clothes before the class had already begun.) Then I came back after 1.5 hours of it, and worked for more than half an hour, alone in the office except for the cleaning crew. Surely that would be enough? it was not.
On Tuesday I worked until after 9 p.m., so 11 hours. Surely that would be enough? it was not.
On Wednesday I worked until ~6:35 p.m.
Then I went off to play volleyball with the colleagues. I arrived at the park 15 minutes late because I needed to finish things up, and because I insist on walking there, I had just done about 20 minutes of very brisk walking... None of the colleagues were there, perhaps because they had been invited out for drinks to mark the departure of another colleague.
So I went back to work for roughly half an hour.
Then I decided to go to the bar to help say goodbye to the colleague. I took the S-Bahn one station, and since it was already after dark, ended up in the weirdest suburban wasteland I have ever walked in. There was the hulking train station that was half-empty at night with fewer passengers and that glowed in a limited perimeter; streets with few buildings on them and just cars passing through the void; concrete overpasses and traffic cones; forsaken yards full of shrubbery, sand, and metal fencing that people had partly opened; the sound of loud music; and altogether the kind of ambience that would grace any thriller. In daylight I'm sure it looks less worrisome.
Anyway, I had an idea where the bar was, but was perambulating about in a manner which, if I'd been watching it in the aforementioned thriller, I would have probably considered extremely stupid.
The bar was at the edge of the Spree, but a pedestrian path passed between it and the water. It had a gatehouse-like entrance, battle-scarred wooden trimmings, a signboard in front, and boisterous 'youths' inside. The menu, as far as I could read it in the dim light, listed non-alcoholic drinks too ... I set foot inside and was ready to look for colleagues. But a man, who had an 'I've seen it all' air and a Jean-Claude van Damme appearance, was sitting on a stool, and he put out his arm to block me. He politely announced that there was a 6-8 Euro entrance charge. So I forked over the money, feeling that it was far past my bed time and wondering — as he stamped the bar logo on my hand — if this meant I was 'clubbing' for the first time. I vaguely wondered what this building and its purpose were during the East German days.
Inside, a band was rendering 'Our House' in a cave-like stage to one side, bathed in yellow light. People thronged the benches, at picnic tables and I think standing tables nearer the stage, and tucked seats in higher niches in the walls that were part of the theme of the pirate's hideaway. I thought they were mostly in their twenties, and felt at least three years too old for the crowd — like I should have experimented with it earlier in life.
Generally I am a great believer in the separation of weekday from weekend, which is fortunately possible at my job (in theory!), and which I think helps keep one's mind keener and fresher, and one's feelings happier. So I was worried that this sacrifice of a Saturday morning would take a psychological toll.
Fortunately it did not — what I did not know, though, is what a small hell the week would become. Surely coming in to work on Saturday would be enough? — it was not.
On Monday I went to my ballet class exactly when the working day officially ended, so that I would arrive on time. (I was on time, but not early enough to get changed into my ballet clothes before the class had already begun.) Then I came back after 1.5 hours of it, and worked for more than half an hour, alone in the office except for the cleaning crew. Surely that would be enough? it was not.
On Tuesday I worked until after 9 p.m., so 11 hours. Surely that would be enough? it was not.
On Wednesday I worked until ~6:35 p.m.
Then I went off to play volleyball with the colleagues. I arrived at the park 15 minutes late because I needed to finish things up, and because I insist on walking there, I had just done about 20 minutes of very brisk walking... None of the colleagues were there, perhaps because they had been invited out for drinks to mark the departure of another colleague.
So I went back to work for roughly half an hour.
Then I decided to go to the bar to help say goodbye to the colleague. I took the S-Bahn one station, and since it was already after dark, ended up in the weirdest suburban wasteland I have ever walked in. There was the hulking train station that was half-empty at night with fewer passengers and that glowed in a limited perimeter; streets with few buildings on them and just cars passing through the void; concrete overpasses and traffic cones; forsaken yards full of shrubbery, sand, and metal fencing that people had partly opened; the sound of loud music; and altogether the kind of ambience that would grace any thriller. In daylight I'm sure it looks less worrisome.
Anyway, I had an idea where the bar was, but was perambulating about in a manner which, if I'd been watching it in the aforementioned thriller, I would have probably considered extremely stupid.
The bar was at the edge of the Spree, but a pedestrian path passed between it and the water. It had a gatehouse-like entrance, battle-scarred wooden trimmings, a signboard in front, and boisterous 'youths' inside. The menu, as far as I could read it in the dim light, listed non-alcoholic drinks too ... I set foot inside and was ready to look for colleagues. But a man, who had an 'I've seen it all' air and a Jean-Claude van Damme appearance, was sitting on a stool, and he put out his arm to block me. He politely announced that there was a 6-8 Euro entrance charge. So I forked over the money, feeling that it was far past my bed time and wondering — as he stamped the bar logo on my hand — if this meant I was 'clubbing' for the first time. I vaguely wondered what this building and its purpose were during the East German days.
Inside, a band was rendering 'Our House' in a cave-like stage to one side, bathed in yellow light. People thronged the benches, at picnic tables and I think standing tables nearer the stage, and tucked seats in higher niches in the walls that were part of the theme of the pirate's hideaway. I thought they were mostly in their twenties, and felt at least three years too old for the crowd — like I should have experimented with it earlier in life.
My colleagues were no longer there.
I arrived at home quite late.
On Thursday I worked until 11 p.m., at least thirteen hours. Surely that would be enough? it was not. As I was finishing up, I also discovered that I had to do twice as much work as I'd expected.
But Friday was horrible. I had come in before 9 a.m., I think, delayed slightly because of a late train, so an hour early. Because of sleep deprivation and stress I felt light headed and floaty, but I kept trying to be sensible and considerate. Surely that would be enough? it was not.
By 6 p.m. I had had enough. I think next week I need to take less of a 'quietly sacrificing all my spare time' approach and instead read the riot act to the project managers as reasonably as I can. I think that this will benefit the company, whereas working away in overtime without fixing the underlying problem is well-meant but ineffective.
Friday, August 03, 2018
Life Ambitions
Every now and then I think of what I want from life. Often it ends up in princely-looking lists of languages I want to be familiar with, books I want to read, and so and so forth.
But at present I suppose that I can list vague aims. I want to have friendships and other relationships in which there is a give-and-take, where both people support and make the other happier, without contracting emotional debts or falling prey to great insecurities. And I also want to know a lot of people who are wise and funny and don't take themselves too seriously, generous-hearted and curious about the world, and clever. At work I want to do my work well and knowledgeably, and become more relaxed and far more helpful as a 'team leader.' (The manager has said that the main aim of a leader is to want the people in his or her team to succeed, and to help them to do better. Which is very sage, but I'm finding it hard to translate it into practice.) I want to become more well-rounded in sports and films and many other subjects, so that I don't cut off sources of enjoyment and interest, and so that I can talk well with others about things they are passionate about.
And, at home, I want to write and play music and draw childish pictures, and daydream about books that I read on the U-Bahn, and investigate political and social problems in newspapers and on the internet in general, and perhaps also add to the comfort of my family.
But at present I suppose that I can list vague aims. I want to have friendships and other relationships in which there is a give-and-take, where both people support and make the other happier, without contracting emotional debts or falling prey to great insecurities. And I also want to know a lot of people who are wise and funny and don't take themselves too seriously, generous-hearted and curious about the world, and clever. At work I want to do my work well and knowledgeably, and become more relaxed and far more helpful as a 'team leader.' (The manager has said that the main aim of a leader is to want the people in his or her team to succeed, and to help them to do better. Which is very sage, but I'm finding it hard to translate it into practice.) I want to become more well-rounded in sports and films and many other subjects, so that I don't cut off sources of enjoyment and interest, and so that I can talk well with others about things they are passionate about.
And, at home, I want to write and play music and draw childish pictures, and daydream about books that I read on the U-Bahn, and investigate political and social problems in newspapers and on the internet in general, and perhaps also add to the comfort of my family.
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Notes of a Disgruntled City Commuter in August
On Tuesday it was over 35°C, and it was mildly thrilling to work in those temperatures and feel stoic and brave. (Although I still became angry when I felt that the windows and blinds weren't being used to their full effect to keep out the sunlight and let in the breeze.)
But since then, a not so thrilling new routine has been born:
At night I wake up once to three times because of the heat.
As for work... today the temperatures were better. But yesterday, on a semi-conscious level, I kept up a constant internal monologue of 'warmwarmwarmwarmwarm.' Eating ice cream feels less effective than it did a week ago, because it is a small speck of relief in a world full of warmth. I rarely leave the orbit of my desk fan. (Generously given by a human resources colleague.) Of course I am quite pampered with these resources against the heat. But the ability to feel the proper amount of gratitude is dwindling and I choose to blame the weather.
One disadvantage of the temperatures climbing back down from 35° is that, on Tuesday, even all the fruit flies and regular flies seemed to have gone into hiding. I was staggered and amazed, but sadly that state of affairs has not lasted.
In the evenings I travel per train. I have begun to take notes and care about window architecture in the U-Bahn. For example, I caught a boxy, compartmented train this evening. I have finally realized that this type of train does not have windows that can be tilted open on both sides, only on one side. Also, at the beginning of the wagon there is a pair of closed windows. So I step farther back into the wagon, behind the open windows. And yet this evening the cold air of the train tunnels only rushed past the windows without coming in. Also, that cold air didn't seem to help much from the outside, either, because the metal sides of the train are warm to the touch. Then, when the train stopped at a station, a few tendrils of cold cellar air seeped in through the open doors, at which point it merely served to present a depressing contrast.
In short: I have a commute where sweat pours all over my face and down my neck. I have accidentally gotten droplets of perspiration on my bookmark, the book I am reading, and on my t-shirt. And I don't really know how disreputable the other commuters think that this is...
That said, this summer has been nowhere near as bad as the summer of 2006, so far.
Friday, July 27, 2018
News from the Berliner Sauna
In the U-Bahn I am reading only the Dilemmas of Lenin for a while. This is due to the temperatures because when I travel to work in the mornings it has already been 27°C lately. And then it rises to 30° or 31° during the day, and settles down to a dissatisfying 20° at night. The past two nights I have woken up between 2 and 3 because of the heat and awkward mosquito bites at the ankles. These are not conditions in which I feel fit enough to read the philosophy of Aristotle or the physics of Schwarzschild. In the case of Aristotle, I admit that this avoidance seems weak-spirited since he worked out all of this philosophy in the heat of Greece without complaining (as far as I know), which is surely more demanding than reading it.
Although this type of summer heat has been one of the preconditions for many a rebellion and revolt in the course of human history, I am reading the book without feeling any burning desire to start a communistic revolution myself.
This week has been strange in general. On Monday morning I had an errand in the embassy. I went there before at the beginning of the year and wasn't let in, so I am quite anxious now whenever I go there that I will be barred again for reasons I don't understand.
On that evening I was going home, but then I wasn't able to switch to the second U-Bahn line that I always take. At least 3 transit personnel were standing at attention at a barrier of tape at the foot of the stairs to the platform. I was part of the bewildered crowd milling around at the foot. Eventually one of them barked at us that the train wasn't coming and that we should use the Straßenbahn or other transport methods. Later I read that someone had been hit by a train; I am not sure about this, but it made sense to me that the train employee who practically yelled at us was under the stress of trauma. There were ambulances with personnel as well as police scattered around outside the entrance above ground, although I wasn't sure whether the police were there for other reasons. i.e. It was a tourist hotspot and it made sense to have police there to prevent handbag thefts and drug sales.
So I decided to walk home, for an hour and a half. Eventually I did feel like weeping a little because it was tiring after a day of work and the tension of going to the embassy (although that went well). But, still, I had a weird, lonely tour of Berlin Mitte. And I passed the embassy again...
On Tuesday, it was Mama's birthday, so uncle M., T. and I went home by the S-Bahn and then when we got home, he and uncle B. both chatted with Mama. (I was in the room at first, then retired shyly to my room, also feeling disgruntled because of the heat.)
For Wednesday, a colleague planned to have a beach volleyball game at 8 p.m. near our place of work. I agreed to go, but went home after the end of work and before the volleyball. But while I was going home, the train I was in stopped at a station and didn't pull away again. I guessed that there was a mechanical problem with the doors, which presumably weren't registering properly whether anyone was still entering the train or not. Whatever the problem may have been, for safety's sake all of us passengers had to leave the train. I was already running late to the volleyball game. So, rather than wait for this train to be fixed or for the next train to arrive, I walked to the next station and caught another connection home. Then I took about ten minutes to change, pack a snack to eat, and go out again. In the end I was around half an hour late.
The sport itself was enjoyable. It was also more rigorous exercise than it seemed, stomping around in the sand, because a few of my muscles decided to hurt after half a day or so had passed. And there's a bruise on my right arm that I consider a minor badge of achievement. The main problem was that mosquitoes were biting me. These bites have come back to haunt me and they're the same ones I complained about at the beginning of this post. The other quibble I had was that I was shocked that a few of the male players had their shirts off, which I thought was more than I ever expected to see of my colleagues and perhaps a trifle exhibitionist, although in an innocent sense. Sometimes I surprise myself with my intense Puritan instincts.
Anyway, although at work I had a plentiful store of ice cream, I feel that this weather is bound to make everything seem like a fata morgana, wavering and blurred in the heat. And it has been weird to me to be away from home during part of the past two weekends, rather than 'recharging' silently in my room and perhaps going on smaller expeditions either to shop for things or to swim or walk or play with the siblings.
Although this type of summer heat has been one of the preconditions for many a rebellion and revolt in the course of human history, I am reading the book without feeling any burning desire to start a communistic revolution myself.
This week has been strange in general. On Monday morning I had an errand in the embassy. I went there before at the beginning of the year and wasn't let in, so I am quite anxious now whenever I go there that I will be barred again for reasons I don't understand.
On that evening I was going home, but then I wasn't able to switch to the second U-Bahn line that I always take. At least 3 transit personnel were standing at attention at a barrier of tape at the foot of the stairs to the platform. I was part of the bewildered crowd milling around at the foot. Eventually one of them barked at us that the train wasn't coming and that we should use the Straßenbahn or other transport methods. Later I read that someone had been hit by a train; I am not sure about this, but it made sense to me that the train employee who practically yelled at us was under the stress of trauma. There were ambulances with personnel as well as police scattered around outside the entrance above ground, although I wasn't sure whether the police were there for other reasons. i.e. It was a tourist hotspot and it made sense to have police there to prevent handbag thefts and drug sales.
So I decided to walk home, for an hour and a half. Eventually I did feel like weeping a little because it was tiring after a day of work and the tension of going to the embassy (although that went well). But, still, I had a weird, lonely tour of Berlin Mitte. And I passed the embassy again...
On Tuesday, it was Mama's birthday, so uncle M., T. and I went home by the S-Bahn and then when we got home, he and uncle B. both chatted with Mama. (I was in the room at first, then retired shyly to my room, also feeling disgruntled because of the heat.)
For Wednesday, a colleague planned to have a beach volleyball game at 8 p.m. near our place of work. I agreed to go, but went home after the end of work and before the volleyball. But while I was going home, the train I was in stopped at a station and didn't pull away again. I guessed that there was a mechanical problem with the doors, which presumably weren't registering properly whether anyone was still entering the train or not. Whatever the problem may have been, for safety's sake all of us passengers had to leave the train. I was already running late to the volleyball game. So, rather than wait for this train to be fixed or for the next train to arrive, I walked to the next station and caught another connection home. Then I took about ten minutes to change, pack a snack to eat, and go out again. In the end I was around half an hour late.
The sport itself was enjoyable. It was also more rigorous exercise than it seemed, stomping around in the sand, because a few of my muscles decided to hurt after half a day or so had passed. And there's a bruise on my right arm that I consider a minor badge of achievement. The main problem was that mosquitoes were biting me. These bites have come back to haunt me and they're the same ones I complained about at the beginning of this post. The other quibble I had was that I was shocked that a few of the male players had their shirts off, which I thought was more than I ever expected to see of my colleagues and perhaps a trifle exhibitionist, although in an innocent sense. Sometimes I surprise myself with my intense Puritan instincts.
Anyway, although at work I had a plentiful store of ice cream, I feel that this weather is bound to make everything seem like a fata morgana, wavering and blurred in the heat. And it has been weird to me to be away from home during part of the past two weekends, rather than 'recharging' silently in my room and perhaps going on smaller expeditions either to shop for things or to swim or walk or play with the siblings.
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
A Ramble Relating to American Presidents and Lenin
Lately there has been a mixture between early autumn and summer. The leaves are still green, fall seems far off, and there is a lovely multitude of apricots, red and white and black currants, gooseberries, watermelons, and other summer fruit in the shops. But there have also been many cloudy days and rainy days, so that the summer only seems half-developed.
Yesterday evening I watched the hour-long lecture that ex-President Obama held in South Africa for the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth. It is always strange to step from the hurly-burly of the Trump administration to Obama's (more) inward-looking worldview aimed at being thoughtful, informed or at least curious, and dignified. I suppose that one man is a mature human being, with some feeling of responsibility, while the other is a gigantic, badly-raised child.
While I don't think that all of Obama's insights are trenchant or critical enough, there was food for thought in the speech. It was also strange to see what he says and how he thinks if he doesn't need to suit his ideas and words to an American audience. Even his style changed — he used his speech in part to entertain the audience and not just as a platform to persuade his listeners or to reel off his statements. Instead of the conformity to what seems like mainstream thought, there was originality there, some half-formed thoughts that were the beginnings of ideas and not just summaries of ideas that were shaped to be acceptable. And, of course, although I have never been as awed by his speeches as many others have, I felt the same thing that I did when I heard him in person in Berlin in 2008: he does make his speeches seem as if they went by too quickly.
Of course the speech was startlingly different from the press conference that the current American President held with the Russian President in Helsinki. It reminded me of the verse that Maria Edgeworth quotes in her romance Patronage:
The morning after I watched Obama's speech, I read more of Tariq Ali's book The Dilemmas of Lenin. It was a funny juxtaposition. Both discuss the role of young people in improving society, and about the deep ills of economic inequality. Of course they come to different conclusions. While I admire the Lenin book for its intelligence and being properly steeped in the time it discusses, I think it smooths over a lot of rough edges. Ali presents rather awful people (not Lenin himself, only) as nature's gentlemen, who possess a few trifling quirks which one should politely ignore, while there is something intrinsically degenerate and rotten about the cruelties of the aristocracy. If I had been alive at the Russian leader's time, a little person observing the colossus, I think I'd learn more about Lenin if I were one of the people who were squashed under his boot than if I were one of the fellow wayfarers perched on his hat brim.
To return to the present, Machiavellian maneouvering in politics and diplomacy I find less distasteful than the gross sleaze that is presently fashionable. Misogyny that terrorizes and exploits women, psychologically pathological contempt of gay citizens, reactionary nationalistic fantasies, religion that has few noble or fine aspects, a brainless and heartless refusal to agree that refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are men and brothers (or women and sisters, if you will), shabby treatment of the innocent and the criminal alike in jails and prisons by people who are greater criminals, anti-Semitism (which I'd naively thought was extinct in its most direct forms), toplofty criticisms of Islam by people who should really examine their own ideological flaws first, and lies that rely on the laziness and brainwashing of the propagandized rather than the skill of the propagandizers. To be fair, one cannot impute this all to one country. Large populations of these political diseases exist internationally, regardless of whether the bacterial strain sports the name of Farage, Orban, Duterte, Putin, what's-his-name of the AfD, or Trump. I know that political correctness and the intolerance of virtue-signalling liberals are supposed to be the great evils of this time — but perhaps one can stop inspecting this mote of self-righteousness in the eye of the other and begin examining the beam of sociopolitical despotism in one's own eye.
Yesterday evening I watched the hour-long lecture that ex-President Obama held in South Africa for the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth. It is always strange to step from the hurly-burly of the Trump administration to Obama's (more) inward-looking worldview aimed at being thoughtful, informed or at least curious, and dignified. I suppose that one man is a mature human being, with some feeling of responsibility, while the other is a gigantic, badly-raised child.
While I don't think that all of Obama's insights are trenchant or critical enough, there was food for thought in the speech. It was also strange to see what he says and how he thinks if he doesn't need to suit his ideas and words to an American audience. Even his style changed — he used his speech in part to entertain the audience and not just as a platform to persuade his listeners or to reel off his statements. Instead of the conformity to what seems like mainstream thought, there was originality there, some half-formed thoughts that were the beginnings of ideas and not just summaries of ideas that were shaped to be acceptable. And, of course, although I have never been as awed by his speeches as many others have, I felt the same thing that I did when I heard him in person in Berlin in 2008: he does make his speeches seem as if they went by too quickly.
Of course the speech was startlingly different from the press conference that the current American President held with the Russian President in Helsinki. It reminded me of the verse that Maria Edgeworth quotes in her romance Patronage:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,(From Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," here.)
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
The morning after I watched Obama's speech, I read more of Tariq Ali's book The Dilemmas of Lenin. It was a funny juxtaposition. Both discuss the role of young people in improving society, and about the deep ills of economic inequality. Of course they come to different conclusions. While I admire the Lenin book for its intelligence and being properly steeped in the time it discusses, I think it smooths over a lot of rough edges. Ali presents rather awful people (not Lenin himself, only) as nature's gentlemen, who possess a few trifling quirks which one should politely ignore, while there is something intrinsically degenerate and rotten about the cruelties of the aristocracy. If I had been alive at the Russian leader's time, a little person observing the colossus, I think I'd learn more about Lenin if I were one of the people who were squashed under his boot than if I were one of the fellow wayfarers perched on his hat brim.
To return to the present, Machiavellian maneouvering in politics and diplomacy I find less distasteful than the gross sleaze that is presently fashionable. Misogyny that terrorizes and exploits women, psychologically pathological contempt of gay citizens, reactionary nationalistic fantasies, religion that has few noble or fine aspects, a brainless and heartless refusal to agree that refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are men and brothers (or women and sisters, if you will), shabby treatment of the innocent and the criminal alike in jails and prisons by people who are greater criminals, anti-Semitism (which I'd naively thought was extinct in its most direct forms), toplofty criticisms of Islam by people who should really examine their own ideological flaws first, and lies that rely on the laziness and brainwashing of the propagandized rather than the skill of the propagandizers. To be fair, one cannot impute this all to one country. Large populations of these political diseases exist internationally, regardless of whether the bacterial strain sports the name of Farage, Orban, Duterte, Putin, what's-his-name of the AfD, or Trump. I know that political correctness and the intolerance of virtue-signalling liberals are supposed to be the great evils of this time — but perhaps one can stop inspecting this mote of self-righteousness in the eye of the other and begin examining the beam of sociopolitical despotism in one's own eye.
Monday, June 25, 2018
Live Blog: Iran and Portugal in Saransk
8:37 p.m. (36 minutes into the game) Iran and Portugal are level; neither has scored a goal. Now the free kick after a foul by the Portuguese team... ends in nothing because the Portuguese goalkeeper Rui Patricio catches the ball.
I've never heard of Saransk; per Wikipedia it is the "capital city of the Republic of Mordovia, Russia, [. . .] located in the Volga basin at the confluence of the Saranka and Insar Rivers, about 630 kilometers (390 mi) east of Moscow."
8:39 p.m. (38 minutes into the game) Cristiano Ronaldo is noblemindedly giving away the ball to a teammate as he nears the Iranian goal. I'm touched, impressed, and not a little surprised.
8:41 p.m. (40 minutes into the game) A Portuguese player tackles an Iranian player by grasping both sides of his back from behind as if he were a 4th-grader about to play leapfrog in the classroom. While it looks highly unorthodox to me, the referee doesn't care.
8:44 p.m. (43 minutes into the game) Although I am hardly an expert on the Portuguese team, the levels of cooperation and cohesion here are rather creeping me out. It's like seeing a rather knavish lad piously sitting in front of his homework.
8:46 p.m. (45 minutes into the game) Quaresma, of the Portuguese team, has scored 1-0.
8:49 p.m. Halftime!
9:19 p.m. (60 minutes into the game) Eloquent gesturing, expressive to me of 'What the hell was that?', of the Portuguese coach toward the playing field. The game is still tense; Portugal doesn't seem to have strengthened its lead enough.
9:23 p.m. (63 minutes into the game) A Portuguese player throws in the ball from the side of the field, in front of the politely interested faces of Iranian fans.
9:25 p.m. (65 minutes into the game) Another strong, but inaccurate, shot on the Iranian goal from a fairly large distance by Cristiano Ronaldo.
9:29 p.m. (69 minutes into the game) Quaresma leaves the field, perhaps (I imagine) to prevent his getting a second yellow card in addition to his first. From past World Cups I remember him as being not averse to fouling now and then.
9:32 p.m. (72 minutes into the game) An Iranian player has just fired a good shot a foot or two to the side of the Portuguese goal.
9:35 p.m. (75 minutes into the game) The Iranian coach demanded a video replay of a supposed foul that didn't look too foul-y. The referee jogged over to reprimand the coach.
9:42 p.m. (82 minutes into the game) After replaying one or two different video recordings again, and again, (ad nauseam) on the review device, to determine the truth of events, the referee thrusts a yellow card on Cristiano Ronaldo. He had lashed out his arm toward an Iranian player behind him. It looked impatient, not vicious, and I think he aimed at the chest and not the face. So he didn't get a red card.
9:45 p.m. (85 minutes into the game) Morocco leads Spain 2-1. Awkward.
9:50 p.m. (90+ minutes into the game) The referee investigates if there was a handball. 6 minutes of extra play time. To be ungrateful, I think I've already had enough joy.
9:52 p.m. (90+ 2 minutes into the game) It was, it seems, a handball. 11-metre penalty for Iran. No pressure. Iran equalizes 1-1.
9:54 p.m. (90+ 4 minutes into the game) Iran had another good chance at a goal. Portugal is playing for time, apparently, and switching in a player.
9:55 p.m. (90+ 5 minutes into the game) 2-2 for Spain and Morocco after Spain's goal is dramatically revealed not to be offside.
9:58 p.m. The end of the game. The Iranian players are, partly, exhausted and depressed. The Portuguese players don't look happy. But the two coaches have embraced in a brotherly gesture.
I've never heard of Saransk; per Wikipedia it is the "capital city of the Republic of Mordovia, Russia, [. . .] located in the Volga basin at the confluence of the Saranka and Insar Rivers, about 630 kilometers (390 mi) east of Moscow."
8:39 p.m. (38 minutes into the game) Cristiano Ronaldo is noblemindedly giving away the ball to a teammate as he nears the Iranian goal. I'm touched, impressed, and not a little surprised.
8:41 p.m. (40 minutes into the game) A Portuguese player tackles an Iranian player by grasping both sides of his back from behind as if he were a 4th-grader about to play leapfrog in the classroom. While it looks highly unorthodox to me, the referee doesn't care.
8:44 p.m. (43 minutes into the game) Although I am hardly an expert on the Portuguese team, the levels of cooperation and cohesion here are rather creeping me out. It's like seeing a rather knavish lad piously sitting in front of his homework.
8:46 p.m. (45 minutes into the game) Quaresma, of the Portuguese team, has scored 1-0.
8:49 p.m. Halftime!
9:19 p.m. (60 minutes into the game) Eloquent gesturing, expressive to me of 'What the hell was that?', of the Portuguese coach toward the playing field. The game is still tense; Portugal doesn't seem to have strengthened its lead enough.
9:23 p.m. (63 minutes into the game) A Portuguese player throws in the ball from the side of the field, in front of the politely interested faces of Iranian fans.
9:25 p.m. (65 minutes into the game) Another strong, but inaccurate, shot on the Iranian goal from a fairly large distance by Cristiano Ronaldo.
9:29 p.m. (69 minutes into the game) Quaresma leaves the field, perhaps (I imagine) to prevent his getting a second yellow card in addition to his first. From past World Cups I remember him as being not averse to fouling now and then.
9:32 p.m. (72 minutes into the game) An Iranian player has just fired a good shot a foot or two to the side of the Portuguese goal.
9:35 p.m. (75 minutes into the game) The Iranian coach demanded a video replay of a supposed foul that didn't look too foul-y. The referee jogged over to reprimand the coach.
9:42 p.m. (82 minutes into the game) After replaying one or two different video recordings again, and again, (ad nauseam) on the review device, to determine the truth of events, the referee thrusts a yellow card on Cristiano Ronaldo. He had lashed out his arm toward an Iranian player behind him. It looked impatient, not vicious, and I think he aimed at the chest and not the face. So he didn't get a red card.
9:45 p.m. (85 minutes into the game) Morocco leads Spain 2-1. Awkward.
9:50 p.m. (90+ minutes into the game) The referee investigates if there was a handball. 6 minutes of extra play time. To be ungrateful, I think I've already had enough joy.
9:52 p.m. (90+ 2 minutes into the game) It was, it seems, a handball. 11-metre penalty for Iran. No pressure. Iran equalizes 1-1.
9:54 p.m. (90+ 4 minutes into the game) Iran had another good chance at a goal. Portugal is playing for time, apparently, and switching in a player.
9:55 p.m. (90+ 5 minutes into the game) 2-2 for Spain and Morocco after Spain's goal is dramatically revealed not to be offside.
9:58 p.m. The end of the game. The Iranian players are, partly, exhausted and depressed. The Portuguese players don't look happy. But the two coaches have embraced in a brotherly gesture.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
Live Blog: Korea and Mexico in Rostov
Although World Cup games often happen while I am working, the obstacles are now removed and I can watch them as much as I want to until Monday.
6:16 p.m. (58 minutes into the game) South Korea vs. Mexico is a highly entertaining game. Mexico: The billiard-like passes between the teammates; their lack of the listless passivity that has dragged down most of the best teams in the Cup; the brilliant goalkeeping of Guillermo Ochoa; the ease with which they run at the South Korean goal with three or four opposing players thronging around them, successfully preventing the ball from being taken away... All of this left me starry-eyed after the first half. The South Koreans aren't lousy either, just not the same type of 'soccer gods' who seem to have been playing soccer from their cradles and kicked a ball as soon as they could drink from a baby's bottle.
6:20 p.m. (62 minutes into the game) Hirving Lozano just sprang what looked like 4 feet into the air to catch a pass from a teammate with his feet, in front of the South Korean goal. It didn't bring any advantage for Mexico as far as I could tell, but it was truly beautiful. ..sigh.. But now he's been injured and, although he is no longer getting medical attention, he was hobbling around on the field for a while — and just looked terribly young.
6:23 p.m. (65 minutes into the game) Chicharrito has scored a goal for Mexico, so it's 2-0. This time it wasn't an 11-metre penalty. Apparently there was fouling going on, so it's an 'unclean' goal, per the television commentator, which is sad — I missed that scene.
6:30 p.m. (72 minutes into the game) I wonder if South Korea has had many more shots on Mexico's goal than vice versa. In the first half it looked like the Mexican team was purposely letting the Korean team do a lot of the running. ... Another yellow card after another foul, this time by the Korean team. (I don't remember the Mexican team getting yellow cards, but perhaps I missed one.)
6:34 p.m. (76 minutes into the game) Guillermo Ochoa to the goaltending rescue again... I admire his skills so much, although he just nearly gave the ball away with a too-complacent pass to a teammate at his goal. He has clashed knees with a Korean player and doesn't look very happy.
6:37 p.m. (79 minutes into the game) Yet another handball, a few minutes ago. Another yellow card as a Mexican player lies on the ground, again — a Korean player 'clotheslined' him across the throat...
6:47 p.m. (89 minutes into the game) It looks like a Mexican player has been bonked in the nose by a Korean player's arm... I will say that on the whole the Korean players seem friendly enough before, during and after their teammates' fouls. Speaking of which...
6:50 p.m. (90 +2 minutes into the game) The Korean team has now scored a goal against Mexico. 1-2. I guess it's well-deserved after all their effort. But admittedly I still yelled 'Noooo.'
6:53 p.m. Game ended. The Korean team looks sad, but they didn't do badly — at least in this game; I haven't seen their others.
6:16 p.m. (58 minutes into the game) South Korea vs. Mexico is a highly entertaining game. Mexico: The billiard-like passes between the teammates; their lack of the listless passivity that has dragged down most of the best teams in the Cup; the brilliant goalkeeping of Guillermo Ochoa; the ease with which they run at the South Korean goal with three or four opposing players thronging around them, successfully preventing the ball from being taken away... All of this left me starry-eyed after the first half. The South Koreans aren't lousy either, just not the same type of 'soccer gods' who seem to have been playing soccer from their cradles and kicked a ball as soon as they could drink from a baby's bottle.
6:20 p.m. (62 minutes into the game) Hirving Lozano just sprang what looked like 4 feet into the air to catch a pass from a teammate with his feet, in front of the South Korean goal. It didn't bring any advantage for Mexico as far as I could tell, but it was truly beautiful. ..sigh.. But now he's been injured and, although he is no longer getting medical attention, he was hobbling around on the field for a while — and just looked terribly young.
6:23 p.m. (65 minutes into the game) Chicharrito has scored a goal for Mexico, so it's 2-0. This time it wasn't an 11-metre penalty. Apparently there was fouling going on, so it's an 'unclean' goal, per the television commentator, which is sad — I missed that scene.
6:30 p.m. (72 minutes into the game) I wonder if South Korea has had many more shots on Mexico's goal than vice versa. In the first half it looked like the Mexican team was purposely letting the Korean team do a lot of the running. ... Another yellow card after another foul, this time by the Korean team. (I don't remember the Mexican team getting yellow cards, but perhaps I missed one.)
6:34 p.m. (76 minutes into the game) Guillermo Ochoa to the goaltending rescue again... I admire his skills so much, although he just nearly gave the ball away with a too-complacent pass to a teammate at his goal. He has clashed knees with a Korean player and doesn't look very happy.
6:37 p.m. (79 minutes into the game) Yet another handball, a few minutes ago. Another yellow card as a Mexican player lies on the ground, again — a Korean player 'clotheslined' him across the throat...
6:47 p.m. (89 minutes into the game) It looks like a Mexican player has been bonked in the nose by a Korean player's arm... I will say that on the whole the Korean players seem friendly enough before, during and after their teammates' fouls. Speaking of which...
6:50 p.m. (90 +2 minutes into the game) The Korean team has now scored a goal against Mexico. 1-2. I guess it's well-deserved after all their effort. But admittedly I still yelled 'Noooo.'
6:53 p.m. Game ended. The Korean team looks sad, but they didn't do badly — at least in this game; I haven't seen their others.
Saturday, June 16, 2018
Stravinsky, Tagliatelle, and World Cup Fever
The leaf-petals of linden trees have turned golden and are being swept from the trees in an early harbinger of autumn. It was the perfect time to go to Unter den Linden for the free open-air concert, Staatsoper für Alle, led by Daniel Barenboim as always and played by the Staatskapelle. This year the programme spread over two days, and today it was the overture from Rossini's Barber of Seville, Claude Debussy's Iberia, and Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. I leaned against the stone façade of the hotel beside St. Hedwig's Cathedral, and observed all I could from about four car-lengths behind the raised stage. It was covered by a barn-like shape of a transparent roof that let the blue sky and white piling clouds through the front, and the (literally) stately buildings of the State Opera Unter den Linden and the Humboldt University Faculty of Law to the right and left. The percussionists' black rolly chairs at the back of the orchestra were more than six feet above the ground.
***
After I returned home, Ge. and I went shopping and brought back, amongst other things, chocolate-covered popsicles. And he made ice cream milkshakes with seasonal strawberries and peaches. I tried a recipe from The Naked Chef: tagliatelle with zucchini, lemon and basil. I did not, sadly, hand-make the tagliatelle.
***
The FIFA World Cup is afoot, but I don't think I have watched a whole game yet. The best ones I partly watched were Spain vs. Portugal yesterday, and today's Argentina vs. Iceland, which was also a corker. I liked the thoughtful approach that Spain and Iceland had.
In Canada I never knew when the World Cup was happening. But I do like the general celebration here, and the internationalism. On Friday, the public viewing amenities were packed outside restaurants and bars — roaring televised crowds and pontificating commentators, groups of engaged fans talking and watching large screens in agog clusters, drinks in tall glasses, strings of flags from dozens of nationalities fluttering over the sidewalk. The faces of German's best and brightest soccer stars are plastered on billboards for a large sports apparel company, all along the Alexanderplatz train platform that I use to get home. A few German-Turkish fans seem to be celebrating Germany enthusiastically, too; Turkey isn't in the tournament, as far as I know.
Today the restaurant terraces were emptier. But plastic leis in Germany's red, gold and black were sold outside a dollar store. People walked by at the concert in Argentinian team jerseys with Messi's 10 on the back. A black SUV parked near the Mall of Berlin had German flags beside the windshield. A display board near Potsdamer Platz mentioned that traffic was shut off around the Street of the 17th of June, for the huge fan area near Brandenburg Gate, which I believe can hold over a million people. (The area will open tomorrow for our game vs. Mexico.) And I heard a few howls of euphoria coming from the street beneath our apartment when Denmark scored against Peru this evening.
***
In the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and before the concert today, I have been re-reading a story in modern Greek and remembering with increasing vividness how much and why I regretted it before. As a fishmonger might become an expert in several variants of fish stink the more often he is around fish that meets the date of expiry, I feel that my amateur attempts at writing fiction have made me an expert in several variants of writing that stinks. I've learned by doing. And I feel that my expertise is pertinent here.
Also, I've struggled with another page or so of the astrophysics book, which was about calculating properties of different depths of stars that have radiative cores and convective envelopes. But I had an easier time with the Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary that I quoted from in the last blog entry. Aristotle's Politics I haven't continued yet after my singleminded immersions into Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Wolff's Fire and Fury (good companion reads), but I have slipped Tariq Ali's Dilemmas of Lenin into the work bag and hope to read it after Voltaire. The Voltaire is an abridged translation, so I won't count it as part of my paper-books-read-this-year tally, which is doing well. On Friday I roamed a bookshop I'd never been in before, and ended up splurging on a black leather-bound, gilt-edged 19th-century edition of Montaigne's essays, fourth volume. I feel that I should read it soon, as well, but perhaps not in trains for fear of damaging it.
But I wish to relax tomorrow. I feel overstimulated, hypercritical, and a little grumpy, likely because of the long walks to and from the concert, the excitement of the concert itself and of the World Cup, and the shopping and cooking on top of that. I played the piano — Spanish Dances by Granados — but not long enough to mellow me. On Monday I'll take part in a meeting at 9:45 a.m., which (I've just realized) means that I must be at work earlier. But I'll also be confronting the bad showing I'll have made in the World Cup office betting pool that a human resources colleague has set up — I thought Peru and Spain would win their games, and would never have dreamed that Iceland would tie Argentina. After reading the American statistician Nate Silver's website, it looks like my predictions for tomorrow were also way off. My bad World Cup guesses are the least of my worries, and in fact the resulting discussions should be quite fun.
***
Having gone on at self-indulgent length, I think I'll stop here.
After I returned home, Ge. and I went shopping and brought back, amongst other things, chocolate-covered popsicles. And he made ice cream milkshakes with seasonal strawberries and peaches. I tried a recipe from The Naked Chef: tagliatelle with zucchini, lemon and basil. I did not, sadly, hand-make the tagliatelle.
***
The FIFA World Cup is afoot, but I don't think I have watched a whole game yet. The best ones I partly watched were Spain vs. Portugal yesterday, and today's Argentina vs. Iceland, which was also a corker. I liked the thoughtful approach that Spain and Iceland had.
In Canada I never knew when the World Cup was happening. But I do like the general celebration here, and the internationalism. On Friday, the public viewing amenities were packed outside restaurants and bars — roaring televised crowds and pontificating commentators, groups of engaged fans talking and watching large screens in agog clusters, drinks in tall glasses, strings of flags from dozens of nationalities fluttering over the sidewalk. The faces of German's best and brightest soccer stars are plastered on billboards for a large sports apparel company, all along the Alexanderplatz train platform that I use to get home. A few German-Turkish fans seem to be celebrating Germany enthusiastically, too; Turkey isn't in the tournament, as far as I know.
Today the restaurant terraces were emptier. But plastic leis in Germany's red, gold and black were sold outside a dollar store. People walked by at the concert in Argentinian team jerseys with Messi's 10 on the back. A black SUV parked near the Mall of Berlin had German flags beside the windshield. A display board near Potsdamer Platz mentioned that traffic was shut off around the Street of the 17th of June, for the huge fan area near Brandenburg Gate, which I believe can hold over a million people. (The area will open tomorrow for our game vs. Mexico.) And I heard a few howls of euphoria coming from the street beneath our apartment when Denmark scored against Peru this evening.
***
In the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and before the concert today, I have been re-reading a story in modern Greek and remembering with increasing vividness how much and why I regretted it before. As a fishmonger might become an expert in several variants of fish stink the more often he is around fish that meets the date of expiry, I feel that my amateur attempts at writing fiction have made me an expert in several variants of writing that stinks. I've learned by doing. And I feel that my expertise is pertinent here.
Also, I've struggled with another page or so of the astrophysics book, which was about calculating properties of different depths of stars that have radiative cores and convective envelopes. But I had an easier time with the Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary that I quoted from in the last blog entry. Aristotle's Politics I haven't continued yet after my singleminded immersions into Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Wolff's Fire and Fury (good companion reads), but I have slipped Tariq Ali's Dilemmas of Lenin into the work bag and hope to read it after Voltaire. The Voltaire is an abridged translation, so I won't count it as part of my paper-books-read-this-year tally, which is doing well. On Friday I roamed a bookshop I'd never been in before, and ended up splurging on a black leather-bound, gilt-edged 19th-century edition of Montaigne's essays, fourth volume. I feel that I should read it soon, as well, but perhaps not in trains for fear of damaging it.
But I wish to relax tomorrow. I feel overstimulated, hypercritical, and a little grumpy, likely because of the long walks to and from the concert, the excitement of the concert itself and of the World Cup, and the shopping and cooking on top of that. I played the piano — Spanish Dances by Granados — but not long enough to mellow me. On Monday I'll take part in a meeting at 9:45 a.m., which (I've just realized) means that I must be at work earlier. But I'll also be confronting the bad showing I'll have made in the World Cup office betting pool that a human resources colleague has set up — I thought Peru and Spain would win their games, and would never have dreamed that Iceland would tie Argentina. After reading the American statistician Nate Silver's website, it looks like my predictions for tomorrow were also way off. My bad World Cup guesses are the least of my worries, and in fact the resulting discussions should be quite fun.
***
Having gone on at self-indulgent length, I think I'll stop here.
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Voltaire on England's Protector and on Relief From Remorse
 |
| Newton, Emilie du Chatelet (the Muse) and Voltaire Frontispiece from Elémens de la philosophie de Newton (ca. 1738) via Wikimedia Commons |
Because I have already 'spammed' the Lighthouse blog with Voltaire quotations, I thought that I would vary the entertainment and offer the quotations here instead.
For whichever reason, I adore Voltaire's one-sided feud with the historical figure of Oliver Cromwell. One of the French philosopher's greatest flaws from a philosophical standpoint is, in my view, his belittling attitude toward every foreign religion. But I did enjoy this paragraph:
Nearly all the officers of his army were enthusiasts who carried the New Testament at their saddle-bow: in the army as in the parliament men spoke only of making Babylon fall, of establishing the religion in Jerusalem, of shattering the colossus. Among so many madmen Cromwell ceased to be mad"Cromwell I" in Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, H.I. Woolf, ed. and transl. (New York: Knopf, 1924) [Hanover College]
I also found the first sentence of Voltaire's essay on "Expiation" deeply touching and poetic, as I believe he calculatingly intended it should be.
Maybe the most beautiful institution of antiquity is that solemn ceremony which repressed crimes by warning that they must be punished, and which calmed the despair of the guilty by making them atone for their transgressions by penitences.It wasn't the punishment part that struck me, but of course the part about healing the harm that has been inflicted on one's soul, through true expiation.
(Side note: I don't sympathize with Voltaire's adulation of Sir Isaac Newton. Bertrand Russell — if I remember rightly — and my father both believed that Newton was a bit of a jerk, and I've read nothing that persuades me otherwise. The illustration above is also pretty saccharine. I wonder if Voltaire was smoking something whenever he read or wrote of the Englishman.)
Fire and Fury, in June
Yesterday I read the last page of Fire and Fury, the memoir by Michael Wolff of all the competition for positions for one's self, favours for allies or friends, and success for one's own ideas and initiatives, of the White House during the first months of the Trump administration.
It is a bit dated already, but although I've read it half a year after the publication date there was gossip in it that I'd missed. There was mention of John Bolton's escapade in a hotel, for example — John Bolton, of course, being the heavily mustached individual whom George W. Bush appointed as Ambassador to the UN after Bolton had said that if a few levels of the UN Building were taken off, no one would care. Now he is the National Security Adviser.
(I see that even Jimmy Carter has aired his opinion of the National Security Adviser appointment:
Wolff mentions few details, but the episode became part of the government hearing when John Bolton was being considered as the UN Ambassador. In Kyrgyzstan two decades ago, an American public relations expert had written a letter to her employers at USAID saying that the company that Bolton worked for wasn't providing enough money. Bolton took it personally; he
"Bolton 'would bang on my door and shout'" [The Independent] (April 24, 2005)
In Fire and Fury's White House, such behaviour, temperamental unreliability, and perhaps incompetence for the job a person is given, are quite the ordinary course of things.
It's described in Wolff's zippy, anecdotal, and, on occasion, quite witty and epigrammatical prose.
It is a bit dated already, but although I've read it half a year after the publication date there was gossip in it that I'd missed. There was mention of John Bolton's escapade in a hotel, for example — John Bolton, of course, being the heavily mustached individual whom George W. Bush appointed as Ambassador to the UN after Bolton had said that if a few levels of the UN Building were taken off, no one would care. Now he is the National Security Adviser.
(I see that even Jimmy Carter has aired his opinion of the National Security Adviser appointment:
When USA Today's Washington bureau chief Susan Page asked the Georgia Democrat and former president what advice he would give to Trump on North Korea, Carter replied: "You mean, other than fire John Bolton? That would be my first advice.""Jimmy Carter: Trump's John Bolton pick one of his 'worst mistakes'" [CNN] (March 26, 2018))
Wolff mentions few details, but the episode became part of the government hearing when John Bolton was being considered as the UN Ambassador. In Kyrgyzstan two decades ago, an American public relations expert had written a letter to her employers at USAID saying that the company that Bolton worked for wasn't providing enough money. Bolton took it personally; he
banged on her hotel room door and ranted at her over a two-week period in 1994. He also made disparaging remarks about her weight, accused her of theft and even questioned her sexuality.Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, was also worried about Bolton being disagreeable toward his subordinates at other workplaces.
"I was alone in the hotel room. It was easy for him to drop by and bang on the door, trying to pressure me until I broke," she said.
"Bolton 'would bang on my door and shout'" [The Independent] (April 24, 2005)
In Fire and Fury's White House, such behaviour, temperamental unreliability, and perhaps incompetence for the job a person is given, are quite the ordinary course of things.
It's described in Wolff's zippy, anecdotal, and, on occasion, quite witty and epigrammatical prose.
Sunday, June 03, 2018
A Cloudy, Lazy Summer's Saturday
Yesterday felt like one of the longest days of my life, although not in a bad way. I woke up before 10 a.m., and at some point ate breakfast with the family. On the weekends we generally have a bag of three croissants, two raisin buns (these are a recent development), a pumpkin seed bun and perhaps one or two other whole grain buns, a poppy seed bun, and two or three plain oval buns with the cut on top which the Berliner calls Schrippen. At present we have orange marmalade, rose hip jam, honey, pepper salami, hams and cheeses to put on top.
***
***
In the early afternoon my sister and I went to the Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg, enjoying the cloudy weather after the heat of the past week, and conversed while perched on a wooden fence that overlooks the waterfall. Since she had her bike along, it would have been more trouble to reach the top of the Kreuzberg hill, with its monument to the Napoleonic Wars at the head of a double staircase, but there were many tourists and residents (speaking Australian-accented English, Turkish, etc.) who did go to the trouble. A dog was standing at the side of the waterfall on its owner's leash, and three or so people sat and read books on the rocky landings, as twin ranks of green trees stretched at the foot of the hill, along a little-trafficked boulevard where cyclists rode down the centres of their lanes.
I have rarely seen happier plant growth in Berlin: a round-leafed plantain grew large in the gravelly soil, fresh paler green leaves at the tips of a large boxwood were thriving, and a yew was shedding scraps of golden plant matter into the frothing brown water. And the late-leafed plane trees were spread out to the finest extent of their crowns. The lawns were tall and misty and pleasingly mysterious, and one could imagine gnats dreaming and wandering in the shadows at their edges.
Now and then my sister and I would move to the side, so that people could take pictures of themselves, families, and friends, in front of this backdrop.
***
After that exercise both of us felt uncomfortably warm after all, and (to perpetrate a pun) warmed to the idea of visiting the Schlachtensee. We prodded a brother to come along, and then rode a train out more and more into the southwestern edge of Berlin.
At the lake, we padded along the trail, amongst the white-flowering jasmine bushes and the joggers and the cyclists, before we found a nook at the earthy banks.
There we hung up our towels and clothing. And we trod out into the water, passed a beach ball to and fro until we were happy enough with the water temperature to be submerged up to the neck, and practiced beginners' breast strokes and doggy-paddling and underwater handstands. Ducklings above the water surface and fish (not much longer than a sardine) beneath the water surface frolicked nearby. Far away a white dead tree trunk leaned against the masses of evergreen and deciduous trees, above lighter contingents of reeds at the water's edge.
It was grey weather. The water felt cold at first, too, in the absence of direct sunshine. But despite what felt like a threat of thunder, lightning, or torrents of rain, the conditions were mild even long after a cool breeze arose and we decided to take the train home.
***
Aside from being in the mood to venture outside, I was in the frame of mind to cook, specifically 'Italian' food. I prepared two salads: one a fennel and radish salad with a lemon juice and olive oil vinaigrette after Jamie Oliver, the other, an inaccurate caprese salad of lamb's lettuce, mozzarella and tomato with a darker vinaigrette. We ate these with leftover baked things from breakfast. Then I made white Beelitz asparagus, topped with melted butter and salt and pepper; that, I admit, is not Italian at all. Lastly, I mixed mascarpone together with vanilla sugar and orange peel to eat with the blueberries, raspberries and strawberries that we had.
It was the first time I've knowingly eaten mascarpone, which I did not much like until I had added a lot of the orange peel. It has made me less enthusiastic about making a traditional tirami su, which I've thought in any case might be tastier although less noble if it had a semolina pudding lightened with vanilla custard in it instead of mascarpone or whipped cream. But, to be frank, I've bored my family horribly with my longing for a traditional tirami su for at least two decades, so I should take the plunge, try it and 'get it out of my system' soon.
I also bought white wine (from Italy, a soave) and cooled it in one side of the sink. Perhaps that was pretentious; if it was, I was horribly punished for it when family members (who shall go unnamed) put a used bowl and two dirty spoons in the basin, and mascarpone scum bobbed merrily alongside. I gave up, retrieved the bottle from the sink and put it back in the refrigerator. And we drank it with take-out pizza and sorbet in the late evening, and although I've found it both useless and expensive to even consider becoming the least bit precious about wines, I think it tasted rather good with the lemon sorbet.
I have rarely seen happier plant growth in Berlin: a round-leafed plantain grew large in the gravelly soil, fresh paler green leaves at the tips of a large boxwood were thriving, and a yew was shedding scraps of golden plant matter into the frothing brown water. And the late-leafed plane trees were spread out to the finest extent of their crowns. The lawns were tall and misty and pleasingly mysterious, and one could imagine gnats dreaming and wandering in the shadows at their edges.
Now and then my sister and I would move to the side, so that people could take pictures of themselves, families, and friends, in front of this backdrop.
***
After that exercise both of us felt uncomfortably warm after all, and (to perpetrate a pun) warmed to the idea of visiting the Schlachtensee. We prodded a brother to come along, and then rode a train out more and more into the southwestern edge of Berlin.
At the lake, we padded along the trail, amongst the white-flowering jasmine bushes and the joggers and the cyclists, before we found a nook at the earthy banks.
There we hung up our towels and clothing. And we trod out into the water, passed a beach ball to and fro until we were happy enough with the water temperature to be submerged up to the neck, and practiced beginners' breast strokes and doggy-paddling and underwater handstands. Ducklings above the water surface and fish (not much longer than a sardine) beneath the water surface frolicked nearby. Far away a white dead tree trunk leaned against the masses of evergreen and deciduous trees, above lighter contingents of reeds at the water's edge.
It was grey weather. The water felt cold at first, too, in the absence of direct sunshine. But despite what felt like a threat of thunder, lightning, or torrents of rain, the conditions were mild even long after a cool breeze arose and we decided to take the train home.
***
Aside from being in the mood to venture outside, I was in the frame of mind to cook, specifically 'Italian' food. I prepared two salads: one a fennel and radish salad with a lemon juice and olive oil vinaigrette after Jamie Oliver, the other, an inaccurate caprese salad of lamb's lettuce, mozzarella and tomato with a darker vinaigrette. We ate these with leftover baked things from breakfast. Then I made white Beelitz asparagus, topped with melted butter and salt and pepper; that, I admit, is not Italian at all. Lastly, I mixed mascarpone together with vanilla sugar and orange peel to eat with the blueberries, raspberries and strawberries that we had.
It was the first time I've knowingly eaten mascarpone, which I did not much like until I had added a lot of the orange peel. It has made me less enthusiastic about making a traditional tirami su, which I've thought in any case might be tastier although less noble if it had a semolina pudding lightened with vanilla custard in it instead of mascarpone or whipped cream. But, to be frank, I've bored my family horribly with my longing for a traditional tirami su for at least two decades, so I should take the plunge, try it and 'get it out of my system' soon.
I also bought white wine (from Italy, a soave) and cooled it in one side of the sink. Perhaps that was pretentious; if it was, I was horribly punished for it when family members (who shall go unnamed) put a used bowl and two dirty spoons in the basin, and mascarpone scum bobbed merrily alongside. I gave up, retrieved the bottle from the sink and put it back in the refrigerator. And we drank it with take-out pizza and sorbet in the late evening, and although I've found it both useless and expensive to even consider becoming the least bit precious about wines, I think it tasted rather good with the lemon sorbet.
Sunday, May 20, 2018
A Meditation on May Twentieth
The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
John Donne, Meditation XVII
via Wikisource
***
It is one year ago today that Papa died. I thought that also on this blog I wanted to post a tribute. Rather than sketch him as a father or as a person, which is self-indulgent and also bound to fall short of his true self, unless the description is lucky or very detailed; and rather than quote him in his own words — it's a tough task to find these, since he was modest in their use; I have fallen back on the above excerpt of a sermon from a 16th-to-17th-century English poet and clergyman.
John Donne, Meditation XVII
via Wikisource
***
It is one year ago today that Papa died. I thought that also on this blog I wanted to post a tribute. Rather than sketch him as a father or as a person, which is self-indulgent and also bound to fall short of his true self, unless the description is lucky or very detailed; and rather than quote him in his own words — it's a tough task to find these, since he was modest in their use; I have fallen back on the above excerpt of a sermon from a 16th-to-17th-century English poet and clergyman.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
U-Bahn Reading: Intersecting Book Spheres
In the past week I've unexpectedly wanted to write a great deal, after feeling like there was not a single sentence in me for days. It has been an inconvenience because I've written and therefore tended to go to sleep far later than ordinary. In every other respect, however, I feel rather smug about it. Also, in the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn I am managing to read books from front cover to back cover with astonishing speed, and also feel, frankly, smug about that.
Much of my fear of losing the motivation and help to explore fields of knowledge in detail, now that I am no longer studying, has been banished. Reading on my own — and letting the events and the pressure of work and news-reading, to some degree, illustrate or lend brilliancy to the reading — works. Also, the interdisciplinary mixture and meetings of fields at unexpected junctures that I enjoyed during the happiest years at university, when I had time and energy to take any course or visit any lecture my heart desired, exists again whenever I read multiple books.
As for what I am reading, Joseph Roth's reporting from the 1920s skirts the edges of the world of Federico García Lorca; Aristotle's Politics and Augustus's Res Gestae dig into the same uncertainties and questions that the governments under whom Roth and Lorca were forced to live, attempted to address in their own ways.
And in these books there is a hidden or revealed preoccupation with who is the 'Untermensch' in any relevant state, and if the state treats them well. Of course Augustus, for example, is not famed for a bleeding-heart philosophy about his meekest subjects. But what he doesn't say about vanquished peoples and about the underclass in Rome (proper and greater) speaks for itself too.
Voltaire jumps back and forth between old and modern history, philosophy, human geography, and also political and social observation, and in his way observes bits of the worlds of all the other books.
The astrophysics textbook, I'll admit, is largely sealed in its own world, although the significance of the advances in nuclear and other physics in the first half of the 20th century (and their political and social effects) rings through the text quietly but firmly. I am also reading a modern Greek educational novel that I already read in university and that I would not classify as much of a 'text.'
But even the books that are less robust or detailed are instructive because of the footnotes in the editions I've happened to come across. The Greek book is educational because it is written in Greek and I need to expand my knowledge for the sake of knowledge and because of my new Greek colleague!
***
Earlier today I've hopped briefly onto the piano and the violin — on the piano, a Scarlatti sonata and Spanish dances by Enrique Granados. On the violin I was cheeky and played bits and pieces of Bach's violin concerto in E major. It was, of course, above my abilities although the notes themselves are not so hard to hit. I also interpreted a G major scale that was not entirely in key. And there was a visit from godfather M***. I haven't set foot outside the apartment yet, but I intend to. It's Ascension Day, after all, and due to the federal holiday, no other duties prevent it.
Much of my fear of losing the motivation and help to explore fields of knowledge in detail, now that I am no longer studying, has been banished. Reading on my own — and letting the events and the pressure of work and news-reading, to some degree, illustrate or lend brilliancy to the reading — works. Also, the interdisciplinary mixture and meetings of fields at unexpected junctures that I enjoyed during the happiest years at university, when I had time and energy to take any course or visit any lecture my heart desired, exists again whenever I read multiple books.
As for what I am reading, Joseph Roth's reporting from the 1920s skirts the edges of the world of Federico García Lorca; Aristotle's Politics and Augustus's Res Gestae dig into the same uncertainties and questions that the governments under whom Roth and Lorca were forced to live, attempted to address in their own ways.
And in these books there is a hidden or revealed preoccupation with who is the 'Untermensch' in any relevant state, and if the state treats them well. Of course Augustus, for example, is not famed for a bleeding-heart philosophy about his meekest subjects. But what he doesn't say about vanquished peoples and about the underclass in Rome (proper and greater) speaks for itself too.
Voltaire jumps back and forth between old and modern history, philosophy, human geography, and also political and social observation, and in his way observes bits of the worlds of all the other books.
The astrophysics textbook, I'll admit, is largely sealed in its own world, although the significance of the advances in nuclear and other physics in the first half of the 20th century (and their political and social effects) rings through the text quietly but firmly. I am also reading a modern Greek educational novel that I already read in university and that I would not classify as much of a 'text.'
But even the books that are less robust or detailed are instructive because of the footnotes in the editions I've happened to come across. The Greek book is educational because it is written in Greek and I need to expand my knowledge for the sake of knowledge and because of my new Greek colleague!
***
Earlier today I've hopped briefly onto the piano and the violin — on the piano, a Scarlatti sonata and Spanish dances by Enrique Granados. On the violin I was cheeky and played bits and pieces of Bach's violin concerto in E major. It was, of course, above my abilities although the notes themselves are not so hard to hit. I also interpreted a G major scale that was not entirely in key. And there was a visit from godfather M***. I haven't set foot outside the apartment yet, but I intend to. It's Ascension Day, after all, and due to the federal holiday, no other duties prevent it.
Sunday, May 06, 2018
A Work-Related Tiger Turns Out to Be a Paper Tiger
Last weekend I was extremely stressed after an impossibly large workload was piled onto my team of five. I had to balance the training of a new colleague and answering of questions from within my team, with the regular daily tasks, surprise questions and requests from colleagues in other teams, and tasks associated with entering new clients' merchandise into our database.
After talks with angelically patient family members during the weekend, I drew up a mental list of observations and potential solutions to the situation. Keeping in mind Papa's advice on preparing presentations for school or university, I tried to have a list of keywords or main points that were most important to me, that should be mentioned. On Monday I asked the higher-ups in the company who set my team's tasks to meet with me, which they kindly did. And, much to my surprise, they agreed with what I said and also cleared up points that much reduced the feeling of pressure.
(Another colleague, whom I regard a bit as the older brother I never had and whom I'd asked for advice about the whole scenario, sat in on the meeting to assist if it was necessary. That was also very kind.)
I was afraid before the meeting that the large workload may have happened because I'd done something wrong, like my time management. But it seemed that my time management was, for once, not the main problem.
Therefore I was euphoric on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday — unlike in Canada where I guess the spectrum of Communism, Marxist-Leninism, and self-declared Socialism has less of a foothold, May 1st is a federal holiday here and we had the day off — I calmed down again. Since then I've been still stressed but happy.
After talks with angelically patient family members during the weekend, I drew up a mental list of observations and potential solutions to the situation. Keeping in mind Papa's advice on preparing presentations for school or university, I tried to have a list of keywords or main points that were most important to me, that should be mentioned. On Monday I asked the higher-ups in the company who set my team's tasks to meet with me, which they kindly did. And, much to my surprise, they agreed with what I said and also cleared up points that much reduced the feeling of pressure.
(Another colleague, whom I regard a bit as the older brother I never had and whom I'd asked for advice about the whole scenario, sat in on the meeting to assist if it was necessary. That was also very kind.)
I was afraid before the meeting that the large workload may have happened because I'd done something wrong, like my time management. But it seemed that my time management was, for once, not the main problem.
Therefore I was euphoric on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday — unlike in Canada where I guess the spectrum of Communism, Marxist-Leninism, and self-declared Socialism has less of a foothold, May 1st is a federal holiday here and we had the day off — I calmed down again. Since then I've been still stressed but happy.
Saturday, April 28, 2018
Tiny Successes and Monumental Failures on the Violin
Right now I am sitting in my room listening to semi-finals of the Menuhin Competition on YouTube — recorded fewer than two weeks ago in Geneva. It makes me antsy in some ways; one can't help but be impressed otherwise, unless one is stricken by envy. I have to admit that I enjoyed the Mozart, Bach, Kreisler, Suk and Dvorak in the first round — although I felt that the approaches to Mozart and Bach were 'identikit' amongst the older violinists — more than the hyper-sophisticated Brahms, Piazzolla, etc. of the second round.
***
I haven't gotten around to practicing the violin much in the past month. In my mind I am still on a practice schedule and enjoy stealing 10 (or, lately, 5) minutes from my morning preparations to achieve at least a little. But, in reality, I need to leave earlier for work because of the new office location in any case; and my workload is in such a state, and my responsibility as 'team leader' is such, that I can't justify arriving only just on time; and I don't want to play the violin before 8 a.m. for the sake of the neighbours. So that schedule is barely happening.
But I feel that the interruption of my regular practice (which leads to broader-minded reflection); as well as observations that I've gathered from the competition; have led to mental leaps of understanding. For example, I am not supposed to saw my entire arm at a figuratively obtuse angle to the strings, but use my wrist to help draw the bow. I saw the finger-pulling and wrist-waggling technique in a YouTube instructional video before, but hadn't really grasped the genius of this concept. Now I am able to pass the bow straight(!) across the strings, which also helps me to play with a decent tone.
In retrospect, it is entertaining, but kind of awful too, to imagine how I played when I tried out at the amateur orchestra's practice in February. It intimidated me from the outset, because I'm a low-level employee at a pretty democratic tech start-up, a newcomer to the orchestra with no 'in' with anyone else, with rusty German. The musicians were, as far as I could tell, white-collar professionals 0.5 to 4 decades older, and partly extremely German with the critical-minded lack of democratic feeling that this entails. (I emailed the concert master afterward, and received a polite reply saying that 'one had the impression that I was somewhat overtasked.' That's fair enough; it was other things that hurt my feelings.) They were also traumatized by a civil war within their orchestra and altogether I popped in at an anxious time. At times I've rarely felt more like people were exerting mental voodoo powers wishing me away, despite the kindness of others. Either way, I don't want to picture the embarrassing or insulting(?) way my more harebrained efforts in life look like from the perspective of critical onlookers...
(On top of my overwhelmingly exact violin bowing form, I also found out that I seemed to have no rosin left on the bow after the 'intermission' in the rehearsal ended. So when I set my bow to the string, it startled me by sliding off. I could barely produce a tone above a scratch. And that was not a reassuring precondition with which to start a fast movement in a Beethoven symphony that I was sight-reading after not taking violin lessons in 20 years. Thankfully the scratches were inaudible amongst the superior music of everyone else. But I already realized at the time how silly that was.)
When I practice at home, sometimes I go through the Suzuki instructional notebooks as well as playing scales or easy pieces in other notebooks or the first Kreutzer études. I like 'reconnecting' to the Suzuki classes I started when I was five years old. I remember random things in the course of playing. For example, I remember that the teacher kept criticizing the height at which I held my elbow; the height is supposed to vary with the string that one is striking at the time; and so I keep correcting myself in imitation. The pieces which I'm playing through are each a 'blast from the past,' too; some I've barely ever played since before 1996, so it's like lifting the glass dome off a museum piece that has been kept untouched in half a century.
It's brutal having a harsh taskmaster sitting inside one's head, ever on the alert for a failure. But the music school hasn't gotten back to me about my request for lessons, as far as I know. (There's an infinitesimal possibility something landed in the spam folder unnoticed.) And so I haven't had a teacher who can criticize me from a comfortable distance and well. I also don't know if I want lessons at present. Firstly, because of the aforementioned work situation; and secondly, because of the constant fear I have of not being able to like music any more if I'm taught it. (Which is no reflection on past music teachers — just a present paranoia.) So I'm stuck nagging myself and basically needing to imagine how I'm doing things wrong.
Not to sound too masochistic or self-pitying, but I do that nagging and imagining all the time about everything anyway — except in ballet class, when I can count on the teacher to criticize the whole class with frequency, vigour, and knowledge, and I am blissfully free of the responsibility.
***
I haven't gotten around to practicing the violin much in the past month. In my mind I am still on a practice schedule and enjoy stealing 10 (or, lately, 5) minutes from my morning preparations to achieve at least a little. But, in reality, I need to leave earlier for work because of the new office location in any case; and my workload is in such a state, and my responsibility as 'team leader' is such, that I can't justify arriving only just on time; and I don't want to play the violin before 8 a.m. for the sake of the neighbours. So that schedule is barely happening.
But I feel that the interruption of my regular practice (which leads to broader-minded reflection); as well as observations that I've gathered from the competition; have led to mental leaps of understanding. For example, I am not supposed to saw my entire arm at a figuratively obtuse angle to the strings, but use my wrist to help draw the bow. I saw the finger-pulling and wrist-waggling technique in a YouTube instructional video before, but hadn't really grasped the genius of this concept. Now I am able to pass the bow straight(!) across the strings, which also helps me to play with a decent tone.
In retrospect, it is entertaining, but kind of awful too, to imagine how I played when I tried out at the amateur orchestra's practice in February. It intimidated me from the outset, because I'm a low-level employee at a pretty democratic tech start-up, a newcomer to the orchestra with no 'in' with anyone else, with rusty German. The musicians were, as far as I could tell, white-collar professionals 0.5 to 4 decades older, and partly extremely German with the critical-minded lack of democratic feeling that this entails. (I emailed the concert master afterward, and received a polite reply saying that 'one had the impression that I was somewhat overtasked.' That's fair enough; it was other things that hurt my feelings.) They were also traumatized by a civil war within their orchestra and altogether I popped in at an anxious time. At times I've rarely felt more like people were exerting mental voodoo powers wishing me away, despite the kindness of others. Either way, I don't want to picture the embarrassing or insulting(?) way my more harebrained efforts in life look like from the perspective of critical onlookers...
(On top of my overwhelmingly exact violin bowing form, I also found out that I seemed to have no rosin left on the bow after the 'intermission' in the rehearsal ended. So when I set my bow to the string, it startled me by sliding off. I could barely produce a tone above a scratch. And that was not a reassuring precondition with which to start a fast movement in a Beethoven symphony that I was sight-reading after not taking violin lessons in 20 years. Thankfully the scratches were inaudible amongst the superior music of everyone else. But I already realized at the time how silly that was.)
When I practice at home, sometimes I go through the Suzuki instructional notebooks as well as playing scales or easy pieces in other notebooks or the first Kreutzer études. I like 'reconnecting' to the Suzuki classes I started when I was five years old. I remember random things in the course of playing. For example, I remember that the teacher kept criticizing the height at which I held my elbow; the height is supposed to vary with the string that one is striking at the time; and so I keep correcting myself in imitation. The pieces which I'm playing through are each a 'blast from the past,' too; some I've barely ever played since before 1996, so it's like lifting the glass dome off a museum piece that has been kept untouched in half a century.
It's brutal having a harsh taskmaster sitting inside one's head, ever on the alert for a failure. But the music school hasn't gotten back to me about my request for lessons, as far as I know. (There's an infinitesimal possibility something landed in the spam folder unnoticed.) And so I haven't had a teacher who can criticize me from a comfortable distance and well. I also don't know if I want lessons at present. Firstly, because of the aforementioned work situation; and secondly, because of the constant fear I have of not being able to like music any more if I'm taught it. (Which is no reflection on past music teachers — just a present paranoia.) So I'm stuck nagging myself and basically needing to imagine how I'm doing things wrong.
Not to sound too masochistic or self-pitying, but I do that nagging and imagining all the time about everything anyway — except in ballet class, when I can count on the teacher to criticize the whole class with frequency, vigour, and knowledge, and I am blissfully free of the responsibility.
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