N.B.: I have not run a fact check on some of the Democratic speakers' claims. If I'll do, I'll amend these 'minutes.'
5:01 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time Antonio Villaraigosa, announced by a bilingual speaker who does his name justice, takes the stage. He is the mayor of Los Angeles.
Gov. Ted Strickland: Amendment to platform. Ordained united Methodist minister. President Obama: Jerusalem capital of Israel. Camera focuses on "Arab American"-wielding people. Loud shouts for and against. Mayor repeats vote. Mayor says 2/3 have voted in favour of the amendment. Bollocks.
(Guardian: "Democratic convention erupts over reinstatement of Jerusalem to policy," by Ewen MacAskill, September 6, 2012)
5:07 p.m. African Methodist Episcopal bishop Vashti McKenzie preaches against "sexism," etc. Much less god-y and more secular messages in the Democratic convention, I'd say. An impressively fiery lady, too.
ROTC Color Guard brings in the flags. Loud applause for Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, who recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Branford Marsalis performs the National Anthem on what looks like a straight saxophone. No sign of Bill Clinton as a duet partner. Kind of cheerful and valiant, piping singly into the large chamber, and very elegant.
Color Guard leaves the stage after chants of "U-S-A!" and to applause.
5:15 p.m. Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois's 4th District. "We are never more patriotic than when we see a group of people being treated unfairly and we say, 'Stop.'" June 17th: Obama offers amnesty for young children of illegal immigrant parents. "They are American in every way but on paper." But Romney wants illegal immigrants to self-deport, he says. Mitt Romney wants to 'turn their dreams into nightmares.' Harsh but perhaps accurate, and I wouldn't make Romney solely responsible for that attitude. Talks about American citizen, a soldier who has a 'beautiful immigrant son' with his wife, who had document issues. Unwisely talks about "mejor amiga" in proximity to "Janice Brewer," since it might be misheard as "whore." We should vote for Barack Obama to help him show that "freedom, equality are for all of us, all of the time."
5:21 p.m. Diana DeGette of Colorado's 1st District, Congresswoman. Talks about her daughters and how she wants to ensure that they are not "second class citizens." Nice western twang. Mentions pay gap between men and women: 1$ vs. 77 cents, addressed by Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Opposes Personhood Amendment including ban on embryonic stem cell research and abortion in cases of rape or incest and on in vitro fertilization, along with ordinary birth control and abortion — which has been proposed by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, etc. Links women's Medicare to the economic needs of American citizens. She seems sincere and conscientiously concerned.
5:28 p.m. Enthusiastic reception for John Pérez, Speaker of the California State Assembly. He answers the question, "Who are we fighting for?" . . . People who are seeking opportunity and equality. In 2009, 'some people said, "let Detroit fail"' (N.B.: Nudge at Mitt Romney and his New York Times op-ed which a subeditor rather bluntly entitled: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." What he did write was, "In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check."); Obama didn't. Like Gutierrez, he talks about having "dignity and respect" for fellow people. "But we have a lot of work to do between now and then. So let's get to work! Thank you." He is, I've found out, also a union organizer and a cousin of Villaraigosa.
5:33 p.m. Boston, Massachusetts, mayor Tom Menino. He sounds very Massachusetts-y at moments, to a Mayor Quimby degree, with a soupçon of congressman Barney Frank. Bawston, jawb. Jabs at Mitt Romney. "In Boston, do you know what we call immigrants? Mom and dad. Do you know what we call same-sex couples? Our friends, our brothers, and our sisters." Pahtna = partner. Health care companies are supported by National Research (Council?), i.e. government, funds, he mentions in passing. Massachusetts apparently 47th out of the 50 states in terms of job creation under Romney; for instance, he "cut workforce training." Romney talks about "broken promises." "Well, he would know."
'It's time to keep moving forward. It's time to reelect Obama as president of the United States.'
5:40 p.m. California congresswoman — 32nd district — Judy Chu, granddaughter of Chinese immigrant. Voting, landowning, hiring discrimination against immigrants; but grandfather persisted and "worked 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, for decades." Obama wants to extend the opportunities for all people, ensure "college affordability" and "small business tax cuts" and "health care for all Americans." Obamacare = "President Obama cares," so she no longer resents that word. Romney hammered for Op-Ed again, Obama praised for 'saving auto industry.' Vouchers mean that there is no guarantee of medical insurance coverage. "President Obama cares about all Americans," "whether we're middle class or working hard to get there." That is a pretty grounded phrase and compares favourably to the Republican conventioneers, whose mantra, I thought, was rather that we may not all be rich, but many of us are working towards getting there.
5:47 p.m. Steve Westly, former California State Controller. Very shiny Silicon Valley person, helped organize eBay. The economy. "It's also about supporting the jobs for tomorrow," making US skilled workers competitive with China, etc. Making "especially math and science, a top priority." When it comes to education, 'We should be beating the rest of the world, not beating up on teachers.' Obama 'pledged to double American exports by 2015. By now, we're more than 50% of the way there.' Smarmy grins. Support for "partnerships between community colleges and businesses." Republican economists are out of touch with contemporary economy. 'Outsource' for Them, 'opensource' for Us. Mr. Westly has two children in public school, so there's that going for him in terms of ordinary-Americanness.
5:51 p.m. "Small Business" short film. Solar panel manufacturers! 'Small businesses create most of the new jobs in this country,' says Obama. Small business tax cuts under Obama administration mentioned again.
Representative John Larson, of Connecticut's 1st District. Seniors can pay up to $6,400 'out of their own pockets' to cover their own medical care, under Romney-Ryan plans. Sister Act-like reference to the nuns - Sisters of Notre Dame. He's 'on fire'! "God bless you! God bless America!"
6:00 p.m. Ken Myers: Deputy Sheriff, father, teamster, of Carroll County of Iowa. Talks about negotiation with armed man; 'thankfully, no one was hurt.' Republicans denouncing "teachers, firefighters, and cops" are denouncing this kind of work; prohibitions on collective bargaining like the ones imposed in Iowa and supported by Mitt Romney are impeding this kind of work; funding for the services, incl. bulletproof vests, ambulances, availability of backup for police first responders, etc. cut by nearly 20% in his state. First 9/11 reference.
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Alternative Pastimes to Sticking Pins in One's Self
It's a Thursday morning and so I am sitting in the bookshop with my nose buried in this laptop.
Yesterday night I began to watch the Republican convention's second day (not including the first day which essentially did not take place because of Tropical Storm Isaac), but I then decided that my time would be much better spent reading a romance novel.
THE PROBLEM is that there was a great deal of hypocrisy, criticizing the President for problems of the Republican congressmen and voters themselves. Later on, according to the reports that I've read, Paul Ryan also said a good deal of things which simply weren't true; so it seems that I really didn't miss much worth hearing.
For instance, when I think of exorbitant spending I think of the Bush-era military sending planes to Afghanistan with pallets full of dollar bills which amount to billions of dollars — which then disappear; and invading Iraq in the absence of any threat to the US from that quarter. Whereas the criticisms of government spending under the Obama presidency are, in fact, criticizing worthwhile and necessary projects like social security, health care funding, and keeping the American-based car manufacturing industry working. Why are the Republicans complaining about this now when this would so clearly have been better applied and undeniably effective during the Bush presidency (they are, after all, still in the majority in the House of Representatives, and profit from a divided Democratic congress)?
I came across a handy graph which showed — and I can't believe this is true — that the tax cuts which were introduced under George W. Bush are in fact a greater contributor of public debt than all of our wars in the past decade. It is the Republican Party who are refusing to allow these cuts to be even partially repealed. I know that debt is calculated two ways — private debt and government debt — so I haven't sorted out yet what the graph precisely means, but this seems pretty egregious.
***
Yesterday night I began to watch the Republican convention's second day (not including the first day which essentially did not take place because of Tropical Storm Isaac), but I then decided that my time would be much better spent reading a romance novel.
THE PROBLEM is that there was a great deal of hypocrisy, criticizing the President for problems of the Republican congressmen and voters themselves. Later on, according to the reports that I've read, Paul Ryan also said a good deal of things which simply weren't true; so it seems that I really didn't miss much worth hearing.
For instance, when I think of exorbitant spending I think of the Bush-era military sending planes to Afghanistan with pallets full of dollar bills which amount to billions of dollars — which then disappear; and invading Iraq in the absence of any threat to the US from that quarter. Whereas the criticisms of government spending under the Obama presidency are, in fact, criticizing worthwhile and necessary projects like social security, health care funding, and keeping the American-based car manufacturing industry working. Why are the Republicans complaining about this now when this would so clearly have been better applied and undeniably effective during the Bush presidency (they are, after all, still in the majority in the House of Representatives, and profit from a divided Democratic congress)?
I came across a handy graph which showed — and I can't believe this is true — that the tax cuts which were introduced under George W. Bush are in fact a greater contributor of public debt than all of our wars in the past decade. It is the Republican Party who are refusing to allow these cuts to be even partially repealed. I know that debt is calculated two ways — private debt and government debt — so I haven't sorted out yet what the graph precisely means, but this seems pretty egregious.
***
Friday, August 24, 2012
Pronounsical Adventures
Today we had (beginning at 9:30 a.m., which is groaningly early compared to the 10:15ish times we've had) an exam review session in my Greek class. Needless to say, it was loads of fun to learn indefinite pronouns and prepositions (hopefully my translation of the grammatical nomenclature is correct) as well as the noun group which includes the word grammatéas.* So I am sharing the wealth and imparting to you what I should be engraving in my cranium for future reference: *secretary
Taken from Giorgos Babinioti's Elliniki Glossa, Chapter 14.
(Ληφθεί από το "Ελληνική Γλώσσα" του Γεώργιου Μπαμπινιώτη, στο ενότητα 14.
This field of highflown expression within the translational art, Greek-to-English, remains in a highly experimental stage.)
Indefinite adjectival pronouns:
1. Κάποιος = somebody, some [person]
Feminine singular: κάποια, Neuter singular: κάποιο
Declined like the paradigmatic adjective νέ -ος, -α, -ο)
Example: Somebody rang the bell.; OR At the party I met someone.
2. Κανένας OR κανείς = anyone
Feminine singular: καμία (it's a little hoity-toitier to put the emphasis on the ι instead of the α after it), Neuter singular: κανένα
Κανείς stays the same, but it's kanén -as, -os (genitive), -an (accusative); kamía, kamías, kamía; kanéna, kanenós, kanéna.
Example: Did anyone call you? OR No, nobody called you.
3. Μερικοί = several, a couple of
Feminine plural: μερικές, Neuter plural: μερικά
Declined merikoí, merikón, merikoús; merikés, merikón, merikés; meriká, merikón, meriká.
[Italics indicate an omega instead of an omicron.]
Example: The eyes of some (/ a couple of) men are very lovely.
(That was the textbook's first example, so I went with it . . .)
***
Though we haven't even gotten around to the prepositions and nouns, I've run out of, er, enthusiasm. (c:
The exam will take place on Monday. — Ο όνειδος θα πραγματοποιηθεί τη Δευτέρα.
Taken from Giorgos Babinioti's Elliniki Glossa, Chapter 14.
(Ληφθεί από το "Ελληνική Γλώσσα" του Γεώργιου Μπαμπινιώτη, στο ενότητα 14.
This field of highflown expression within the translational art, Greek-to-English, remains in a highly experimental stage.)
Indefinite adjectival pronouns:
1. Κάποιος = somebody, some [person]
Feminine singular: κάποια, Neuter singular: κάποιο
Declined like the paradigmatic adjective νέ -ος, -α, -ο)
Example: Somebody rang the bell.; OR At the party I met someone.
2. Κανένας OR κανείς = anyone
Feminine singular: καμία (it's a little hoity-toitier to put the emphasis on the ι instead of the α after it), Neuter singular: κανένα
Κανείς stays the same, but it's kanén -as, -os (genitive), -an (accusative); kamía, kamías, kamía; kanéna, kanenós, kanéna.
Example: Did anyone call you? OR No, nobody called you.
3. Μερικοί = several, a couple of
Feminine plural: μερικές, Neuter plural: μερικά
Declined merikoí, merikón, merikoús; merikés, merikón, merikés; meriká, merikón, meriká.
[Italics indicate an omega instead of an omicron.]
Example: The eyes of some (/ a couple of) men are very lovely.
(That was the textbook's first example, so I went with it . . .)
***
Though we haven't even gotten around to the prepositions and nouns, I've run out of, er, enthusiasm. (c:
The exam will take place on Monday. — Ο όνειδος θα πραγματοποιηθεί τη Δευτέρα.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
An English Afternoon Tea
Since it is my mother's birthday, we decided to make an English afternoon tea, which she has suggested every now and then as an idea for dinner, but which I'd been dodging due to a frustrating experience with scone-baking.
First of all, however, Ge. and I went on a leisurely stroll to Tempelhofer Feld. It was a stifling atmosphere when we emerged from the cool apartment and stairwell, and I thought that it might have been wise to wear sunscreen, since it was around 1 o'clock and "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." But there were leisurely fields of clouds, too; as the Bard noted, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd." Besides there was a breeze.
Then, at the invitation of Mama, I went to the bookshop to pick up my Farsi-German dictionary. In the front of the book it was helpfully that written Farsi consists of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as four more; so I was pleased to find that it looked familiar and also interested that the letter names (shin, for instance) are sometimes like Hebrew ones. Then Mama and I talked outside, with little glasses of mallow tea and a saucerful of pretzels and trail mix.
After that came the grand journey to Edeka for the groceries.
***
***
I made the cucumber sandwiches, as usual, by toasting white bread so that it would be firm on the outside and soft on the inside; cutting the bread lengthwise with a large bread knife so it is half as thick; buttering the insides of the toast carefully so that it protects the bread from sogginess; sprinkling salt and pepper on the two halves; placing thinly sliced cucumber between the halves; today, cutting the toast into four triangles.
For the radish sandwiches, I didn't cut the toast but left it thick, then butter and salt and pepper, then the sliced radishes. Since this household is fond of having liberal amounts of butter with radishes, I put a tiny dollop of butter on top of some of the sandwiches.
First of all, however, Ge. and I went on a leisurely stroll to Tempelhofer Feld. It was a stifling atmosphere when we emerged from the cool apartment and stairwell, and I thought that it might have been wise to wear sunscreen, since it was around 1 o'clock and "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." But there were leisurely fields of clouds, too; as the Bard noted, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd." Besides there was a breeze.
Then, at the invitation of Mama, I went to the bookshop to pick up my Farsi-German dictionary. In the front of the book it was helpfully that written Farsi consists of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as four more; so I was pleased to find that it looked familiar and also interested that the letter names (shin, for instance) are sometimes like Hebrew ones. Then Mama and I talked outside, with little glasses of mallow tea and a saucerful of pretzels and trail mix.
After that came the grand journey to Edeka for the groceries.
***
The grand repast:
Platter, smoked salmon, gouda, cucumber sandwiches, radish sandwiches
Canadian wild sockeye salmon in rolls, with capers and horseradish on the side and eaten with dark bread; gouda in slices to be eaten with the same; cucumber sandwiches closed and radish sandwiches open-faced.
Ramekin of radishes
Glass dish of sliced cucumber
Scones
with
Lemon curd
Clotted cream
or
Orange marmalade
(which is made in England and which we, er, 'sourced' in the chain grocery store)
or
other
Orange pekoe
or
Assam tea
Red currants
Chocolate-marshmallow kisses
After Eight
Vanilla ice cream
Popsicles
Bilberry compôte
I made the cucumber sandwiches, as usual, by toasting white bread so that it would be firm on the outside and soft on the inside; cutting the bread lengthwise with a large bread knife so it is half as thick; buttering the insides of the toast carefully so that it protects the bread from sogginess; sprinkling salt and pepper on the two halves; placing thinly sliced cucumber between the halves; today, cutting the toast into four triangles.
For the radish sandwiches, I didn't cut the toast but left it thick, then butter and salt and pepper, then the sliced radishes. Since this household is fond of having liberal amounts of butter with radishes, I put a tiny dollop of butter on top of some of the sandwiches.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Probing an Examination and Pitiful Learning Endeavours
On Friday I took the day off from the bookshop and had a holiday-holiday, wherein I did pretty much nothing, and it was a very nice experience. Saturday and Sunday are relaxed in any case, so it was only this morning where I set off somewhere, namely to the university to write my Latin exam.
Last night I felt overcome with guilt for not preparing for the exam carefully. After the 'orare' thing I decided to try something else. So I began reviewing the textbook from last semester so that I could tell apart the declensions, conjugations, and parts of speech more swiftly and therefore finish the exam more swiftly. But I hadn't gotten far.
During a massive case of guilty anxiety, I tend to keep on reading things on the internet to keep my mind off of it late into the night, as the guilty feelings keep gnawing and gnawing away, conscious all the while that I should go to sleep soon and set the alarm clock so that I wake up in time. The process ends in my going to sleep in the early morning hours, 'worn to a frazzle.' This case of guilty anxiety was comparatively light but unpleasant per se.
I did not expect the Latin exam to be massively difficult in terms of vocabulary, but the syntax is a crapshoot; either I know what's going on or I don't, even after knowing what each word in a sentence means individually. So there wasn't so much more preparation I could do aside from finding a reputable side-by-side Latin-English text with accurate grammatical elucidations (which I don't expect to find easily) and gradually gathering experience with the differences between the languages (which would also take two or three months, I think). Which I didn't do.
After a shower and a little internet time I set off twenty minutes early, and therefore had plenty of time to reach the class and study more of the textbook. Since the confluence of students to the campus has diminished, the Nollendorfplatz-Krumme Lanke U-Bahn line has shortened trains now, so I awaited it at the front of the platform. At Dahlem Dorf station the strawberry vending shack was shuttered. In the streets between Dahlem Dorf and the Rostlaube there was no discernible difference in the quantity of people, though.
At the room where the exam was to take place, the door was locked and nobody was waiting in front. Overzealously I went to the Latin/Greek department to inquire, to be rightfully advised to wait in front of the room and hope that people would start coming by and by. So that was what happened, and after we had (presumably) all gathered, the professor showed and apologetically herded us to a different classroom wherein we wrote our exams. It was one sheet of paper, with a very slightly simplified text of Cicero wherein he brings the matter of Verres and Sthenius to the attention of all. To assist our feeble minds there were fortunately commas added into the text to separate the main and ancillary clauses, as well as a summary of events in German above the text; the professor even read out the text to us once so that we could hear the groupings of the words. And we were allowed to use our dictionaries. Nevertheless it was a task which took up at least an hour for me, and I was the first person done.
As soon as I got home I found a professional translation on the internet, and saw that I had made a key error but hopefully not one that obscured the elegance and fairly accurate nature of my text as a whole.
As one can tell from the self-praising tone of the previous sentence, I feel quite smug, not only because I came up with logical if inaccurate translations by the end, but particularly because I was also so happy that Latin is over for this first pair of semesters. It was a six o'clock to eight o'clock p.m. class which swallowed up even my Friday evenings in the first semester, riddled with naps as unslept nights avenged themselves, and on one hot evening made into an extra penance by my feeling sick for two hours straight. In one or two weeks' time I need to stop being smug, though; otherwise I won't learn from the mistakes I did make, and otherwise I'll have a nasty surprise once the marks are in. (c:
***
Aside from following current events exhaustively through my new overlord, Twitter; and reading books and other things for enjoyment; I am planning to go on long bicycle rides to explore Berlin. (I feel like cycling to the North Sea, though that wouldn't work since I'd be borrowing my brother's or mother's bike.)
As far as amateur journalism is concerned, it's been a relief to find that either the media have been on a good streak lately, or there really is a lot of profound and good stuff in existence as long as one strikes on a worthy publication. My crusading spirit has been a little appeased. I will say, though, that purely going from instinct I think that the reporting about Syria in the mass media has been completely misguided, and that the revolution going on now will be the absolute worst thing that could happen to the country and to American/European interests. While I supported even the invasion of Libya, I think that the situations in Tunisia and Egypt could have been solved better if they had been dissociated from each other entirely and not interfered with by Western interests; conversely I think that the suppression of protests in Bahrain was absolutely shameful and that here the moral equivocation of e.g. the EU was clear. Syria is something else altogether, and is being turned into a frontier of armed groups, government forces which are presumably splintering off to something else, local fighters, population groupings (e.g. the apparently de facto autonomous Kurds near the Turkish border), and intelligence agencies which is a wild west without any guarantees for civilians' security. Of course the massacres and mistreatment of children in custody must be investigated and legally prosecuted in Syria, but I think that it could be done under the existing government as long as the state military and police apparatus are held out of the investigations. Basher Assad is, at least, neither deranged nor bloodthirsty. As for Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, etc., I have absolutely no clue what is going on in those countries but I think we should have a clue.
Anyway, since I haven't been writing blog posts about these things, I have been weakly attempting to supplement my courses of university study until my bad conscience wears off.
One of these weak attempts is a learn-one-Arabic-word-per-day thing. Though I will not need Arabic for my specific Culture and History of the Near East programme, it seems like a waste of opportunity not to pick up a bit on the occasion. So I come across an Arabic phrase or word on the internet, copy and paste it into a translator to find out what it means, and write it down into a notebook; then I take each letter and copy and paste it individually to see what it looks like in its main form, to come up with a translation. The Arabic alphabet is full of phenomena like the Greek sigma, which looks like σ except if it is at the end of a word ς. So this way I am very, very slowly learning the alphabet as well as words like talib, Misr, and arabiy (I'm not too sure about the transliteration). But I feel like doing something adventurous and challenging and of having some kind of knowledge which is relatively rare rather than redundant, so I've ordered a Farsi textbook through the bookshop and have taken down the ISBN, etc., for a course in colloquial Urdu. We do have materials for learning Hebrew and Russian, too; but I worry that I will mix them up with Greek (I've already mixed up the 'Η' and 'Ν' at least once), whereas visually Arabic and Farsi look different. Besides the unsuccessfulness of past attempts at engraving the Hebrew alphabet on my memory is discouraging me a little; I remember what aleph and gimel look like and that's pretty much it.
Besides I want to read the Koran in Max Henning's German translation, and am presently bogged down in Annemarie Schimmel's quite valuable introduction. Even in the Bible I haven't read much at one stroke. One night in 2003ish when T. and I were collaborating on a Spanish project I had lots of free time and so tackled long segments of it, and another night I was trying to find out if Job's story was as senseless as it sounded (I decided to ignore it in my personal theology); and for some reason I was quite interested in the Book of Esther. In fact this may also be connected to the compulsion I felt to go to church again around that time — Mama was attending one and so I went along a couple weekends, before finding out that as usual the people and building and so on are distracting, and that I only become neurotic about things like eating fish on Good Friday rather than deepening the spirit of religion, so I don't feel good-er, if I go to church. In any case I don't consider theological texts easy reading. But it seems dumb to study Islamic Studies without reading the Koran, and I might need the knowledge of it in my Moorish Science Temple essay due October — it would be good to be able to discern the evidently great differences between the MST's religious text and the 'orthodox' Koran without needing to rely entirely on a scholarly treatment by someone else.
Last night I felt overcome with guilt for not preparing for the exam carefully. After the 'orare' thing I decided to try something else. So I began reviewing the textbook from last semester so that I could tell apart the declensions, conjugations, and parts of speech more swiftly and therefore finish the exam more swiftly. But I hadn't gotten far.
During a massive case of guilty anxiety, I tend to keep on reading things on the internet to keep my mind off of it late into the night, as the guilty feelings keep gnawing and gnawing away, conscious all the while that I should go to sleep soon and set the alarm clock so that I wake up in time. The process ends in my going to sleep in the early morning hours, 'worn to a frazzle.' This case of guilty anxiety was comparatively light but unpleasant per se.
I did not expect the Latin exam to be massively difficult in terms of vocabulary, but the syntax is a crapshoot; either I know what's going on or I don't, even after knowing what each word in a sentence means individually. So there wasn't so much more preparation I could do aside from finding a reputable side-by-side Latin-English text with accurate grammatical elucidations (which I don't expect to find easily) and gradually gathering experience with the differences between the languages (which would also take two or three months, I think). Which I didn't do.
After a shower and a little internet time I set off twenty minutes early, and therefore had plenty of time to reach the class and study more of the textbook. Since the confluence of students to the campus has diminished, the Nollendorfplatz-Krumme Lanke U-Bahn line has shortened trains now, so I awaited it at the front of the platform. At Dahlem Dorf station the strawberry vending shack was shuttered. In the streets between Dahlem Dorf and the Rostlaube there was no discernible difference in the quantity of people, though.
At the room where the exam was to take place, the door was locked and nobody was waiting in front. Overzealously I went to the Latin/Greek department to inquire, to be rightfully advised to wait in front of the room and hope that people would start coming by and by. So that was what happened, and after we had (presumably) all gathered, the professor showed and apologetically herded us to a different classroom wherein we wrote our exams. It was one sheet of paper, with a very slightly simplified text of Cicero wherein he brings the matter of Verres and Sthenius to the attention of all. To assist our feeble minds there were fortunately commas added into the text to separate the main and ancillary clauses, as well as a summary of events in German above the text; the professor even read out the text to us once so that we could hear the groupings of the words. And we were allowed to use our dictionaries. Nevertheless it was a task which took up at least an hour for me, and I was the first person done.
As soon as I got home I found a professional translation on the internet, and saw that I had made a key error but hopefully not one that obscured the elegance and fairly accurate nature of my text as a whole.
As one can tell from the self-praising tone of the previous sentence, I feel quite smug, not only because I came up with logical if inaccurate translations by the end, but particularly because I was also so happy that Latin is over for this first pair of semesters. It was a six o'clock to eight o'clock p.m. class which swallowed up even my Friday evenings in the first semester, riddled with naps as unslept nights avenged themselves, and on one hot evening made into an extra penance by my feeling sick for two hours straight. In one or two weeks' time I need to stop being smug, though; otherwise I won't learn from the mistakes I did make, and otherwise I'll have a nasty surprise once the marks are in. (c:
***
Aside from following current events exhaustively through my new overlord, Twitter; and reading books and other things for enjoyment; I am planning to go on long bicycle rides to explore Berlin. (I feel like cycling to the North Sea, though that wouldn't work since I'd be borrowing my brother's or mother's bike.)
As far as amateur journalism is concerned, it's been a relief to find that either the media have been on a good streak lately, or there really is a lot of profound and good stuff in existence as long as one strikes on a worthy publication. My crusading spirit has been a little appeased. I will say, though, that purely going from instinct I think that the reporting about Syria in the mass media has been completely misguided, and that the revolution going on now will be the absolute worst thing that could happen to the country and to American/European interests. While I supported even the invasion of Libya, I think that the situations in Tunisia and Egypt could have been solved better if they had been dissociated from each other entirely and not interfered with by Western interests; conversely I think that the suppression of protests in Bahrain was absolutely shameful and that here the moral equivocation of e.g. the EU was clear. Syria is something else altogether, and is being turned into a frontier of armed groups, government forces which are presumably splintering off to something else, local fighters, population groupings (e.g. the apparently de facto autonomous Kurds near the Turkish border), and intelligence agencies which is a wild west without any guarantees for civilians' security. Of course the massacres and mistreatment of children in custody must be investigated and legally prosecuted in Syria, but I think that it could be done under the existing government as long as the state military and police apparatus are held out of the investigations. Basher Assad is, at least, neither deranged nor bloodthirsty. As for Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, etc., I have absolutely no clue what is going on in those countries but I think we should have a clue.
Anyway, since I haven't been writing blog posts about these things, I have been weakly attempting to supplement my courses of university study until my bad conscience wears off.
One of these weak attempts is a learn-one-Arabic-word-per-day thing. Though I will not need Arabic for my specific Culture and History of the Near East programme, it seems like a waste of opportunity not to pick up a bit on the occasion. So I come across an Arabic phrase or word on the internet, copy and paste it into a translator to find out what it means, and write it down into a notebook; then I take each letter and copy and paste it individually to see what it looks like in its main form, to come up with a translation. The Arabic alphabet is full of phenomena like the Greek sigma, which looks like σ except if it is at the end of a word ς. So this way I am very, very slowly learning the alphabet as well as words like talib, Misr, and arabiy (I'm not too sure about the transliteration). But I feel like doing something adventurous and challenging and of having some kind of knowledge which is relatively rare rather than redundant, so I've ordered a Farsi textbook through the bookshop and have taken down the ISBN, etc., for a course in colloquial Urdu. We do have materials for learning Hebrew and Russian, too; but I worry that I will mix them up with Greek (I've already mixed up the 'Η' and 'Ν' at least once), whereas visually Arabic and Farsi look different. Besides the unsuccessfulness of past attempts at engraving the Hebrew alphabet on my memory is discouraging me a little; I remember what aleph and gimel look like and that's pretty much it.
Besides I want to read the Koran in Max Henning's German translation, and am presently bogged down in Annemarie Schimmel's quite valuable introduction. Even in the Bible I haven't read much at one stroke. One night in 2003ish when T. and I were collaborating on a Spanish project I had lots of free time and so tackled long segments of it, and another night I was trying to find out if Job's story was as senseless as it sounded (I decided to ignore it in my personal theology); and for some reason I was quite interested in the Book of Esther. In fact this may also be connected to the compulsion I felt to go to church again around that time — Mama was attending one and so I went along a couple weekends, before finding out that as usual the people and building and so on are distracting, and that I only become neurotic about things like eating fish on Good Friday rather than deepening the spirit of religion, so I don't feel good-er, if I go to church. In any case I don't consider theological texts easy reading. But it seems dumb to study Islamic Studies without reading the Koran, and I might need the knowledge of it in my Moorish Science Temple essay due October — it would be good to be able to discern the evidently great differences between the MST's religious text and the 'orthodox' Koran without needing to rely entirely on a scholarly treatment by someone else.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
The Peripatetic Future of the Gemäldegalerie?
The Frankfurt am Main-based daily newspaper FAZ, in a ringing denunciation of the relocation of Berlin's foremost collection of paintings by the old masters:
(Translated with the help of G*e Translate.)
***
There must be some compelling reason for this prima facie cheek of the highest order, but I haven't found one yet.
Ohne Not soll diese weltberühmte Gemäldesammlung, eines der kostbarsten Güter der Nation, Kernstück und Kronjuwel des preußischen Erbes, das im Jahrhundert der Katastrophen verborgen, verpackt, ausgelagert, geplündert, verschleppt und nach dem Krieg zerteilt wurde und erst nach 1989 seine glanzvolle Zusammenführung und Wiederauferstehung erlebte, nach nur vierzehn Jahren Dasein in einem maßgeschneiderten Neubau wieder eingepackt, zerschlagen, ins Depot verfrachtet und nur als Torso zwischen die Skulpturen des Bode-Museums geschoben werden.
— Eduard BeaucampIn the absence of any necessity, this world-famous collection of paintings — one of the most precious possessions of the nation; heart and crown jewel of the Prussian legacy; hidden in the century of catastrophes, packaged, outsourced, looted, kidnapped; and divided after the war; and only after 1989 experiencing its glorious reunion and resurrection — is to be, after only a fourteen years' existence in a custom-tailored building, packed up again, broken, freighted into storage and to be wedged as a scant torso in between the sculptures of the Bode Museum.
(Translated with the help of G*e Translate.)
***
There must be some compelling reason for this prima facie cheek of the highest order, but I haven't found one yet.
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Pink Mousse, Yellow Cards and Feminism
After a long day at university, I have just eaten some of the windfall from a neighbourhood restaurant whose owners have gone on holiday, passed on to us by a second neighbour who can't possibly consume it all. Yesterday it was a slaw of cabbage, carrot, parsley, and fennel or celery stalk; tzatziki; and a dreamy cloud-like pink mousse which rumour declared contained a kind of fish and which most of us treated with respectful distance. Today it was a carton with a green bell pepper, eggplants and zucchinis, cucumbers, and a head of lettuce. So Mama sliced the eggplants and zucchinis, fried them in olive oil, and whoever wanted some had some.
Besides I have been able to try smoked almonds for the first time, thanks to our English aunt (as I like to think of her): the first three almonds are good; the fourth flips a switch where they become nearly irresistible.
***
À propos of nothing, the weather is kind of terrible. It is not uncommonly hot for this time of year — hardly impressive in fact in any way — but this degree of humidity drags one down like a gourmand albatross. Two days in a row one finds one's self covered in a fuzzy layer of moistness if one is cursed by the need to ride in the U-Bahn. (By 'one' I am obviously thinking of 'me.') I catnapped through much of the Latin lesson and admittedly found that it went by with rather enjoyable swiftness.
Over the weekend we had a lightning storm which raised the worry that someone somewhere in Berlin had offended God in a very thorough manner. I had managed to go to sleep by 2 a.m. perhaps when I was woken up by a series of tremendous tearing sounds from overhead which ripped away until they abruptly stopped, then there came great barely perceptible booms which echoed from the very foundations of the soil, and lightning so bright and so encompassing in its brightness that it was like daylight at dawn. There was torrential rain, too. I wasn't the only one who woke up in the family; the neighbours overhead were also thumping presumably to the window and back. It turns out (from the U-Bahn televisions' news on Monday), that there were 8000 lightning strikes and two fires — fortunately no injuries.
***
As for the Euro Cup final, I hadn't thought much of Italy's team from what I'd heard of it. I detested it with a fiery hatred after the World Cup 2006 final because of the Zidane-Materazzi incident and because I had the impression that most of the team were cheats and that the team captain had a Mussoliniesque fascist air. During the World Cup in 2010 I repented because they mounted so much of an effort in their final game. Now Materazzi is nowhere to be seen, I have a good impression of the team generally, and rightly or wrongly I thought their game against Germany (which at first I was convinced they'd justly lose) showed skill and also a fairly clean way of playing.
During the World Cup 2012 I hated, instead, Spain's and the Netherlands' teams. I didn't think much of the players's personalities — though I made an exception for Spain's goalkeeper and the head coach — and the style of playing on both teams was a contrast to the fireworks of talent, inspiration, and 'soul' which were shown even by teams which didn't make it to the finals. I probably made clear which teams I liked at the time — for instance Uruguay and Chile, except for the latter's foul-spree tendencies. But Brazil's team, except if I am overidealizing it, was the most impressive. One did have the idea that it was a remnant of glory past. But first of all the greater heights of the players gave them a kind of dignified movement and loftiness. Secondly the attitude toward the game was so different: not the product of training regimens it seemed so much as of living the sport from a very early age, so that much of the technique was in fact second nature and not calculation, and it felt as if they were in their element and didn't really need a coach telling them what to do. This is where, though I've come to like Spain's team much better, I object to Spain and the Netherlands' team (though it appears to have changed a little) and to a lesser degree to the German team, which plays with conscientious strategy but tends in my view to falter if they are losing instead of rising to the challenge and battling as well they can.
This quality of courage, I think, characterized Italy's playing in this year's final. After Thiago Motta left the field, it did fizzle, but considering what they did since it was clear from the outset that Spain had the upper hand, I thought it was good. The fouls were not too bad, and the diving was less melodrama and more naturalism. As for Spain, I thought that the third goal was one of the most uninteresting ones I've seen in my life, and didn't know why the goalscorer looked so pleased until I read that he has won the Golden Boot.
So the game did make me grumpy, but when the tiny children of the soccer players came out onto the field, it defused my resentment a little. Besides the team which played better did win. I only wish it hadn't been darn Spain again.
***
Since I have no interest in Wimbledon, the Tour de France, or that costlier sport, the inquiry into the rate-fixing scandal, I have moved on to the haute couture week in Paris.
I said scathing things about Givenchy's collection the last time around (or the time before that?). But much to my surprise it did appear to catch on, and long, impractical gowns which are practically translucent except for strategically located stitching showed up on actresses at film premieres and so on. (At which point I will mention that I am glad that Katie Holmes is apparently casting off the fetters of Scientology forever.) This year I liked the collection better.
As for Raf Simons's Dior collection, it was more in the combined aesthetic of the early days and of John Galliano than I'd expected. I still pigeonhole the designer as a minimalist with a predilection for shapelessness and disagreeable colours — though, to be fair, some of the blues and reds in this Dior collection were lovely — probably unfairly. It irritates me a little that commentators on fashion are trying to pretend that Galliano's disagreeable views detract from the quality of his fashion; they do no such thing. You can't put in any designer, say 'He isn't anti-Semitic,' and expect him to come up with something wonderful and original based on that qualification — and maybe it is the very offensiveness with which Galliano could act which made him barrel ahead and produce the flamboyant things which made him a striking and not servilely conformist contributor to fashion weeks. That said, I am obviously not privy to the inner workings or finer points of the fashion world.
I remember Galliano's aesthetic generally, and though I don't think it's one of his most influential collections, I really liked the one he did which was inspired by flowers (and the models had upside-down cones of transparent plastic popped over their heads in homage to florists' wrappers). Having spent a great deal of time in our garden when we had one, it was a very nice experience to see how, in an alien but wonderfully observed way, the shapes and tinges and so on of the flora were being celebrated in cloth. It seemed clear that he and his design team loved flowers as much as I do.
***
Yesterday two classmates and I gave a presentation on black and Islamic feminism in the US. I concentrated on the second topic, and though it is very interesting, I think there is in fact a great deal more scholarship to be done. That said, the number of Muslim women in the US seem to number from 500,000 to 3.5 million (since the US Census is forbidden from asking about religion, the number of Muslims in the country is unknown except as extrapolated from surveys and so on), dispersed fairly widely around the states, so it isn't maybe a very visible group.
A theme I went into is that many of the restrictive practices attached to Islam are, in fact, practiced in specific sects and countries only, and secondly often arise from local cultural traditions rather than the Quran or even the core Sunni or Shi'a philosophies themselves.
Anyway, I had so many points that I had to stop maybe four-fifths of the way through; but I felt that it was good this way and that I didn't leave essential things out. But I mostly covered immigrant Muslim communities, left out the Nation of Islam and the hijab because these were covered in other presentations, and only had a short blurb about the Five Percent. And I still feel like talking on and on about what I found out during my research.
Besides I have been able to try smoked almonds for the first time, thanks to our English aunt (as I like to think of her): the first three almonds are good; the fourth flips a switch where they become nearly irresistible.
***
À propos of nothing, the weather is kind of terrible. It is not uncommonly hot for this time of year — hardly impressive in fact in any way — but this degree of humidity drags one down like a gourmand albatross. Two days in a row one finds one's self covered in a fuzzy layer of moistness if one is cursed by the need to ride in the U-Bahn. (By 'one' I am obviously thinking of 'me.') I catnapped through much of the Latin lesson and admittedly found that it went by with rather enjoyable swiftness.
Over the weekend we had a lightning storm which raised the worry that someone somewhere in Berlin had offended God in a very thorough manner. I had managed to go to sleep by 2 a.m. perhaps when I was woken up by a series of tremendous tearing sounds from overhead which ripped away until they abruptly stopped, then there came great barely perceptible booms which echoed from the very foundations of the soil, and lightning so bright and so encompassing in its brightness that it was like daylight at dawn. There was torrential rain, too. I wasn't the only one who woke up in the family; the neighbours overhead were also thumping presumably to the window and back. It turns out (from the U-Bahn televisions' news on Monday), that there were 8000 lightning strikes and two fires — fortunately no injuries.
***
As for the Euro Cup final, I hadn't thought much of Italy's team from what I'd heard of it. I detested it with a fiery hatred after the World Cup 2006 final because of the Zidane-Materazzi incident and because I had the impression that most of the team were cheats and that the team captain had a Mussoliniesque fascist air. During the World Cup in 2010 I repented because they mounted so much of an effort in their final game. Now Materazzi is nowhere to be seen, I have a good impression of the team generally, and rightly or wrongly I thought their game against Germany (which at first I was convinced they'd justly lose) showed skill and also a fairly clean way of playing.
During the World Cup 2012 I hated, instead, Spain's and the Netherlands' teams. I didn't think much of the players's personalities — though I made an exception for Spain's goalkeeper and the head coach — and the style of playing on both teams was a contrast to the fireworks of talent, inspiration, and 'soul' which were shown even by teams which didn't make it to the finals. I probably made clear which teams I liked at the time — for instance Uruguay and Chile, except for the latter's foul-spree tendencies. But Brazil's team, except if I am overidealizing it, was the most impressive. One did have the idea that it was a remnant of glory past. But first of all the greater heights of the players gave them a kind of dignified movement and loftiness. Secondly the attitude toward the game was so different: not the product of training regimens it seemed so much as of living the sport from a very early age, so that much of the technique was in fact second nature and not calculation, and it felt as if they were in their element and didn't really need a coach telling them what to do. This is where, though I've come to like Spain's team much better, I object to Spain and the Netherlands' team (though it appears to have changed a little) and to a lesser degree to the German team, which plays with conscientious strategy but tends in my view to falter if they are losing instead of rising to the challenge and battling as well they can.
This quality of courage, I think, characterized Italy's playing in this year's final. After Thiago Motta left the field, it did fizzle, but considering what they did since it was clear from the outset that Spain had the upper hand, I thought it was good. The fouls were not too bad, and the diving was less melodrama and more naturalism. As for Spain, I thought that the third goal was one of the most uninteresting ones I've seen in my life, and didn't know why the goalscorer looked so pleased until I read that he has won the Golden Boot.
So the game did make me grumpy, but when the tiny children of the soccer players came out onto the field, it defused my resentment a little. Besides the team which played better did win. I only wish it hadn't been darn Spain again.
***
Since I have no interest in Wimbledon, the Tour de France, or that costlier sport, the inquiry into the rate-fixing scandal, I have moved on to the haute couture week in Paris.
I said scathing things about Givenchy's collection the last time around (or the time before that?). But much to my surprise it did appear to catch on, and long, impractical gowns which are practically translucent except for strategically located stitching showed up on actresses at film premieres and so on. (At which point I will mention that I am glad that Katie Holmes is apparently casting off the fetters of Scientology forever.) This year I liked the collection better.
As for Raf Simons's Dior collection, it was more in the combined aesthetic of the early days and of John Galliano than I'd expected. I still pigeonhole the designer as a minimalist with a predilection for shapelessness and disagreeable colours — though, to be fair, some of the blues and reds in this Dior collection were lovely — probably unfairly. It irritates me a little that commentators on fashion are trying to pretend that Galliano's disagreeable views detract from the quality of his fashion; they do no such thing. You can't put in any designer, say 'He isn't anti-Semitic,' and expect him to come up with something wonderful and original based on that qualification — and maybe it is the very offensiveness with which Galliano could act which made him barrel ahead and produce the flamboyant things which made him a striking and not servilely conformist contributor to fashion weeks. That said, I am obviously not privy to the inner workings or finer points of the fashion world.
I remember Galliano's aesthetic generally, and though I don't think it's one of his most influential collections, I really liked the one he did which was inspired by flowers (and the models had upside-down cones of transparent plastic popped over their heads in homage to florists' wrappers). Having spent a great deal of time in our garden when we had one, it was a very nice experience to see how, in an alien but wonderfully observed way, the shapes and tinges and so on of the flora were being celebrated in cloth. It seemed clear that he and his design team loved flowers as much as I do.
***
Yesterday two classmates and I gave a presentation on black and Islamic feminism in the US. I concentrated on the second topic, and though it is very interesting, I think there is in fact a great deal more scholarship to be done. That said, the number of Muslim women in the US seem to number from 500,000 to 3.5 million (since the US Census is forbidden from asking about religion, the number of Muslims in the country is unknown except as extrapolated from surveys and so on), dispersed fairly widely around the states, so it isn't maybe a very visible group.
A theme I went into is that many of the restrictive practices attached to Islam are, in fact, practiced in specific sects and countries only, and secondly often arise from local cultural traditions rather than the Quran or even the core Sunni or Shi'a philosophies themselves.
Anyway, I had so many points that I had to stop maybe four-fifths of the way through; but I felt that it was good this way and that I didn't leave essential things out. But I mostly covered immigrant Muslim communities, left out the Nation of Islam and the hijab because these were covered in other presentations, and only had a short blurb about the Five Percent. And I still feel like talking on and on about what I found out during my research.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
The Sybaritic Millionaire, etc.
This pastiche is inspired by a British romance novel genre I came across during light reading over the years. It is complete with the insights into the lifestyle of the wealthy, Mediterranean speech patterns in English, the emotional inhibition natural to the male, buried childhood traumas, martyring maternity, hidden offspring, and all the other appurtenances of modern living where humble femininity with no pretences to sophistication but with the possession of a well-intentioned heart encounters the fiscal patriarchy:
Sybaritic Millionaire, Excessively Patient Wife
Annie Petropavlokovskoulos noted without surprise that she was turning heads as she passed. It was not because of her Titian hair, which glowed like a traffic light as it curled to her coccyx; it was not because of her slender legs which appeared to stretch into the stratosphere; it was not even because of her elegant female stride. It was because of her muumuu, a billowing brown monstrosity that looked like a potato sack in an ogre's warehouse, and the classical leather sandals that clapped along the marble flooring of the Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises headquarter offices. She was a hippy.
All along the hallways lit like an upscale mall and bathed in stiflingly inoffensive pastel, immaculately dressed and coiffed men and women who were clutching monogrammed Blackberries and Hermès suitcases and exhaling discreet perfumes, turned to watch her druidic progress.
At last she swept past a shocked secretary through an enormous portal of a walnut door studded with bronze lozenges, and bearing in gold lettering: Dimitros Markos Georgios Petropavlokovskoulos, MBA (Harvard), President and CEO of Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises, Inc. As the portal swung heavily open she found herself opposite a set straight out of the architect Schinkel’s design for the original production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. From experience she knew that each careless starry twinkle in the canopy was an amorphous mass of Swarovksi crystals and that the desk sitting in the centre of it, and harbouring not the Queen of the Night but her problematic estranged husband, was made from the single golden mahogany tree that had ever been discovered in nature, and a tribe of Flecheiro Indios from the Brazilian jungles was now in contact with the outside world just because of Dimitros's pursuit of that rare plant.
Her problematic estranged husband now rose to his feet and stood staring at her in foreboding silence. They could see each other in the face. Naturally he ogled her bosom instead, before fixing on her mouth. She looked at the rugged planes of his face, remembering the day when she had given him a cucumber-ginger facial; saw his penetrating silvery-blue eyes, the tint of Mount Everest on a sunny day on a flank where it was not buried fathoms deep in snow; and peered at his flexing eyebrows, which looked as if they were harbouring fascinating secrets. She felt a shiver of electricity go through her.
"You might want to step away from the van de Graaf generator, pedhi mou" Dimitros commented in his gravelly Greek-accented English, finally looking her in the eyes.
"So that's why my hair was airborne," Annie replied and coolly stepped further into the room. "This room – it hasn't changed a bit," she said.
"Well, one thing has," Dimitros replied, and looked suggestively toward the windows, with their splendid view of St.Paul's Cathedral and the gut-wrenchingly distant heads of passersby on the asphalt below.
Annie only glanced at the sill before remarking coolly, "The Fittingsley orchid is gone, and you have replaced it with a bonsai Victoria regia lily. So the orchid is indeed extinct."
“Yes, well, that's why you're the botanist and I'm the businessman. Enjoyable as this conversation is, I must be in my limousine and on the way to a conference in Burj Khalifa in 4 minutes 58 seconds. Why have you come after eight years?"
"To ask for a divorce."
Dimitros’s eyes flickered, a muscle in his jaw twitched, his grip on his chair tightened, a hair at his temple danced a jig, and he felt a sudden and unaccountable surge of attraction which expanded his pupils until the irises nearly vanished into the Everest blue like the shadow of a moon vanishes from the surface of the Earth when the solar eclipse has passed.
He sat down in his chair again, twirled once, and propelled himself with his feet until the wheels rolled to a stop right on top of the hem of his wife’s dress. There was a terrible rip and he was titillated by the prospect of looking under the muumuu until he realized that she was wearing a Victorian nightgown and two – no, three, petticoats underneath.
"As you see I was well prepared," Annie told him wryly. "Now about that divorce."
She was horrified to see Dimitros dissolve into tears. "Please stay secretly married with no income or career or private life. You shall be my de facto mistress!"
Sybaritic Millionaire, Excessively Patient Wife
Annie Petropavlokovskoulos noted without surprise that she was turning heads as she passed. It was not because of her Titian hair, which glowed like a traffic light as it curled to her coccyx; it was not because of her slender legs which appeared to stretch into the stratosphere; it was not even because of her elegant female stride. It was because of her muumuu, a billowing brown monstrosity that looked like a potato sack in an ogre's warehouse, and the classical leather sandals that clapped along the marble flooring of the Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises headquarter offices. She was a hippy.
All along the hallways lit like an upscale mall and bathed in stiflingly inoffensive pastel, immaculately dressed and coiffed men and women who were clutching monogrammed Blackberries and Hermès suitcases and exhaling discreet perfumes, turned to watch her druidic progress.
At last she swept past a shocked secretary through an enormous portal of a walnut door studded with bronze lozenges, and bearing in gold lettering: Dimitros Markos Georgios Petropavlokovskoulos, MBA (Harvard), President and CEO of Petropavlokovskoulos Enterprises, Inc. As the portal swung heavily open she found herself opposite a set straight out of the architect Schinkel’s design for the original production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. From experience she knew that each careless starry twinkle in the canopy was an amorphous mass of Swarovksi crystals and that the desk sitting in the centre of it, and harbouring not the Queen of the Night but her problematic estranged husband, was made from the single golden mahogany tree that had ever been discovered in nature, and a tribe of Flecheiro Indios from the Brazilian jungles was now in contact with the outside world just because of Dimitros's pursuit of that rare plant.
Her problematic estranged husband now rose to his feet and stood staring at her in foreboding silence. They could see each other in the face. Naturally he ogled her bosom instead, before fixing on her mouth. She looked at the rugged planes of his face, remembering the day when she had given him a cucumber-ginger facial; saw his penetrating silvery-blue eyes, the tint of Mount Everest on a sunny day on a flank where it was not buried fathoms deep in snow; and peered at his flexing eyebrows, which looked as if they were harbouring fascinating secrets. She felt a shiver of electricity go through her.
"You might want to step away from the van de Graaf generator, pedhi mou" Dimitros commented in his gravelly Greek-accented English, finally looking her in the eyes.
"So that's why my hair was airborne," Annie replied and coolly stepped further into the room. "This room – it hasn't changed a bit," she said.
"Well, one thing has," Dimitros replied, and looked suggestively toward the windows, with their splendid view of St.Paul's Cathedral and the gut-wrenchingly distant heads of passersby on the asphalt below.
Annie only glanced at the sill before remarking coolly, "The Fittingsley orchid is gone, and you have replaced it with a bonsai Victoria regia lily. So the orchid is indeed extinct."
“Yes, well, that's why you're the botanist and I'm the businessman. Enjoyable as this conversation is, I must be in my limousine and on the way to a conference in Burj Khalifa in 4 minutes 58 seconds. Why have you come after eight years?"
"To ask for a divorce."
Dimitros’s eyes flickered, a muscle in his jaw twitched, his grip on his chair tightened, a hair at his temple danced a jig, and he felt a sudden and unaccountable surge of attraction which expanded his pupils until the irises nearly vanished into the Everest blue like the shadow of a moon vanishes from the surface of the Earth when the solar eclipse has passed.
He sat down in his chair again, twirled once, and propelled himself with his feet until the wheels rolled to a stop right on top of the hem of his wife’s dress. There was a terrible rip and he was titillated by the prospect of looking under the muumuu until he realized that she was wearing a Victorian nightgown and two – no, three, petticoats underneath.
"As you see I was well prepared," Annie told him wryly. "Now about that divorce."
She was horrified to see Dimitros dissolve into tears. "Please stay secretly married with no income or career or private life. You shall be my de facto mistress!"
Sunday, June 24, 2012
In the Große Hamburger Straße
TO close the assembling of the Mendelssohn clan, there was a photography session and farewell at the old Jewish cemetery in the Große Hamburger Straße during the early afternoon. It proved quite short and sweet, so I won't write much about it, but let pictures cribbed from Wikimedia Commons speak for me:
The graveyard is largely empty, since the contents were destroyed in the 1940s; covering much of it there is a carpet of ivy growing amidst the trees and neat gravel paths, tall elderly apartment houses in excellent and neat condition and fences and walls around, and a couple of salvaged gravestones standing either in a proud pair at the entrance or along one wall. It is still considered as a religious site, so my brothers wore kippot.
IN one corner, standing on its own, is the gravestone of Moses — not the original stone, but its descendant. It has a German-language inscription on one side, and a Hebrew-language one on the other, which can be seen here:
Source: Achim Raschka (photo uploaded December 2005), via Wikimedia Commons
The pebbles on top of the gravestone are, if I remember correctly, a Jewish symbol to mark that someone is thinking of the person who lies there. Since Moses's wife Fromet is buried far away, in Hamburg, one of the members of the Mendelssohn Society took the trouble to bring one of the pebbles from the top of her gravestone, so it could be lain on her husband's. There was a little ceremony surrounding that, and I thought it was a nice inspiration.
The photography session was given a touch of profundity as a cellist performed two sedate and echoing movements from Bach's cello suites; then came the speeches. These also commemorated the assassination ninety years ago today of Walther Rathenau, former German foreign minister during the Weimar Republic and friend of my great-grandfather, I think.
*
Then Mama, Ge., J. and I took the S-Bahn home again, together. (I was still showering and such when they left earlier today, so I set forth on my own. Having emerged from the Oranienburger Straße station, I went the wrong direction for a couple minutes and had to find my way with the assistance of a map in a bus station. It wasn't too bad and I still arrived early at the graveyard — indeed I wondered if I had come after the ship had sailed, so to speak, because it was fairly deserted — but I was sweating like the kosher equivalent of a pig afterwards. I was only pleased that this wasn't a job interview, because that's generally the reason for my wandering aimlessly around unfamiliar streets in mid- and eastern Berlin.)
***
LASTLY, here is an engraving for no particular reason of Moses and Lessing, as well as (possibly) Johann Kaspar Lavater:
Illustration: "Kupferstich nach einem Gemälde von Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882)" via Wikimedia Commons
The graveyard is largely empty, since the contents were destroyed in the 1940s; covering much of it there is a carpet of ivy growing amidst the trees and neat gravel paths, tall elderly apartment houses in excellent and neat condition and fences and walls around, and a couple of salvaged gravestones standing either in a proud pair at the entrance or along one wall. It is still considered as a religious site, so my brothers wore kippot.
IN one corner, standing on its own, is the gravestone of Moses — not the original stone, but its descendant. It has a German-language inscription on one side, and a Hebrew-language one on the other, which can be seen here:
The pebbles on top of the gravestone are, if I remember correctly, a Jewish symbol to mark that someone is thinking of the person who lies there. Since Moses's wife Fromet is buried far away, in Hamburg, one of the members of the Mendelssohn Society took the trouble to bring one of the pebbles from the top of her gravestone, so it could be lain on her husband's. There was a little ceremony surrounding that, and I thought it was a nice inspiration.
The photography session was given a touch of profundity as a cellist performed two sedate and echoing movements from Bach's cello suites; then came the speeches. These also commemorated the assassination ninety years ago today of Walther Rathenau, former German foreign minister during the Weimar Republic and friend of my great-grandfather, I think.
*
Then Mama, Ge., J. and I took the S-Bahn home again, together. (I was still showering and such when they left earlier today, so I set forth on my own. Having emerged from the Oranienburger Straße station, I went the wrong direction for a couple minutes and had to find my way with the assistance of a map in a bus station. It wasn't too bad and I still arrived early at the graveyard — indeed I wondered if I had come after the ship had sailed, so to speak, because it was fairly deserted — but I was sweating like the kosher equivalent of a pig afterwards. I was only pleased that this wasn't a job interview, because that's generally the reason for my wandering aimlessly around unfamiliar streets in mid- and eastern Berlin.)
***
LASTLY, here is an engraving for no particular reason of Moses and Lessing, as well as (possibly) Johann Kaspar Lavater:
Illustration: "Kupferstich nach einem Gemälde von Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882)" via Wikimedia Commons
Saturday, June 23, 2012
A Boatload of 'Orare' and the Girl with Flaxen Hair
TODAY (Saturday) I decided not to go on a tour of a graveyard, which morbid but most likely pleasing activity is one of many offerings in the frame of a Mendelssohn descendants' family reunion being held in Berlin over this past week. I slept into the afternoon, that being the contingency that clinched it. Last evening, however, we went to a reception, which I intend to post about soon(er or later), with some two hundred other relations and, of course, the immediate family.
WHERE university is concerned, I took the day off. In my Islamic Studies seminar my group is preparing for a presentation, and I personally am beginning to prepare for the essay to be handed in much later. Then I have done extracurricular thingies for Greek and for Latin I have resolved to get all the noun declensions and verb conjugations and so on straight, which is an absurd enterprise but one which I feel is demanded of us.
The absurdity of this enterprise was particularly perceptible when I decided to write down all the tables for 'orāre,' taking 'amāre' as set out in my dual purpose Latin dictionary/grammar for my handy paradigm. The further I leafed in this dictionary and wrote out ōrō, orās, orat, orāmus, orātis, orant; orāre; orābam, orābās, orābat, orābāmus, orābātis, orābant; orābō, orābis, orābit, orābimus, orābitis, orābunt; oram, orēs, oret, orēmus, orētis, orent; orāvī, orāvistī, orāvit, orāvimus, orāvistis, orāvērunt; orāveram, orāverās, orāverat, orāverāmus, orāverātis, orāverant; orāverō, orāveris, orāverit, orāverimus, orāveritis, orāverint; oror, orāris, orātur, orāmur, orāminī, orantur; orābar, orābāris, orābātur, orābāmur, orābāminī, orābantur; orābor, orāberis, orābitur, orābimur, orābiminī, orābuntur; orārem, orārēs, orāret, orārēmus, orārētis, orārent; orer, orēris, orētur, orēmur, orēminī, orentur; orārer, orārēris, orārētur, orārēmur, orārēminī, orārentur [N.B. Apologies for any transcription errors; I wasn't feeling enterprising enough to doublecheck all my handwritten verb tables against the dictionary's.] — the more moods and tenses sprang out of the woodwork. Having reached the subjunctive pluperfect passive I had it 'up to here.' Much inclined to shoot the dictionary out to sea from a cannon, I closed it instead and haven't attempted to review further until now. In hindsight, though, we haven't looked at all of these mood-tense combinations; so I might be off the hook.
SINCE, at any rate, I wasn't going to be doing any of that, I looked through more photos in a Flickr account which has proven rather addictive, especially the abandoned train yards and sheds and signage and so on — "Forest Pines". Besides, having begun to watch physics lectures on YouTube and having found, much to my surprise, that watching them feels uncommonly relaxing and enjoyable, I watched more of the third.
The key to enjoying these videos is that I don't expect to understand everything, or anything at all. Instead I piece together what I can and either drop or ask about the rest. In the absence of this pressure to understand everything, physics are a sort of thrilling new field; and when I have questions, Papa can answer them quite easily and point me to the relevant books.
For example, I was wondering why an electric charge isn't transferred to a capacitor at a steady rate; rather the charge rushes over to it at first but then slows down. Papa explained that the electrons are being 'pushed' to a degree by their repulsion from each other; and that just as people fill an U-Bahn train easily when it is relatively empty, a crowded train is an entirely different matter.
One resource Papa recommends highly is the online lectures of Richard Feynmann, and the books written by the same; I intend to look at these when I'm done with these other lectures, but I'd rather have dipped my toe into the discipline properly first.
These videos point, I think, to the potency of well-chosen language. Finding precise nouns and verbs which suggest precisely the associations and the meanings which one intends to convey, economically, is, I think, not only useful in instructing students in the sciences, but in many other areas as well.
WHAT I also like is that sciences are relatively 'truthful.' In the humanities, bad research and weak premises and thoughtlessness seem much easier to cover up. Lies, opinion and unverifiable statements are presented without cautionary labels, and where there are no sound observations to give them an empirical underpinning one can't even redeem the occasion by coming up with a better interpretation. Political Science is the absolute worst in this regard. I may hate it when someone misses the point in an analysis of Jane Austen, but no one is carpet-bombed as a result. So I think that while it may not be in the power of humans to know Truth absolutely — and in this respect I'd like to dust off Pope's maxim, "Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man." — our approach to truth and to applying the truth are very important.
BESIDES I completed the grand feat of reversing a jam jar so that the jam is wedged into the top half. I proudly announced that I had 'defeated gravity,' to a mixed reception from the family, which was assembled for the repast of pancakes where this occurred. The scenario seemed familiar to me, and I realized later that one of the websites I visit now and then, Boing Boing, had an article about hover-jelly a long time ago.
LASTLY, I played a boatload of Chopin and excerpts of our score of Die Zauberflöte transcribed for the piano. Among the Chopin there was the Polonaise Héroïque, still a long slog and an unlikely prospect for pleasing the neighbours; and the Military Polonaise, in which the tempo is still a trifle irregular; and a nocturne or two, which I still can't do very much with. I've complained about them before, but I think that these nocturnes are like TV musicians whose glossy appearance, soulful air, elaborate gestures and sentimental flourishes are (as far as I can tell) cynically gauged to sucker in people to presume that their music expresses honesty, profundity, broad understanding and sensitivity. Thankfully I am very fond of everything else in the volume which contains these nocturnes, so I have no real bone to pick with Chopin generally.
I did think when I was younger that playing his waltzes and nocturnes were deleterious to one's fibre as a musician, because of their extraordinary indulgence, which is also something that annoyed me a bit with Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. But counteracting the very ease with which one can make these songs sound expressive is my anxiety not to fall prey to this lazy route and instead to work against the grain of the music and find irregularities and nuances in it. So, for instance, the only way I use rubato is if my tempo is faulty, and I already resolved nine or ten years ago to only insert rubato when I have reached some dignified age and have learned to play the piece properly without. Even rubato has, I think, its rules; and whether rightly or wrongly I have heard or read that it should be like an elastic which is expanded but also relaxed again — so every slowing down should be followed by a proportionate speeding up.
What I didn't play today is Debussy's "Fille aux cheveux de lin," which is kind of familiar because I used to listen to Jacques Thibaud's recording on the violin. I think I understand intellectually what Debussy was going for, but I haven't really transferred it to the keyboard yet; the jazz and Javanese(?) influences are obviously there, though, and I have to learn to do justice to them. As for a mental image, I thought of a kind of dainty 19th-century mock castle hidden in the treetops in Fontainebleau — the realm of the impressionists — wherein a vaguely blotted face of a lady stands in the tower window with her long Rapunzel-esque tresses flowing over the stonework. And that the man who sees this picture in his fantasy has imbibed or smoked a little of something frowned upon by the police. I have no idea if this is close to what inspired Debussy, but I'll keep that image in mind until it no longer serves a purpose.
Generally I think I'd have absolutely nothing in common with Debussy if I'd ever met him, but it is sort of fun to try to clear one's mind and to play him without bias. It demands that one step out of one's accustomed zone and rely on intuition, and especially since I want to do this sincerely and unselfconsciously (without any arrière-pensée as the French might say, or Hintergedanke as the Germans do), it feels kind of like acting. Much like Chopin, though, I think one obstacle is that I haven't concentrated so much on removing shortcomings of technique that the facility which the composers expect of their music exists.
WHERE university is concerned, I took the day off. In my Islamic Studies seminar my group is preparing for a presentation, and I personally am beginning to prepare for the essay to be handed in much later. Then I have done extracurricular thingies for Greek and for Latin I have resolved to get all the noun declensions and verb conjugations and so on straight, which is an absurd enterprise but one which I feel is demanded of us.
The absurdity of this enterprise was particularly perceptible when I decided to write down all the tables for 'orāre,' taking 'amāre' as set out in my dual purpose Latin dictionary/grammar for my handy paradigm. The further I leafed in this dictionary and wrote out ōrō, orās, orat, orāmus, orātis, orant; orāre; orābam, orābās, orābat, orābāmus, orābātis, orābant; orābō, orābis, orābit, orābimus, orābitis, orābunt; oram, orēs, oret, orēmus, orētis, orent; orāvī, orāvistī, orāvit, orāvimus, orāvistis, orāvērunt; orāveram, orāverās, orāverat, orāverāmus, orāverātis, orāverant; orāverō, orāveris, orāverit, orāverimus, orāveritis, orāverint; oror, orāris, orātur, orāmur, orāminī, orantur; orābar, orābāris, orābātur, orābāmur, orābāminī, orābantur; orābor, orāberis, orābitur, orābimur, orābiminī, orābuntur; orārem, orārēs, orāret, orārēmus, orārētis, orārent; orer, orēris, orētur, orēmur, orēminī, orentur; orārer, orārēris, orārētur, orārēmur, orārēminī, orārentur [N.B. Apologies for any transcription errors; I wasn't feeling enterprising enough to doublecheck all my handwritten verb tables against the dictionary's.] — the more moods and tenses sprang out of the woodwork. Having reached the subjunctive pluperfect passive I had it 'up to here.' Much inclined to shoot the dictionary out to sea from a cannon, I closed it instead and haven't attempted to review further until now. In hindsight, though, we haven't looked at all of these mood-tense combinations; so I might be off the hook.
SINCE, at any rate, I wasn't going to be doing any of that, I looked through more photos in a Flickr account which has proven rather addictive, especially the abandoned train yards and sheds and signage and so on — "Forest Pines". Besides, having begun to watch physics lectures on YouTube and having found, much to my surprise, that watching them feels uncommonly relaxing and enjoyable, I watched more of the third.
The key to enjoying these videos is that I don't expect to understand everything, or anything at all. Instead I piece together what I can and either drop or ask about the rest. In the absence of this pressure to understand everything, physics are a sort of thrilling new field; and when I have questions, Papa can answer them quite easily and point me to the relevant books.
For example, I was wondering why an electric charge isn't transferred to a capacitor at a steady rate; rather the charge rushes over to it at first but then slows down. Papa explained that the electrons are being 'pushed' to a degree by their repulsion from each other; and that just as people fill an U-Bahn train easily when it is relatively empty, a crowded train is an entirely different matter.
One resource Papa recommends highly is the online lectures of Richard Feynmann, and the books written by the same; I intend to look at these when I'm done with these other lectures, but I'd rather have dipped my toe into the discipline properly first.
These videos point, I think, to the potency of well-chosen language. Finding precise nouns and verbs which suggest precisely the associations and the meanings which one intends to convey, economically, is, I think, not only useful in instructing students in the sciences, but in many other areas as well.
WHAT I also like is that sciences are relatively 'truthful.' In the humanities, bad research and weak premises and thoughtlessness seem much easier to cover up. Lies, opinion and unverifiable statements are presented without cautionary labels, and where there are no sound observations to give them an empirical underpinning one can't even redeem the occasion by coming up with a better interpretation. Political Science is the absolute worst in this regard. I may hate it when someone misses the point in an analysis of Jane Austen, but no one is carpet-bombed as a result. So I think that while it may not be in the power of humans to know Truth absolutely — and in this respect I'd like to dust off Pope's maxim, "Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man." — our approach to truth and to applying the truth are very important.
BESIDES I completed the grand feat of reversing a jam jar so that the jam is wedged into the top half. I proudly announced that I had 'defeated gravity,' to a mixed reception from the family, which was assembled for the repast of pancakes where this occurred. The scenario seemed familiar to me, and I realized later that one of the websites I visit now and then, Boing Boing, had an article about hover-jelly a long time ago.
LASTLY, I played a boatload of Chopin and excerpts of our score of Die Zauberflöte transcribed for the piano. Among the Chopin there was the Polonaise Héroïque, still a long slog and an unlikely prospect for pleasing the neighbours; and the Military Polonaise, in which the tempo is still a trifle irregular; and a nocturne or two, which I still can't do very much with. I've complained about them before, but I think that these nocturnes are like TV musicians whose glossy appearance, soulful air, elaborate gestures and sentimental flourishes are (as far as I can tell) cynically gauged to sucker in people to presume that their music expresses honesty, profundity, broad understanding and sensitivity. Thankfully I am very fond of everything else in the volume which contains these nocturnes, so I have no real bone to pick with Chopin generally.
I did think when I was younger that playing his waltzes and nocturnes were deleterious to one's fibre as a musician, because of their extraordinary indulgence, which is also something that annoyed me a bit with Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. But counteracting the very ease with which one can make these songs sound expressive is my anxiety not to fall prey to this lazy route and instead to work against the grain of the music and find irregularities and nuances in it. So, for instance, the only way I use rubato is if my tempo is faulty, and I already resolved nine or ten years ago to only insert rubato when I have reached some dignified age and have learned to play the piece properly without. Even rubato has, I think, its rules; and whether rightly or wrongly I have heard or read that it should be like an elastic which is expanded but also relaxed again — so every slowing down should be followed by a proportionate speeding up.
What I didn't play today is Debussy's "Fille aux cheveux de lin," which is kind of familiar because I used to listen to Jacques Thibaud's recording on the violin. I think I understand intellectually what Debussy was going for, but I haven't really transferred it to the keyboard yet; the jazz and Javanese(?) influences are obviously there, though, and I have to learn to do justice to them. As for a mental image, I thought of a kind of dainty 19th-century mock castle hidden in the treetops in Fontainebleau — the realm of the impressionists — wherein a vaguely blotted face of a lady stands in the tower window with her long Rapunzel-esque tresses flowing over the stonework. And that the man who sees this picture in his fantasy has imbibed or smoked a little of something frowned upon by the police. I have no idea if this is close to what inspired Debussy, but I'll keep that image in mind until it no longer serves a purpose.
Generally I think I'd have absolutely nothing in common with Debussy if I'd ever met him, but it is sort of fun to try to clear one's mind and to play him without bias. It demands that one step out of one's accustomed zone and rely on intuition, and especially since I want to do this sincerely and unselfconsciously (without any arrière-pensée as the French might say, or Hintergedanke as the Germans do), it feels kind of like acting. Much like Chopin, though, I think one obstacle is that I haven't concentrated so much on removing shortcomings of technique that the facility which the composers expect of their music exists.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
The Corruption at the Heart of Greece
INSPIRED by insights of foreign politicians, website commenters, and bank officials, I have gathered that this is the course which led Greece into its present fiscal crisis:
It began when, in a series of policy papers, a teacher in a village on the Dodecanese island of Kos forced a course of exorbitant public employee retirement packages on the state. A priest in Zakynthos instituted a raise in the age of retirement, and a homeless person in Thessaloniki negotiated a high unemployment insurance rate. To finance these terrible measures, a consortium of the children of Aegean fishermen fraudulently hit up divers banks for enormous loans while their parents were busily withholding their fiscal largesse from the tax bureaucracy. Coffee shop owners negotiated a minimum wage of (for adult workers)€1,832 €1,801.49 €1,558.18 €1.456,20 €1,398.37 €1,387.49 €915.20 €641.40 €584.29 per month. Transit workers in Athens accumulated fleets of 30-ft. yachts, and olive oil production workers built palatial rural residences, which they then failed to declare to the tax authorities.
Through a system of collusion, corruption, and above all a gross misuse of their staggering powers as private citizens, the middle and lower classes have formulated and executed Greece's economic policy over the past decade.
In the meantime, government employees, lender institutions, and the foreign commentariat urged the populace to moderate their demands and accumulate less debt. Bankers refused to proffer monies which could not be repaid until their entire family (up to relatives in the third degree) was kidnapped at gunpoint. The upper socioeconomic class meanwhile declared its property, work and investment income, with thrilling veracity and an overarching and steadfast sense of its duty toward the polity as a whole.
***
THEREFORE, to save the country and future generations from summary collapse, we must plumb the endless fiscal resources of all except the upper-class-earners who (although now impoverished and suffering) have done their duty by the country all along.
In order to do this, the salaries of public employees have been cut in half, benefits (luxurious frills such as health insurance) withdrawn entirely whether through purposeful policy or neglectful non-payment, and why private companies must leave Greece for greener shores. The guiltiest 22% of the Greek population is now jobless and the guiltiest 33% now lives below the poverty line.
But the harm which these brigands have done extends beyond the shores of privately-owned Greek islands. They should bow their head in shame, too, at the havoc they have wrought in the finances not only of their own fiscal and political elite, but also in the finances of the fiscal and political elite in the entire European Union and banks everywhere.
The upper management of the Deutsche Bank and Angela Merkel, have been so impoverished by Greek hotel receptionists' non-payment of the national debt that they are living in cardboard boxes on the streets of Frankfurt and Berlin. They dine in soup kitchens set up by their states and rely upon the generosity of more fortunate relatives and private charities. Through anxiety for the welfare of Europe, and their zealous wish to set the right economic course for all, they have not slept in years.
TOUCHED to the heart by their plight, German citizens are voluntarily and personally handing over our incomes to our Hellenic counterparts, even though we are thereby reducing our gross domestic product to such a painful extent that in two more months we will have reached a North Korean standard of living.
***
Against the mafioso Greek small businessmen, alas, we can still do nothing; nothing, too against the corruption and tax evasion which are still bubbling up like swamp effluvia among the pecuniary bigwigs and influence-peddlers in homeless shelters as well as the foyers of private charities, etc., across the country. Nothing will do but for the noble Nordic businessmen to construct, from the foundation up, that Eiffel Tower of integrity, duty, and humility which characterizes our own economic system — in the hills and beaches of Greece.
We must look to the ancients who once carried Greece to such glory — and bid the Greeks emulate the examples of such as Socrates, who got by without a swimming pool, and who — upon being told that he was bringing about the summary moral collapse of his own society — duly imbibed his cup of poison hemlock so as to get in nobody's way.
Fin.
It began when, in a series of policy papers, a teacher in a village on the Dodecanese island of Kos forced a course of exorbitant public employee retirement packages on the state. A priest in Zakynthos instituted a raise in the age of retirement, and a homeless person in Thessaloniki negotiated a high unemployment insurance rate. To finance these terrible measures, a consortium of the children of Aegean fishermen fraudulently hit up divers banks for enormous loans while their parents were busily withholding their fiscal largesse from the tax bureaucracy. Coffee shop owners negotiated a minimum wage of (for adult workers)
Through a system of collusion, corruption, and above all a gross misuse of their staggering powers as private citizens, the middle and lower classes have formulated and executed Greece's economic policy over the past decade.
In the meantime, government employees, lender institutions, and the foreign commentariat urged the populace to moderate their demands and accumulate less debt. Bankers refused to proffer monies which could not be repaid until their entire family (up to relatives in the third degree) was kidnapped at gunpoint. The upper socioeconomic class meanwhile declared its property, work and investment income, with thrilling veracity and an overarching and steadfast sense of its duty toward the polity as a whole.
***
THEREFORE, to save the country and future generations from summary collapse, we must plumb the endless fiscal resources of all except the upper-class-earners who (although now impoverished and suffering) have done their duty by the country all along.
In order to do this, the salaries of public employees have been cut in half, benefits (luxurious frills such as health insurance) withdrawn entirely whether through purposeful policy or neglectful non-payment, and why private companies must leave Greece for greener shores. The guiltiest 22% of the Greek population is now jobless and the guiltiest 33% now lives below the poverty line.
But the harm which these brigands have done extends beyond the shores of privately-owned Greek islands. They should bow their head in shame, too, at the havoc they have wrought in the finances not only of their own fiscal and political elite, but also in the finances of the fiscal and political elite in the entire European Union and banks everywhere.
The upper management of the Deutsche Bank and Angela Merkel, have been so impoverished by Greek hotel receptionists' non-payment of the national debt that they are living in cardboard boxes on the streets of Frankfurt and Berlin. They dine in soup kitchens set up by their states and rely upon the generosity of more fortunate relatives and private charities. Through anxiety for the welfare of Europe, and their zealous wish to set the right economic course for all, they have not slept in years.
TOUCHED to the heart by their plight, German citizens are voluntarily and personally handing over our incomes to our Hellenic counterparts, even though we are thereby reducing our gross domestic product to such a painful extent that in two more months we will have reached a North Korean standard of living.
***
Against the mafioso Greek small businessmen, alas, we can still do nothing; nothing, too against the corruption and tax evasion which are still bubbling up like swamp effluvia among the pecuniary bigwigs and influence-peddlers in homeless shelters as well as the foyers of private charities, etc., across the country. Nothing will do but for the noble Nordic businessmen to construct, from the foundation up, that Eiffel Tower of integrity, duty, and humility which characterizes our own economic system — in the hills and beaches of Greece.
We must look to the ancients who once carried Greece to such glory — and bid the Greeks emulate the examples of such as Socrates, who got by without a swimming pool, and who — upon being told that he was bringing about the summary moral collapse of his own society — duly imbibed his cup of poison hemlock so as to get in nobody's way.
Fin.
Monday, June 11, 2012
From Olives to Football
LATELY I have found university a trifle boring, though this perception may be influenced by a heavy streak of truancy, so I have plunged into all kinds of projects at home. Lately these have taken a scientific turn.
Inspired by a Guardian article about a new generation of fastidious child-size gourmands, I decided to read scientific literature about the reasons why children are picky about food (with an interesting side tangent on propylthiouracil and phenylthiocarbamide, which I may have misspelled). As a child I didn't think it was because adults are more polite, heroic, or self-sacrificing, and as an adult this skepticism is borne out. One obvious example: grapefruit tasted like pure poison when I was little except under a mountain of sugar, but now I can tolerate the acidity perfectly; and olives tasted awful and now I can gobble them up easily though from an aesthetic perspective I find the pallid green ones with the sad mush of lemon creme or even cubic pimento bits in them somewhat disturbing. I can eat strawberries without sugar and still taste something besides acridity, and drink Cointreau without being overwhelmed by the alcohol fumes. This early aversion to acidity must not be universal, however. When one of my brothers was little we would pile all the lemon quarters which garnished our fish-and-chips in restaurants onto his plate, and he would eat the insides of each one after the other and with great enjoyment.
Anyway, old-fashioned or not, the trick that worked best for me is to eat lousy-tasting food one spoonful or forkful at a time and to pretend that each spoonful is a kind of toast to a different relative or friend of the family. But the older I get the more ridiculous I think it is to eat food which one really can't enjoy, so if I am ever a host to children, I would have pretzels or other food which is familiar and practically impossible to dislike. (Based on what I've read, statistically speaking, starchy foods tend to be liked by most people.) As for changes in attitudes over time, I must admit to mentally snickering when children in 19th-century fiction suffer under the delusion that apples are candy.
Before that, I watched roughly half of the Venus transit and idly listened to the commentary from a NASA team at Mauna Kea, which may in retrospect have kicked off the scientific interest.
The other thing is that I am rewriting a lousy thriller and one of the figures is a postgraduate oceanography or marine biology student, so I have begun a crash course of reading in a textbook each on biology and limnology (which I hope to tie into oceanography). Since my characterization and plotting and so on are still hopelessly terrible, though improving very slowly over time, I figure that it's best to do what I can already do well now — namely, research. Thereby I can not only grow my brain but also find more fuel for the imagination as well as better habits of observation and mental pigeonholing. Besides, our field of work does play a role in our lives, though maybe not the role which is likeliest to land up in a Hollywood biopic, so the better I know the careers of protagonists the better I can render their aforementioned lives.
Then I remembered that MIT has free online courses, so I began the biology course for that. This led me to a YouTube video wherein a professor gives a biology student's introduction to chemistry, and I highly recommend it (though not so much for its cinematographic quality). What helps is, of course, that I took and liked Biology in high school. In Grade 11 we went through the kingdoms one by one, which had a nice sweeping quality in terms of the organisms and the progression of time from the emergence of the simplest organisms from the primordial soup to the emergence of the simplest human from his stony retreats. In Grade 12 we did biochemistry and human biology in general. In our all-purpose Science class in Grade 10, we had learned about cell organelles; and in Grade 9 we had learned the very basics of human biology and nutrition, which insofar as explaining to us e.g. that amino acids are the building blocks of protein, did lay a biochemical foundation.
Besides the sister had a special tutorial session today, which I attended. Since I didn't understand much of it, I worked on my artistic marginalia as well as on my information-technological notes, but it was still enlightening. It's a bit like pinning-the-tail-on-the-donkey, where a piece of solid comprehension is a tail, and its context remains vague.
Departing from the scientific realm, I went to a Greek class which never happened (more about that fiasco, perhaps, at another time) in the morning and in the evening went to Latin. I admit that I was inclined to wonder at Cornelius Nepos's writing style when he wrote with an atypical precision of detail that Hannibal had snakes gathered into clay jars. The detail that these snakes were live and poisonous was easy to interpret, but the attribute 'of clay' less so. I was also wondering why one would put snakes into jars when crates or baskets containing figs (or, depending which Grimm fairy tale ending one is reading, barrels or pits full or empty of simmering oil and presumably cellar-temperature toads) seem so much more common and intuitive. As it turns out, these jars were catapulted onto an enemy ship, and the clay must have been brittle enough to unleash them once they made their impact.
In this same battle Nepos also tells of a mean stroke of genius in which Hannibal wanted his ships to attack the enemy king's at once. The question was, whose ship was the king's? To find it out, he sent a messenger on a little boat wielding a letter, and the enemies duly guided this messenger to the king's ship so that the king might inspect what they presumed to be a peaceful overture.
On the U-Bahn on the way to the university that third time, two passengers were excitedly retelling the Italy-Spain match of the Euro Cup, including Italy's 3-5-2 formation and a spectacular foul. On the way home, today's France-England match was apparently still taking place, so at the beer garden at Dahlem Dorf I caught a glimpse of the outdoor TV screen through the heavy leaf. Still exhausted from the World Cup two years ago, and inclined to curl into a protective ball at the revived notion of vuvuzelas, I have not been watching the 90-minute games. I have reduced them probably by half or more by reading the minute-by-minute reports on the Guardian, instead, and using my imagination. When Germany played Portugal, it was easy to determine the score based on the neighbourhood sound of firecrackers, etc., and divers triumphal tootery. I wouldn't recommend these oblique experiences for everyone but it is enough for me at present.
Inspired by a Guardian article about a new generation of fastidious child-size gourmands, I decided to read scientific literature about the reasons why children are picky about food (with an interesting side tangent on propylthiouracil and phenylthiocarbamide, which I may have misspelled). As a child I didn't think it was because adults are more polite, heroic, or self-sacrificing, and as an adult this skepticism is borne out. One obvious example: grapefruit tasted like pure poison when I was little except under a mountain of sugar, but now I can tolerate the acidity perfectly; and olives tasted awful and now I can gobble them up easily though from an aesthetic perspective I find the pallid green ones with the sad mush of lemon creme or even cubic pimento bits in them somewhat disturbing. I can eat strawberries without sugar and still taste something besides acridity, and drink Cointreau without being overwhelmed by the alcohol fumes. This early aversion to acidity must not be universal, however. When one of my brothers was little we would pile all the lemon quarters which garnished our fish-and-chips in restaurants onto his plate, and he would eat the insides of each one after the other and with great enjoyment.
Anyway, old-fashioned or not, the trick that worked best for me is to eat lousy-tasting food one spoonful or forkful at a time and to pretend that each spoonful is a kind of toast to a different relative or friend of the family. But the older I get the more ridiculous I think it is to eat food which one really can't enjoy, so if I am ever a host to children, I would have pretzels or other food which is familiar and practically impossible to dislike. (Based on what I've read, statistically speaking, starchy foods tend to be liked by most people.) As for changes in attitudes over time, I must admit to mentally snickering when children in 19th-century fiction suffer under the delusion that apples are candy.
Before that, I watched roughly half of the Venus transit and idly listened to the commentary from a NASA team at Mauna Kea, which may in retrospect have kicked off the scientific interest.
The other thing is that I am rewriting a lousy thriller and one of the figures is a postgraduate oceanography or marine biology student, so I have begun a crash course of reading in a textbook each on biology and limnology (which I hope to tie into oceanography). Since my characterization and plotting and so on are still hopelessly terrible, though improving very slowly over time, I figure that it's best to do what I can already do well now — namely, research. Thereby I can not only grow my brain but also find more fuel for the imagination as well as better habits of observation and mental pigeonholing. Besides, our field of work does play a role in our lives, though maybe not the role which is likeliest to land up in a Hollywood biopic, so the better I know the careers of protagonists the better I can render their aforementioned lives.
Then I remembered that MIT has free online courses, so I began the biology course for that. This led me to a YouTube video wherein a professor gives a biology student's introduction to chemistry, and I highly recommend it (though not so much for its cinematographic quality). What helps is, of course, that I took and liked Biology in high school. In Grade 11 we went through the kingdoms one by one, which had a nice sweeping quality in terms of the organisms and the progression of time from the emergence of the simplest organisms from the primordial soup to the emergence of the simplest human from his stony retreats. In Grade 12 we did biochemistry and human biology in general. In our all-purpose Science class in Grade 10, we had learned about cell organelles; and in Grade 9 we had learned the very basics of human biology and nutrition, which insofar as explaining to us e.g. that amino acids are the building blocks of protein, did lay a biochemical foundation.
Besides the sister had a special tutorial session today, which I attended. Since I didn't understand much of it, I worked on my artistic marginalia as well as on my information-technological notes, but it was still enlightening. It's a bit like pinning-the-tail-on-the-donkey, where a piece of solid comprehension is a tail, and its context remains vague.
Departing from the scientific realm, I went to a Greek class which never happened (more about that fiasco, perhaps, at another time) in the morning and in the evening went to Latin. I admit that I was inclined to wonder at Cornelius Nepos's writing style when he wrote with an atypical precision of detail that Hannibal had snakes gathered into clay jars. The detail that these snakes were live and poisonous was easy to interpret, but the attribute 'of clay' less so. I was also wondering why one would put snakes into jars when crates or baskets containing figs (or, depending which Grimm fairy tale ending one is reading, barrels or pits full or empty of simmering oil and presumably cellar-temperature toads) seem so much more common and intuitive. As it turns out, these jars were catapulted onto an enemy ship, and the clay must have been brittle enough to unleash them once they made their impact.
In this same battle Nepos also tells of a mean stroke of genius in which Hannibal wanted his ships to attack the enemy king's at once. The question was, whose ship was the king's? To find it out, he sent a messenger on a little boat wielding a letter, and the enemies duly guided this messenger to the king's ship so that the king might inspect what they presumed to be a peaceful overture.
On the U-Bahn on the way to the university that third time, two passengers were excitedly retelling the Italy-Spain match of the Euro Cup, including Italy's 3-5-2 formation and a spectacular foul. On the way home, today's France-England match was apparently still taking place, so at the beer garden at Dahlem Dorf I caught a glimpse of the outdoor TV screen through the heavy leaf. Still exhausted from the World Cup two years ago, and inclined to curl into a protective ball at the revived notion of vuvuzelas, I have not been watching the 90-minute games. I have reduced them probably by half or more by reading the minute-by-minute reports on the Guardian, instead, and using my imagination. When Germany played Portugal, it was easy to determine the score based on the neighbourhood sound of firecrackers, etc., and divers triumphal tootery. I wouldn't recommend these oblique experiences for everyone but it is enough for me at present.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
An Essay on Matters from Ants to Zaire
The temperature in Berlin was expected to reach 31 degrees today, though it was intermittently cloudy and a wind has been blowing in from the northeast, so I wore a dress and sandals (with socks). As it turns out, the weather was not as sweltering as on dog days in August of years past, the U-Bahn was airy enough, shade from trees was everywhere once I was out in Dahlem, and the interiors of buildings are still as cool as the middle of a stone rain cistern. But while standing still is comfortably warm, the moment one begins to walk more than five meters the sweat (or, to use a politer term, 'glow') begins.
Having missed the last History and Society of the Near East lecture, and the first five to ten minutes of this one, I was mildly surprised to find ourselves plunked into the middle of the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt already. It was briefly touched upon, though, before we skipped ahead to Muhammad Ali. I was kind of excited when the name was first mentioned; instead of an esoteric tangent about the boxer, however, the professor was speaking of the Egyptian khedive.
This khedive was completely unfamiliar to me until I realized that he is the same person as Mehmet Ali Pasha. (Not that I had any idea who he was, but I'd come across his name.) Since Mehmet Ali was an independent and ambiguous reforming figure in his own right, and unfortunately sensationally brutal at times (for example, gathering a bunch of elites into a citadel for a 'feast' and killing them all, with results so nice he did it twice — at any rate this stratagem was later repeated in Istanbul), his tale was interesting too. So I resolved toembark on an intensive round of reading with the professor's recommended reading list as a starting point look it up in Wikipedia later.
When he was not reforming agriculture through policy resembling in its wisdom and well-guided humility the Great Leap Forward, conscripting the peasantry instead of recruiting foreign mercenaries and coercing prisoners into the army as had been the custom, expelling the Turkish-originating Mameluke upper class, driving the house of Saud away from Mecca and Medina (I mentally cheered at this, since I don't like Wahhabism nor the present Saudi rulers' mode of governance as far as I've heard about it), taking over Greater Syria with a menacing ambition towards Anatolia and then Istanbul, and being a wheel in the cogs of the Ottoman Empire which was eager to roll off and construct its own mechanism, etc., he was looking to transform the education system which was still dominated for instance by madrassas. By these means and others he endeared himself to the religious scholars of the state — I really mean did the opposite of 'endeared himself.' (Later these ulama would partly align themselves with peasants' revolts.) I may be mixing up Mehmet Ali's achievements with hisson grandson and indirect successor Ismail Pasha's later ones, however.
The khedive sent a sheik, Tahtawi, to Paris, with a gaggle of students in order to observe specifically the educational system of France. As the professor mentioned this and suggested in an aside that Tahtawi was also supposed to keep the young people from going off the rails, I pictured the Egyptian in my mind's eye, steering serious-minded students clad in robes away from the Moulin Rouge, like overenergetic schoolchildren on a field trip to the Musée d'Orsay but worse. (Neither the Moulin nor the Musée already existed in 1826, but anyway.)
Whether the students used their time wisely or not, their Argus wrote a book about it later. A biography of Tahtawi himself is here (from the website of Durham University; and if you read the text at length, you will only see orange afterwards by virtue of the colourful background), but I haven't found an online text. So I'm still curious if he took scholarly revenge on the Lettres persanes, the Entführung aus dem Serails, the Rondos alla turca, the portrait of Byron in a turban, and all the other European, er, insights into the being of the Ottoman Empire and its predecessor states.
It's arguable, but my professor said right at the beginning of the lecture that in the Islamic world the revolutions have all been a renewal of tradition rather than complete innovation as in Europe. Which is an interesting insight even if I find it a little hard to believe. Certainly there was much about the French Revolution which seemed to graft completely new and abstract ideas onto whatever was left of the Ancien Régime, but it also derived part of its authority, I think, from modern interpretations of Roman political systems in theory and practice, and from references to England as it constituted itself after the Glorious Revolution of 1668. As far as I know their ideas of Rome and England were all veiled and rose-tinted and soft-focused so that the Romans and constitutional monarchic English might be excused for not recognizing their polity in a revolutionary's representation thereof; but I imagine that Christ might also be agog at the interesting things he has been accused within the past millennium or so of thinking ca. 30 Anno Ipsius (eius? — pardon my neologized Latin), so even religious tradition does not quite live up to the promise of its name.
After the lecture there was a two hour interval where I could have gone home, but decided to read books outdoors. There are lots of books I could and should be reading. Yesterday I realized that I should begin preparing for my Islamic Studies seminar's essay if I wanted to write it properly. I still have an inkling that it won't be my finest work, but I don't want to have a bad conscience about the preparation process on top of everything else. So for now I am reading about 20th-century black history in America. We have The Autobiography of Malcolm X at home too, but I've decided to begin with Black Rage. After reading a really interesting cluster of Wikipedia articles about the senator who wrote the foreword and his wife, his rivals, etc., I began to read up on the Watts Riots, mentioned in the book alongside Newark and Detroit riots which I haven't even begun to research. The report of the commission which investigated the riots is quite good reading — one of the commission members is Warren Christopher, who I seem to remember also spearheaded an investigation into police brutality around the time of the Rodney King riots — though I am not sure how much of it to believe. It's still horrifying to realize that people die in these riots, instead of spraypainting vulgarities or torching parked cars whose owners are presumably long gone or being dragged away by police or throwing things against armoured officers with pusillanimous black masks over their faces as people do in the riots that we see on the news once or twice a year now.
I've just realized that the deaths of people during the looting in New Orleans have also barely been reported, compared for instance to Kanye West's 'Bush doesn't care about black people' commentary (which I still think is hilarious and probably true) — which is part and parcel of the strange tendency of the American press to bypass any news, however sensational, if it is really important and symptomatic of America's underlying realities. It is also, I think, racist.
I am also still reading through Thomas Pynchon's essay on Watts, but put aside a French opinion article whose author implied that the death of a police officer was quite peachy and who gloried in the destruction which was as far as I can tell pretty cannibalistic since it probably hurt African-Americans more than it did others. There was an article from the Los Angeles Times (probably) where the police officer who arrested a drunk driver and thereby sparked the Watts Riots said, 'I was just doin' ma job' and that he 'doesn't think about the riots much' — which irritated me greatly. While it is true that he evidently carried out this arrest in the most indisputably ordinary and reasonable manner, firstly, people who are interviewed in newspapers who trot out the tired phrase "I was just doing my job" are generally trying to avoid being embarrassed by fulsome praise for a heroic deed, which your garden variety DUI arrest is not. Secondly, not thinking about violence where dozens of people died and you know some of the actors is either a necessary defense mechanism, or highly egocentric and frankly a bit dumb.
Then I read an article about Thurgood Marshall (I had forgotten that he was replaced by Clarence Thomas, so a loud but silent internal cry of 'noooooo!' arose once that was mentioned) and even waded through the Supreme Court ruling, Reitman v. Mulkey, against the discriminatory housing policy which had been enshrined in California's state law by a voter proposition just before the riots.
But I was not sitting at a computer and I hadn't brought Black Rage along, so I read more of Der ewige Krieg, which was not so cheerful to begin with and is becoming more and more depressing, cynical, and full of futility, still expressed in the somewhat timeworn New York Times style. But I read far more of the introductions in our copy of Zaïre, the play by Voltaire from the 1730s, and though it is a tragedy reading about it is quite cheerful. The editors have limned the historical context, echoed the plaudits and critiques of the play's original audience, and in delineating its literary and other influences have dispatched questions like 'is the play an egregious imitation of Othello?' (— one can see why one would ask, but the answer is no) with polite emphasis.
Now I am slogging through Voltaire's dedications (which are as ever tremendously boring to read, since they can be properly interesting — to borrow a phrase from Jane Austen — only to the principal parties) to his English friend.The footnotes are unexpectedly cheeky; I like the comment about the absurd tradition in dedications 'd'écrire des lettres d'esclave à des gens qui sont digne de l'être' (that was probably misquoted; the sense: 'to write letters in a slavish manner to persons who deserve to be one'). The playwright goes on and on, explaining the nature of England to an Englishman; so that one does feel inclined to throttle him lightly and tell him to get with the programme and talk to the poor man about something he doesn't already know. English dramas are coarse, English freedom of expression and social mobility (that's a larf, but French society must have been even worse) and so on good, and Englishmen cheeky little monkeys for unfairly being mean to actors. We get it. — Lessing evidently felt the same, since he is quoted in the footnotes being critical in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. I've found the whole thing as an online text at Gutenberg, so here is an amusing excerpt:
First, he recapitulates Voltaire's argument that English plays were unnatural for having a rhymed couplet at the end of each act, out of sheer habit, and that this couplet invariably contains some trite analogy (Cato comparing himself to a rock, for instance). Aaron Hill, the translator who rendered Voltaire into the English has, according to Voltaire, broken with this tradition to bow to the natural instinct and shed this artificial practice:
For as surely as it is composed in rhymeless verse, so surely does every act close with two or four rhymed verses. They may not contain comparisons; but, as stated, among all rhymed lines of that order with which Shakespeare and Jonson and Dryden and Lee and Otway and Rowe, and whatever all their names are, finish their acts, there are surely five which also contain none. What was particular about Hill, then?
If he had really possessed that unique quality which Voltaire lent him, it would thirdly still not be true that his example bore the influence which Voltaire ascribes to it. To this hour there appear in England quite as many if not more tragedies whose acts close with rhymed lines, as those who do not. Hill himself has not, in a single play — of which he has after all undertaken several, still after the translation of Zaire —, removed himself entirely from the old fashion.
And what does it matter, whether we hear rhymes last or none? When they are there, they can perhaps still benefit the orchestra, in particular as a signal to take up the instruments, which signal would in this manner be more neatly by far be derived from the drama, than the pipe or the key provides.)
I moved locations while reading several times, but sitting on the steps of a building was out after two ants crawled into my dress. Though I miss the feeling of having random insects walking over, resting on, and otherwise visiting me since we left the Canadian countryside, and feel kind of happy whenever I see a spider even if it isn't nearly as huge as past acquaintances, this went too far. After that, obviously, I started seeing ants everywhere, along the sidewalks and so on.
Then it was time for the History and Society of the Near East seminar. Today the topic was whether there is a catty hierarchy within the American Muslim community which relegates African-American Muslims to lower positions. Firstly it wasn't clear if this is really an issue which people worry about in real life or rather something which academics worry about for them; secondly the question was whether racism is Islamic and we barely touched on the theological aspect. We discussed slavery in the seminar last semester, and I think that the Prophet was uneasy with it but not strictly opposed, and that his successors chose to pretend that owning non-Muslim slaves was, er, halal; but a central tenet of Islam is equality. I also don't know if there was ever the sense that God made black people inferior — only unlucky if they were caught or handed over, which was a fate possible for any neighbour of the Abbasid, Ottoman, etc. empires.
A classmate also rightly asked whether new converts to Islam (which pretty much any African-American is, since immigration from Africa and specifically Muslim African nations was I think impossible until the laws changed in the 1960s) were not always rather looked down upon. The teacher said that converts from unlikely demographic sources, e.g. pretty blonde Americans, are heartily welcome, but from the example that she gave it seemed rather that such a convert can be paraded as a rara avis rather than shuttled up into the hierarchy. She also mentioned that there are squabbles about which self-declared Muslims can actually read the Koran in the original Arabic, etc.
What was also mentioned is that the racial hierarchy is omnipresent; and that immigrants tend to assimilate into it as easily as into anything else. A cheerful thought.
Finally, I went to my Latin class. We are still translating Cornelius Nepos's biography of Hannibal. Last time there was a passage which intrigued us all, about Hannibal's soldiers twining brushwood (sarmentum) into the horns of steers at nighttime, lighting the twigs on fire, and then sending the animals loose into the field toward the Roman lines. The Romans were apparently so disconcerted that they didn't dare to set foot outside their fortifications. Written in spare language, this detail left open all sorts of questions. First and foremost, weren't the poor creatures burned? Secondly, were the burning twigs supposed to look like torches held by roaming soldiers, in which case mightn't the Romans have shot at the animals? Thirdly, or were the roaming steers supposed to look like ghosts? Fourth, mightn't they have looked like will o' the wisps? Fifth, are there will o' the wisps in Italian marshes, or would the Romans have been frightened even more since nothing they had ever encountered would explain the roving lights?
Either way, I was feeling tired but not as badly as yesterday (fourish hours of sleep are a bad idea); the heat wilted us all a little, however. Even the awkward silences before someone answered a question were extremely mellow; I thought the class went swimmingly. But the professor thought otherwise. She was especially, though mildly, bewildered that we couldn't state that absens is in the nominative case (she told us that the word was absens, absentis, and then it still took someone a while to raise a hand); 'The weather is hot, but not that hot!'
Anyway, it is now nearly 6 a.m., so off to bed for me. When I wake up I'll probably look like a vampire again, unwholesome and with a sunken reddish look underneath fixed beady eyes, thanks to sleep deprivation. By 12:15 I must be at my Greek speech lab, by 2:15 voluntarily at T.'s tutorial, then two hours of twiddlingmy thumbs, and then another two hours of Latin, followed by a trip to the U-Bahn, ascent up the street to our apartment, climb of the stairs, and finally summary collapse across the threshold. The drama will be intense. On Thursday I have three and a half hours of Greek; on Friday nothing, and since Pentecost is a holiday, there will be a day off on Monday. So this is survivable.
P.S.: I am sorry for the inaccuracies or slips due to being kind of woozy and lazy which are doubtless rife in this post.
Having missed the last History and Society of the Near East lecture, and the first five to ten minutes of this one, I was mildly surprised to find ourselves plunked into the middle of the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt already. It was briefly touched upon, though, before we skipped ahead to Muhammad Ali. I was kind of excited when the name was first mentioned; instead of an esoteric tangent about the boxer, however, the professor was speaking of the Egyptian khedive.
This khedive was completely unfamiliar to me until I realized that he is the same person as Mehmet Ali Pasha. (Not that I had any idea who he was, but I'd come across his name.) Since Mehmet Ali was an independent and ambiguous reforming figure in his own right, and unfortunately sensationally brutal at times (for example, gathering a bunch of elites into a citadel for a 'feast' and killing them all, with results so nice he did it twice — at any rate this stratagem was later repeated in Istanbul), his tale was interesting too. So I resolved to
When he was not reforming agriculture through policy resembling in its wisdom and well-guided humility the Great Leap Forward, conscripting the peasantry instead of recruiting foreign mercenaries and coercing prisoners into the army as had been the custom, expelling the Turkish-originating Mameluke upper class, driving the house of Saud away from Mecca and Medina (I mentally cheered at this, since I don't like Wahhabism nor the present Saudi rulers' mode of governance as far as I've heard about it), taking over Greater Syria with a menacing ambition towards Anatolia and then Istanbul, and being a wheel in the cogs of the Ottoman Empire which was eager to roll off and construct its own mechanism, etc., he was looking to transform the education system which was still dominated for instance by madrassas. By these means and others he endeared himself to the religious scholars of the state — I really mean did the opposite of 'endeared himself.' (Later these ulama would partly align themselves with peasants' revolts.) I may be mixing up Mehmet Ali's achievements with his
The khedive sent a sheik, Tahtawi, to Paris, with a gaggle of students in order to observe specifically the educational system of France. As the professor mentioned this and suggested in an aside that Tahtawi was also supposed to keep the young people from going off the rails, I pictured the Egyptian in my mind's eye, steering serious-minded students clad in robes away from the Moulin Rouge, like overenergetic schoolchildren on a field trip to the Musée d'Orsay but worse. (Neither the Moulin nor the Musée already existed in 1826, but anyway.)
Whether the students used their time wisely or not, their Argus wrote a book about it later. A biography of Tahtawi himself is here (from the website of Durham University; and if you read the text at length, you will only see orange afterwards by virtue of the colourful background), but I haven't found an online text. So I'm still curious if he took scholarly revenge on the Lettres persanes, the Entführung aus dem Serails, the Rondos alla turca, the portrait of Byron in a turban, and all the other European, er, insights into the being of the Ottoman Empire and its predecessor states.
It's arguable, but my professor said right at the beginning of the lecture that in the Islamic world the revolutions have all been a renewal of tradition rather than complete innovation as in Europe. Which is an interesting insight even if I find it a little hard to believe. Certainly there was much about the French Revolution which seemed to graft completely new and abstract ideas onto whatever was left of the Ancien Régime, but it also derived part of its authority, I think, from modern interpretations of Roman political systems in theory and practice, and from references to England as it constituted itself after the Glorious Revolution of 1668. As far as I know their ideas of Rome and England were all veiled and rose-tinted and soft-focused so that the Romans and constitutional monarchic English might be excused for not recognizing their polity in a revolutionary's representation thereof; but I imagine that Christ might also be agog at the interesting things he has been accused within the past millennium or so of thinking ca. 30 Anno Ipsius (eius? — pardon my neologized Latin), so even religious tradition does not quite live up to the promise of its name.
After the lecture there was a two hour interval where I could have gone home, but decided to read books outdoors. There are lots of books I could and should be reading. Yesterday I realized that I should begin preparing for my Islamic Studies seminar's essay if I wanted to write it properly. I still have an inkling that it won't be my finest work, but I don't want to have a bad conscience about the preparation process on top of everything else. So for now I am reading about 20th-century black history in America. We have The Autobiography of Malcolm X at home too, but I've decided to begin with Black Rage. After reading a really interesting cluster of Wikipedia articles about the senator who wrote the foreword and his wife, his rivals, etc., I began to read up on the Watts Riots, mentioned in the book alongside Newark and Detroit riots which I haven't even begun to research. The report of the commission which investigated the riots is quite good reading — one of the commission members is Warren Christopher, who I seem to remember also spearheaded an investigation into police brutality around the time of the Rodney King riots — though I am not sure how much of it to believe. It's still horrifying to realize that people die in these riots, instead of spraypainting vulgarities or torching parked cars whose owners are presumably long gone or being dragged away by police or throwing things against armoured officers with pusillanimous black masks over their faces as people do in the riots that we see on the news once or twice a year now.
I've just realized that the deaths of people during the looting in New Orleans have also barely been reported, compared for instance to Kanye West's 'Bush doesn't care about black people' commentary (which I still think is hilarious and probably true) — which is part and parcel of the strange tendency of the American press to bypass any news, however sensational, if it is really important and symptomatic of America's underlying realities. It is also, I think, racist.
I am also still reading through Thomas Pynchon's essay on Watts, but put aside a French opinion article whose author implied that the death of a police officer was quite peachy and who gloried in the destruction which was as far as I can tell pretty cannibalistic since it probably hurt African-Americans more than it did others. There was an article from the Los Angeles Times (probably) where the police officer who arrested a drunk driver and thereby sparked the Watts Riots said, 'I was just doin' ma job' and that he 'doesn't think about the riots much' — which irritated me greatly. While it is true that he evidently carried out this arrest in the most indisputably ordinary and reasonable manner, firstly, people who are interviewed in newspapers who trot out the tired phrase "I was just doing my job" are generally trying to avoid being embarrassed by fulsome praise for a heroic deed, which your garden variety DUI arrest is not. Secondly, not thinking about violence where dozens of people died and you know some of the actors is either a necessary defense mechanism, or highly egocentric and frankly a bit dumb.
Then I read an article about Thurgood Marshall (I had forgotten that he was replaced by Clarence Thomas, so a loud but silent internal cry of 'noooooo!' arose once that was mentioned) and even waded through the Supreme Court ruling, Reitman v. Mulkey, against the discriminatory housing policy which had been enshrined in California's state law by a voter proposition just before the riots.
But I was not sitting at a computer and I hadn't brought Black Rage along, so I read more of Der ewige Krieg, which was not so cheerful to begin with and is becoming more and more depressing, cynical, and full of futility, still expressed in the somewhat timeworn New York Times style. But I read far more of the introductions in our copy of Zaïre, the play by Voltaire from the 1730s, and though it is a tragedy reading about it is quite cheerful. The editors have limned the historical context, echoed the plaudits and critiques of the play's original audience, and in delineating its literary and other influences have dispatched questions like 'is the play an egregious imitation of Othello?' (— one can see why one would ask, but the answer is no) with polite emphasis.
Now I am slogging through Voltaire's dedications (which are as ever tremendously boring to read, since they can be properly interesting — to borrow a phrase from Jane Austen — only to the principal parties) to his English friend.The footnotes are unexpectedly cheeky; I like the comment about the absurd tradition in dedications 'd'écrire des lettres d'esclave à des gens qui sont digne de l'être' (that was probably misquoted; the sense: 'to write letters in a slavish manner to persons who deserve to be one'). The playwright goes on and on, explaining the nature of England to an Englishman; so that one does feel inclined to throttle him lightly and tell him to get with the programme and talk to the poor man about something he doesn't already know. English dramas are coarse, English freedom of expression and social mobility (that's a larf, but French society must have been even worse) and so on good, and Englishmen cheeky little monkeys for unfairly being mean to actors. We get it. — Lessing evidently felt the same, since he is quoted in the footnotes being critical in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. I've found the whole thing as an online text at Gutenberg, so here is an amusing excerpt:
First, he recapitulates Voltaire's argument that English plays were unnatural for having a rhymed couplet at the end of each act, out of sheer habit, and that this couplet invariably contains some trite analogy (Cato comparing himself to a rock, for instance). Aaron Hill, the translator who rendered Voltaire into the English has, according to Voltaire, broken with this tradition to bow to the natural instinct and shed this artificial practice:
Er sagt z.E. zu seinem englischen Freunde: "Eure Dichter hatten eine Gewohnheit, der sich selbst Addison unterworfen; denn Gewohnheit ist so maechtig als Vernunft und Gesetz. Diese gar nicht vernuenftige Gewohnheit bestand darin, dass jeder Akt mit Versen beschlossen werden musste, die in einem ganz andern Geschmacke waren, als das Uebrige des Stuecks; und notwendig mussten diese Verse eine Vergleichung enthalten.
Phaedra, indem sie abgeht, vergleicht sich sehr poetisch mit einem Rehe, Cato mit einem Felsen, und Kleopatra mit Kindern, die so lange weinen, bis sie einschlafen.
Der Uebersetzer der "Zaire" ist der erste, der es gewagt hat, die Rechte der Natur gegen einen von ihr so entfernten Geschmack zu behaupten. Er hat diesen Gebrauch abgeschafft; er hat es empfunden, dass die Leidenschaft ihre wahre Sprache fuehren und der Poet sich ueberall verbergen muesse, um uns nur den Helden erkennen zu lassen."Lessing replies to this notion, "Es sind nicht mehr als nur drei Unwahrheiten in dieser Stelle;" — 'There are not more than three solitary untruths here"
(and that is in sooth not much for Master Voltaire. True it may be, that the English have been in the habit since Shakespeare and perhaps earlier, to end their acts in unrhymed verse with a few rhymed lines. But that these rhymed lines contained nothing but comparisons — that they must needs contain comparisons — that is utterly wrong; and I do not comprehend how Master Voltaire could say such stuff to the very face of an Englishman — whom he could, after all, believe to have read the tragic bard of his countrymen. Secondly, there are no grounds for the statement that Hill has departed from this tradition in his translation of Zaire. It may be near incredible that Master Voltaire has not inspected the translation of his piece more closely than I or any other. It must be so all the same.
und das ist fuer den Hrn. von Voltaire eben nicht viel. Wahr ist es, dass die Englaender, vom Shakespeare an, und vielleicht auch von noch laenger her, die Gewohnheit gehabt, ihre Aufzuege in ungereimten Versen mit ein paar gereimten Zeilen zu enden. Aber dass diese gereimten Zeilen nichts als Vergleichungen enthielten, dass sie notwendig Vergleichungen enthalten muessen, das ist grundfalsch; und ich begreife gar nicht, wie der Herr von Voltaire einem Englaender, von dem er doch glauben konnte, dass er die tragischen Dichter seines Volkes auch gelesen habe, so etwas unter die Nase sagen koennen. Zweitens ist es nicht an dem, dass Hill in seiner Uebersetzung der "Zaire" von dieser Gewohnheit abgegangen. Es ist zwar beinahe nicht glaublich, dass der Hr. von Voltaire die Uebersetzung seines Stuecks nicht genauer sollte angesehen haben, als ich oder ein anderer. Gleichwohl muss es so sein. Denn so gewiss sie in reimfreien Versen ist, so gewiss schliesst sich auch jeder Akt mit zwei oder vier gereimten Zellen. Vergleichungen enthalten sie freilich nicht; aber, wie gesagt, unter allen dergleichen gereimten Zeilen, mit welchen Shakespeare und Jonson und Dryden und Lee und Otway und Rowe, und wie sie alle heissen, ihre Aufzuege schliessen, sind sicherlich hundert gegen fuenfe, die gleichfalls keine enthalten. Was hatte denn Hill also Besonders? Haette er aber auch wirklich das Besondere gehabt, das ihm Voltaire leihet: so waere doch drittens das nicht wahr, dass sein Beispiel von dem Einflusse gewesen, von dem es Voltaire sein laesst. Noch bis diese Stunde erscheinen in England ebensoviel, wo nicht noch mehr Trauerspiele, deren Akte sich mit gereimten Zellen enden, als die es nicht tun. Hill selbst hat in keinem einzigen Stuecke, deren er doch verschiedene, noch nach der Uebersetzung der "Zaire", gemacht, sich der alten Mode gaenzlich entaeussert. Und was ist es denn nun, ob wir zuletzt Reime hoeren oder keine? Wenn sie da sind, koennen sie vielleicht dem Orchester noch nutzen; als Zeichen naemlich, nach den Instrumenten zu greifen, welches Zeichen auf diese Art weit schicklicher aus dem Stuecke selbst abgenommen wuerde, als dass es die Pfeife oder der Schluessel gibt.
For as surely as it is composed in rhymeless verse, so surely does every act close with two or four rhymed verses. They may not contain comparisons; but, as stated, among all rhymed lines of that order with which Shakespeare and Jonson and Dryden and Lee and Otway and Rowe, and whatever all their names are, finish their acts, there are surely five which also contain none. What was particular about Hill, then?
If he had really possessed that unique quality which Voltaire lent him, it would thirdly still not be true that his example bore the influence which Voltaire ascribes to it. To this hour there appear in England quite as many if not more tragedies whose acts close with rhymed lines, as those who do not. Hill himself has not, in a single play — of which he has after all undertaken several, still after the translation of Zaire —, removed himself entirely from the old fashion.
And what does it matter, whether we hear rhymes last or none? When they are there, they can perhaps still benefit the orchestra, in particular as a signal to take up the instruments, which signal would in this manner be more neatly by far be derived from the drama, than the pipe or the key provides.)
I moved locations while reading several times, but sitting on the steps of a building was out after two ants crawled into my dress. Though I miss the feeling of having random insects walking over, resting on, and otherwise visiting me since we left the Canadian countryside, and feel kind of happy whenever I see a spider even if it isn't nearly as huge as past acquaintances, this went too far. After that, obviously, I started seeing ants everywhere, along the sidewalks and so on.
Then it was time for the History and Society of the Near East seminar. Today the topic was whether there is a catty hierarchy within the American Muslim community which relegates African-American Muslims to lower positions. Firstly it wasn't clear if this is really an issue which people worry about in real life or rather something which academics worry about for them; secondly the question was whether racism is Islamic and we barely touched on the theological aspect. We discussed slavery in the seminar last semester, and I think that the Prophet was uneasy with it but not strictly opposed, and that his successors chose to pretend that owning non-Muslim slaves was, er, halal; but a central tenet of Islam is equality. I also don't know if there was ever the sense that God made black people inferior — only unlucky if they were caught or handed over, which was a fate possible for any neighbour of the Abbasid, Ottoman, etc. empires.
A classmate also rightly asked whether new converts to Islam (which pretty much any African-American is, since immigration from Africa and specifically Muslim African nations was I think impossible until the laws changed in the 1960s) were not always rather looked down upon. The teacher said that converts from unlikely demographic sources, e.g. pretty blonde Americans, are heartily welcome, but from the example that she gave it seemed rather that such a convert can be paraded as a rara avis rather than shuttled up into the hierarchy. She also mentioned that there are squabbles about which self-declared Muslims can actually read the Koran in the original Arabic, etc.
What was also mentioned is that the racial hierarchy is omnipresent; and that immigrants tend to assimilate into it as easily as into anything else. A cheerful thought.
Finally, I went to my Latin class. We are still translating Cornelius Nepos's biography of Hannibal. Last time there was a passage which intrigued us all, about Hannibal's soldiers twining brushwood (sarmentum) into the horns of steers at nighttime, lighting the twigs on fire, and then sending the animals loose into the field toward the Roman lines. The Romans were apparently so disconcerted that they didn't dare to set foot outside their fortifications. Written in spare language, this detail left open all sorts of questions. First and foremost, weren't the poor creatures burned? Secondly, were the burning twigs supposed to look like torches held by roaming soldiers, in which case mightn't the Romans have shot at the animals? Thirdly, or were the roaming steers supposed to look like ghosts? Fourth, mightn't they have looked like will o' the wisps? Fifth, are there will o' the wisps in Italian marshes, or would the Romans have been frightened even more since nothing they had ever encountered would explain the roving lights?
Either way, I was feeling tired but not as badly as yesterday (fourish hours of sleep are a bad idea); the heat wilted us all a little, however. Even the awkward silences before someone answered a question were extremely mellow; I thought the class went swimmingly. But the professor thought otherwise. She was especially, though mildly, bewildered that we couldn't state that absens is in the nominative case (she told us that the word was absens, absentis, and then it still took someone a while to raise a hand); 'The weather is hot, but not that hot!'
Anyway, it is now nearly 6 a.m., so off to bed for me. When I wake up I'll probably look like a vampire again, unwholesome and with a sunken reddish look underneath fixed beady eyes, thanks to sleep deprivation. By 12:15 I must be at my Greek speech lab, by 2:15 voluntarily at T.'s tutorial, then two hours of twiddlingmy thumbs, and then another two hours of Latin, followed by a trip to the U-Bahn, ascent up the street to our apartment, climb of the stairs, and finally summary collapse across the threshold. The drama will be intense. On Thursday I have three and a half hours of Greek; on Friday nothing, and since Pentecost is a holiday, there will be a day off on Monday. So this is survivable.
P.S.: I am sorry for the inaccuracies or slips due to being kind of woozy and lazy which are doubtless rife in this post.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Embroidery in the Sewing and in the Imagining Sense
It's a very cloudy day which has pulled torrential rain, lightning, and a winterly brooding quality through the otherwise summery atmosphere.
Around Tuesday T. decided pretty much spontaneously to sew herself a shirt, so on Wednesday she dragged me to the Schlosstraße. This is something of a shopping mecca; it has a touristy ex-West German air and city eclecticism mixed with something of the bourgeois sedateness of well-to-do parts of southwestern Berlin, I think. I felt a little uncomfortable with the architecture, the proportions of the open space and the street, and with the people, but it was something new.
One of the passengers on our bus was a louche but impassive broad-shouldered man in an expensively fine-looking though simple black T-shirt and jeans, who had the lope and air of a bodyguard (for a figure of dubious eminence) or XXX nightclub bouncer in a Jean-Claude van Damme action film. So I was kind of agitated afterwards, like the time where I was in the night train from Munich to Düsseldorf and there was this awful sort of criminal atmosphere pervading it — and where, of course, I'm not entirely sure whether it isn't all in my imagination.
In the Schlosstraße's Karstadt outlet, whose layout felt familiar since the one which used to exist closer to our home had it in compacter form, we descended to the basement. Tucked amongst the islands of bedlinens and pillows there was a sewing corner. The shelves were rife with notions (seam rippers, leather thongs, knitting needles, and an artillery-like array of zippers, thread spools, and beads in a large spectrum of bold colours) and yarn, with a couple of unlacquered sewing-boxes and prepared tablecloth embroidery kits. But we found no patterns or cloth bolts, and the lady whom T. asked confirmed that there were none to be found.
After reemerging through the cosmetics and perfume counters — with their fumes of eau de cotton candy and bubblegum (as I slanderously perceived it) — we went on to a toy and crafts department store on the lady's recommendation. It did have cloth bolts and so on and so forth in stock, which was mainly targeted to a younger crowd, but we found no patterns.
I hauled myself back to university for a corking hour and a half of Latin (T. came along with me to Rathaus Steglitz so that I would find the right bus stop for the way back), and by the time I was home T. had her tailorly ducks — cloth, patterns, and so on and so forth — in a row.
Pudel was there too, so (greatly miffed since I have developed the cleanly or paranoid habit of changing out of the clothes I go out in as soon as I am home, and since my socks were soaked in sweat up to the base of my toes, and I hadn't had a chance to redd myself or whatever the Scots locution is) I was conscripted to play Haydn trios. In the course of the trios I became less miffed, and fortunately I had already had a bite to eat. Afterwards the daughter of my Greek professor telephoned again to say that she was too sick to come in the following day, so since then I have been enjoying an early weekend.
Around Tuesday T. decided pretty much spontaneously to sew herself a shirt, so on Wednesday she dragged me to the Schlosstraße. This is something of a shopping mecca; it has a touristy ex-West German air and city eclecticism mixed with something of the bourgeois sedateness of well-to-do parts of southwestern Berlin, I think. I felt a little uncomfortable with the architecture, the proportions of the open space and the street, and with the people, but it was something new.
One of the passengers on our bus was a louche but impassive broad-shouldered man in an expensively fine-looking though simple black T-shirt and jeans, who had the lope and air of a bodyguard (for a figure of dubious eminence) or XXX nightclub bouncer in a Jean-Claude van Damme action film. So I was kind of agitated afterwards, like the time where I was in the night train from Munich to Düsseldorf and there was this awful sort of criminal atmosphere pervading it — and where, of course, I'm not entirely sure whether it isn't all in my imagination.
In the Schlosstraße's Karstadt outlet, whose layout felt familiar since the one which used to exist closer to our home had it in compacter form, we descended to the basement. Tucked amongst the islands of bedlinens and pillows there was a sewing corner. The shelves were rife with notions (seam rippers, leather thongs, knitting needles, and an artillery-like array of zippers, thread spools, and beads in a large spectrum of bold colours) and yarn, with a couple of unlacquered sewing-boxes and prepared tablecloth embroidery kits. But we found no patterns or cloth bolts, and the lady whom T. asked confirmed that there were none to be found.
After reemerging through the cosmetics and perfume counters — with their fumes of eau de cotton candy and bubblegum (as I slanderously perceived it) — we went on to a toy and crafts department store on the lady's recommendation. It did have cloth bolts and so on and so forth in stock, which was mainly targeted to a younger crowd, but we found no patterns.
I hauled myself back to university for a corking hour and a half of Latin (T. came along with me to Rathaus Steglitz so that I would find the right bus stop for the way back), and by the time I was home T. had her tailorly ducks — cloth, patterns, and so on and so forth — in a row.
Pudel was there too, so (greatly miffed since I have developed the cleanly or paranoid habit of changing out of the clothes I go out in as soon as I am home, and since my socks were soaked in sweat up to the base of my toes, and I hadn't had a chance to redd myself or whatever the Scots locution is) I was conscripted to play Haydn trios. In the course of the trios I became less miffed, and fortunately I had already had a bite to eat. Afterwards the daughter of my Greek professor telephoned again to say that she was too sick to come in the following day, so since then I have been enjoying an early weekend.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
A Student's-Eye Picture of Maytide
There are so many flowers and so much foliage out around the university buildings that walking to and from classes has become a detailed inventory: lilacs in blossom and buds — dark purple, white, and above all light purple, chestnut blossoms red and white, forget-me-nots, angelica or something like it in the underbrush, withered forsythia, honeysuckle or a blueberry variety with small and scattery pink flowers, the deep shadow in the streets from all the leaves thronging on the trees above them, herb-robert, white-flowered garlic mustard(?), dove nettles, common nettles, big pink clover, flowerless clover leaflets, daisies, seed-blown dandelions, and swathes of wisteria which fall like grape vines in a Mediterranean painting, very blue sky, very white clouds, and today a thorough grey cloud cover with some glimpses of sun. I looked for four-leaved clovers, and didn't find one, but instead saw a magpie strutting across a shortly cropped lawn.
Today there was the scent of mown grass, the ordinary whiffs of car exhaust and fuel, cigarette smoke, the racket of the construction beside the Silberlaube at the Fabeckstraße along with the Sahara-like yellow-brown dust, ringing bicycles, fuming sound of the U-Bahn trains at Dahlem Dorf, and besides all kinds of fragrances from the flowers and leaves and then from the different perfumes which people wore as they passed me.
A 'harlequin' ladybug loitered in the grass, an ant scrabbled over my book bag, two fruit flies or some cousin skittered over the book I was reading (Der Ewige Krieg, a translation of a book on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dexter Filkins). Though I didn't see a mouse again (once one saw me coming and, streaking across the cobble path, dove into one of the ring of holes in a manhole cover) I didn't really mind that; and otherwise there is a black cat which slunk across the Otto-von-Simson Straße into the brush at the corner to the Fabeckstraße once or twice in the winter, which I didn't see again either.
As for the classes, they began with a lecture on Iran during the Safavid period, then two hours of reading, then a seminar on the Moorish Science Temple and the beginnings of the Nation of Islam (where I really wished that this was my seminar last semester; because the professor was tactless but also very good at getting thorough background knowledge, detail, and thought out of us), and lastly a glorious hour and a half of Cornelius Nepos, describing the career of Hannibal. Cornelius Nepos is purportedly easy to read; I don't find him so, and the translation of almost every sentence, with the inbuilt challenge of transposing his Latin grammar into logical and fluent and accurate German, has about it the same doomed, untriumphant atmosphere. (The pauses before someone volunteers an answer to the professor's question have been epic throughout the year, also because the course is set up completely unrealistically with regard to how many verb and noun and other tables, and conjunctions, etc., one can cram down one's Strasburg-goose-like gullet without being given the time to understand the moods, tenses, etc. properly. The least justified uncomfortably long pause, which I have turned into a byword in this household, came at the beginning of the year, when the professor asked us for the definition of 'in.')
Today there was the scent of mown grass, the ordinary whiffs of car exhaust and fuel, cigarette smoke, the racket of the construction beside the Silberlaube at the Fabeckstraße along with the Sahara-like yellow-brown dust, ringing bicycles, fuming sound of the U-Bahn trains at Dahlem Dorf, and besides all kinds of fragrances from the flowers and leaves and then from the different perfumes which people wore as they passed me.
A 'harlequin' ladybug loitered in the grass, an ant scrabbled over my book bag, two fruit flies or some cousin skittered over the book I was reading (Der Ewige Krieg, a translation of a book on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dexter Filkins). Though I didn't see a mouse again (once one saw me coming and, streaking across the cobble path, dove into one of the ring of holes in a manhole cover) I didn't really mind that; and otherwise there is a black cat which slunk across the Otto-von-Simson Straße into the brush at the corner to the Fabeckstraße once or twice in the winter, which I didn't see again either.
As for the classes, they began with a lecture on Iran during the Safavid period, then two hours of reading, then a seminar on the Moorish Science Temple and the beginnings of the Nation of Islam (where I really wished that this was my seminar last semester; because the professor was tactless but also very good at getting thorough background knowledge, detail, and thought out of us), and lastly a glorious hour and a half of Cornelius Nepos, describing the career of Hannibal. Cornelius Nepos is purportedly easy to read; I don't find him so, and the translation of almost every sentence, with the inbuilt challenge of transposing his Latin grammar into logical and fluent and accurate German, has about it the same doomed, untriumphant atmosphere. (The pauses before someone volunteers an answer to the professor's question have been epic throughout the year, also because the course is set up completely unrealistically with regard to how many verb and noun and other tables, and conjunctions, etc., one can cram down one's Strasburg-goose-like gullet without being given the time to understand the moods, tenses, etc. properly. The least justified uncomfortably long pause, which I have turned into a byword in this household, came at the beginning of the year, when the professor asked us for the definition of 'in.')
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
A Farewell to My Holiday Humour
This morning I set off for the university fairly cheerfully, but realized as soon as I left the U-Bahn station that this was in fact only a superficial mood, and that in fact I was sort of grumpy and that it would be less gruesome and fake if I 'owned' it.
So birds twittered left and right, orange-billed blackbirds hopped on the ground, squills and pink hyacinths and red tulips and Oregon grape flowers and forsythias burst out from the growing green of the lilacs, snowberry bushes, etc., and I noticed it all and felt mildly happily grouchy throughout.
My Greek class is taking place in a new room this semester; fortunately I found it soon enough, acting upon system, and the numbers of classmates seems to be roughly the same. A new classmate and native of Amsterdam joined the group, and we all negotiated the schedule for the coming semester, in which the others evinced a powerfully strange enthusiasm for a Monday class beginning at 8:30 a.m. But the Tuesday time slot which thus drops away was highly inconvenient for me because my History and Society of the Near East (Islamic Studies) lecture takes place at the same time. We read part of a description of the origins of Easter, which I found quite easy actually, and then said what we did during the holidays. Mine had felt quite lively because I had transposed myself into so many situations and places through my heavy news reading, and because I felt that I had somehow progressed; but when I was searching for things to mention very little had happened after all, but my class didn't seem to mind.
After I was let out, I crossed to the auditorium for the Islamic Studies lecture, and heard the tail end of a charting of the rise of the Ottoman Empire. I was surprisingly sad that I'd missed the lecture, but I presume the material will partly be repeated in the weeks to come.
After two hours not very scintillatingly spent reviewing fewer than two pages of Greek in such a way that it took forever (then recollecting that I'd need my textbook and possibly my dictionary for Latin in the evening, and then going home and back to university without even having the drink of water I'd rather wished for), I arrived late at the Islamic studies seminar. I didn't mind since introductions can be awkward; I was surprised, though, that no one in the class was familiar from my seminar last semester. Altogether, at first glance, everyone seemed a contrast to the grittier classmates, and to the classmates who were actually from the Middle East or India and therefore could enlighten the rest of us about Arabic terms and arab history, Muslim observances, etc. — all of whom altogether had an inspiringly serious and kind of impressive and genuine approach to the subject — in the last semester.
But I like the seminar teacher's style. She seemed generally bright and energetic; and, regarding our topic of the Muslim community in the US, she openly declared, for instance, that we would be examining the Nation of Islam alongside more 'orthodox' Islam; and that we would respect the self-identification of people as Muslims, non-Muslims, or whatever they chose. To give us a context she reeled off figures and studies about the numerical composition of the Muslim community; mentioned Dearborn, Michigan; gave an overview of the American civil rights movement, which is kind of relevant through the Nation of Islam; and altogether relayed all sorts of tidbits which I'm sure the reader would be interested in but which I'm too lazy to list. Altogether it seems that my addiction to Americana and exposure to the news and culture will come in quite handy, but it was already evident today that the reality which underlies these things is something else again.
Then I found a way out of the building, which was slightly difficult since some of the doors had been locked for the night, and proceeded to my Latin class. This class contained far fewer people, and my professor seemed to be really happy about it. We plunged back into our textbook and read Cicero for Dummies, thereby being introduced to the various uses of 'cum' (with, since, while, etc.) and to the active and passive forms of the pluperfect (Plusquamperfekt in German). Amavisse and such. Needless to say I was not thrilled with the joys of grammatical discovery, but I did put up my hand and translate a clause of the semi-Ciceronian text to the professor's satisfaction.
I thought that the text made Cicero sound like a pompous prig, inventing a halcyon past which never existed to vituperate the remaining political establishment, etc., very much like a conservative might in the modern US (I'm no historian, but as far as I've observed the historical record tends to leave out peccadilloes which weren't considered so important or sufficiently decorous, which doesn't mean that human nature itself goes through huge fluctuations) but didn't vent this opinion.
Walking back to the U-Bahn station sometime after 7:45 p.m., admiring the magenta wash of sunset colour at the horizon, I may or may not have inhaled a fruit fly.
So birds twittered left and right, orange-billed blackbirds hopped on the ground, squills and pink hyacinths and red tulips and Oregon grape flowers and forsythias burst out from the growing green of the lilacs, snowberry bushes, etc., and I noticed it all and felt mildly happily grouchy throughout.
My Greek class is taking place in a new room this semester; fortunately I found it soon enough, acting upon system, and the numbers of classmates seems to be roughly the same. A new classmate and native of Amsterdam joined the group, and we all negotiated the schedule for the coming semester, in which the others evinced a powerfully strange enthusiasm for a Monday class beginning at 8:30 a.m. But the Tuesday time slot which thus drops away was highly inconvenient for me because my History and Society of the Near East (Islamic Studies) lecture takes place at the same time. We read part of a description of the origins of Easter, which I found quite easy actually, and then said what we did during the holidays. Mine had felt quite lively because I had transposed myself into so many situations and places through my heavy news reading, and because I felt that I had somehow progressed; but when I was searching for things to mention very little had happened after all, but my class didn't seem to mind.
After I was let out, I crossed to the auditorium for the Islamic Studies lecture, and heard the tail end of a charting of the rise of the Ottoman Empire. I was surprisingly sad that I'd missed the lecture, but I presume the material will partly be repeated in the weeks to come.
After two hours not very scintillatingly spent reviewing fewer than two pages of Greek in such a way that it took forever (then recollecting that I'd need my textbook and possibly my dictionary for Latin in the evening, and then going home and back to university without even having the drink of water I'd rather wished for), I arrived late at the Islamic studies seminar. I didn't mind since introductions can be awkward; I was surprised, though, that no one in the class was familiar from my seminar last semester. Altogether, at first glance, everyone seemed a contrast to the grittier classmates, and to the classmates who were actually from the Middle East or India and therefore could enlighten the rest of us about Arabic terms and arab history, Muslim observances, etc. — all of whom altogether had an inspiringly serious and kind of impressive and genuine approach to the subject — in the last semester.
But I like the seminar teacher's style. She seemed generally bright and energetic; and, regarding our topic of the Muslim community in the US, she openly declared, for instance, that we would be examining the Nation of Islam alongside more 'orthodox' Islam; and that we would respect the self-identification of people as Muslims, non-Muslims, or whatever they chose. To give us a context she reeled off figures and studies about the numerical composition of the Muslim community; mentioned Dearborn, Michigan; gave an overview of the American civil rights movement, which is kind of relevant through the Nation of Islam; and altogether relayed all sorts of tidbits which I'm sure the reader would be interested in but which I'm too lazy to list. Altogether it seems that my addiction to Americana and exposure to the news and culture will come in quite handy, but it was already evident today that the reality which underlies these things is something else again.
Then I found a way out of the building, which was slightly difficult since some of the doors had been locked for the night, and proceeded to my Latin class. This class contained far fewer people, and my professor seemed to be really happy about it. We plunged back into our textbook and read Cicero for Dummies, thereby being introduced to the various uses of 'cum' (with, since, while, etc.) and to the active and passive forms of the pluperfect (Plusquamperfekt in German). Amavisse and such. Needless to say I was not thrilled with the joys of grammatical discovery, but I did put up my hand and translate a clause of the semi-Ciceronian text to the professor's satisfaction.
I thought that the text made Cicero sound like a pompous prig, inventing a halcyon past which never existed to vituperate the remaining political establishment, etc., very much like a conservative might in the modern US (I'm no historian, but as far as I've observed the historical record tends to leave out peccadilloes which weren't considered so important or sufficiently decorous, which doesn't mean that human nature itself goes through huge fluctuations) but didn't vent this opinion.
Walking back to the U-Bahn station sometime after 7:45 p.m., admiring the magenta wash of sunset colour at the horizon, I may or may not have inhaled a fruit fly.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
The Visit of the Easter Bunny
Two or so days ago, the maternal Bunny declared herself quite satisfied to leave the Easter preparations to a consortium of some or all of her children. So I did the remaining planning — an Easter breakfast and a dinner with roast lamb were already a given — and Mama unbent insofar as she did housecleaning and part of the shopping, and Ge. and J. took care of the rest of the purchases. This night I was up and about anyway, having gone to sleep around 3 p.m. and woken up some eleven hours later, and together with Ge. and J. cleared off and set the table.
In case anyone cares, a glass of yellow tulips stands in the middle of the table, on top of a potato-brown, lacy round cloth; underneath there is a tablecloth of white linen, with turquoise and white placemats around. I put plain white bread-and-butter plates at every place, the cutlery, and our plaid napkins.
Besides I made a yeast dough for buns, which should probably be called brioches since they were sweetish, according to a recipe from our big, eye-candy cake book from Dr. Oetker. The dough rose beside the oven (covered in clingwrap which traps condensation and prevents the surface of the dough ball from drying out), and I gave it a second kneading eventually, after which it reassured me by rising far more.
I boiled one batch of three white eggs, which T. and I decorated with aquarell pencils, and then one batch of five or six brown and white eggs with onion skin to dye them a pale or darker brown. By coincidence I had recently read (here) that the 'proper' way to boil an egg so that it is soft and devoid of a olive-green ring around the yolk, is to bring it to a boil in plenty of water with the usual salt (without a lid, but I kept on the lid most of the time because the environmental benefits of heat-saving seemed more important), and then to turn off the heat and leave the egg in the water for fifteen minutes with the lid closed. So I did this with the second batch; it seems to have worked. For reasons of sanitation I still feel inclined to boil eggs for a handful of minutes, then shock them in cold tap water, as I have done for most of my life. During the breakfast I made fresh eggs which were supposed to be 'soft-boiled' . . . I left them in too long.
Then Ge. and J. and I distributed the marzipan (little bars with fig/vodka, apple/calvados, pineapple, etc. flavouring), chocolate eggs, and lots of squares from chocolate bars (white, nougat, marzipan-filled, dark and milk) over the plates, over the tablecloth, and over one of those delightful Tuscan plates with the raspberry and yellow and dark blue patterns and a rooster in the middle.
Mama, once she woke up, went to the bakery for buns and croissants, and at the last moment I made tea and coffee (I forgot the paper filter so water and coffee grounds quietly splattered all over and, as if a soaked chamois cloth and towel weren't enough evidence of the answer, I wondered where the extra four cups of water had gone), and Ge. heated milk for hot chocolate and the coffee. With the freshly baked brioches we had sliced gouda, black currant jam, sliced egg; and a plateful of cold cuts — among them prosciutto di Parma, which I rolled up loosely.
Gi. has Been Abroad for the last couple of days,
In case anyone cares, a glass of yellow tulips stands in the middle of the table, on top of a potato-brown, lacy round cloth; underneath there is a tablecloth of white linen, with turquoise and white placemats around. I put plain white bread-and-butter plates at every place, the cutlery, and our plaid napkins.
Besides I made a yeast dough for buns, which should probably be called brioches since they were sweetish, according to a recipe from our big, eye-candy cake book from Dr. Oetker. The dough rose beside the oven (covered in clingwrap which traps condensation and prevents the surface of the dough ball from drying out), and I gave it a second kneading eventually, after which it reassured me by rising far more.
I boiled one batch of three white eggs, which T. and I decorated with aquarell pencils, and then one batch of five or six brown and white eggs with onion skin to dye them a pale or darker brown. By coincidence I had recently read (here) that the 'proper' way to boil an egg so that it is soft and devoid of a olive-green ring around the yolk, is to bring it to a boil in plenty of water with the usual salt (without a lid, but I kept on the lid most of the time because the environmental benefits of heat-saving seemed more important), and then to turn off the heat and leave the egg in the water for fifteen minutes with the lid closed. So I did this with the second batch; it seems to have worked. For reasons of sanitation I still feel inclined to boil eggs for a handful of minutes, then shock them in cold tap water, as I have done for most of my life. During the breakfast I made fresh eggs which were supposed to be 'soft-boiled' . . . I left them in too long.
Then Ge. and J. and I distributed the marzipan (little bars with fig/vodka, apple/calvados, pineapple, etc. flavouring), chocolate eggs, and lots of squares from chocolate bars (white, nougat, marzipan-filled, dark and milk) over the plates, over the tablecloth, and over one of those delightful Tuscan plates with the raspberry and yellow and dark blue patterns and a rooster in the middle.
Mama, once she woke up, went to the bakery for buns and croissants, and at the last moment I made tea and coffee (I forgot the paper filter so water and coffee grounds quietly splattered all over and, as if a soaked chamois cloth and towel weren't enough evidence of the answer, I wondered where the extra four cups of water had gone), and Ge. heated milk for hot chocolate and the coffee. With the freshly baked brioches we had sliced gouda, black currant jam, sliced egg; and a plateful of cold cuts — among them prosciutto di Parma, which I rolled up loosely.
Gi. has Been Abroad for the last couple of days,
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