A Chromatic Scale

It's the summer holidays and so I haven't been at the bookshop, instead have been drifting and doing kind of the same things and kind of other things, in a looser schedule.

For one thing, the spare time is a nudge to work on the piano again. Today and yesterday I sightread some of the piano part for Beethoven's Emperor concerto No. 4. It went better than last time because it is difficult to get into the mood; the piano bit is more scrappy and subordinated to the orchestra than in some other concerts. It's especially rewarding in a way, though, because the recognizable, relaxed, and lovely pieces of melody come at unexpected moments, especially after the most tedious scale or repetitive broken chords or a difficult trill that persists like an angry and troubling bumblebee. (Which can also happen with Mozart when, in a compositional device my father likes to point out, a chromatic scale leads haphazardly back to the original key. Chromatic scales run up or down in half notes; I think that they have a meandering character because they pause by the sharps and flats and therefore draw out the run, or a scurrying character because the additional sharps and flats render them more frenzied. Inventing dumb or obvious miniature stories about scales is the way I've developed to convince myself that they have meaning and that I can love them.) It is nicest of all when it is an endearing earlier motif which I thought had been extinguished forever.

There are two cadenzas to the concerto in the back of the score. The first made no sense to me yesterday but I should try again, and the second is the one I seem to have heard in recordings. Today I made up ones of my own as I went along, because even if I don't have much of a method or book-instruction yet I must start figuring out improvisation at some point.

By the time I had gone through Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Chopin's Raindrop Prelude and Revolutionary Etude, etc., I was tired.

The Grey Lady at the Helm

This article is a project that has arbitrarily consumed hours and hours of the past week. Credit goes to all the reporters and anonymous Wikipedia contributors whose work I have aggregated. I hope the self-conscious attempt at being journalistic isn't too mined with jargon and other characteristic flaws to be readable or fit into a personal blog; and I tried to answer all of my own questions. What is left out is a closer look at the New York Times's editorial approach to the Bush years, since I had neither the strength, curiosity, nor ready sources to have hoped to do justice to it.

On June 2nd, Bill Keller, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Dean Baquet, and Jill Abramson gathered for an 11 a.m. address to the New York Times newsroom and announced that Abramson will replace Keller, who is resigning to pursue writing, as the executive editor on September 6th. This is the first time in its 160-year history that a woman will head the newspaper, and for the second time or so the dignified New York Times made a stir in internautical wilds like Twitter.

Jill Abramson, born in New York City and alumna of Harvard University, had worked as a journalist until 2003; after the Jayson Blair news fabrication scandal she was appointed as co-managing editor for the news.

The tasks of a managing editor are to "[oversee] and [coordinate] the publication's editorial activities" and at the Times it is the second-highest post. (Based on pure surmise this presumably means that if the arts editor wants to know whether to publish a contentious story, as is, or with changes, (s)he would refer it to the managing editor; and it would be at Abramson's discretion to consult the paper's lawyers or the top editor or even the publisher, etc., if she can't satisfactorily settle the question herself.) Baquet, now the assistant managing editor and an employee who is highly regarded by his colleagues at the New York and formerly at the Los Angeles Times,* will assume this post.

THE history of women reporters in the Times is venerable but chequered, and it begins with Jane Grant. She was stuck writing articles on "women's issues" and struggled through a rude environment for fifteen years in all. (In 1925 she co-founded the magazine New Yorker with her husband Harold Ross.)

Later women have held high positions in the Times, like the columnists Anna Quindlen and Maureen Dowd, and more recently Gail Collins; Carlotta Gall is charged with the reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan after a similarly tough post for a different paper in Chechnya; and bylines from Ligaya Mishan through Elaine Sciolino to Janet Maslin appear throughout. Dowd won a Pulitzer in 1999 for her columns about the Monica Lewinsky affair, but she has ten predecessors (Ada Louise Huxtable in 1970 for architecture reporting, Nan C. Robertson in 1983 for a medicine feature, Sheryl WuDunn in a shared laurel in 1990, Natalie Angier in 1991, Anna Quindlen in 1992, Isabel Wilkerson in 1994, Margo Jefferson in 1995, Linda Greenhouse and Michiko Kakutani in 1998 ) all the way down to Anne O'Hare McCormick, who in 1937 was honoured for her foreign correspondence. (Since then there have been five others: Gretchen Morgenson, Andrea Elliott, Amy Harmon, Sheri Fink, and Ellen Barry.) There are three women — Lynn G. Dolnick, Susan W. Dryfoos, and Cathy J. Sulzberger — on the Ochs-Sulzberger Trust board, too. Judith Miller certainly left her mark as well.

AS for other American publications, women have already held leading posts. Tina Brown edited Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, Katharine Graham was the moving spirit behind the Washington Post as its publisher, Anne Marie Lipinski was the editor of the Chicago Tribune from 2001 to 2008, others have headed the Portland Oregonian (Sandra Rowe starting in 1993) and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Julia Wallace starting in 2002). Nancy Hicks Maynard was the first African-American woman to own a large newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, in 1983. In the online press Arianna Huffington and more recently Brown have become formidable figures.

The response of these colleagues, also in the television milieu, has been enthusiastic; PBS's Gwen Ifill, Katie Couric of ABC News, Time's Kate Pickert, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, and Tina Brown joined employees in the Times in expressing their congratulations and appreciation for the shattering of another glass ceiling.

***

Jill Abramson has co-written among other books a weighty rebuttal to the defamation of Anita Hill by David Brock in his book The Real Anita Hill, by political allies, and by the media who uncritically repeated the libel. Hill had endangered the confirmation of Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas by accusing him of harassment. Jane Mayer (then a colleague at the Wall Street Journal and now a contributor to the magazine New Yorker) was the co-author, and it came out on the bookshelves as Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas in 1994. Since then it has become the final word on the matter. In October Puppy Diaries, a nonpolitical compendium of her series of personal blogs on the Times's website in 2009, will appear in Times Books.

In terms of the press, she worked for Time magazine (1973-1976), NBC News, The American Lawyer during the eighties, and the Legal Times as editor-in-chief from 1986-1988. In 1988 she started her stint at the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, and when Maureen Dowd nudged her to the Times in 1997 she became Washington bureau chief. While she was with the Times she and Don Van Natta Jr. uncovered part of the network of lawyers and enemies of the Clintons who ferreted out and nudged into press circulation reports of fiscal and amorous impropriety in the 1990s (praised in ex-editor Joseph Lelyveld's 2003 article, "In Clinton's Court," for the New York Review of Books).

Since 1988 she has appeared on television often: 39 times on the political affairs channel C-SPAN and 2 times on Charlie Rose's highly civilized talkshow on PBS. Her voice has a New York edge, and it is a continuous flow of words that stretch into each other, presumably as a way to avoid stumbles or filler like "um," though "you know" presents an island of punctuation intermittently. In short, her speaking style is Harvard-educated Sarah Palin with superior syntax, brain, and no conscious folk vernacular. On television her clothing seems a little stuffy, her tone occasionally patronizing, her emotions and reactions detached by superego, and despite the geniality toward the interviewer her air is a billboard declaring Keep Away. Relative to the rank and file of commentators, she is neither defensive nor aggressive, nor needily impelled to prove herself; she seems as willing to listen and think as to talk and think. She gives a careful interview. When someone challenges the Times's golden calf, viz. the belief in its own immaculate objectivity, her sense of responsibility to the New York Times seems to declare red alert as her autopilot reiterates nuanceless assurances of the Times's impeccable neutrality.

JILL Abramson has been seen as the potential heir to Bill Keller for years, though as she put it to Gabriel Sherman in 2010

"I don’t dwell on it," [. . .] "I think it would be a healthy, nice thing for the country. It is meaningful to have women in positions of leadership at important institutions in society. But, you know, there are wonderful male editors in this place who are just as capable as I am, and they could run this place exquisitely well. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t."

She has a relatively benign example to follow. Before Keller became the executive editor he had been passed over for the position in favour of Howell Raines. When Raines was fired two years later in connection with the Blair scandal — nominally; he also raised animosity by insisting on reforms which frankly the Times might need, but perhaps more aggressively than the Times needs — the publisher decided abruptly that he wanted Keller after all.

BESIDES Keller's dispiriting consciousness of being Sulzberger's second-best, his heart lies in the writing which earned him his Pulitzer (though why he would use the lofty writerly skills, which to garner the prize must have rendered the decline and fall of the Soviet Union in vivid colour, to battle the Twitter windmill is beyond me) rather than in editing, particularly when freighted with a high burden of business decisions.

Keller's current employee David Carr characterizes him with excellent conciseness in a recent interview with Baristanet:

He has accomplished amazing things in the job and is probably one of the most talented journalists of our time. Remember, he was not the first choice, and it was an accident of history. And the crown with him never exactly fit. He never was the imperial executive editor of the New York Times, and he turned out to be a fabulous one.

Keller himself has surmised,

I think Howell’s view of leadership is martial [. . .]. And mine is more paterfamilias, I guess. You are dependent on this huge reservoir of talent, and your job is to create the circumstances under which they can do their best work, to reward them when they do well, correct them when they do wrong, set some guidelines, and spur their ambitions. But it’s not about me.

SO Keller soothed the savage malcontent among the Times reporters. Even if the outrage is not entirely laid (Abramson herself has been gloomily cast as having Raines moments), Sulzberger is fully behind her — even in 2003 he was hoping that she would become the first female executive editor — and despite the controversies over the delay of the National Security Agency wiretap story in 2005 and over the free imaginative rein which Judith Miller held over her reporting on Iraq's putative weapons of mass destruction, etc., she appears to have emerged happily from the froth like a Venus.

***

Her father, Norman L. Abramson, is a New Yorker like her mother and "retired president of Irish Looms Associates, New York textile importers." (This is the information in her wedding announcement in the Times. Despite the section's habit of adorning occupations which have an insufficiently patrician air, in this instance embellishment is clearly not required.)

The household were newspaper-readers who harboured a Virginia O'Hanlon faith in the Times's dictates — "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth," Jill Abramson told the newsroom on Thursday — and it could afford to send her to Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a NYC school and member of the Ivy Preparatory School League.** The school's list of prominent alumni is a fragmentary Who's Who of the American elite, among them Sofia Coppola, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Howard Wolfson, David Denby, Jane Mayer (whom Abramson seems to have met and become friends with at the school), Sheryl WuDunn and, coincidentally, Gil Scott-Heron.

At Harvard she pursued undergraduate studies in History and Literature, and emerged magna cum laude in 1976, to dive straight away into the journalist profession.

Along the road she picked up an interest in fashion — in pursuit of his profile Gabriel Sherman caught her before a Narciso Rodriguez runway show — and in music in the form of Arcade Fire; feminism appears a passion if her early book on the first graduating class of Harvard Law School where women had represented over 10% of the freshman class, the photo of the Times's third female reporter on her office wall, and her paean to her predecessors during her newsroom speech on Thursday are an indication; so, clearly, is raising dogs. She broke her wrist last year during a hike, so corpore sano is evidently not neglected either (except for the wrist).

In 1981 she married fellow New Yorker and Harvard graduate Henry Little Griggs 3rd. As the son of an NBC News producer and employee with a political PR company he was not new to the halls of the Ivy League, journalism, or politics either. They have two children and the hero of the puppy diaries, Scout, and alternate geographically between New York City and Connecticut.

***

"Good for one fare only"

Subway token inscription / philosophical metaphor for a human life (presumably it implies carpe diem/dum vivimus vivamus) / part of Jill Abramson's tattoo

*

"Jill Abramson" [Wikipedia] (read)
"Carlotta Gall" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Elaine Sciolino" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Jane Grant" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Tina Brown" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011 UTC+2)

"Jill Abramson: 'I'm a battle-scarred veteran'" [Guardian] by Ed Pilkington (June 7, 2011)
"Jill Abramson, Just-Named New York Times Editor, Ready To 'Seize The Future'" [Huffington Post], by Michael Calderone (June 2, 2011)
"New York Times shakes up its masthead" [Politico], by Keach Hagey (June 2, 2011)
"Jill E. Abramson Is Bride Of Henry Little Griggs 3d" [New York Times] (March 15, 1981)
"Ethical Culture Fieldston School" [Wikipedia] Read June 3, 2011
"The New York Times" [Wikipedia] (read June 6, 2011)
"Times Two" [New York Magazine], by Gabriel Sherman (September 26, 2010) [and Page 2]
"New York Times names Jill Abramson as first female executive editor" [Guardian], by Jason Deans (June 2, 2011)
"Coffee With . . . David Carr" [Baristanet] by Debbie Galant (June 5, 2011)
"The United States of America vs. Bill Keller" (p. 2) [New York Magazine], by Joe Hagan (Sept. 10, 2006) [and Pages 4, 7 and 10]
Interview: "Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in Current Affairs" [Charlierose.com] (Nov. 7, 1994)

*

* From Politico's article: "Dean Baquet, the paper’s assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief who became a kind of journalistic folk hero when he refused to cut staff as editor of the Los Angeles Times, will replace Abramson as managing editor."
** To be honest, though the Ivy Preparatory School League sounds prestigious and likely is, even after reading the relevant Wikipedia article the practical ramifications of this affiliation remain obscure.

Lycurgus, the Obnoxious Tyrant

Back during one of my depressed years, maybe Grade 11, when I was worried about being underread, I kept our old brown copy of Plutarch's Lives (in the Dryden translation, and my grandmother's I believe) at the bedside and strove to make inroads.

One of the lives did strike a chord, since it recapitulated what I learned about Spartan education in history class during an otherwise mostly unedifying year in German school. Under the impression that Lycurgus's biography was the one in question, I found it this morning in a different translation online and read it, keeping on expecting to find the nice passages. The further it went the clearer it was that this is the incomprehensible hagiography of a tremendous jerk, and a paean to totalitarianism.

As I thought it out, Plutarch is likely an originator of the neoclassical and later Christian model of finding a historical figure who can be elevated as a man worthy of emulation, who never does anything wrong and whose enemies are wicked envious ones, or whose faults (for whom a nebulous and inexorable fate is to blame) are a dignified caution to his historical successors. (Probably a harebrained idea, but it seems to me after reading lots of retellings that Homer's heroes for example don't strive so hard after perfection and everyone meets a sticky end whether they're impressive human beings or middling ones — their paths of glory lead but to the grave, etc.) The taxation on the truth and the realities of the human character is too high to be redeemed by the potential benefit. In short it appears profoundly unsound. The air of moral eventemperedness and conservative yearnings are taken as signs of health and practicability, but in fact they often appear to conceal narrow experience, feeble imagination about human nature and the world, and an egotistical need to order the cosmos to one's physical and spiritual comfort that neither recognizes the rights and differences of others, nor is fundamentally good.

Anyway, that is a tangent which it is practically impossible to defend objectively, so to return to "Lycurgus" here is one passage that encapsulates a little of the pleasant experience his rule must have been:

the Laconian cup, we are told by Kritias, was especially valued for its use in the field. Its colour prevented the drinker being disgusted by the look of the dirty water which it is sometimes necessary to drink, and it was contrived that the dirt was deposited inside the cup and stuck to the bottom, so as to make the drink cleaner than it would otherwise have been.

From the modern perspective, water taken from dirty sources would have borne fecal bacteria and parasites, and drinking a broth is not more pleasant even if the silt has settled and the vessel it's served in is a tasteful chalky grey. Besides I am pretty sure that Lycurgus would have drunk (if that grammatical tense is correct) from a slightly different cup. Skim over the dry passages and there are many more gems like this one.

Anyway, I don't follow Plutarch's thoughts. Would he have liked to live in a dual kingdom with lousy furniture, communal dinners, discontent rich people throwing stones, servants presumably living in worse circumstances as the wealth declined, a mediocre democracy where Lycurgus was ruling through the young second king after a military coup (though bloodless), no "useless tradesmen" and no merchant relations with foreign towns since these couldn't do much with the new iron (as opposed to gold and silver) coins?

Unless he was living on the street and was infested with a horrible disease, in contrast to which this Sparta might sound like the Elysian Fields, I doubt Plutarch would have found this lifestyle much fun to put in practice. Sparta may have been truly awful before Lycurgus improved it and so he is a model of making the best of a bad lot. Or, since I didn't finish the Life (too disgruntled), perhaps it has a splendid surprise ending.

Maybe he should be excused on the grounds that most of us who read the Little House on the Prairie series when we were little also thought that, with the exception perhaps of the Long Winter, it sounded rather cozy and nice. The idea of austerity can be charming, the reality of it unthinkable.

What also annoyed me was the praise which the Oracle at Delphi accorded to Lycurgus, twice. Either the oracle accepted arrant bribery, Lycurgus was misrepresenting its findings or never went there, or the oracle did inspire herself through now-controlled substances and had partaken of particularly happy ones whenever he came to visit. I don't think any proper god would accord a follower unalloyed praise, because 'tis human to err, etc. The tale of Croesus is far more instructive and real, I think, and I would think more of Plutarch's or Lycurgus' psychology if one of them had thought that the praise must be a particularly mean trick of the Olympians.

But, to end on a more cheerful note, the Laconian cup puts me in mind of Aunt Adelaide Stitch's education and boarding programme in Nurse Matilda:

"Her own suite of rooms, decorated in chocolate brown
A new wardrobe of clothing in colours that wouldn't show the dirt"

The Audience of Wooden Seats

Though I have watched pieces only of the least artistically obscure of his films, besides ignorant of the craft in general, and therefore am ill qualified to judge his actorly stature, I've had a mild crush on Peter O'Toole after Lawrence of Arabia, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Lion in Winter and the one with Audrey Hepburn whose name I can't recall; so here is a link to an interview — "Peter O’Toole Has a Few Words for Directors" — by Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times (June 26).

Chirpy Update on "Uni," Etc.

On June 2nd I sent the electronic application to the Freie Universität and on the 4th I sent the corroborating documents (or, rather, my mother kindly dropped the envelope into the box for me on her way out), and now I am waiting. Since July 15th is the deadline for applications and responses come in September, I am not worried about being too much on tenterhooks, and instead am focusing — at least these days — on researching the news and revisiting Mozart sonatas on our piano and tending the bookshop.

After much dithering I decided to apply for Modern Greek, as promised, Near Eastern Studies (culture and languages), and Classical Studies: Latin. Russian wasn't an option in combination with other courses, as I found after studying the charts lengthwise and crosswise several times, though eventually I want to take a language course in it outside of studies. Realistically I don't think my chances of getting in are terribly good; however with Modern Greek I do happen to have an extra "in" if I've learned another modern language; since English is evidently one, and French in university and Spanish in high school are there, I hope that will help, and fortunately I did rather well in my Ancient Greek course.

In the meantime I've tried to acquire a little modern Greek; fortunately a vague recollection led me to the BBC website, which has a modest collection of resources including MP3 files to supplement the pronunciation guide I found in the dictionary in our bookshelves. I've done other things too but won't go into too much detail. Fortunately the pronunciation doesn't appear too abstruse, though it has certainly changed in 2000 years and it's a minor disappointment to pronounce "ph" as such and not as a strong "p," the loss of "eta" as a long e as opposed to ee is also sad, and so on and so forth. These changes do align the sound of Greek words more closely with the pronunciation of similar words in different languages, however, just taking "philosophy" as an example, and I admit I'm hardly distraught that the accents now indicate simple emphasis and not convoluted changes in pitch.

So . . . otherwise I'm reading through UNAIDS's report on AIDS after 30 years, though I am too ignorant about the issue to be properly informed even after the perusal, and at some point I may wrap up a blog post about the incoming executive editor of the New York Times. For the latter I've gone through our physical archive of New York Review of Bookses, and since Jill Abramson did important political reporting the contributions where she shows up have been a bundle of nostalgia. Her television appearances on Charlie Rose are also preserved, so I watched those. When was the last time I'd heard about Zell Miller, Jesse Helms, etc.? But I don't feel nostalgic about Whitewater, etc., and while the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas must have taken place while I was already reading the newspaper I don't remember anything about them. The combination of scandalmongering and of libelling victims of harassment makes it seem like it would have been a lacklustre use of time and attention anyway. Speaking of Rose, I found his show tremendously boring the last time I tried to watch it, but it has apparently really grown on me.

Less importantly, it has been a very warm day, not miserable precisely and my brain is reasonably active because of the aforementioned mental exercises, but my physical reflexes are presumably terribly slow and let's say I feel a little sticky. Garbage Day (Friday? — I've forgotten.) was the pits, and still a balmy air is very pleasant when it emanates from the flowers and particularly roses which are blossoming in panoply. Yesterday morning I realized that dehydration might be a minor issue, so I am taking "doses" of water with a couple drops of lime juice, teaspoon of sugar, and pinch of salt. It feels pleasingly unspartan particularly when I reach the bottom, i.e. the delicious deposit of saccharine grains.

Scrying

I've come to the conclusion lately that it would be best to apply for university again. That I am not enthusiastic about it is certain, but since I live in a country where it is paid for and since it is better than idling for another year (the idling is worthwhile, but there is a time when it is worthwhile, and next year it would not be) I have decided to take a chance. The main obstacles now are, first and foremost, the likelihood that I will not get in; secondly, figuring out which programmes to apply for; thirdly, finding work to supply an income and help me when (if) I have the BA and am standing on the threshold of a career.

So far I would like to take Modern Greek, Russian, and Latin. (The first would be the major, the Russian and Latin double minors.)

The courses of Ancient Greek at UBC might not help that much, so I have decided to try learning a great deal in the meantime. At the bookshop today I did quizzes to learn the colours, for instance, and of course there are newspaper articles available for reading practice once I am advanced enough, which will take a little while. Besides there is the literature, geography, history, cooking, etc., to read up on for background. I'm hoping that the fact that I've liked Greece and Greek so much, though as they were two thousand years ago, will fuel the toil.

Besides I would like to do something in journalism and maybe visit one or two classes to be sure that I am making the right decision.

In the meantime I am worried that I am worthless, etc., as customary, and past dealings with the Freie Universität haven't removed the feeling that with the grades I had in the past and other things I am not a welcome applicant and am both obstreperous and beneath their notice; but these worries won't help even if they are right, so I blot them out and try to forget them. I still haven't lost the feeling that I should stick with applying to the FU, either, rather than trying a different university.

Anyway, in the best case scenario I'll be accepted and happy in my studies. I have all sorts of inferiority complexes about my mind, reinforced by years of creeping along in school and sometimes doing very well and sometimes doing very badly with equally middling energy, and never being able to take positive opinions as an incontrovertible truth rather than polite flattery. Besides I worry that the next time I become depressed or unhappy, the clarity of mind, memory, etc., will be taken away again — which is one reason why I am so circumspect about finding the right job. Feeling stupid feeds into insecurity, and not being clearminded enough to sort through the problems and find mental distraction makes me feel trapped inside my head. At present reading novels, one after the other, feeds my mind and curiosity reliably, and keeps it running so that I can process newspaper articles, the world around me, whatever I feel like reviewing on the Lighthouse blog, etc., easily.

As for the distant future, I have changed my mind in a major way about becoming an author. I feel less doubtful now about being able to write reasonably mature stories and so on, which may be a troubling sign in itself; but the prospect of becoming a public figure or of flogging my ware is so disruptive, and so little concerned with the kind of personal but unselfcentred exercise which I consider nice literature to be, that I want to wait if at all until I am older, secure of my identity, and good-humoured enough to clown around in public persona if that's what publishers, etc., demand. Journalism and writing stories for myself seems better, and if I can Emily Dickinsonesquely leave one or two very good novels behind for posthumous publication (if they're any good) I'd be pleased, and aside from that I think I'd like to publish stories for free on the web. Not middling run-of-the-mill stories but good, unpretentious ones whose principal purpose is to be enjoyed in the reading and the writing. As for poetry (to which the Dickinson analogy would of course better apply) I'll no doubt write it when the spasm seizes but otherwise I think my approach is too desultory to deserve much respect.

Canada: Roughly Four More Years Of The Plague

In . . . cheerful . . . news, Canada has just reelected Stephen Harper as Prime Minister and given his Conservative Party a majority in Parliament.

Though I have long left the shores of Canuckia, it was not before Harper appeared on the scene as part of the "reform" conservative movement. It is essentially composed of neoconservatives who have very peculiar ideas of the world allied with a practically impermeable layer of semibenevolent stupidity. Its other exponents include Stockwell Day who, though also young and reasonably picturesque (in politician terms) like Harper, was a less serious figure but left the realm of Canadian political comedy with far greater riches, like the picture of him in a skintight suit on a speedboat. Harper seems, behind his somewhat undistinctive face and slightly protuberant-tipped nose and indolent blue eyes, the most intelligent of the lot.

Behind this meaningless façade the government is as far as I can tell self-seeking and inwardlooking, ignores those social problems which it might prove inconvenient to solve, and casually prone to endorsing rather repellent ideas to the effect that Muslims are generally suspicious, people who are poor are maliciously bent on disturbing the comfort of the rich, immigrants are moochers, and that the starving masses abroad should feel content with Canada's past largesse and accept the now circumscribed crumbs of aid like the princely alms which the wilted soul of an Ottawa parliamentarian considers it to be. This mentality will be familiar far beyond the shores of Canada, for its proponents are a somewhat international burden.

On the other hand the NDP, the New Democratic Party and the party to the left of the Liberal Party, has done exceedingly well. How the Liberal Party, which happily occupied the centre and majority of the Canadian pool of eligible voters for over a decade, managed to lose the vast sections of support may remain a mystery. Certainly Michael Ignatieff is a contentious figure, though whether it is that he mostly dwelled in the US, that he is an Elitist who spent years in the Ivy pinnacle of the Ivory Tower and hobnobbed among the ambient intelligentsia, that he supported the Iraq War (which is the "deal-breaker" for me), that he had tinges of neoconservatism (which was also a problem for me) or that he is simply not very compelling in himself and as a representative of a happy and harmonious Liberal Party, it is impossible for me to determine.

The NDP's Jack Layton seems a slightly abrasive, combative miniature Napoleon, who has the minor opposition party advantage in always being right whenever he criticizes a government policy that turns out to be wrong. And I think he has also profited either by the leftwing belief that now that Canada's economy is in a good state one can afford a little idealism, or by a spillover of the lefty hopefulness of Obama-era America circa 2008, or both. When I was growing up in Victoria the problem was that the Liberal Party was the only left-wingish party capable of gaining a majority, so a vote for the NDP or the Green Party was essentially a vote wasted. Since the opposition to the Conservative government has been a triumvirate for a while, composed of the Liberal Party, the NDP, and the Bloc Québécois — the second and third parties harbouring a relentless undercurrent of needling resentment for the first due to their history of suffering as the more or less impotent naysayers under the Liberal yoke — the argument that the Liberals are the lone hope of the left has evidently become less and less compelling.

Lastly the Green Party triumphed with one parliamentary seat, held by the party's leader Elizabeth May.

Anyway we may well wonder at the degree of stupidity which led people to vote for the Conservatives by such a margin, but evidently the Canadian public has decided that the success of the NDP is a sufficient sign of progressivism, so the mere, trifling fact that the Conservative Party can push its nasty ideas through freely is a side issue . . . except of course for the people who are most affected by the nasty ideas.

If my Facebook friends are an indication, there is no great rejoicing at this electoral outcome, though as one friend astutely pointed out, it isn't quite as embarrassing as the reelection of Bush was for Americans.

What I will do is effectively stuff my ears for the next little while and think very concentratedly back to the glory days of Trudeau and Chrétien.

De Miseris Mondayensis

It's around 1:30 in the bookshop, a thunderously grey day only without the thunder and the sky has dissolved into white cloud cover, and the very new heavy foliage of the trees gives a peculiar weight and fullness to the scene. I hadn't been outside much since the Friday before the holidays, if at all, and it was all very new to me. There are even dandelions blown to seed in the garden patches at the street.

During the white night I read about the Osama bin Laden stuff and wrote the blog post beneath, which I may delete eventually because it doesn't seem nice or helpful, and it feels revolting to be so cheerful about someone's death (Mama felt that it was murderous and Papa was angry about it, I think). I also still don't understand why someone dying should make me feel so much better. Someone came into the bookshop to drop off a book for us to sell on commission, and he solemnly stated that yesterday was an important day in history. I must admit that I replied, facetiously, "Because of the Pope?". As I was going to write on a Facebook update I never posted (not wanting to attack people with political controversies), I think that this would be an important day of history if bin Laden's death made the people who died in 2011 (or in the African embassies earlier, or on the U.S.S. Cole) alive again. But this is just a death day. So that's why I was irritated and (completely uncharacteristically) sarcastic.

What I don't understand is why all of the doubts I had about whether bin Laden knew of the plans for Sept. 11th, or took them seriously if he did, have suddenly vanished. The idea of CIA plots was in my view absurd though in the realm of possibility; what I rather thought is that it might have been a "grassroots initiative" and to make Osama bin Laden immediately responsible for that is like arguing that any crime a Mafia drug dealer commits is directly ordered by the padrone (if that's the correct term).

In any case it is comforting to read Gawker and Jezebel, because there is a good deal of New Yorkish levelheadedness, skepticism and thoughtfulness in the comments. I was looking for an editorial or article in the newspapers to make a useful point for me, but it didn't happen. There was an immensely sad quote from a woman whose son had died on Sept. 11th who basically had no reaction, and said that bin Laden's death didn't change anything. Nonetheless I felt as if it did, and though it may be wishful thinking I hoped that we could cork the islamophobia back up in the bottle, not carry out secret operations in Pakistan, etc., and begin again with a clean canvas.

Anyway, these things happen slowly. The newspapers are much better again, even before 2008 I was thankful at the thought that Donald Rumsfeld was no longer Defense Secretary (though when he appeared on the Daily Show this year it was definitely too soon), when Obama won the election I realized that the Bush administration had stolen eight years of my life which I will never get back but at least those eight years were over, and pretty much every time I watch a session in British Parliament I am happy that Antonius Blair has departed and the clean fresh air of David Cameron has entered. But Fox News and its brainless brethren are still with us, and CNN for instance has I think not a fifth of its former succinctness, informativeness, and class, and since I watched the Headline News almost daily as an eighth- or ninth-grader I should know.

Other than that, my holidays were I think well spent. I've read dozens of romance novels, relaxed into a veritable sea anemone, scribbled a little on stories, returned to long Hermitologies blog posts though they are most likely a nuisance, and finally spent more time on the piano, where I had marathon sessions with Bach, Beethoven, Satie, Haydn, Scarlatti, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, etc., etc., and eventually stopped overthinking the music. The idea of composing probably won't amount to much, though.

Here in the bookshop I turned to a philosophical book on Aristotle again but couldn't concentrate. But hopefully I will, because it spreads on the troubled waters of my soul like a calming oil, and I could really use some of that.

P.S.: Never mind the Latin in the post title. Half of ancient Rome is probably rolling in its graves.

Trying to Close the Chapter

Last night I came across the snippet of an AP news article which announced that President Obama had called a press conference in the evening and that, unprecedentedly, he had not mentioned what it would be about. I was guessing that it would be about Libya, the budget or (in the wildest conjecture) his resignation.

Then the first reports came that, according to an anonymous American government official, Osama bin Laden had been killed and his body captured, and that the press conference was related. About an hour after the announced time of 10:30 Eastern time, in which I had the White House livestream open but nothing happened, that turned out to be the case.

Though I would have expected that the death of Osama bin Laden would leave me indifferent, it hasn't. It brought back my memories of Sept. 11th and made me feel (illogically or not) that it was finally resolved and put in the past.

The fact that he had been purposely assassinated didn't bother me either. I preferred it to torture, an unjust trial, secret jailing, humiliation, institutional execution, desecration of the body, or any of the other methods which disgrace us and our governments more than the people who suffer them, and which I would have expected. If he was really shot through the head he hopefully died right away.

If the attacks had not happened on Sept. 11th, several thousand people would still be alive and (as Obama pointed out) parents would have been able to raise their children, etc.; besides the press would have remained objective, no one would especially notice if people are Muslim or Arabic, and there wouldn't have been the pressure to go to war in Afghanistan.

On a personal level it also had a bad psychological effect on everyone who cared, also on me, and dragged us down into a weltschmerzy depression which had a deadening effect on anything artistic and intellectual. Though that was important to us of course it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

It also seemed to damage the relatively pacific and open inner life of America itself. Though it bothered me that no one made the connection between the suffering of Sept. 11th and the suffering of people abroad who live with war daily, there is really something vile in bringing violence into a country which (regardless of what its government wreaks abroad) has managed to forge a reasonable level of inoffensive comfort and harmony, and to gain a sort of innocence, and to share this peace and some goodwill (naïve or otherwise) with those who enter it. I don't think immigrants had an easy time, but unfortunately, no matter what the country, they rarely do.

*

On the other hand, we are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths, torture, illegality, and so on that came afterwards.

We used indiscriminate weapons in Afghanistan and killed entire families, we supported any force whose opponents are Arabic or Muslim and armed no matter how they treated civilians, we killed Sikhs and Muslims and didn't report the deaths properly, we were suspicious of anyone who was or looked Muslim and made them feel it, we pretended that torture wasn't torture and handed off men to dictatorships to force confessions, we imprisoned over seven hundred people in Guantánamo Bay without investigating their situations properly and let them rot there, we invaded Iraq, we undermined the case for respecting human rights by demonstrating that we did not feel bound by them, we hired contractors who shot people for no reason, we put hundreds of thousands of soldiers into situations where they had to fire on civilians or terrorize people by invading their homes at night and where they were at risk of being wounded or killed or emotionally damaged, we arbitrarily arrested people and held them over the twenty-four-hour limit under the Magna Carta, we approved the Patriot Act and its ideology that an American life is worth more than the life of an individual of any other nationality, we intimidated and harassed and isolated people who were against the Bush administration's policies for being unpatriotic, we flew over and dropped bombs into Pakistan and didn't particularly care whether people who had nothing to do with the matter died, and so on and so forth. Some of these things are continuing.

And I think that we are solely responsible for all of that.

So it is time now, since not only the hijackers but also the person who apparently stood behind them are gone, to begin to really look at and address the abuses and murder that followed Sept. 11th.

As a side note, I don't think that Osama bin Laden's death should be celebrated as an achievement of America as a country, either, since killing a man is the kind of, er, feat which knows no national limitations. But I admit that it's bringing out weird jingoistic feelings in me too, the kind I hated ten years ago, and of course I'm not American.

*

As a detail, I was wondering why the CIA director, Leon Panetta, was so moved and close to tears during the press conference about the shuffled positions in the Department of Defence, etc., last week. I think this may be the reason.

The Balcony Scene, Un-Star-Crossed

This afternoon I woke up to find that the Royal Wedding was already taking place rather than occurring in the early evening, as I had thought. The television was out in the corner room and I didn't want to suffer through the commentary and the length of the ceremony itself, so every now and then I read about it on the Guardian.

The more I read the more likeable and interesting the ceremony sounded. In the end, for strange reasons difficult to pinpoint, I became very fond of the wedding; as it turns out my critical faculties were melting into a species of naïve admiration.

The ceremonies had a fine balance between formality and informality, pomp and modesty, tradition and modernity; little things like the trees in Westminster Abbey, the fact that Kate Middleton's dress was neither fluffy nor too remote (as Karl Lagerfeld suggested), the red uniform of the groom instead of a rigid black suit or more gritty militaristic clothing (as it is the formally decorated and sculpted back of William's costume had a hint of the watchmen's attire in the Wizard of Oz — oh-wee-yo, oh-weeee-yo; etc. — about it), and the, er, creative exuberance of the ladies' hats were thoroughly pleasing.

What I did watch on television (where at least eight channels, including ARD, ZDF, CNN, BBC and TV Monde, were covering the ceremonies live) were the minutes on the balcony. It was rather fun to observe the dynamic between the actors, by which I mean the royal family.

As is well known, the kisses of the married pair were (as it was described on Le Monde's website) very English and not French. In that scenario — massive crowds, television, and the argus eyes of one's granny and other family, not to mention several centuries though not quite forty, contemplating them — an impetus of Heathcliffesque passion hardly seems proper or likely, so I found the absence of romantic fakery refreshing.

Besides the two of them have, to a degree (and in my opinion), slipped fairly suddenly into premature middle age and responsibility lately; it's clear that they have long and demanding careers ahead of them, whether as a rescue pilot or as a public figure or both, etc., so a certain pragmatism and sedateness is right.

What I really coveted was the wedding cake, a colossus of the genre, a veritably princely creation in beaded and flowered white, which I stared at in the monarchy's Flickr photostream. Cupiditas radix malorum est! In this type of crisis I remind myself of the time I read that fondant tastes lousy.

***

Anyway, otherwise weddings horrify me a little. First of all I tend to the opinion that love is egotistic and that weddings are generally self-seeking, secondly that the ceremonial form and public exhibitionism injures a relationship's private, unforced and sacrosanct nature. Thirdly the planning of them sounds nervewracking, for one's self and for any minions, and lastly I have the sense that the day of mine, if it occurs, will be a nightmare.

***

In the evening I made cucumber sandwiches; little rounds and hearts and an angel cut out of white bread, using cookie cutters, with dollops of cranberry on top; and a pot of chamomile tea. Together with the bags of winegums and licorice allsorts (since they were H***bo there were unfortunately far more gummies than licorice pieces) which Ge. had purchased they formed a repast in the corner room. The chamomile tea was intended to be fruit tea, and Mama howled in protest when she observed the switcheroo, but nobly drank a cup regardless.

In the past, and unrelated to current events, I have tried to make English teas, and the results have always been doubtful. The thing is that the sandwiches and tea are dainty but not very filling, and scones and clotted cream seem more rustic and besides a pain to prepare, and it is difficult to manufacture lemon curd which does not taste and look artificially enhanced and overly sugary; and even then these things are still not really filling. Besides the subtleties of the sandwiches are beyond me and the consequences are invariably plebeian.

Other than that I have been living the life of a slob, and the juxtaposition of that with the neat luxury of the wedding was highly enjoyable. Picture bare feet, clothing I've worn day and night perhaps even since the weekend, unwashed hair, a soupçon of perspiration in the air, and a fixation on the computer screen, and there you will have an unflattering but accurate portrait of me in a holiday mood. I did wash my hair in the evening and brush my teeth earlier, so it could be worse. What is sadly true, however, is that I am one of those commoners who looks to events of spurious significance, like the events of today, as a distraction from the plodding thoughts and minor feelings of inadequacy of everyday existence; a little opiate for the masses can help here and there . . .

Fitzinghurst and Susannah

An accounting of royalle nuptialles, undertakene in the yeare 1736 in the faire kingdome of Englande. Tho' loste to posteritee for a nonce, rediscovered by E.H. and transmitted thusely to a century newe.

***

28th of April 1736
London Towne.

Dear diary,

'Tis the eve of the wedding of Prince Fitzinghurst with Susannah Centreham, daughter of a Berkshire coachman, and the coffee-houses (when not brooding o'er the parlous state of our state's finances) are agog with interest in the preparations.

Westminster is all barred to the publick, save to those who there have their home, and the gawkeres from foreign shores must content themselves with the environnes of Tyburn and other lurid and comparatively unkingly spectackles.

The armes of state and pennant of England are aflutter everywhere, indeede one cannot enter a whitewashed roome without beholding before one's eye a faint shadow of blue and red in reverse, in shorte (as the scientists have wrote) a spectral green and gold. I deem it not treesonous though impolitick to admit that I have affected short sighte and worne tinted goggles since Tuesdaye to spare mine visual (and mentall) healthe.

On Sundaye I walked the side of the Thames to finde that it was a thoughte less stinkee than upon previous rapprochements. The reason to this Enigma was evidente enough when my Horse led me upstreame past a kind of dory in which men (who looked to be of ill repute and doubtless grateful of the groats' payment) were a-skimming the noctious waves of our noble river and removing a Menagerie's worth of deceased beasts, fishe, and Debris of urban life. Greenere of visage I spurred my horse and soone arrived at home.

There I found my trusty servant bearing my eventide repast to table as the hour had strucke. With customary loquacitee he told me of the strange happenings in the town. One quarter in Westminster had been cleaned with such rapiditee that its inhabitants, when returning from the day's labours, failed to recognize their streetes and piteefully strayed. Our pick-pockets profited therefrom and it is said that more than one earnest thanksgiving to His Highness and Her incipient Highness was offered up among the more devoute, but the tradesmen and fine folk did not offere parallel gratitude even when at last they arrived in their homes. 'Tis bruited besides that one lady swooned giddilee as she passed into the abruptly purified atmosphere, and berating her servants when she had regained consciousness, declared that if she wished to draw breath relatively unhindered she would be living in sight of a Tree and not in sight of a Smokestack.

As I write this I look out upon the street and forcibly recall that the Fashioun has run mad. There are old and young men who bear upon their pates wigs dyed in the colours of State; the ladies affecte ribbons around the crownes of their headgear, gownes, shoes, &c., in the style of Miss Centreham, to the extent that there are hundreds of Miss Centrehams to be found in every quarter of the city. The taske of the Royal Guard must be truly of Mammoth proporcions. My old friende in the wildes of Buckinghamshire informs me that the Plague has Spread beyond the urban limits.

The pondes within twenty leagues of London have all been fished clean of the species of troute which is intended for the nuptial Banquet. Most have been purloined by an army innumerable of gastronomick imitators. My correspondent (invited to too many a supper) cannot bear the sight or taste of this fish anymore, and goes about with a porcion of pickled eel in his pocket by way of Anti-dote. A couple of species of songbird, doomed by their edibility and grace and like rumours of their presence in the banquet, will in probability not be seen on these shores again either. 'Twill lighten the labours of Linnaeus.

In fine 'tis a relief that a marriage like this comes perchance once every three decades. When the present Fuss and Frivolitee is fizzled, the earnest of our finances, ills of societee, &c. will pull us once again down to the sublunary realities of English existence. And then my goggles may be layed aside for another thirty years!

Divers Pianistic Endeavours

On the piano I played the beginning of Schumann's a minor concerto, the first movement of Mendelssohn's d minor trio (may have finished the second, too), Chopin's "revolutionary étude," his "raindrop prélude," and maybe other things today. Afterwards I rummaged in our shelves, looking for Lizst's third "Liebestraum," and among other things unearthed Rachmaninoff's prelude in g minor again, to be revisited properly in future.

While the Haydn trios which I play with Papa and Pudel have been going beautifully, and the better things go the more imaginatively we render it and grasp the echoes of folkloric music and so on, I am not as happy about the way I am playing solo. Besides, due to the hot weather or something else two or so of the keys are sticking, which is a pain of in the neck for the romantic repertoire that roams over almost the entire range.

The problem is that now I mostly consider the way I want to play the music; it seems humbler and nicer to follow the old approach of inhabiting the atmosphere and of figuring out what the composer was thinking and hoping for when he wrote the score. It does seem reductive to play Haydn and Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Mendelssohn and the others too idiosyncratically Haydnishly, Mozartishly, Bachishly, etc., but it indicates a certain respect for their work and stature, and I like doing justice to zeitgeisty and stylistic quirks, and faithfully embodying their moods instead of drawing attention to myself.

So that's why I have thought that it might be worthwhile to compose things myself. Encouragingly, and along the lines of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's pronouncement in Pride and Prejudice, I have the inkling that if I learned to compose music, I would be very good at it.

***

"What is that you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is it you are talking of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is."

"We are speaking of music, madam," said he, when no longer able to avoid a reply.

"Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient."

(Quoted from Pride and Prejudice at Gutenberg.org)

***

Anyway, though I am presently completely ignorant of the laws and details of composition, I think it would be fun to find whether my style is old-fashioned, derivative, or a progression. When I am playing I tend to feel quite close to Beethoven's compositional thought processes, but when I dabble (badly) in writing little compositions myself they tend hypothetically to resemble Mozart's oeuvre at the age of two. So this is still a castle-in-the-air.

After tiring of the television I picked up a violin again with the most moderate imaginable success, and eventually went to sleep. Now I'm awake again.

Then, because it is Easter and bells are a symbol of the feast, I wanted to write about Schiller's poem "Das Lied von der Glocke" for the "Lighthouse." Since it isn't turning out the way I want, I will post it in Hermitologies as an unfinished fragment with no literary pretensions. I didn't consult a dictionary, either, so the translations are totally unreliable. Sorry for the lousiness.

***

"The Song of the Bell"

First published: 1798

WHEN I was twelve years old or so my grandfather taught my sister and me a little German grammar and literature. Among other things Opapa read Schiller's "Lied von der Glocke" with us, and I liked it very much. Now it feels didactic and a little consciously quaint, but it has a purity of language that is quite classical as well as an informality of subject and diction that already feel romantic.

It traces the casting of a church bell, and describes in poetic terms the manufacture and its purpose once it is finished and hung in the tower (and I think it is very suited to Easter because of the association of the feast with bells in Italy and France).

After a Latin epigraph whose emphases echo the ringing of the bells — toll . . . toll . . . — it begins,

Fest gemauert in der Erden
Steht die Form, aus Lehm gebrannt.
Heute muß die Glocke werden.

"Firmly walled within the earths there stands the mold of fired clay; on this day the bell must be."

The bronze is formed from liquid tin and copper, ash salts are added and the foam removed so that the bell will have a clear tone as the dry fir wood heats the whole, and the workers are sweating like pigs.

Schiller reminds us of the higher purpose of these proceedings:

Soll das Werk den Meister loben,
Doch der Segen kommt von oben.

In other words, the work should sound its master's praises, and yet the blessing comes from heaven.

If I understand the lines he idealizes manual labour in general, arguing that it invariably has a purpose and that any man who does not work meditatively is degraded. Schiller doesn't do much for the repute of poets as pragmatic individuals who understand the realities of the labour here.

A church bell is admittedly lofty in more than the physical sense. It will persist (if providence permits) for centuries, and

rühren vieler Menschen Ohr
Und wird mit dem Betrübten klagen
Und stimmen zu der Andacht Chor.
Was unten tief dem Erdensohne
Das wechselnde Verhängnis bringt,
Das schlägt an die metallne Krone,
Die es erbaulich weiterklingt.

"touch the ear of many men and lament with those who live in grief and sound with the choir to the prayer. What to the sons of earth below the varying fates and destiny brings, that beats against the metal crown which it most usefully further rings." ("Erbaulich" is much like the modern word "constructive" — though I put it as "usefully" — and similarly pedantic.)

Then the narrator follows the fate of an ideal baby whose arrival and every subsequent epochal moment of life is celebrated by the bell. Schiller is drippingly sappy when the baby grows into the age of romance:

herrlich, in der Jugend Prangen,
Wie ein Gebild aus Himmelshöhn,
Mit züchtigen, verschämten Wangen
Sieht er die Jungfrau vor sich stehn.

"Glorious in the pomp of youth, like a presentment from heavenly heights, with decorously shameful cheeks he sees the maiden before him stand."

Bleaugh.

After the nuptials we revisit the bell. You poke in a stick of wood; if it comes out of the liquid bronze with a glassy coat it is time to pour the bronze into the mold.

Then the metonymous baby marries, as Schiller declares that an alliance of feeble (femininity?) and strong (masculinity?) is the ideal. The family flourishes and is from the sounds of it painfully bourgeois, though as Schiller points out fortune is fickle and they may yet be poor.

As the bronze is poured into the mold, at last and amid anxieties about its propensities to break, Schiller philosophizes about fire. Fire is good for humanity if we tame it and bad if we do not, etc. Any retelling of the Prometheus myth, however simplified, already has this truism covered, I think.

In Schiller's case it appears to be a metaphor for human passions, and he admonishes the reader to keep a tight rein on it, be decorous all the time, and keep the will of heaven always in mind. Otherwise God will unleash destruction upon him:

Leergebrannt
Ist die Stätte,
Wilder Stürme rauhes Bette,
In den öden Fensterhöhlen
Wohnt das Grauen,
Und des Himmels Wolken schauen
Hoch hinein.

. . .

Needless to say, Schiller's conception of religion pretty much does nothing for me, and it seems consciously folksy and naïve.

. . .

A major charm of the poem — as the relevant article at a certain online encyclopaedia states — is that it has a clear narrative, so that even a grade-schooler like I was can like it; besides it is feels like an atmospheric vignette of German society in terms of the late 18th-century ideal as well as of the historical setting, which is particularly useful as a kind of verbal illustration if one lives as I did in relatively ahistorical und un-Teutonic places where churches with bell towers are rare birds. It is left to adults to speculate on the full and finer significance of the poet's thought.

Easter in Insufferably Trivial Detail

I was up before the Easter bunny today, not on the "early to bed and early to rise" principle but on the principle that I like to kick back my heels and stay up into outrageous hours and now that I am on holiday there is no duty for me to be spiritually hungover for.

This year the Easter brunch was particularly munificent. Despite cynical prognostications one of us did shop for Easter eggs and Papa had a secret stash which enriched the table greatly. So we had a little bunch of chocolate eggs, filled or not, and candy eggs with nougat or marzipan or other centres, and sugar eggs that looked like a sunny-side-up egg on our plates and decorating the white tablecloth; our trusty reddish clay pot of tea; two platters of cheese and Schinkenspeck and maybe blood sausage; baskets of soft pretzel sticks and croissants filled with nougat or marzipan or plain and raisin buns and ordinary buns; cold boiled eggs that had been painted red or orange or yellow or green or blue or lilac with watercolours; and fresh soft-boiled eggs. Then there is a large platter of further Easter eggs, and two chocolate bunnies stood at each plate, and chocolate ladybugs interspersed; the centrepiece is a jar with cherry twigs and a scarlet geranium and a yellow and violet pansy, with three of our handpainted hollow eggs hanging from it. Ge. heated milk and there was I think also a pot of hot coffee.

* * *

Before it began we watched the children's show Die Maus. It had a depressing story about the history of the Easter egg hunt; the heroine was a hen who wanted to lay white eggs and could only lay them in different colours. Aside from the quality of the short animation, it was first of all disconcerting that the hen was so conformist and secondly that she was fixated on white skin tones, even if the skin is a shell and belongs to a fictive egg. Mama also thought it was weird . . . Then there was a segment about milking eggs, which was where the real depression set in, because the actor just went in and milked a random cow out of an anonymous row without asking permission or anything, and I was already feeling Charlie Brownish enough when they then showed how the machine milks cows, and anything more loveless, mechanical, and disrespectful can hardly be imagined . . . So to progress further into the children's literary canon I felt like Eeyore at this point.

Then a film crew accompanied our Pope as he went about his daily activities in the Vatican, and it was incredibly boring. There are two cooks and two housekeepers or something in his household, conservatively and formally dressed women who look utterly devoid of cheer (note to self: do not work for Pope unless wish to look like life sucked out of self), and then a secretary and other people, a very closed circle which barely enlivens the minimalist though not modern rooms. He eats breakfast off of specially commissioned plate with his coat of arms on it, presumably eats lunch or dinner off the same, takes a short walk along the same old route to aid his digestion (TMI, I thought!), signs proclamations given to him in a portfolio by someone in a boring office with however a checkerboard pattern in the floor which I found superficially intriguing, and then watches television on one of a set of dusty olive armchairs whose velvety surface looks like it has been vacuumed within an inch of its life twice every day. And in the morning he can appear on the balcony and wave to people and say something in several languages, as the flag waves below him. And so on and so forth. Given the choice of being a mafioso or Catholic grandee the former seems far more fun, though the formal gardens of the Pope's summer palace are like a wormhole in time, and the patch of olive trees where the cows graze and the brood of chickens are endearing. The footage of the Pope himself was captured by the Vatican; our secular Maus production team was permitted to film on the palace grounds.

The short animation about a sheep who runs a farm for a day was far more fun, and I can't presently recall if there was anything else.

Anyway, even an innocuous children's show can apparently feed my cynicism.

* * *

Then Arte showed a production of Händel's Messiah. I missed most of it but it looked like utter tosh. From an environmental perspective it was however most congenial, because it lit only the bottom tenth of the stage, though in antiseptic white glare, everything else being plunged in darkness; an energy-saving measure if I ever saw one.

The action took place on a gigantic revolving stage, which failed to transcend the dignity of a Lazy Susan, and for some reason the thick and towering partitioning walls were given a classisistic flair which did not fit the modern hotel(?) environment.

Which leads me to the dramatis personae, who were all dressed in modern businesswear, grey and black and other dark skirts and tights and jackets, and white shirts for the gentlemen. How is this related to the Messiah? — The secret is shared between the director and god.

By the time I arrived they were stacking dark wood chairs onto a pile in the centre of the Lazy Susan on top of an airport-lounge or hotel-room-y wall-to-wall carpet, and then bending over as if they were all afflicted with stomach cramps or extreme somnolence only to get up again and wilt in subsequent scenes, and Mama mentioned that there was an earlier scene where someone had slit his wrists.

Then the scene shifted to a hotel room where a woman was undressing, going to a crib that clearly had nothing in it and the white curtain above it did nothing to convince me otherwise, and dropping her clothes carefully on the floor!, and then a man in his shirtsleeves who (so Mama informed me) was supposed to be Jesus entered the door quietly backwards like Mr. Bean enacting the world's worst ninja and sat down on the floor before joining the lady in bed after she had peeled off her black stockings for the titillation of the audience.

Being fed up I wandered away from the corner room. When I came back there was a faintly North Korean choreographed group thing where they waved their hands about and so on, and then a woman in a pale nightgown who was presumably something like an angel interpreted the lyrics in sign language. Eventually the stage light narrowed in on the angel, who was terribly obnoxious, and it was somehow over. Then everyone came to take a bow and the audience clapped enthusiastically.

As far as the production goes this could have been any play or opera or oratorio ever written, if you're going to reinvent the tale entirely. In the US this would have been more amusing or genuine, but in Europe these things always reek of trying so, so hard to be cool and avantgarde.

Anyway, didn't see all of it and don't want to set myself up as a critic, but that was my take on the affair. At least the stage lighting, aside from its ecological worth, supports the opthalmological and optometrical trades. Thank you for your contribution to our economy!

* * *

Happy Easter!

Rant About the Ivory Coast

Not a cheerful subject, but I'm becoming very angry about the role the UN has played in the Ivory Coast. It has given Alassane Ouattara and everyone fighting under him a carte blanche — simply because he won the elections by whichever margin — which will have to be revoked soon, and it has not acted as an impartial arbiter in any sense.

It is fanatical to believe that the outward form of democracy is the highest good, above the wellbeing of Ivorian citizens whom it is supposed to represent. In fact in this case the election seems to have resulted in a UN-approved hegemony, and now the parties are fighting over who is the hegemon over whom.

Even the rebels in Libya have been criticized far more for deciding to take up arms against a state which has been run by Muammar Gaddafi for 42 years — not by firing missiles into markets, assassinating statesmen, setting car bombs, or slaughtering civilian opponents, as far as I have heard, but by openly attacking military vehicles and installations — than Ouattara's supporters in Côte d'Ivoire. Now that (inevitably, given this course of action) several massacres have been ascribed to fighters on Ouattara's side it is quite clear that it almost never was about the people of Côte d'Ivoire.

I think the UN has allowed itself to be unduly influenced by the fact that Alassane Ouattara has cooperated with it whereas Laurent Gbagbo hasn't. That circumstance is too unrepresentative and insignificant to be the foundation of such wholesale approval and persistent benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations of massacring, and I am guessing there will have to be a change of official position.

On Becoming a Warmonger

Yesterday and today I slept into the afternoon and woke to a rewarding plenitude of sunshine. Not that I should be rewarded as such for lollygagging, but rather perhaps for having overcome a tumultuous week with a modicum of cheer intact.

When the Security Council voted on Resolution 1973, the one about intervening in Libya, I watched it on the live broadcast at the UN's website, and by that point I was in favour of the no-fly zone. It's not a popular opinion in this household. What convinced me was the fear that as Gaddafi's army retook land it would destroy houses and fire on armed rebels and unarmed civilians indiscriminately, the hypocrisy of encouraging the rebels but doing nothing to help them when they are faced with being killed off in great numbers, the clause that there would be no ground invasion, the clear desire that the political future of Libya will be left entirely to the determination of the Libyans, and the fact that even if it is unlikely that anyone will help the protestors being shot at, though unarmed, with live ammunition in Bahrain or in Yemen, at least in one country they will receive a measure of support. As far as I heard the way the protests were handled in Tripoli was unusually cruel — for instance, that bodies of suspected fighters were reportedly taken from hospitals and not returned to their families at all or except under conditions — and governments of other countries (Morocco, Jordan, and even Egypt) reacted very differently to their own protests. Besides it is not fair to say that we may do our best to overthrow our government by casting votes against it in elections, but that people who have far acuter reasons to wish to do so may not, because they would be provoking violence from their government. Since I usually dislike revolution and instinctively dislike wars led by the European Union or the United States (though I was in favour of NATO's actions over Kosovo in 1999, which however seem much more equivocal than I thought at the time) the fact that I have changed my mind in this specific instance indicates that there is a good reason for it. On the other hand I do not like the tendency of the countries which are carrying out the military intervention to celebrate specific airstrikes at all.

Anyway I feel morally responsible for this opinion and so mixed in with the usual Weltschmerz there is the surface worry that I am terribly wrong. Secondly I do think that sincere mediation led by a state like China or India to bring about a political solution now — like a transitional government of Libya still headed by Gaddafi with impartial and rebel statesmen mixed in, with elections to be held three or four years from now so that there is enough time to become familiar with new figures and to adjust to the idea of no longer having a de facto dictatorship; and no presence of armed forces in the territory now held by the rebels — before the war grows intenser, would be a good idea.

On the personal level I've been reading portions of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, which I attempt often with temporary success, and playing the piano for short periods and working on a different blog, among other things. Then I've been thinking about university again, and since I provisionally intend to study sciences this time around I've been looking into a book on tensors and a physics textbook, Gravitation. J. was doing Latin homework and Mama was reading something by André Gide in the corner room as I was doing said looking.

English Literary History in a Nutshell

[More nonsense. This is likely Part I of II.]

Prehistory

Scratches in tree bark, soft stone and dried mud.

Roman Britain

Army ledgers. The poetry of names and strategy.

731 A.D. Ecclesiastical History of the English People

For the benefit of legions of young military-age men educated in monasteries and elsewhere, the Venerable Bede produces a history "textbook," a literary genre designed to bore school-persons into submission and in this case thereby to reduce resistance to Christianity.

1000 A.D. Beowulf

A baying wolf from Sweden goes on an epic rampage against an early teatotaller and his mother in Denmark, and decades later dies when he attempts in vain to remove a fire hazard from his kingdom. After this tragic incident, possibly pure fiction, Swedish children were taught to "stop, drop and roll" and the first fire trucks — wheelbarrows and rainwater — were constructed.

end of 14th cent. Canterbury Tales

In a court unsettled by the Hundred Years' War, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote bedtime stories for the beleaguered nobility much as Giovanni Boccaccio had done in his Decamerone in Florence.

1589-1613ish William Shakespeare's Plays and Sonnets

A cabal of English Literature professors at Oxford University decides to write plays plagiarized from ancient and newer sources to establish an authorship controversy whose resolution would procure funding for their successors in perpetuity. William Shakespeare is the hapless tool who must produce the plays and pretend to be the figurehead of the thing.

1611 King James Bible

As the head of the Anglican Church King James I considers it infra dignitas to have it known that he has read a Puritan translation of the Bible, and reading it in ancient Greek or Hebrew or the Vulgate is a drag, so he commissions his very own.

1667 Paradise Lost

"A smalle whyte dogge by the name of Paradys has been loste on the road twixt Southampton and Dover. Any kind sirs having knowleddge of his presente lodgynges please to despatche a messengere to J. Milton, 34 Hay Roade, Chalfont St. Giles Bucks."

1671 Paradise Regained

Hiding in hay-cart all along.

1712 Rape of the Lock

A consortium of millowners is highly wrought after the Leafley river is reconstituted into a canal and the old lock above the juncture to the Finch tributary is demolished. They turn to Alexander Pope to tear into the enterprise with a sarcastic editorial using his preferred weapon, heroic couplets.

1722 A Journal of the Plague Year

Six decades after an unspeakably horrid year in dress fashions, pamphleteer Daniel Defoe bravely broaches the collective trauma of English society and describes the monstrosities in lace and velvet which lurched and broddled through Whitehall.

1729 A Modest Proposal

After a bitter babysitting experience a young policy-maker in the Foreign Office advocates cannibalism, only to be sternly told that he must evince greater sensitivity to the public and obtain knowledge in the art of child care through apprenticeship in a nursery. Later in his career it transpires that it was he who (under the influence of hallucinogens) had anonymously published (1726) a highly spurious account of his travels in lands for example where horses reign (known afterwards by the name of hippocracy, sometimes spelled hypocrisy). It offends so many diplomatic missions who read it as ridicule of their own nations that the War of the Austrian Succession two decades after is but an extension of childish insults by other means. Yet the authorship has come as no surprise to his superiors in the Foreign Office, who have placed no great reliance upon his dispatches after the first; their initial panic after reports of Rose-coloured Pachyderms preying upon the docks of Marseilles proved greatly unfounded.

1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho

England discovers southern France and Italy only to be shocked by the depravity of the upper classes and surprised by the similarity of its scenery to paintings by Watteau and etchings by china-manufacturers. As Mrs. Ann Radcliffe reported in this and later works, Italian marquesses are greatly prone to killing off their families and conspiring with clergymen.

1813 Pride and Prejudice

A naive and unobservant young novelist, daughter of a rural parson, suggests that one should marry for love rather than rank, money, or suave manners. Her work unleashes a firestorm of denunciation which, particularly among women, inspires animosity against her and her works to this day.

1814-29 Waverley Novels

Sir Walter Scott uncovers a similar vein of depravity in England and Scotland. Brides stabbing unwanted husbands, Scots stabbing unwanted English, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert trying not to execute unwanted love interests, etc., and everyone from astrologers to highlanders conspiring against everybody else.

1836-7 Pickwick Papers

An inventory of the finances of a small town outside of London by name of Pickwick. Followed by Oliver Twist, a monograph on an obscure Elizabethan poet; A Tale of Two Cities, contrasting the street waste disposal methods of Paris and London; Great Expectations, predicting a stark rise of the gross domestic product in London and outlying towns between 1862-5; Little Dorrit, a comparison of the types and quantities of fish which were caught off a tiny Dorsetshire port in 1857; and Nicholas Nickleby, a philosophical look at the relative merits of hempen and wood-fibre paper as described in the diary of a 17th-century scrivener. Charles Dickens was a minor and dry writer with a profoundly limited insight into the realities of human interaction and greater social problems, and so despite an impassioned reevaluation in the 20th century he never truly acquired influence.

1847 Jane Eyre

In an investigative report the Yorkshire freelance writer Charlotte Brontë concludes that it is best for well-born but poor women not to become governesses except if the surname of their employer is Rochester, and finds at the same time that any woman in an engagement should secure her footing in the eyes of the law before the ceremony by inspecting the betrothed gentleman's house from roof to cellar to ferret out concealed dependents.

1847-8 - Vanity Fair

Having consumed too much cotton candy, the writer William Makepeace Thackeray indicts a rambling denunciation of society and the sugar industry at large, and the sugar industry at street carnivals in particular, concluding that the brief surge of energy is in the end a hollow good.

1891 - Salome

The great playwright Oscar Wilde suffers fraught relations with other personages of high society. Pushed past the powers of endurance by one particular grande dame, he decides to spoil her appetite for dinner by putting in theatrical form a Biblical tale of a young lady who, on a momentous occasion, orders not a salad, not a soup, not a proper met of any sort, but the head of a prophet on a platter.

Et cetera.

The Hamster Ball

Yesterday evening, having gazed upon the latest offerings of the sartorial art in Milan, I watched the new season premiere of America's Next Top Model, having been forewarned by a certain blog (namely Jezebel) that it would be tremendously stupid.

So it was and yet not repellently so. This time the group of obligatorily shrieking girls who were anointed unto the "Top 13" were told at first by the cryptic medium of a blank piece of paper in an envelope that they were unanointed, so that their shrieks were muted into sobs amid the shrieking of, presumably, actresses, who it was pretended were the successful contestants. Tyra Banks magnanimously explained to the pseudo-rejected girls, as they meditated the ignoble heap of their suitcases in the staircase, that they were through after all, and that she had only been trying to give them the experience of rejection. Why she would consider that the girls had not encountered rejection yet, particularly those who had already worked as models, remained unexplained; so it must be surmised that this little trick was designed for the benefit of the television viewer. Anyway, she pulled away a curtain to reveal their home — perhaps due to the vagaries of the camera lens the atrium looked roughly the size of a high school gymnasium — and with piercing cries they revelled in their material surroundings.

The perennial circus of the contestant interviews was not broadcast this time, but Tyra exercised her actorly predilections by imitating three common contestant types. I consider it a little unprofessional to make fun of young people half your age who are guests on your television show, as it were, but the second impersonation was good.

The next morning, at least in terms of artistic compression, the girls were hailed out onto the lawn where they met Erin Wasson. Her status as supermodel and stylist and jewellery designer was elucidated; and I could have sworn that she also had a fashion line which showed during New York Fashion Week and which was discontinued due to fiscal pressures — this, at any rate, was not mentioned.

Erin and the fashion shoot director Jay Manuel announced a runway fashion show in one of Alexander Wang's lines and Erin Wasson's jewellery. So far, so good, I suppose. As a clincher, however, the models were to walk on a 12-inch-wide transparent strip jutting into a pond and they had to walk inside a plastic bubble where bits of reddish material would drift along the bottom like confetti in a hamster wheel. Why self-respecting designers would participate in a runway show set up to be more or less impossible, humiliating for the contestants, and too fussy or weirdly arranged to permit a good view of the fashion which the models are supposed to be modelling, remains another unanswered question. In the event two or three of the contestants fell, could have hit their heads on the edge of the runway and been knocked unconscious (a litigator's dream) but fortunately didn't, and had to crawl inside the sphere until it bobbed back to the runway where their feet could gain purchase. Idiocy, I say!

Behind the scenes the photographer Russell James staged what is called "beauty" photos at Style.com. I think it is a public relations invention intended to humanize the models and by extension the fashion industry, and to counter the nasty insinuations of cruelty (invented as it were by the rational people amongst us who don't think that fashion transcends the human right to comfort and dignity) against the latter. Models obligingly pose with a sandwich, a respectable book (no Harry Potter, though I guess that would be endearing), curling-irons, make-up brushes, mirrors and each other, and smile with the serenity which inevitably accompanies 12-hour-workdays, painful high heels, hair extensions which it will take hours to remove, and other stresses perfectly natural for people who are deracinated from their homes and not yet old enough to graduate from school.

Based on these backstage photos or on the desired narrative of the show's producers, the girl named Angelia was sent home. I was pleasantly surprised that some of the contestants did look like they could be models. This also means being as slender as possible; to the fashionable mind I don't think that models are ever too slender for the runway and only perhaps for print work it might be awkward to have the lateral dimensions of a piece of paper.

***

Last cycle was the first "high fashion cycle," where presumably by grace of André Leon Talley — a friendly giant of sorts — designers from Diane von Furstenberg (who was really impressive and a revisitation of the 1940s and 1930s, European-accented American high society) to Zac Posen were hooked into appearing. Karolina Kurkova made a slurried drink of healthy, healthy fruits and vegetables, which though it ended up tinted a respectable blueberryish lilac was greeted with muted enthusiasm, and evidently inspired less enjoyment than the batch of deep-fried Oreos with which the contestants were likewise regaled by one of their number.

Franca Sozzani made an appearance too as the editor of Italian Vogue; I think I would like her, but I do find it a bit tiresome how she is part of the handful of fashion industry members (also like Emmanuelle Alt, Carine Roitfeld and children, etc.) which is always photographed everywhere. Then there was a painful non-conversation between a model raised in rural America who was unable to decipher Gallic-accented English and the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, both bored and on edge. As high fashion television I thought the season was a bit of a bust, though a painful degree of ambition and kowtowing permeated it, which doubtless resonated with the target audience of 13-28-year-olds who are enduring or still able to recollect the vicissitudes of attracting the favours of the fashionable clique in their schools.

***

Lastly and somewhat unrelatedly, I've been keeping track of the fashion weeks in New York and London. New York's week was so excessively tasteful and at times boring that one or two years ago I would have made sage remarks about the Recession; and for once I looked to London for relief, eager for the heady dash of discombobulating vulgarity by way of contrast, only to find that here too was a sad dearth of offensiveness. In Milan so far some conspiracy is going on, too, because the shows I've seen so far tend to plunge into "jewel tones," which means intense and saturated cobalt, amethyst, emerald and so on and so forth. At least familiar model faces like Natasha Poly and Anna Selezhneva and Coco Rocha have reemerged there; they had not much appeared elsewhere and I didn't know whether they were superannuated, keeping out of the spotlight for a while on a publicist's advice so that their allure remains fresh, or bound by exclusive contracts to make Milan Fashion Week (which has been a trifle moribund) particularly attractive. By the way, I have not seen Anna Wintour anywhere. Maybe this means that Carine Roitfeld, so newly deposed by Emmanuelle Alt, will be at American Vogue after all, or maybe it means that I haven't been looking at the relevant front row photos. As for the season's fads, the one I've noticed most is the colour scarlet.

***

Anyway, despite the pretentiousness of my statements and the scarcity of qualifiers, I am evidently not inside the heads of the people who put on New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week, or American's Next Top Model, so the preceding may be pure invention.

Rambling about Tricherie

I am once again in the Throes of a Cold, this time with a sore throat throughout Sunday, then intermittent loss of voice on Monday and Tuesday. And my legs are weakish when I go to the bookshop and my head feels disproportionately hot. Yesterday, however, I discovered a miracle cure when I decided to roll around in the chair in the bookshop's office. Whether it is the cooling effect of the wind compounded with the cardiovascular perks of the exertion of pushing one's self around with the feet, or the release of endorphins, or a more complex explanation, it made me feel much better. But I also gargled a little chlorhexamed this morning.

When I came in this morning Mama summarized a TV discussion about our defence minister Guttenberg's (whom I somewhat dislike and therefore pronounce in English so that the name has "gut" at the beginning) plagiarism in university. I haven't read the details, but I have never really bought into the virulent denunciations of plagiarism. It's a ratty thing to do in itself, but I think it's more sad than depraved, because it means that one doesn't have the same pride in one's work and hasn't benefited by the same process of clarifying one's thought and preparations; so in the end it carries with it a hollow benefit. Besides not all essays and theses are written with love for the field, or written on a topic which is genuinely interesting and useful, so morally and spiritually I find them a hollow exercise at the outset. In this particular case one might guess that the denunciating party doth protest too much; certainly I think that neglecting a German citizen in Guantánamo or accidentally dropping a bomb on hundreds of civilians is more shameful.

The closest I came to plagiarism was probably during a group project for English 120(?) when we had to write an annotated bibliography for a poem by John Donne. It was the day of the Bush/Kerry elections when I had to finish it. In between hectically refreshing the election map at nytimes.com I tried to read the books, summarize them in three to fivish sentences, and gauge their usefulness given the subject as we were supposed to. But eventually my mind was overstuffed and I had to go to sleep; so with one of the books I just checked the index to see if the poem is mentioned, summarized the table of contents and propped it at the head of my bed and was trying to read it anyway when I went to sleep for two or three hours. It was quite clear that Kerry had lost by then and after that it was one of the worst days of my life. When the bibliographies were handed back a couple of weeks later the professor or teaching assistant or both first of all made a speech about plagiarism to the class, and I think I felt rather guilty. Then there was a little note on my bibliography in which the TA explained that she had checked the annotated books because the phrasing of my annotations sometimes seemed unlikely, and that I had squeaked by but should be more careful.

There were three cheating incidents in school: when I was in Grade 1 or 2 we had "minute drills," where we each received a piece of paper with math questions on it and we were supposed to solve them as many of them as possible within a minute or two. I disliked the pressure and was afraid of disgracing myself, so I surreptitiously answered a handful of questions beforehand. After a couple of times doing this I realized that it was unnecessary and stopped. And honestly I didn't feel that bad about it, firstly because I was good at math, secondly because I wasn't trying to do better than the others, and thirdly because I wasn't caught.

In Grade 9(?) we watched a film in Social Studies and were asked to answer a worksheet or write something about it. I thought then as now that watching films is really no substitute for substantive learning material, and besides it wasn't a big deal; so I didn't put up much resistance when a clique of classmates sitting around me asked to copy what I'd written. Somewhat to my surprise we were asked to hand our work in. I'd forgotten about it completely, when a couple of weeks or months later the student teacher asked us to step outside the door one by one and inquired whether we had copied things off of each other — said that, in fact, it was evident that this had happened — and asked me specifically whether I'd been put under pressure. I tried to remember but couldn't, and I detest tattle-tales, so I honestly said that I wasn't put under pressure and didn't remember. What did irk me was that I then received a 0 for the assignment. Later someone intermittently tried to copy off of me during the Spanish final exam, but as I said to her it was unlikely that I'd gotten everything right, besides which it would have been difficult for her to see what I'd written because she was across the aisle and my writing is tiny and somewhat indecipherable. I did find that rather obnoxious but maybe she needed the boost to her self-confidence as much as I had in Grade 2, and she was very good at spoken Spanish.

Lastly, and very ignominiously, I went to a provincial-level geography quiz during Grade 8, because I had misunderstood the teacher during the school-level finals and forewent answering a question which I should have answered and would have gotten wrong. I realized that I had misunderstood him when he prompted me to answer the next question. For the rest of the day I was in agonies of conscience, but was far too ashamed to tell the teacher and forfeit, which would now seem the sensible alternative. The third-place winner seemed cleverer than I was; in terms of the score I think I would have had one point less than him. Anyway, for these and many other reasons I am glad to be out of an academic environment.

It must be admitted, though, that this kind of competitiveness and artificial frames which almost coerce one into cheating are present outside of school — the job search, for instance, or work contracts, or writing competitions, and many other things. Competition is fun enough if one can win it fair and square, but otherwise it seems degrading.

What I like about not working is not that it's easier, which it isn't even after I was inoculated against serious depression two years ago, but that it gives me freedom. The material freedom of earning an income might be equivalent, but it likely does not encourage one to think and act independently, nor to strengthen and expand one's inner life. But since I have had that, I think it is worthwhile now not only to gather experiences and earn an income but also to profit by the raised threshold of physical and therefore mental activity. The work at the bookshop is quite invigorating that way already.