The Quill and the Cembalo

TODAY I showered again after basking in what I think of as a piglet state, rather gloriously, for the past week or two. I still feel happy about the way the essay turned out, and am only a little nervous about the grade I am getting for it, which is a minor consideration in the grand scheme of things but it would be disappointing if the professor isn't as perfectly satisfied with it as I am. Besides I should pick up my Latin exam eventually. But on the whole my conscience feels splendidly at ease.

So, anxiety about preparing sufficiently for the next semester aside, I have plunged into a news junkie state, flirted with the idea of doing a normal driver's license and then a truck driver's license and taking horseback riding lessons next year so that I am prepared to work on a farm for three to six months after I graduate from university, have daydreamed about journalistic enterprises again, played a little piano and cembalo, and otherwise am reading books.

As far as the journalistic enterprises go, the blog I am keeping up again requires work similar to that of my university essay, and I have decided to go for a magazine approach and write long features. But even intelligent research is no substitute, I think, for personal involvement and legwork, so I have been trying to feel my way into doing interviews and so on. The thing is that I had a shortlived blog where I asked someone from a reporter NGO for more information, and the responsible individual responded with edifying enthusiasm and we ended up having a Berlin-to-New York off-the-record phone conversation — so I know that some people at least are glad to talk even to minor bloggers.

What I did more recently, and more as a cheeky experiment, is get into contact with a Goldman Sachs media representative to see if I could get a quote from the corporate perspective about "political intelligence" in the US. (This was after I did something like a dozen hours of reading up on it over two days.) I either wrote down the wrong email address or was genuinely fobbed off, but I did talk to two different ladies with a received pronunciation British and an intermittent Anzac accent respectively.

So even if nothing comes of it and a true journalist would despise my efforts, I have learned a good deal while doing it; and I like probing a subject from different perspectives and in depth, then writing about it in a much boiled down way, until it 'gels' into a cohesive couple of paragraphs which, while hopefully rich in information, give no obtrusive evidence of the knotty and long path of preparation. Besides I have decided not to try to popularize my approach to any subject or my style, but to write as heavily as I like, while being sure to write what I mean and mean what I write.

Even the interviewing doesn't address a problem which I find with armchair reporting, which is firstly of not being privy to the milieu in which news events occur (like, let's say, a Congressman's office) and secondly of writing glibly about things which one hasn't felt with one's own skin, so to speak. Thirdly I worry that the absence of journalistic training will lead me into thoughtless breaches of prudence, ethics, or professionalism.

AS for the piano, I haven't been playing on it much lately, because I have come to the conclusion that I am Not Very Good, and my ego requires far more nourishment than it has gotten to be convinced otherwise. Besides I have been thinking that my temperament might not be best suited to music even if I do become good, because it might bring out too much of my softer sensibilities and leave me more prone to megrims or whatever, than some pursuit which has strong practical element and takes me out into the world a bit more.

This has been reinforced by playing on the cembalo, which on the one hand has reassured me that it's no wonder that I haven't been able to achieve much with Bach on the modern piano because he really sounds a million times better and characteristic on the cembalo, and on the other hand has shown up the difference between a sound technical base and the slipshod habits into which I've gotten. Since the cembalo requires a different approach — much more different than I'd thought — it makes me look at scores in a new way, and so I also see how I compensate for finger strength by dragging one note into the next and how I ignore the proper phrasing and so on.

Besides, since the keys of the older instrument require much less pressure, it has also become clear how far my relative feebleness has been an obstacle to speed and trills. Conversely, though, I have not ever wanted the technical side of playing the piano to come easily, since the labouring process forces me to engage with the notes and the music 'behind' them much more slowly and carefully and thoroughly. The problem is if it is (and it definitely is) an impediment to the 'music behind it.'

So the last time Pudel, Papa and I played the Haydn trios, I played more slowly, but I also paid more attention to everything — particularly the way I 'produce' the notes in relation to each other — and there was, in that respect, an improvement.

Lastly, though, I think that there has been a lull with the piano because I don't need it to work through thought processes any more; university and my 'journalistic endeavours' and so on have greased the squeaky wheel (as it were) of ye olde noggin. And I'd need to really get into again, and in the absence of a YouTube spree that might not happen so quickly.

But basically what I think is that it is clear that it is quite different to play amateurishly the way I have and to be trained in an environment where one is held up to standards but at the same time also has one's path smoothed by the influence of others and is around others who are deeply absorbed in music. My route has the advantage of originality, and it is only a lack of confidence and of trust and of courage which prevents me from accepting it as perfectly valid, without being embarrassed and insecure.

P.S.: Papa bought a bottle of ouzo for our corner room supply of liqueurs, and I have become quite fond of it. I think it is about the most fun way one can celebrate or supplement the study of Greek, the next fun way being my finally making the pan of baklava I've been thinking about for a while. (Back in Canada my littlest brother and I made it once entirely from scratch, but the 'phyllo' pastry we produced was thicker than what one gets in stores, so it was simply not the same.)

Free At Last

My essay is finished! I printed it out along with the bibliography and cover (in past experience it has proven wiser to separate them into two further documents so that the page numbering, etc., is accurate) roughly at noon; dawdled, since the secretary's lunch hour is until 2 p.m.; and then set off for the university.

It is a 'fresh' day and the sun was shining; it is not really springlike, but one bulbous saffron-yellow flower which might be a crocus gleamed from the U-Bahn embankment, and the mistletoe globes were as present in the twiggy trees as ever; there were also surprisingly many students still at the university. I reached the Islamic Studies department and climbed up to the office, whose door was open, and then there stood the professor! He seemed pleased to receive the essay — surprisingly, considering that he has to read it all, considering that it is 18 pages long rather than the suggested range of 10-15, and considering that it is *cough* no longer 'the end of February.' So I scuttled off again, shamefaced though happy.

Now I am at the bookshop and debating the crucial question: to waste my time uproariously for the rest of the holidays (until mid-April), or to do something useful? Or both?

Brief Note From Terrible Person

I read in passing today that my middle school of uncherished memory has been torn down, and felt extremely pleased. Since another of my schools was closed because there were too few students (or something) I had hoped that this was similarly the case, and that the hellhole was Gone Forever. Unfortunately, having pounced onto a search engine for further information, it became clear that it was torn down some five years ago only to be rebuilt by the next year. So what goes around, comes around — but only for a short time. (c:

Live Blog II: Student Must Burn More Oil

Much more of the essay is written. I read an extract from Herodotus and then chased down Bardasanes's entertainingly nutty pronouncements, quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparations for the Gospel (ca. 313 AD).

The following three passages appear to be tongue-in-cheek:

"From the river Euphrates, and as far as the Ocean towards the East, he who is reviled as a murderer, or a thief, is not at all indignant: but he who is reviled for sodomy avenges himself even to the death: among the Greeks, however, even their wise men are not blamed for having favourites."

"The Medes all cast out the still-breathing corpses to the dogs whom they carefully rear"

"In Syria and Osrhoene many used to mutilate themselves in honour of Rhea: hereupon king Abgar at one stroke commanded that those who cut off the genital organs should also have their hands cut off, and from thenceforth no one in Osrhoene mutilated himself."

I think that 'at one stroke' is a brilliant pun, by the way; one wonders if it was the translator or Bardasanes himself who coined it, or if it was accidental.

In my essay draft I wrote a footnote explaining that Bardasanes is not the most reliable source and gave as my example the fact that he boldly announced that "most of the Germans die by strangulation." (He also said, "in Britain many men have the same wife.") If strangulation was a popular practice of the Germanic criminal system, however, I am guilty of sloppy research.

An internal debate I had was whether to mention the Salic Law (about which I have plenty of notes) as an example of law whose origins were contemporaneous with pre-Islamic and early Islamic law, but decided to come back to it at the end of the essay, if there is room. For some reason I find these legal codes deeply engrossing, though the Code of Hammurabi is atrocious and the parts of the Code of Justinian which I read (the 'institutes') seem less horrifying but repellently smug.

Now I will try to read Margaret Smith's biography of Rābi‘a, a Sūfī mystic who was a woman. There were Sūfī 'convents' toward the end of the Abbasid period, too, but since we had an acrid debate about the Arabic term in one of our seminar classes I have decided to, er, tread lightly.

***

02:01 Undoubtedly the longest name I have come across: "Abū ‘Abdu l-Lāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs ibn al-Abbās ibn ‘Uthmān ibn Shāfi‘ ibn as-Sa'ib ibn ‘Ubayd ibn ‘Abd al-Yazīd ibn al-Muttalib ibn ‘Abd Manaf." As far as I can tell, 'ibn' refers to distant ancestors (a grandfather at the least) and 'al-' to nicknames (like 'the' in 'Ethelred the Unready'), so this is no more complicated than a protracted genealogy.

***

02:48 Fuel for the mind: two pancakes with "rote Grütze" (diluted because the tub was almost empty), quark with vanilla sugar prepared with true beans by brother Gi., and maple syrup, which is admittedly gilding the lily.

***

04:02 Finished the extract of the book on Rābi‘a, which was simple because it was short, and much of it went into Sūfī doctrine (interesting but, from the perspective of m' essay, irrelevant). Tried to find out where I read a passage by Fatima Mernissi about Islam being used as an excuse to keep men on top of the political sphere, which was cheekily expressed and not propagandistic as far as I can tell; it turns out it might have been in Beyond the Veil. It also has the delightful though quintessentially passive-aggressive detail about women (in certain tribes in the 6th and 7th century) divorcing people by turning their tent entrance in the opposite direction. I had skim-read it during my first trip to the university's library. So now the question is whether I can call it quits with the main research and finish the essay, only researching here and there to confirm the facts. I really hope so. (c:

***

05:43

Live Blog: A Student Burns the Midnight Oil

Today the term essay was due for my History and Society of the Near East seminar. Though back at UBC I would generally wait until the day and night before the deadline to launch into things, having made feeble stabs at research throughout the previous month, I started reasonably early with this one. But it is not done, so to relieve my boredom, I will be sketching the process.

22:13 Have finished taking notes on Gavin Hamblyn's introduction to Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety. In fact I had read part of it as the obligatory reading for a class presentation three weeks ago; should have read all of it. Now foraging through the bibliography and looking up the extracts on Google Books (which I am using as a scholarly resource for the first time and which is pretty good, though it would be better if I had a couple of weeks to read up what it leaves out in the Islamic Department library, which I visited on Tuesday and rather like).

An Arab-Syrian gentleman and warrior in the period of the Crusades, though I don't much like the chronicler, Usāmah ibn Munqidh, who is being translated and quoted here, has quite corking stories about the Crusades. They show how deranged people were by the brutality, even in their attitudes toward family. I haven't the foggiest notion what to think of this anecdote (p. 179), for instance:

A Moslem captive drowns herself. — In the army of the Bridge was a Kurd named abu-al-Jaysh, who had a daughter named Rafūl, who had been carried away as captive by the Franks. Abu-al-Jaysh was affected by a kind of monomania on account of her, which made him say to everyone he met every day: "Rafūl has been taken captive." The second morning as we were walking on the bank of the river, we saw by the side of the water an object. We said to one of our attendants, "Swim and see what is that thing." The attendant went to it and lo! the object was Rafūl herself, dressed in a blue dress. She had thrown herself from the back of the horse of the Frank who had carried her away and was drowned. Her dress was caught in a willow tree. The anguish of her father, abu-al-Jaysh, was thereby abated.

I think the chronicler's moral compass is generally as wobbly as a Verne hero's literal compass near the core of the Earth, and yet he seems smug about it. On the other hand, it was in the middle of the Crusades.

Every now and then I hop to other sources, like this book chapter which has a broad vein of jargon or humbug:

the contributions in this book examine indigenous sources which reveal the visibility, the agency and the consciousness of women's actions—and their limits [. . .] and which show that these women exercised a certain amount of economic, legal and intellectual freedom within defined areas in different situations.

I think I should use this inspiration to draft an essay in the scientific realm. For instance, "The impact of hydrogen dioxide upon the human epidermis can produce a feeling of fluidity combined with the sensation of a temperature minimally below that of the corporeal climate at the boundary of muscle to the lipid boundary underlying the dermis, which in the common anglophone usage may be described as wetness." Upon further research, "One may find that the application of cotton, wool, and other natural textile fibres is capable — by trapping the molecules within the tiny hairs — of absorbing the compound and assuaging the stimulation to the peripheral nervous system."

23:09

A Trivial Sidenote

Today I was looking for the piece of paper on which I had written the caramel brownies recipe, and found on its reverse the answers which I had scribbled down (based on what I know without looking things up, though looking things up is really the crux of the quiz) for this year's [Link in PDF] King William's College Quiz. Of course I mentioned having looked up the solutions for the quiz in the last post, since they have come out already, but hadn't known what my precise 'score' was.

Here are the questions which happened to coincide with my (sometimes peripheral, having only perused roughly a solitary page each of 1.9. and 4.1.) book-reading over the years:

1.9. In the year 1911: who silently portrayed Marguerite Gauthier?

4.Which tale or tales:
1. is all about Hester's badge of shame?
8. tells of how Dick and the outlaw dress up as friars?

7.7. in which Study did Sir James, disappointingly, marry Celia
instead of her sister?

8.10. what is essentially cheese on toast?

11.4. who received details of the School of Pain from her invalid
cousin?

12. Unmask:
5. Alexander Thomson
9. Newsom

The answers may be found here.

The Asinine Eyewitness

This morning Greek was a little boring, except perhaps to a person who considers the replacement of proper nouns as indirect objects by pronouns, and the conjugation of irregular verbs in their 3rd person plural active forms, wildly stimulating. I also came, er, a trifle late.

In the Islamic Studies lecture, the professor went through the divisions of the Muslim religio-polity into the (I may have invented some of these names) Hassanids, Ismailites, Nizarites, Idrissids, Qaramites, etc., which was like a laundry list. He runs through the groups so evenhandedly and factually that just when I have come to think, yes, that sect sounds like a right crowd of crazypantses, a moment later he mentions something about the group that sounds reasonable. Besides, from one end of a sentence to another, I've mostly already forgotten which imam they believed was the last legitimate one, who was descended from which uncle or cousin or associate of Muhammad, whether they leaned toward the Sunni or Shi'ite, who was the de facto leader of the group, and where the group lived. And I still don't know the difference between Sunni and Shi'a!

A bright spot were the Suetoniusesque antics of Al Hakim, caliph of Egypt when the Fatimids were governing it in opposition to the caliphate in Baghdad. (Apparently the Fatimids did not use that name to refer to themselves; it was bestowed upon them by outsiders whose reference to the Fatimids' veneration of Fatima — a woman! — was intended to approximate the label of "Girlie Men.") The Wikipedia page is comparatively dull. As the professor summed it up, this gentleman was rather a hardliner but in a flip-flopping manner, in that he forbade things and then un-forbade them. He forbade wine, which is not so abstruse given the Quranic traditions; but also forbade trade between Christians and Jews with Muslims, women from going out at all (but the Wiki only mentions that they weren't allowed to go out uncovered), and men from going out at night so as to prevent nocturnal hijinks, besides which he burned down a church or temple but then felt sorry and tried in vain to rebuild it. Thanks perhaps to the bad offices of his elder sister, he went out for one of his nighttime strolls in the desert one night and didn't come back; all that was found later were pieces of his bloody clothes. I thought the professor said that pieces of the caliph were found too, but may have misremembered that; at any rate, Wiki also places an abandoned donkey at the sanguinary scene.

The hashish-fuelled Assassins sounded interesting, too, but I'll presumably read up on them some other time. The Crusades are coming up in the lectures, and I admit that I'm looking forward to hearing about them, though most of the other warfare mentioned in this course has been hugely depressing.

Over the weekend I played the piano a lot and watched bits of the Golden Globe awards and even a crime show or two (not German, but American, since I like my crime unrealistic and full of shiny high technical production values), and checked my partially (3?) correct answers for this year's King William's College quiz, much to my content.

By the way, I have my Blackboard password now and everything's fine. Regarding the post below.)

In Which The Student Throws A Tantrum

N.B.: The following is rather self-absorbed and correspondingly boring.

On Wednesday evening I attended the philosophy lecture, which was about the question of what constitutes Self. What the lecture and the two others have proven is that I do explain the cosmos to myself in religious terms — which is comforting because I haven't been too stalwart of a defender either of religion or of agnosticism when I thought I was agnostic — and that it feels comfortable and, I guess, elastic enough to embrace all sorts of explanations.

Thursday was very long, with over three hours of Greek and one hour and forty-five minutes of my History and Culture of the Near East seminar and one hour and forty-five minutes of Latin. At the end of the seminar I asked the professor for the password to the online course material, which was evidently a faux pas, since I should have asked for it far earlier. He said that I should ask a fellow student for the password. Anyway, I summed this up as petty obstructionism and, interesting though I find the class, if it is even more difficult to do what I have to do to prepare for a presentation, catch up on readings which I hadn't figured out until that day that we had to do, and then put together material for a ten-to-fifteen page take-home assignment due at the end of February which I found out about by overhearing a classmate mention it to someone else who also didn't know about it, it won't work out. So I scheduled an appointment during the professor's office hours and will put forward the possibility of my dropping the seminar. Partly I am doing this to make it easier on the professor (certainly not for me, because the bureaucracy will most likely be a headache), and partly I admit I feel irritated and inclined to flounce.

In my defense, I had several courses at UBC which had online course materials, and often they were the professor's PowerPoint slides which I was there to see in person at the lecture often enough, and when they held important information this was explicitly brought up in class; so there was some reason for me to think that the maledicted Blackboard access was not such a big deal. As for asking a fellow student for the password, I think I will; but the atmosphere in the seminar itself would seem to indicate that they would be annoyed at me for accosting them and asking them the question — as I mentioned to my parents during my interminable complaints over the past few days, we wouldn't even know each others' names if they weren't written on the handouts which every presenter must distribute to the class in conjunction with their presentations. (And some students have another class together.)

On Friday evening I was still scourging myself with this tempest-in-a-teapot, so I dove into a sea of research for my presentation subject, and kept at it so steadily that, as the French (as far as I remember) say 'I did not see the hour pass,' and then I came late to Latin. (On the other hand, such lateness is not unprecedented, and was in this case exacerbated by the quick consumption of an extraneous bowl of yoghurt before I left, so it can't be blame entirely on scholarly vigour.)

But in the end it is unreasonable for me to expect to be happy at university every single hour of every single academic day, and my grumpiness and infantile impulses to dissolve into a burst of tears and so on are a rather 'clean' form of unhappiness — nothing depressive or guilty (I feel in the end that I might have done something unwise but not wrong). And as far as the seminar goes, even if I drop out on Tuesday, it and the accompanying lecture have given me precisely the kind of detailed material I can use to set forth medieval Islamic society in a future story and to provide a context which could be useful if I set a story in Europe (or Byzantium or Iran) at the same epoch. Which is part of the reason why I want to go to university: to learn to do good research so that I can use it to learn history out of curiosity, find material for stories, better understand the origins of things, and to write thorough and accurate non-fiction. So in the end I think I have it pretty good.

The Return of the Slog

This evening the academic week began again with one hour and forty-twoish minutes of Latin. Normally, in school and even in university, I spend the entire pedagogical session after the Christmas holidays mentally howling a dirge — of ennui and of fear of being despised by my fellow students and of discomfiture at the impending essay and project deadlines — as the deprived trees outside weep rain and hail and snow in sympathy. But this year I feel surprisingly unanxious and unbothered in face of the resumption of classes.

On the other hand much of the Latin class today whooshed over my head. As long as the Future I form looks like amabo I know where I'm at, but the passive forms and infinitive moods and the sinister transformation of ferre into tollere or whatever are an ineffable nuisance. Fortunately the verb tollere is at least familiar from the Lord's Prayer, where I always thought at first glimpse that it meant tolling of a bell somehow until I realized that no bell pops up in the text, and that I have never heard of a ringing lamb or of resonating sins of the world. We finished translating a truly gripping account wherein the Roman sheeple are confident at last that they will be saved from Catiline's vile and predatory schemes for the seizure of the reins of state.

Then the professor dismissed the class after we had completed what she considered a very apposite exercise, wherein we had to identify the future verb forms within a list of words, and determine a saying of Cicero's which was spelled out by the first letters of the verbs. The answer: Nihil agere delectat, which roughly translates to "It is enjoyable to do nothing."

On the way home the sky gave way for a gauzy glimpse of the moon (in an awkward transitional phase) and a star, like a mole, beside it; and a presumptive helicopter. On the ground I much admired the dark shapes of the mistletoe in the trees, the puddles, and the Christmas decorations which had been set up around the houses since I last visited. Somehow it made the houses seem like stations along the face of an Advent calendar, with the house numbers as the dates. There was a bang or wheeeeee of firecracker or firework here and there, too.

On the news ticker in the U-Bahn it was proudly announced that Berlin has 30,000 more tourist beds than New York. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, one of the major cultural centres of the world!!!

New Year's in Truly Exhausting Detail

For New Year's Eve we had wieners, potato salad emulating my godmother's recipe (potatoes, pickles, bacon, green apple, parsley, and this year fried onion), divers pickles on the side, two bowls of punch (mineral water, canned mandarin slices and peach pieces, Sekt, white wine and tonic water), and a bottle of Sekt to open at the turn of midnight.

This year the fireworks and firecrackers seemed more subdued and the streets emptier than ordinary. Besides the usual taxis and the lone car and a bus which ran the gauntlet of the artillery in the sulfurous haze, the passage of firetrucks and police cars seemed more noticeable. So it was a strangely sad New Year's.

I stayed up late into the night and woke up again after eleven, in time for the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert on television.

***

This year the conductor is Mariss Jansons, and I had the impression that, coming hypothetically from Amsterdam and moving toward Vienna, he landed somewhere in mid-Germany with the programming and the style in which he rendered Strauss. There was besides less Strauss than in some years; even Tchaikovsky made an appearance. There were many medleys — later also of Carmen — and I was inclined to be rather frowny-faced about those, especially since though I may have been too sleepy to identify it correctly I thought I heard in one of them that string opus of Haydn's which became Our national anthem, reinforcing what I thought were Anschluss-y associations.

As for the concert hall, the moderator informed us that the old wall paintings have been uncovered and, whether unrelatedly or not, their dark brown and cream were theme tones this year. The lighting seemed less severe than in past years, not as glitzily gold. The flowers were red and white this year, white lilies and red roses and white Gerbera daisies, with variations into orangey and yellowy ranunculus. On the one hand I detest the pink and red combination of past years and so am glad to have been spared it, presume that more intricate colour combinations might not appear well on film and that perhaps the range of flowers which could stand up to the physical demands of the role is limited, rather like the starry effect which intensely coloured flowers can have against an indeterminate background of almost black evergreens, and besides have never had anything nice to say about the flower arrangements at these concerts. On the other hand I dislike asparagus fern extremely, there was an anthurium which fortunately appeared only briefly and though it had a white base and a blush-red stamen looked surprisingly more tasteful than the commoner tints, and the red and white had a mediocre wedding banquet effect.

But the true horror of this year's concert was in subverting it into an unsubtle and unoriginal, romance-themed commercial for the Vienna tourist board.

***

I missed the opening of the concert, since during that interval I was still thinking of nobly forgoing the usual course of watching the gimmickry, taking notes, sharpening a quill into a deadly point and dipping it in bile, and then rendering the spectacle in print for the cruel amusement of others — and instead concentrating on listening to the music. That noble resolve did not last long.

During the first half of the concert, we were introduced to the Vienna Boys' Choir, who were participating for I think the announcer said the fifth time and who seemed to have to scream-sing to be heard in the hall. Besides Austria's president Heinz Fischer and Horst Seehofer (a right-wing German politician, who looks in my lefty opinion like a smug overgrown college football player), one was relieved to glimpse the actress Julie Andrews in fine Queen-of-Genovia fettle in a balcony-box in the audience.

***

I WAS especially grateful, however, for my two or three matutinal glasses of punch when we were subjected to The Intermission. It began subtly enough with a cheesy scene of musicians from the Philharmonic fake-playing a series of music from different classical composers in the bright sun in front of (or on top of, etc., in all of the permutations of the pedagogical French ditty "Sur, sous, dans") a series of tourist lodestones. Then there was a little girl who was awkwardly being 'pulled up' into the air by a red balloon above them (N.B.: profound metaphor expressing something something inspiriting and elevating, indeed ebullient, effect of music and culture and Viennesedom upon the psyche), never truly soaring due to obligatory safety harness in which the child actress was presumably anticking on a soundstage in front of a green screen, so that the range of motion stayed well within children's pop-up book pull-tab capacities.

But the heroine of the monstrosity was an enthusiastic young Tourist Everywoman with bounding antigravitational hair, glaringly pink top and a similarly skintight white skirt which curved well in at the bottom-cheeks. Since I am firstly oblivious to clothes in ordinary contexts, secondly oblivious to people's physiques, and thirdly straight, the fact that I noticed the skirt says a good deal about this style of sartorial architecture. After being ferried around a weirdly overlit and empty Vienna on the open-air top of a bus alongside possibly Japanese tourists wearing schoolgirl uniforms and making cute gestures with their fingers for the camera (a leap of imagination which does the film production proud), and taking to the air as awkwardly as the Little Girl, she arrives at her hotel at last.

Having checked into a very chic hotel lobby, despite the impediment of nil luggage and ninguno identification, she throws herself upon the mercy of the forthcoming receptionist and on some smartphone or whatever (the director is really "with it"!) displays a photo of a smiling young man, evidently her lost belovèd. The receptionist has sadly not seen this well-groomed individual. So she goes up to her very large and well-furnished and luxurious room, full of self-pity and still devoid of luggage; and to the tune of Débussy's "Claire de lune" (argh) assumes actorly howly-face No. 22 and drags herself around the floor a little. The director industriously demonstrates his incredible contempt for the television viewer by cutting to a shot of the full moon, thereby hitting us over the head with the musical reference with the finesse of a twenty-tonne asteroid crashing into the Mare Orientale. At some point there is also a heart-shaped locket with photos of the heroine's lost belovèd.

The thing is that I have seen one too many teeny romance films involving travel, and can confirm that the Brief (Tourist) Encounter and the Search in a City of Hundreds of Thousands or Millions Plus Tourists For One Person are an incredible cliché. The heroine's bobbing about with an umbrella might be a subtle reference to Mary Poppins, but ends up looking similarly like intellectual property theft, and a later scene in which lots of amateur aeronauts speckle the canopy over a strangely overlit touristy part of Vienna is cribbed from René Magritte. There is also some children's film about a red balloon or something which I never watched, and that song about 99 Luftballons, and an illustration in Winnie the Pooh — in short, there are too many people who have done this balloon or umbrella aloft thing, more sympathetically.

One redeeming aspect of The Monstrosity was a brief (though in its insights not particularly novel) excursion to the Middle East in terms of the music, and to the immigrant population of Vienna in terms of showing street markets, jars of olives, and such. Another redeeming aspect of the Monstrosity was the way the music was played, though I wondered why the musicians who had been hooked into the affair didn't run away screaming from the production; and I thought that it would have been more interesting to hear good folk music performers from the Middle East play the Middle Eastern music, since though the lilt and other characteristic effects were faithfully rendered, it sounded dampened. Besides I was wondering whether this was genuine in its motivations or an attempt to seem more tourist-friendly to the UAE, Qatar, etc.

***

AFTER the intermission came the dancing interludes. It seemed freer and more fluent than ordinary, since I don't like the stiff costumes, doll-like gestures, and the makeup-up-the-wazoo of most years, and the dichotomy of male and female dancers and pairs was not so severe; but the choreography was at times frankly pretty crummy. The costumes the first time around were a caramel colour, or at least the colour of caramel wrappers, and together with the tight pants of the men Papa remarked that they looked quite Bollywood. I thought, not nearly enough. For some reason the main pair of dancers was sniffing each other and I wondered aloud whether the choreographer by any chance bore the surname of St. Bernard (or Basset, or Schnauzer, etc.).

For the Blue Danube waltz (since it's the traditional encore, I anticipate, but still) the costumes were in shades of blue from turquoise through to purple. Ge. astutely observed that it must be in hommage to the waters of the Danube, I thought that the waters are probably not blue but that the title of the waltz indicates that they once were, and Papa and Mama were both underwhelmed and in favour of the monochromatic designs and the less shiny fabrics for instance of Valentino for 2010. What bothered me more was that it was framed as the fantasy of a Young Tourist Couple.

IN "Mac Flecknoe," Dryden's nod to his nemesis and so full of broad insults that I sort of wish that had I known it existed as a child, he writes:

All human things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey:

This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young

Was call'd to empire, and had govern'd long:

In prose and verse, was own'd, without dispute

Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute.

This aged prince now flourishing in peace,

And blest with issue of a large increase,

Worn out with business, did at length debate

To settle the succession of the State:

And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit

To reign, and wage immortal war with wit;

Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he

Should only rule, who most resembles me:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years.

Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he

Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,

Strike through and make a lucid interval

[From Representative Poetry Online, U of Toronto]

If the tourist film at the intermission is Shadwell, the third dance interlude is surely Flecknoe. Inspired by a painting of Gustav Klimt (whose 150th birthday is this year), a pair of ballet dancers begins embraced in a tableau, shrouded in a gilt sleeping bag like a Snuggie. It then parts to dance in a utilitarian white shirt and tan leggings for the gentleman, and the offspring of a brownish medical bandage and of a figure skating costume with a swirl of glitter for the lady. There were several rock-dumb moves in this pas de deux or whatever it is termed — one where the male dancer had to rest on the floor on all fours like a three-toed sloth, one where the dancer would turn the partner's head by grasping their skulls and dishevelling their hair, and others which I have thankfully forgotten. By the end the pair was shrouded in their blankie again for the final tableau; and in the most horrendously cheesy effect ever, the film production faded in a reddish frame to the top and right so that the resemblance to Klimt's red-framed painting was as plain as the nose on one's face. In any case I find the inspiration mildly dubious, since Klimt tip-toes rather close to kitsch.

***

For the Delirium waltz I paid more attention to the music and quite liked it — the Blue Danube Waltz was also a relief to hear since it was unselfconsciously gentle. The piece with the train effects was I thought far too literal. I rather liked it in a later piece when Jansons contributed to the percussion section by having two metal dealies propped up on either side of his podium, which he hit vigorously in tune to the music, looking like he was living out every essentially infantile dictator's dream.

As for the Radetzky March, which is my bugbear, I survived it — in spite of my loving family's decision to join in the clapping just to see me pull my blanket tighter over my head and hear me groan like one of the damned.

At the end of the caboodle, a little sentence at the top of the screen informed us that this programme had contained product placement. . . . No. Kidding.

***

The foregoing text may have contained inaccuracies. Please to forgive.

The Oak Tree, The Holly, and Company

THOUGH given the last post, one might well expect to hear of one all too well-fed blogger, lying torpid, immobile and generally stretched out (like the boa constrictor in Swiss Family Robinson) in some less frequented corner of our apartment, I have in fact been reasonably much and well employed.

YESTERDAY afternoon uncle N. took the train back to his home, and the rest of the day was exceedingly quiet. I slept into the evening and feasted on turkey and chicken carcass, along with the remaining cranberry sauce; there is plenty of other food, too, so entering the kitchen is still like walking into an idyllic pays de Cocagne (or Schlaraffenland).

AMONG other things, I looked through the repository of writing on my laptop and found rather a lot of nice things, not only poems but also bits of screenplays and the like.

For one thing I wanted to concoct a musical for home performances based on Lord of the Rings; so I wrote a few rhymes to set to preexisting tunes. The fruits of the endeavour are below, and I hope it is all right that I am posting so much of it.

***

I'll sing a lay of the Shire-land
'Midst the calm rolling hillsides of Middle-Earth
Where all the view that one could command
Spoke of peace and of plenty — no sorrow; much mirth.

For hobbits are a tranquil folk,
Smallish and roundish and fond of a joke,
And near their green subterranean abodes
Not warfare nor danger have made much inroads.

*

Come, ye comrades, pluck your bow-strings,
Whet the blade of your dwarvish axe
Sing of hope until the wood rings,
For of hope the world now lacks.

Ride against the Eye of Mordor,
Ride against the fiendish orcs,
Ride against the goblins with ardour,
Ride 'gainst Sauron's evil works.

Come, ye comrades, swing your sword-blades
Big and small -- little hobbits, too,
So to fight the menace of the Ring-Lords
So to win our peace anew.

*

and:

Ring gently, o Elf-harp;
I bid thee to sing
Of elf-lore so old
Of our great elven-king,
When with his tall warriors
He went through the land
To counter the goblins
With his mighty band.
The sunshine was bright
Though the Mirkwood was deep
And sentries at nighttime
Made safe their sweet sleep;[*]
And one foggy morning
They made taut their bows
And with them they vanquished
Their fell mountain foes.

[A fairly direct quotation from "Away in a Manger," I think.]

***

PROBABLY after that effort had waned, I started this grumpy parody undertaking, with a reckless disregard for due rhyme and rhythm. Whether the fragments are intelligible to anyone who has not seen the film or read the books may well be doubted:

LORD OF THE RINGS
(Set to tunes of well-known Christmas carols)

ACT ONE

Scene One
Bilbo’s birthday party

Divers Hobbits: [To the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”]
"We wish you a happy birthday,
we wish you a happy birthday,
we wish you a happy birthday
and a happy eleventy-twelfth year.

"Good brewings we bring;
We love our drinking.
Let's toast to your birthday
and a happy eleventy-twelfth year!"

Speech, speech!

Bilbo: Thank you, thank you, my friends. This has been a memorable feast, and (he starts fumbling in his vest pocket) memorability has always been one of my favourite virtues, and I do enjoy your company . . . (Drat it, where is it?) . . . I have never been happier to be a hobbit living in this fine land of the Shire. Home, sweet home, and all that. . . . So, farewell, and . . . (He slips the ring on his finger and disappears. This can be represented by cloaking him in a black cloth and then making him exit the stage.)

Everyone in an uproar.

Frodo: Noooooo! (Sheds girly tears. Then finally has an idea, dignifiedly waves off the condolences of his neighbours, and prepares to leave the scene. Before he vanishes offstage, he pauses to say, sotto voce) If I know Bilbo well, this may just be another adventure of his. I shall head home and see if he has left a note behind.

Scene Two

In the hobbit-hole. Bilbo is stuffing his belongings into a bindle. Frodo enters, sees him, then fixes a look of reproach on him.

Frodo: [To the tune of "What Child is This?"]
Alas, dear Bilbo, you do me wrong
By thus discourteously vanishing.
You made me cry; I don't know why;
I had rather not do that again.

Bilbo: Shush, Frodo; it's no big deal
I'm bored and tired; I need a trip
Out into the world beyond
The Shire, which makes me sick.

*

Gandalf: (knocks on door, then opens it and strides in with bent head because of the low ceiling.) [To the tune of "Joy to the World"]
Joy to the world!
So you're not dead
As everyone has said!
I never thought you'd really croaked
But still I am a bit provoked
That you made me quite sad
Till I knew that we'd been had;
What is it that you have really been about?

Why, what's this ring?

Bilbo: Oh, that old thing.

Christmas Eve and Morn in Truly Exhausting Detail

For Christmas Eve we consumed turkey and chicken for dinner. The turkey was a seven-pounder, and something of a find since once we moved to Berlin we've encountered the beast far more often in piecemeal form. As far as its size goes, I did stare at it a little bemusedly, since the last time we had an entire turkey it must have been over 20 pounds as usual; and once we had a real leviathan. But even without the chicken there would already have been a heaping serving of meat for all, and in the inner cavity Papa crammed plenty of his delicious salty bread stuffing. On the side we ate mashed potatoes, the turkey and chicken jus, cranberry sauce, green peas, and Turkish flatbread, and we drank white wine.

During the following night I had a complex dream [Warning: almost certain to be terrifically boring; 'proper' blog post resumes beneath asterisk.] where T. and I roamed for interesting rocks on a low mountain on the Alps, where no trees but grass grew, and I turned over a coaly black boulder of sparkling-grained metamorphic rock to find mugs and other dishes in blue and white china. I thought it was an interesting archaeological find until I saw that one mug had the year "1937" written on it in the watery blue ink, and until the family which owned the land came wandering up for a picnic and reminded me that the terrain and by extension any objects in it were theirs. By that point the funicular which had brought T. and me up the slope had left for the valley again, and as the family informed me, it was the last of the evening. The stars came out and I even saw a meteor, but the rest of the dream took place in daylight; there was a modest beige palace of one or two levels which had been refurbished into a tourist centre and in whose colonnaded courtyard there was a garden, and I briefly peered inside it.

As we walked down to the family's home there was a deep turquoise lagoon among the cliffs which were the colour of dark clay, and one of the children lost his footing and fell off the clifftop into the water. Some of us dove in after him; I was closest but couldn't find him even in the crystal-clear water, since he had settled into the gravel at the bottom. Instead there were other men who had fallen into the lagoon and whose faces poked out from the gravel, as intact and immobile as those of the terra cotta soldiers in the Chinese emperor's grave; when we hauled them out of the gravel they became awake again. So I was reassured that the child was all right and that he would resurface in time. But then I was strangely pulled down into a clay element, to reemerge in a semimedieval kitchen, very dark and vaguely brown-walled, in the middle of a rectangular vat full of sluggishly boiling water, with a somewhat hasty cook flitting between her pots and stirring the water I was in with a big wooden spoon; and I felt doomed and damned.

I woke up in a much-perturbed and weighty frame of mind; and, to tie this all back into Christmas Eve dinner, came to the sleepy conclusion that if I wanted more lightsome dreams it would be better if I did not eat dinner so quickly and if, moreover, I had not eaten that additional slice of flatbread this particular time.

*

Besides we sang Christmas carols and in my case tried to sing bits of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, which I have YouTube'd frequently of late, before which I had nearly gone hoarse singing all twelve of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." Then J. and Ge. and I staged a dramatic reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Around 2004 I rearranged the short story into a three-act play; we kept rehearsing it without much success, and after a while I refused even to try. It became rather a joke as Ge. would needle me at random moments by hailing me with Watson's first line of dialogue, and the scripts buried themselves amongst my other papers. But yesterday I fished them out again and it went reasonably well. Even my "received" British pronunciation was slightly better. Mama came by toward the conclusion of the proceedings, around the time when J. was overwhelmed with giggles at a rather untimely juncture shortly before his character pops a cap at Watson, and critiqued us here and there. Earlier Uncle N. and I hung up ornaments on our Christmas tree; this year we went with straw stars and angels and other figures, brightly painted wooden figurines, gilt-painted stars, three or so metallic balls, a bell, etc., and ranged small animals around the Christmas card which Aunt L. sent us from England.

*

This morning, I woke up after 8 a.m. and

Regal Circumnatal Festivities

On Wednesdays the blog Jezebel provides synopses of the week's events as reported by tabloids; this time I found the portrait of the British Royal Family's Christmas traditions full of comedic merit.

So it inspired the following work of art:


which is much easier to perceive when you click on it to enlarge it.

*

Other than that I baked brownies with salted caramel according to the "Pioneer Woman" recipe.

I was going to take all or half of the brownies to share with my Greek class, which has that kind of atmosphere. (A classmate even generously gave us chocolate Santa figurines on St. Nicholas's Day.) But since I left them in the oven for too long they burned black around the edges and became granulated in the middle, and since they have cooled they have become hard as adamant. (Surprisingly they are still delicious, and can be pried apart by a fork.)

The caramel turned out well by a miracle, since it charred and recrystallized at one edge of the pot. I was dubious about putting in gelatine (I took one package of gelatine and the full quantity of water, which soaked up the gelatine powder entirely but made the caramel generally more fluid than necessary); but I surmise that it is used to prevent the caramel from becoming a thick hard crust or from squelching down into the chocolate cake.

I also washed dishes for the first time in weeks or months; but after one or two loads my enthusiasm tapered off, to no one's surprise. What I am looking forward to in terms of domestic activities is concocting an enormous bowl of eggnog. I have consulted different recipes depending on the year, and this year intend to prepare it according to Melissa Clark's recipe from the New York Times. (I would seek out and post a link to the webpage, but I selfishly don't want to lose more of my 20 free Times internet articles per month.)

*

TOMORROW I have 3 hours (τρις ωρες ?) of Greek, 1 hour and 45 minutes of Islamic history seminar, and 1 hour 45 minutes of Latin (all obligatory). While I have taken to napping in classes (for fun and profit) if I have slept too little and have found that a Napoleonic five-minute catnap can be helpful indeed, it is comparatively awkward in the seminar because it takes place in a small room with people sitting right next to me. Besides Latin is in the evening, by which point even my third wind should have exhausted itself. So I should get some sleep.

*

Today I had a Greek speech laboratory class, which went well. Much to my surprise each time I listen to dialogues from the past Wednesdays I understand a much greater proportion of them. The Vatnajökull — as I will henceforth denominate each laboratory computer since they operate as slowly as glaciers run — which fell to my lot started up fairly quickly. Last week or the week before one of the computers firstly took forever to start up and then secondly refused to transmit sound; I timed the process, and it honestly took half an hour until I had tried and abandoned the first computer and had managed to get the sound file up and running on an alternative computer. The professor has also had a great deal to say, though quite politely, about this masterpiece of technological efficacy. To be honest I rather like navigating the arbitrary waters of computer idiosyncracies, however, and growing up with Microsoft operating systems is a lesson in patience, the helpfulness of workarounds and modest little tricks, and the quiet whimsy of fate.

***

When I went home, I noticed that two orange-vested workers were fixing a slide of planks over the gravel and up the bottom of the embankment where the Fabeckstraße crosses the U-Bahn rails. Further along to the Podbielskiallee station, bright garbage bags were lying huddled at the concrete ledge beside the tracks, and I Holmes-ishly observed that they must be full of the leaves that were raked from the Prussianesquely overgroomed, long beige grasses on the nearby embankments.

At some point in the transit to or from the university, two contractors for the BVG (they tend to wear navy-blue jackets with 'Im Auftrag der BVG' written on the back and a white stripe or two running above the waistband, and hunt in pairs or gather in groups of five or so, and hold little devices like the ones for credit or debit card payments in stores or for signing for a postal delivery) entered the train and asked for our tickets. Sometimes they enter the train, sometimes they roam the platform and ask people to show their tickets, once one of them brigandishly asked us for the tickets as soon as we stepped out the train door and I walked past and thought (and must have looked like I thought) 'You must be joking.' Sometimes I think there are still plainclothes people who hop with somewhat irritating jubilant airs into the train and whip out their identification, then ask to see tickets. Anyway, this time I fetched out my ticket very, very slowly, hopefully in an inconspicuous way but I really wanted to buy time for anyone who didn't have a ticket; and the person wanted to see my photo ID so I took even more slooowwwly.

While my hypothetical moral inhibitions about working for call centers have almost dissipated, ratting people out as a "loss prevention expert" in a shoe store or as a ticket controller in a train or whatever is still infra a lot in my view. Still, I haven't found that any of the security contractors were personally objectionable; though to be honest I would have expected one or two to seem power-hungry or aggressive or condescending.

What I don't understand is whether they are there in case security concerns arise — like beatings or sabotage —; or to ensure that contrary to the words of the Bible the poor, i.e. the homeless, are not always with us; or to drive in cash for the BVG (a Christmas gift to self, as it were); or to provide jobs for individuals who have trained as security contractors; or for other reasons. Anyway, I have already expatiated upon my conjectures and observations to the family, so much of this will seem old news to them.

***

Now: sleep!

Vivat My Brother; and Latin

It's my brother's birthday today, and in honour of it we feasted: chocolate, marzipan and cake.

From 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. I was at the Rostlaube for my Latin class, wherein we were taught the perfect participle passive (e.g. arbor caesa est) and the 4th declension (e.g. manus, exercitus, senatus). We tamely cleave unto the textbook, so we read through and translated a reading from it as customary. This time it was a paragraph on Rome after Tarquinius Superbus — the father of the perpetrator of the Rape of Lucrece, I think, but it wasn't mentioned — was jettisoned and his friend, Lars Porsena, king of the city of Clusium, lay siege to the city. There were new words, like iussu (the ablative of iussus, and it translates I think as "by order of" e.g. the senate) and the aforementioned exercitus (army).

One of the sentences in the reading didn't appear to make sense, since it looked like a singular subject with a plural verb. So at home I asked J. (who has been toiling through school Latin for decades centuries years) how he would translate "field camp" into Latin. He said "castra," then took out his Stowasser German-Latin dictionary. It turns out that castrum, -ī means "fortification," and, as I just found out through a certain online encyclopaedia's dictionary, castra is pluralis tantum and means "camp."

Anyway, I arrived home rather grumpily, having waited too long for my uncertain temper to catch an U-Bahn train. Since then I have written a Lighthouse blog post, chatted with the family in the corner room perched atop the coal-fired stove, eaten and had tea and coke, and begun a little light reading.

In the U-Bahn, a busker sang something in Dylan mumble-English to the accompaniment of the guitar, and I was rather amusedly transported back to the 70s. I looked out for the moon on the way to and from my class, but none was to be seen, though the brightest star shone intently from its customary quadrant and I finally noticed the beautiful effect of the windows of the houses around the Rostlaube when it is too dark to see their façades. The interior illumination lends them a strange transparency — as in, you can't only see vaguely into the rooms, but the houses on the whole seem like modest two-dimensional shapes and as if there were a lot of room for trees and lawns and flowers behind them — and a lantern-like appearance. The effect even worked back at home, in the half-lit façades on our otherwise busy and loudly lit street.

Besides I stared into the cafeteria again, since the large area in the back where nobody sits except for the hundreds of chairs and tables and a couple palmetto plants inevitably creeps me out, and I keep expecting to see a corpse lying there, kind of in plain unseen sight, like in an early 20th-century factory or some other large building after hours in an Agatha Christie film. When I passed it at shortly after 6:10 there were still two or three people seated at the near corner; often there are more.

I've decided to skip the Foundations of Ancient History lectures, since I've lost the hope of gaining credit for them anyway, and they are sometimes worthwhile and sometimes not; and I didn't feel like learning about the philosophy of German idealism this week; so until Latin I had a free day to do nothing in particular.

A Discourse Upon The Ontology of Being

TODAY I dropped in on a lecture from a course entitled "Introduction to the Philosophy of German Idealism." We had not yet embarked on the full spectrum of Hegel, etc., but were sitting comfortably in Aristotle and then transitioning to Kant.

Presumably the subject of the lecture was ontology — the problem with philosophy as with many other disciplines, I find, is that one must be extremely careful how to use one's terms once one is no longer permitted the freedom of layman's terminology, just like I felt gingerly about the French language after reading a compendium of naughty idiom.

At any rate, the lecture was about how one describes what exists, i.e. is. There seems to be a fine distinction in that Aristotle does not bother to mention that we may not absolutely know or describe what truly exists, whereas Kant stresses that we know or describe only what we perceive.

There was a certain Socratean element, or rather an element of what I seem to remember my Uncle Pu introduced to my siblings and me when we were little: we would make a statement and he would ask us, "Why?" and then when we had answered ask us "Why?" again, etc. So in the lecture, rhetorically put questions like "What is whatness?" followed each other in quick succession, and I would be vaguely thinking, "This question is either very dumb or very clever, and I'm not always quite sure which."

Basically, however, we were looking at neat little lists of criteria by which one may define a thing, (relatio, modality, quantity, quality; universally or particularly; negatively or positively; etc.), which Aristotle and Kant drew up similarly yet differently; the professor was explaining to us what Aristotle and Kant meant by those terms.

My brain went on holiday part of the way through, and in its leisurely way ambled back again to the substance of the lecture, so it was all quite relaxed; and I'm not attending the lecture for credit or all that regularly. I have the creeping feeling that I will, however, need the knowledge from it.

Then I took the U-Bahn back to the bookshop and spent a quiet couple of hours wasting time on the internet. My first class was Foundations of Ancient History again, and this time the concentration in the spotlight was the Studies of the Ancient Orient, which in a weird roundabout way (which I don't feel like explaining) is like examining the wreck of the Tower of Babylon (Babel transposed to Mesopotamia) in linguistic terms.

Besides I've had two emails, confirming that my archaeology work course is from 10:15 a.m. - 3 p.m. on Fridays, and that I can join the History and Culture of the Near East seminar of my choice, namely on Thursday. So Monday from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. is free for the bookshop, lectures I might want to attend unofficially, or any desired variety of loitering. And I needn't take off for the work course at quarter after seven as previously feared! (c:

Occam's Razor and the Throttled Lion of Nineveh

This morning I slept in and snuck into my Foundations of Ancient History lecture over half an hour late.

It was a representative of Near Eastern Archaeology who was lecturing this time, and he quickly went over the archaeologists responsible for digging at Susa (where the Code of Hammurabi was found as part of 2nd-century-B.C.(?) loot) and at Çatal Hüyük. When I came in, he also mentioned the relief of the lion-hunt at Nineveh, presumably the one which T. and I quickly but thoroughly enjoyed looking at in the British Museum some five years ago. Heinrich Schliemann was mentioned and, surprisingly enough, there was no verbal hopping with rage. Indeed he suggested that the concept of stratigraphy, and of the information which may be gleaned from observing the contents of the layers relative to each other, was then not yet developed. On the other hand he stated that any archaeological dig in fact involves the destruction of that which it studies.

Another point on which I am inclined to be more critical than he is with regard to reconstructing ruins. For example, though it may be presumptive to find fault, the fakeness of the Gate of Ishtar in the Pergamon Museum gets on my nerves; and I found Saddam Hussein's government's reconstructions of ancient sites in Iraq butt-ugly because they were turned into huge blocks of characterless, unworn, glaringly indistinguished mudbrick. A proper ruin has gravitas — just like a proper painting, which if it was indeed painted 300 or 400 years ago should have a patina to make one wonder if our common ancestor was in fact a dark-dwelling mole. I (let's say partly; it was an unfinished fragment) wrote an essay on Sir Arthur Evans for my Classical Archaeology course at UBC, and I vaguely recall that he had reconstructions built at Knossos, to help along the publicity and funding, much like what is theoretically organized at Pompeii except that a wall recently collapsed due to improper maintenance, etc. I was willing to overlook it there, going from the premise that Evans is one of the protagonists of archaeology and thus worthy of greater critical latitude, but still.

Aside from that the professor had a great deal to say about matters political, which upon the hearing I took with a large grain of salt, but whose essential impulse was not, I think, unadmirable.

In this context, and also out of admiration for a goodly quantity of hard work, he mentioned an exhibition which came to the Pergamon Museum until late August. Max von Oppenheim had founded a Vorderasiatisches Museum and it was filled with statues from a monumental dig at Tell Halaf. A firebomb struck during World War II; the firefighters came, and it seems that the impact of cold water on hot basalt stone is explosive in its effects. So in 2001 a team began to painstakingly set together the 27,000 fragments.

"Das 27'000-Teile-Puzzle" (Basler Zeitung, orig. Tages-Anzeiger, February 3, 2011)

***

In Greek we were at the speech lab, where the computers cooperated, and so we listened to a dialogue being read out. Some words were easy to understand and I took a great deal of pains to figure out the meanings of the words as typed out in our textbook. But at times the sounds of the words and syllables shifted like will-o'-the-wisps, so that one time I would understand them perfectly and another time encounter gibberish. Before that I extracted my trusty dictionary and looked up the definite and indefinite articles as well as the conjugations of εχω and ειμαι. Not much has changed over the centuries, compared to what one would expect; on the other hand, I've difficulty recalling the Ancient Greek plural articles, which were generally given to my Ancient Greek class.

***

There is a vote on the extension of our student transit ticket arrangement being held by the student body. The prices are to be raised in the following years, but it sounded like they weren't negotiable, so I took to the ballot-box and voted in favour.

***

Besides I walked to the Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology to discover the sheet which is to advertise the times and dates of a work course; I didn't see one, so will email the professor again. On the way back I passed the Kenyan embassy and, much to my amusement, the smaller home to the Lesotho mission tucked beside it.

***

Then I went to a history seminar where we traipsed over a library and had to write a statement about why archaeology interests us. It was embarrassing particularly because I'm not sure if my interest in it isn't kind of lame and fanciful (though nice), like saying "When I grow up I want to be an astronaut." Certainly not something which one wants to expand on to an adult expert. Besides the class was overstuffed in the little villa. I felt guilty because I was not supposed to be there, according to the formal rules, at which a great deal of winking is done by students and docents alike. I guess I'll hope for the best.

***

Lastly I decided to stick around for an Introduction to Theoretical Philosophy. I was peeved when a surprisingly vast horde of us (young and old, students and guest auditors) was locked out of the room until after the hour. Given the institution of the "academic quarter," classes begin and end cum tempore, a quarter hour off from the stated time, so there were some ten minutes left until class began. But I had been lolling around on my feet for a long time and was eager for a seat inside the hall.

First of all we were told through a passage from Kant that philosophy is not the reading of the ideas of another, but the practice and personal application of reason on our own — the philosophy past is the rubble upon which we construct our own ideas. Then there was a long and repetitious excursion through Philosophy's FAQs, and the professor underlined that philosophers barely ever agree on anything, even as to who among them constitutes a proper philosopher. Then he said, with quotations from Karl Jaspers and a nod to Schopenhauer, that man becomes aware of himself as he reflects on the world around him, and that the portion of the world upon which he does not reflect does not exist for him. And so on and so forth.

I was hungry and grumpy; ensconced in a kind of superior eyrie at the summit of the lecture hall; and very much inclined to reflect on the world through an oneiristic (if the word exists) lens — which is to say have a nap; but I want to give the lecturer and lectures more of a chance. The philosophers intended to appear in this course: e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates(?), St. Thomas of Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, and Derrida. The course should generally be good for showing off — 'empirical' and 'Occam's razor' and 'straw man argument' are a start in terms of preexisting knowledge, and 'normative' would be too if I remembered what precisely it means or felt like consulting a dictionary; but there is no reason to settle!

*

P.S.: The wording "throttled lion" is cribbed from my sister.

The Year of the Elephant and Other Stories

This afternoon, before coming to the bookshop, I had my first Islamic Studies lecture, i.e. the prerequisite course to higher-level studies of the Culture and History of the Near East minor.

I had originally thought to skip it entirely this year because I like my Greek classes and there happens to be one at the same time, besides which the seminar would require a little schedule-cramming. But I sent an email to the Islamic Studies department and, though the response was helpful and its terms liberal, it did transpire that it would be best for me to take it.

So far I have not gone to a seminar. If the rooms in the large building wherein they are held are not too crowded, I am thinking of going to more than one. (I visited the building after class today so that I could figure out how to get there; or, in the worst case, how not to get there.)

***

THE PROFESSOR began with a more cerebral approach than customary. For instance he acutely and very quickly argued-without-arguing which historical approach is best — a social focus, political focus, or what-have-you; story, empiricism, or theory — and announced that (as the lecture title implies) he would focus on Islamic society at various historical points. A corollary of which aim is that he does not intend to take a strictly schematic, chronological or geological approach, rattling off what happened where in a list. — Since I haven't thought much about it, the only thing that came to mind by way of social history is George Macaulay Trevelyan's English Social History from Opapa's bookshelf. I looked into it and seem to remember finding far too vague to be of utility.

Nevertheless he began at the beginning and tried to portray for our benefit something of the Arabian peninsula before the birth of Muhammad and the spread of his prophecies. It was a nexus of the Byzantine, West Roman, and Iranian empires (re. 'Iran': Persia, he said, is in fact a smaller region) or more specifically of the traders who shuttled silk, gold, slaves, myrrh, balsam, etc. between them, over a land route to Syria and along the Red Sea to or from the Mediterranean and through the Arabian Sea, or over the Silk Road, to India.

There were orthodox Christian sectors who were in opposition to the state religion of Constantinople: the Nestorians and the Monophysites. The Nestorians are also denominated Duophysites because they believed that the spirit of God is separate from Christ, and the Monophysites comprised the Copts and others who believe that Christ is God and man in unity. In Iran there were Zoroastrianists, who were monotheistic on the one hand but believed in the dual presence of good and evil on the other. There were tensions between which trading points supported which state and consequently its religion.

Contrary to common belief, Islam is not a "faith of the desert," since only a relatively small part of the Arabian peninsula consists of dunes in which no plant may grow; and at the time of its inception the trade routes meant that there were thriving little towns and kingdoms like Sabaa (the Queen of Sheba — the professor emphasized — may not have existed, but her kingdom certainly did) all over.

Mecca, with its Kaʿba — whose provenance is rather vague, though it is now considered Abraham's toil, but significance great — was one of the trading points, and one of the places where poets met and talked and developed in a subtle long-winding way what we consider the classical Arabic language, ʿarabiyya.

It was ruled within the great Quraysh tribe. In the old sense of proper government, the chief of a tribe was, as the professor put it, primus inter pares. Every man who was a tribesman, not a slave or an outsider (for instance the Roma, or gypsies), was considered to have equal rights. The chief was the mediator and where necessary the representative of the tribe in negotiations and relations with other tribes; every tribesman had a right to protection. Slaves, who were widespread there as they were in Europe, had no right to protection.

One of the poorer men who was not happy under the heel of the fellow Qurayshes, despite this nominal equality and freedom, was Muhammad, who lived on the outer margins of Mecca. He was born around 570 AD (in this case I will say CE), which is a little subject to controversy because by others his birth is attributed to the Year of the Elephant — apparently the year in which what would become Yemen was conquered by Ethiopian troops — but the dates don't fit. He married the widow of a comfortably-off tradesman and ended up travelling up to Syria and becoming acquainted with the religious traditions of his neighbours. Then he was privy to enlightenment by God through his intermediary, the angel Gabriel; after running afoul of the authorities he retired to Medina. There he wished to form an umma, or community, with a Jewish clan in the area, which ended in blood and presumably tears. He decided that it was his aim to return to Mecca — he did, and (by this point in the lecture the end of class was impending — so 'tell-tale compression' of events, etc.) by the time he died in 632 CE his religion was officially observed throughout the Arabian Peninsula. It is this kind of state religion which a sector of Islam insists on endeavouring to reinstate.

That was basically the end of the lecture. I've left a great deal out and I'm happy that there is so much more, because I like having a whole pile of facts and thoughts to sort through at leisure. I think I've remembered everything reasonably well, too, but this blog post isn't fact-checked, so reader beware and all that.

He is incidentally the only one of my professors who seems to read out a lecture from detailed notes or even a text — so far it seems a pithier and more content-rich and a little less condescending method than PowerPoint presentations and other methods which involve ex tempore commentary. I also liked that he clearly had lots of opinions and a lively interest in politics and controversies — during the beginning of the Iraq War he would probably have been one of those of us who talked about it with everyone he knew, read as many magazine articles about it as he could lay his hands on, sent letters to the editor, etc. — but that he didn't feel impelled to inflict them on us. Sometimes I come across people and have the urge to haul them home to meet the family, and as far as I can tell, he is one of them.

***

My other classes were Greek (we're reviewing the sounds/phonemes, thank goodness, because I don't know all of them that well, and am sort of giving up on knowing when to use which pronunciation of ντ, for instance; today when I was gone we in the broad sense of the term we also learned "have" and "be," and the definite and indefinite articles, and maybe something I've forgotten) and Foundations of Ancient History. That class began with 19th-century Danish archaeologists who came up for instance with the three-period system (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age) and ended with the, er, Schicklgrubrian reinterpretations and politicization of German and Scandinavian prehistory research. At the very end the lecture slid into the inevitable post-war repentance, discarding of the ideas formed in the shadow of the short mustache, and the rise of new technology, for instance radiocarbon dating.

Greek, in Exhausting Detail

Please beware of and forgive all and any factual errors in the following:

This evening I have Latin again, but in the meantime I have returned from the morning's Greek lessons and am sitting comfortably in the bookshop. In the lessons we reviewed the phonetics of the past two days, which is highly useful, and read aloud example words for consonant pairs like κλ and γδ, which looks complicated but in fact isn't.

This time our professor took the time to tell us the meanings of words, which with πνευμα (air, breath, spirit) and ενεργειεα was simple enough; there were quite interesting ones in between. Ανθοσ (flower) and αμυγδαλια (almond tree) were familiar but I hadn't known the Greek stem-words.

Though I have left out the stress accents (in Greek, the accent is called the οξεια) on these Greek words until I figure out the html encoding, there should be an acute on each one. Since 1982, Greek has adopted the "monotοnikó" (μονοτονικο) system whereby every accent is stricken from the written language except for the οξεια. In the absence of the rough and smooth breathing (the little curling apostrophe which sits on the first vowel of a word and separates the "ho"s from the "o"s), and circumflexes and grave accents indicating changes in the pitch of the voice, written Greek has become much less fussy. I wonder where the changes in pitch went — whether they were artificially imposed on Ancient Greek when it became the scholar's preserve or whether they did exist but have fallen into complete disuse over the centuries.

Earlier the professor gave a leisurely introduction into modern Greek history.

She reiterated that the Erasmus system of pronunciation (e.g. οι = ahoy!, αι = might) is artificial and demonstrably historically inaccurate, Erasmus having designed it purely so help his students learn to spell the words. I was a little miffed, since I like Erasmus's system and moreover have used it consistently for Ancient Greek — though it is admittedly best suited for communication within the ivory tower. But Russian or French and certainly Greek universities — for example — seem to teach a different Ancient Greek system.

She went into detail besides about the Katharevousa — which is a formal language created after Greece shed Ottoman rule, spelled καθαρευουσα, and which like modern Italian hopped back in time not in this case to the Middle Ages but a little further for inspiration. But if I've understood correctly, it created an unsettling gap, by separating Greeks into the hoity-toity world of the official constructed language, and the hoi polloi world of the demotic tongue, Dimotiki — δημοτικη. The popular language had in fact acted as a reservoir to preserve Greek over the centuries and folk poetry had kept what the written word had discarded, but in a different form from the tongue of Aristophanes or Pericles, whose preservation fell to scholars who left Constantinople as it fell in 1453 and to their Arabic colleagues and later of course to scholars across Europe who would no longer have been privy to the spoken traditions (for instance pronunciation) which would hint at the ancient forms. Katharevousa took over some of the popular language, but otherwise was a little estranged. Besides the Katharevousa is apparently not held in good odour since it is associated with the military dictatorship and its organs.

What I had not heard before is that the administration of Greece in the early 19th century had been pedantic and quite foreign in character. It was guided by Philhellenes from the remainder of Europe, many of whom were shocked to arrive in Greece and find that it was not a nation of (as the professor put it) lofty-souled, tunic-wearing philosophers. Instead there were guerrilla fighters. She also pointed out that due to the four preceding centuries of foreign rule, and a brutal extirpation of the regional aristocracy at the time of the conquest in 1453, Greece does not have any aristocracy; its handful of modern kings were invariably imports or descendants of imports.

Apart from that she explained the construction of Greek last names, which were introduced as such under the Ottoman government to simplify taxation and the military. Papandreou would mean, I think, the child of Andreas; physical attributes like black hair also lent themselves to names.

Midweek

This morning I went to the Foundations of Ancient History Studies lecture and arrived in excellent time, in the very large and already familiar lecture hall with down-folding blond wood chairs and the technical booth in the back at the top and the ghostly glow of a PowerPoint slideshow in front. It has a clever windowy antechamber which presumably guards from noise and conspicuous intrusions.

As it turns out the Foundations course will introduce a cluster of specializations, like Prehistoric Archaeology and Classical Archaeology, and even the seminars will rotate between the various sub-disciplines and therefore various buildings.

The professor, who looked rather like General Wesley Clark, laid out the course itself, up to the exam; his associate described the electronic resources. The professor defended the three-year Bachelor system enthusiastically, whereat I metaphorically speaking rolled my eyes.

Then I had a long interval to the next class, which I spent in finding the right room and in looking up (in an English-Modern Greek dictionary which was I think bought accidentally) the words which my Greek class materials use as phonetic examples. Someone else asked me for directions.

Greek took place in the speech laboratory today, so we sat among the cubicles with fairly rotten computers; mine refused to start up properly so I never even glimpsed the user desktop. But we spent most of the time finishing the phonetics and reading the sample words out loud. Ν can sound unusual depending where it is placed, for instance, so we spent some ten minutes with the computers in the end.

Since there was no Ancient History seminar and no evening philosophy lecture, and the career preparation advisor whom I had wanted to consult about the archaeology work course, etc., seemed very busy, I had the rest of the day off. Despite the respite, I still feel really tired. So I will continue my Greek homework and then rest in preparation for the class at 8:30 tomorrow morning.

A Student's Odyssey

Today I had the first day of my Greek pre-language course. We learned how to pronounce the vowels, consonants, and diphthongs, and were introduced to the textbook and two potential grammar reference works, by a very nice professor who is an excellent teacher. Knowing some Ancient Greek was an advantage, but some of the counterintuitive sounds were thoroughly irritating.

e.g. β beta
- letter name pronounced "béta" for Ancient Greek purposes
- name pronounced like Latin "vita" for Modern Greek purposes

ντ nu + tau (nt)
- pronounced like "ant" in Ancient Greek, as far as I know
- pronounced like "d" ("dog"), "nd" (and), or "nt" (ant) in Modern Greek

μπ mu + pi (mp)
- pronounced like "imp" in Ancient Greek, as far as know
- pronounced like "b" (bar), "mb" (amble), or "mp" (imp) in Modern Greek

Besides "nu" is pronounced "nee"; "mu," "mee"; "tau," "taph".

AND all of these vowels or diphthongs are now pronounced like "eek!":

iota (ι), eta (η), upsilon (υ); (omicron + iota) οι, (epsilon + iota) ει

AND alpha + iota, αι, is pronounced like the epsilon — "meh."

THE professor argued that Greek is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get language because it has so many compound words (e.g. symphony = with + sound). But I find it quite ambiguous, as I told my father at somewhat obnoxious length today. Taking the example, "with sound" can as easily signify a modern "talkie" film, noise, or singing in unison.

*

ANYWAY, I think that the Rost-/Silberlaube is mad at me after the remarks I made about it yesterday; I spent maybe an hour trying to find a room in it that didn't exist, and after literally roaming over the rooftops I stumbled across the right room through mere chance since class schedules are posted beside classroom/lecture hall doors. But I do know where the Habelschwerdter Allee is now, from having to consult further maps.

Then I decided to pay my father a visit and roamed all over the wrong part of his building, dismayed and bewildered because none of the rooms looked familiar from a similarly peripatetic adventure last week. In the morning I also went for an, er, circuitous walk, which I will skip in this post.

The irony is that at least two people asked me for directions today.

T. HAS kindly and justifiedly bought me a very own alarm clock, which I should set soon, and one of the drawers around Papa's desk donated the battery. Tomorrow I have three classes, from 8-10 a.m., 12-2 p.m. and 6-8 p.m, if I decide to attend all. The important one is my Greek, from 12 to 2. As optional homework I have written out a good copy of part of my Greek course notes; besides I've sketched out a schedule for the next five university days, but it will require ironing out.

LASTLY, I like riding the U-Bahn, partly because I like the people-watching, and because I have not been packed into it like a sardine yet; but I like the stretch around Dahlem-Dorf best because it is overground, at the bottom of a green embankment.