An Essay on Matters from Ants to Zaire

The temperature in Berlin was expected to reach 31 degrees today, though it was intermittently cloudy and a wind has been blowing in from the northeast, so I wore a dress and sandals (with socks). As it turns out, the weather was not as sweltering as on dog days in August of years past, the U-Bahn was airy enough, shade from trees was everywhere once I was out in Dahlem, and the interiors of buildings are still as cool as the middle of a stone rain cistern. But while standing still is comfortably warm, the moment one begins to walk more than five meters the sweat (or, to use a politer term, 'glow') begins.

Having missed the last History and Society of the Near East lecture, and the first five to ten minutes of this one, I was mildly surprised to find ourselves plunked into the middle of the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt already. It was briefly touched upon, though, before we skipped ahead to Muhammad Ali. I was kind of excited when the name was first mentioned; instead of an esoteric tangent about the boxer, however, the professor was speaking of the Egyptian khedive.

This khedive was completely unfamiliar to me until I realized that he is the same person as Mehmet Ali Pasha. (Not that I had any idea who he was, but I'd come across his name.) Since Mehmet Ali was an independent and ambiguous reforming figure in his own right, and unfortunately sensationally brutal at times (for example, gathering a bunch of elites into a citadel for a 'feast' and killing them all, with results so nice he did it twice — at any rate this stratagem was later repeated in Istanbul), his tale was interesting too. So I resolved to embark on an intensive round of reading with the professor's recommended reading list as a starting point look it up in Wikipedia later.

When he was not reforming agriculture through policy resembling in its wisdom and well-guided humility the Great Leap Forward, conscripting the peasantry instead of recruiting foreign mercenaries and coercing prisoners into the army as had been the custom, expelling the Turkish-originating Mameluke upper class, driving the house of Saud away from Mecca and Medina (I mentally cheered at this, since I don't like Wahhabism nor the present Saudi rulers' mode of governance as far as I've heard about it), taking over Greater Syria with a menacing ambition towards Anatolia and then Istanbul, and being a wheel in the cogs of the Ottoman Empire which was eager to roll off and construct its own mechanism, etc., he was looking to transform the education system which was still dominated for instance by madrassas. By these means and others he endeared himself to the religious scholars of the state — I really mean did the opposite of 'endeared himself.' (Later these ulama would partly align themselves with peasants' revolts.) I may be mixing up Mehmet Ali's achievements with his son grandson and indirect successor Ismail Pasha's later ones, however.

The khedive sent a sheik, Tahtawi, to Paris, with a gaggle of students in order to observe specifically the educational system of France. As the professor mentioned this and suggested in an aside that Tahtawi was also supposed to keep the young people from going off the rails, I pictured the Egyptian in my mind's eye, steering serious-minded students clad in robes away from the Moulin Rouge, like overenergetic schoolchildren on a field trip to the Musée d'Orsay but worse. (Neither the Moulin nor the Musée already existed in 1826, but anyway.)

Whether the students used their time wisely or not, their Argus wrote a book about it later.  A biography of Tahtawi himself is here (from the website of Durham University; and if you read the text at length, you will only see orange afterwards by virtue of the colourful background), but I haven't found an online text. So I'm still curious if he took scholarly revenge on the Lettres persanes, the Entführung aus dem Serails, the Rondos alla turca, the portrait of Byron in a turban, and all the other European, er, insights into the being of the Ottoman Empire and its predecessor states.

It's arguable, but my professor said right at the beginning of the lecture that in the Islamic world the revolutions have all been a renewal of tradition rather than complete innovation as in Europe. Which is an interesting insight even if I find it a little hard to believe. Certainly there was much about the French Revolution which seemed to graft completely new and abstract ideas onto whatever was left of the Ancien Régime, but it also derived part of its authority, I think, from modern interpretations of Roman political systems in theory and practice, and from references to England as it constituted itself after the Glorious Revolution of 1668. As far as I know their ideas of Rome and England were all veiled and rose-tinted and soft-focused so that the Romans and constitutional monarchic English might be excused for not recognizing their polity in a revolutionary's representation thereof; but I imagine that Christ might also be agog at the interesting things he has been accused within the past millennium or so of thinking ca. 30 Anno Ipsius (eius? — pardon my neologized Latin), so even religious tradition does not quite live up to the promise of its name.

After the lecture there was a two hour interval where I could have gone home, but decided to read books outdoors. There are lots of books I could and should be reading. Yesterday I realized that I should begin preparing for my Islamic Studies seminar's essay if I wanted to write it properly. I still have an inkling that it won't be my finest work, but I don't want to have a bad conscience about the preparation process on top of everything else. So for now I am reading about 20th-century black history in America. We have The Autobiography of Malcolm X at home too, but I've decided to begin with Black Rage. After reading a really interesting cluster of Wikipedia articles about the senator who wrote the foreword and his wife, his rivals, etc., I began to read up on the Watts Riots, mentioned in the book alongside Newark and Detroit riots which I haven't even begun to research. The report of the commission which investigated the riots is quite good reading — one of the commission members is Warren Christopher, who I seem to remember also spearheaded an investigation into police brutality around the time of the Rodney King riots — though I am not sure how much of it to believe. It's still horrifying to realize that people die in these riots, instead of spraypainting vulgarities or torching parked cars whose owners are presumably long gone or being dragged away by police or throwing things against armoured officers with pusillanimous black masks over their faces as people do in the riots that we see on the news once or twice a year now.

I've just realized that the deaths of people during the looting in New Orleans have also barely been reported, compared for instance to Kanye West's 'Bush doesn't care about black people' commentary (which I still think is hilarious and probably true) — which is part and parcel of the strange tendency of the American press to bypass any news, however sensational, if it is really important and symptomatic of America's underlying realities. It is also, I think, racist.

I am also still reading through Thomas Pynchon's essay on Watts, but put aside a French opinion article whose author implied that the death of a police officer was quite peachy and who gloried in the destruction which was as far as I can tell pretty cannibalistic since it probably hurt African-Americans more than it did others. There was an article from the Los Angeles Times (probably) where the police officer who arrested a drunk driver and thereby sparked the Watts Riots said, 'I was just doin' ma job' and that he 'doesn't think about the riots much' — which irritated me greatly. While it is true that he evidently carried out this arrest in the most indisputably ordinary and reasonable manner, firstly, people who are interviewed in newspapers who trot out the tired phrase "I was just doing my job" are generally trying to avoid being embarrassed by fulsome praise for a heroic deed, which your garden variety DUI arrest is not. Secondly, not thinking about violence where dozens of people died and you know some of the actors is either a necessary defense mechanism, or highly egocentric and frankly a bit dumb.

Then I read an article about Thurgood Marshall (I had forgotten that he was replaced by Clarence Thomas, so a loud but silent internal cry of 'noooooo!' arose once that was mentioned) and even waded through the Supreme Court ruling, Reitman v. Mulkey, against the discriminatory housing policy which had been enshrined in California's state law by a voter proposition just before the riots.

But I was not sitting at a computer and I hadn't brought Black Rage along, so I read more of Der ewige Krieg, which was not so cheerful to begin with and is becoming more and more depressing, cynical, and full of futility, still expressed in the somewhat timeworn New York Times style. But I read far more of the introductions in our copy of Zaïre, the play by Voltaire from the 1730s, and though it is a tragedy reading about it is quite cheerful. The editors have limned the historical context, echoed the plaudits and critiques of the play's original audience, and in delineating its literary and other influences have dispatched questions like 'is the play an egregious imitation of Othello?' (— one can see why one would ask, but the answer is no) with polite emphasis.

Now I am slogging through Voltaire's dedications (which are as ever tremendously boring to read, since they can be properly interesting — to borrow a phrase from Jane Austen — only to the principal parties) to his English friend.The footnotes are unexpectedly cheeky; I like the comment about the absurd tradition in dedications 'd'écrire des lettres d'esclave à des gens qui sont digne de l'être' (that was probably misquoted; the sense: 'to write letters in a slavish manner to persons who deserve to be one'). The playwright goes on and on, explaining the nature of England to an Englishman; so that one does feel inclined to throttle him lightly and tell him to get with the programme and talk to the poor man about something he doesn't already know. English dramas are coarse, English freedom of expression and social mobility (that's a larf, but French society must have been even worse) and so on good, and Englishmen cheeky little monkeys for unfairly being mean to actors. We get it. — Lessing evidently felt the same, since he is quoted in the footnotes being critical in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. I've found the whole thing as an online text at Gutenberg, so here is an amusing excerpt:

First, he recapitulates Voltaire's argument that English plays were unnatural for having a rhymed couplet at the end of each act, out of sheer habit, and that this couplet invariably contains some trite analogy (Cato comparing himself to a rock, for instance). Aaron Hill, the translator who rendered Voltaire into the English has, according to Voltaire, broken with this tradition to bow to the natural instinct and shed this artificial practice:

Er sagt z.E. zu seinem englischen Freunde: "Eure Dichter hatten eine Gewohnheit, der sich selbst Addison unterworfen; denn Gewohnheit ist so maechtig als Vernunft und Gesetz. Diese gar nicht vernuenftige Gewohnheit bestand darin, dass jeder Akt mit Versen beschlossen werden musste, die in einem ganz andern Geschmacke waren, als das Uebrige des Stuecks; und notwendig mussten diese Verse eine Vergleichung enthalten.

Phaedra, indem sie abgeht, vergleicht sich sehr poetisch mit einem Rehe, Cato mit einem Felsen, und Kleopatra mit Kindern, die so lange weinen, bis sie einschlafen.

Der Uebersetzer der "Zaire" ist der erste, der es gewagt hat, die Rechte der Natur gegen einen von ihr so entfernten Geschmack zu behaupten. Er hat diesen Gebrauch abgeschafft; er hat es empfunden, dass die Leidenschaft ihre wahre Sprache fuehren und der Poet sich ueberall verbergen muesse, um uns nur den Helden erkennen zu lassen."

Lessing replies to this notion, "Es sind nicht mehr als nur drei Unwahrheiten in dieser Stelle;" — 'There are not more than three solitary untruths here"

und das ist fuer den Hrn. von Voltaire eben nicht viel. Wahr ist es, dass die Englaender, vom Shakespeare an, und vielleicht auch von noch laenger her, die Gewohnheit gehabt, ihre Aufzuege in ungereimten Versen mit ein paar gereimten Zeilen zu enden. Aber dass diese gereimten Zeilen nichts als Vergleichungen enthielten, dass sie notwendig Vergleichungen enthalten muessen, das ist grundfalsch; und ich begreife gar nicht, wie der Herr von Voltaire einem Englaender, von dem er doch glauben konnte, dass er die tragischen Dichter seines Volkes auch gelesen habe, so etwas unter die Nase sagen koennen. Zweitens ist es nicht an dem, dass Hill in seiner Uebersetzung der "Zaire" von dieser Gewohnheit abgegangen. Es ist zwar beinahe nicht glaublich, dass der Hr. von Voltaire die Uebersetzung seines Stuecks nicht genauer sollte angesehen haben, als ich oder ein anderer. Gleichwohl muss es so sein. Denn so gewiss sie in reimfreien Versen ist, so gewiss schliesst sich auch jeder Akt mit zwei oder vier gereimten Zellen. Vergleichungen enthalten sie freilich nicht; aber, wie gesagt, unter allen dergleichen gereimten Zeilen, mit welchen Shakespeare und Jonson und Dryden und Lee und Otway und Rowe, und wie sie alle heissen, ihre Aufzuege schliessen, sind sicherlich hundert gegen fuenfe, die gleichfalls keine enthalten. Was hatte denn Hill also Besonders? Haette er aber auch wirklich das Besondere gehabt, das ihm Voltaire leihet: so waere doch drittens das nicht wahr, dass sein Beispiel von dem Einflusse gewesen, von dem es Voltaire sein laesst. Noch bis diese Stunde erscheinen in England ebensoviel, wo nicht noch mehr Trauerspiele, deren Akte sich mit gereimten Zellen enden, als die es nicht tun. Hill selbst hat in keinem einzigen Stuecke, deren er doch verschiedene, noch nach der Uebersetzung der "Zaire", gemacht, sich der alten Mode gaenzlich entaeussert. Und was ist es denn nun, ob wir zuletzt Reime hoeren oder keine? Wenn sie da sind, koennen sie vielleicht dem Orchester noch nutzen; als Zeichen naemlich, nach den Instrumenten zu greifen, welches Zeichen auf diese Art weit schicklicher aus dem Stuecke selbst abgenommen wuerde, als dass es die Pfeife oder der Schluessel gibt. 

 (and that is in sooth not much for Master Voltaire. True it may be, that the English have been in the habit since Shakespeare and perhaps earlier, to end their acts in unrhymed verse with a few rhymed lines. But that these rhymed lines contained nothing but comparisons — that they must needs contain comparisons — that is utterly wrong; and I do not comprehend how Master Voltaire could say such stuff to the very face of an Englishman — whom he could, after all, believe to have read the tragic bard of his countrymen. Secondly, there are no grounds for the statement that Hill has departed from this tradition in his translation of Zaire. It may be near incredible that Master Voltaire has not inspected the translation of his piece more closely than I or any other. It must be so all the same.


For as surely as it is composed in rhymeless verse, so surely does every act close with two or four rhymed verses. They may not contain comparisons; but, as stated, among all rhymed lines of that order with which Shakespeare and Jonson and Dryden and Lee and Otway and Rowe, and whatever all their names are, finish their acts, there are surely five which also contain none. What was particular about Hill, then?


If he had really possessed that unique quality which Voltaire lent him, it would thirdly still not be true that his example bore the influence which Voltaire ascribes to it. To this hour there appear in England quite as many if not more tragedies whose acts close with rhymed lines, as those who do not. Hill himself has not, in a single play — of which he has after all undertaken several, still after the translation of Zaire —, removed himself entirely from the old fashion.


And what does it matter, whether we hear rhymes last or none? When they are there, they can perhaps still benefit the orchestra, in particular as a signal to take up the instruments, which signal would in this manner be more neatly by far be derived from the drama, than the pipe or the key provides.)

I moved locations while reading several times, but sitting on the steps of a building was out after two ants crawled into my dress. Though I miss the feeling of having random insects walking over, resting on, and otherwise visiting me since we left the Canadian countryside, and feel kind of happy whenever I see a spider even if it isn't nearly as huge as past acquaintances, this went too far. After that, obviously, I started seeing ants everywhere, along the sidewalks and so on.

 Then it was time for the History and Society of the Near East seminar. Today the topic was whether there is a catty hierarchy within the American Muslim community which relegates African-American Muslims to lower positions. Firstly it wasn't clear if this is really an issue which people worry about in real life or rather something which academics worry about for them; secondly the question was whether racism is Islamic and we barely touched on the theological aspect. We discussed slavery in the seminar last semester, and I think that the Prophet was uneasy with it but not strictly opposed, and that his successors chose to pretend that owning non-Muslim slaves was, er, halal; but a central tenet of Islam is equality. I also don't know if there was ever the sense that God made black people inferior — only unlucky if they were caught or handed over, which was a fate possible for any neighbour of the Abbasid, Ottoman, etc. empires.

A classmate also rightly asked whether new converts to Islam (which pretty much any African-American is, since immigration from Africa and specifically Muslim African nations was I think impossible until the laws changed in the 1960s) were not always rather looked down upon. The teacher said that converts from unlikely demographic sources, e.g. pretty blonde Americans, are heartily welcome, but from the example that she gave it seemed rather that such a convert can be paraded as a rara avis rather than shuttled up into the hierarchy. She also mentioned that there are squabbles about which self-declared Muslims can actually read the Koran in the original Arabic, etc.

What was also mentioned is that the racial hierarchy is omnipresent; and that immigrants tend to assimilate into it as easily as into anything else. A cheerful thought.

Finally, I went to my Latin class. We are still translating Cornelius Nepos's biography of Hannibal. Last time there was a passage which intrigued us all, about Hannibal's soldiers twining brushwood (sarmentum) into the horns of steers at nighttime, lighting the twigs on fire, and then sending the animals loose into the field toward the Roman lines. The Romans were apparently so disconcerted that they didn't dare to set foot outside their fortifications. Written in spare language, this detail left open all sorts of questions. First and foremost, weren't the poor creatures burned? Secondly, were the burning twigs supposed to look like torches held by roaming soldiers, in which case mightn't the Romans have shot at the animals? Thirdly, or were the roaming steers supposed to look like ghosts? Fourth, mightn't they have looked like will o' the wisps? Fifth, are there will o' the wisps in Italian marshes, or would the Romans have been frightened even more since nothing they had ever encountered would explain the roving lights?

Either way, I was feeling tired but not as badly as yesterday (fourish hours of sleep are a bad idea); the heat wilted us all a little, however. Even the awkward silences before someone answered a question were extremely mellow; I thought the class went swimmingly. But the professor thought otherwise. She was especially, though mildly, bewildered that we couldn't state that absens is in the nominative case (she told us that the word was absens, absentis, and then it still took someone a while to raise a hand); 'The weather is hot, but not that hot!'

Anyway, it is now nearly 6 a.m., so off to bed for me. When I wake up I'll probably look like a vampire again, unwholesome and with a sunken reddish look underneath fixed beady eyes, thanks to sleep deprivation. By 12:15 I must be at my Greek speech lab, by 2:15 voluntarily at T.'s tutorial, then two hours of twiddlingmy thumbs, and then another two hours of Latin, followed by a trip to the U-Bahn, ascent up the street to our apartment, climb of the stairs, and finally summary collapse across the threshold. The drama will be intense. On Thursday I have three and a half hours of Greek; on Friday nothing, and since Pentecost is a holiday, there will be a day off on Monday. So this is survivable.

P.S.: I am sorry for the inaccuracies or slips due to being kind of woozy and lazy which are doubtless rife in this post.

Embroidery in the Sewing and in the Imagining Sense

It's a very cloudy day which has pulled torrential rain, lightning, and a winterly brooding quality through the otherwise summery atmosphere.

Around Tuesday T. decided pretty much spontaneously to sew herself a shirt, so on Wednesday she dragged me to the Schlosstraße. This is something of a shopping mecca; it has a touristy ex-West German air and city eclecticism mixed with something of the bourgeois sedateness of well-to-do parts of southwestern Berlin, I think. I felt a little uncomfortable with the architecture, the proportions of the open space and the street, and with the people, but it was something new.

One of the passengers on our bus was a louche but impassive broad-shouldered man in an expensively fine-looking though simple black T-shirt and jeans, who had the lope and air of a bodyguard (for a figure of dubious eminence) or XXX nightclub bouncer in a Jean-Claude van Damme action film. So I was kind of agitated afterwards, like the time where I was in the night train from Munich to Düsseldorf and there was this awful sort of criminal atmosphere pervading it — and where, of course, I'm not entirely sure whether it isn't all in my imagination.

In the Schlosstraße's Karstadt outlet, whose layout felt familiar since the one which used to exist closer to our home had it in compacter form, we descended to the basement. Tucked amongst the islands of bedlinens and pillows there was a sewing corner. The shelves were rife with notions (seam rippers, leather thongs, knitting needles, and an artillery-like array of zippers, thread spools, and beads in a large spectrum of bold colours) and yarn, with a couple of unlacquered sewing-boxes and prepared tablecloth embroidery kits. But we found no patterns or cloth bolts, and the lady whom T. asked confirmed that there were none to be found.

After reemerging through the cosmetics and perfume counters — with their fumes of eau de cotton candy and bubblegum (as I slanderously perceived it) — we went on to a toy and crafts department store on the lady's recommendation. It did have cloth bolts and so on and so forth in stock, which was mainly targeted to a younger crowd, but we found no patterns.

I hauled myself back to university for a corking hour and a half of Latin (T. came along with me to Rathaus Steglitz so that I would find the right bus stop for the way back), and by the time I was home T. had her tailorly ducks — cloth, patterns, and so on and so forth — in a row.

Pudel was there too, so (greatly miffed since I have developed the cleanly or paranoid habit of changing out of the clothes I go out in as soon as I am home, and since my socks were soaked in sweat up to the base of my toes, and I hadn't had a chance to redd myself or whatever the Scots locution is) I was conscripted to play Haydn trios. In the course of the trios I became less miffed, and fortunately I had already had a bite to eat. Afterwards the daughter of my Greek professor telephoned again to say that she was too sick to come in the following day, so since then I have been enjoying an early weekend.

A Student's-Eye Picture of Maytide

There are so many flowers and so much foliage out around the university buildings that walking to and from classes has become a detailed inventory: lilacs in blossom and buds — dark purple, white, and above all light purple, chestnut blossoms red and white, forget-me-nots, angelica or something like it in the underbrush, withered forsythia, honeysuckle or a blueberry variety with small and scattery pink flowers, the deep shadow in the streets from all the leaves thronging on the trees above them, herb-robert, white-flowered garlic mustard(?), dove nettles, common nettles, big pink clover, flowerless clover leaflets, daisies, seed-blown dandelions, and swathes of wisteria which fall like grape vines in a Mediterranean painting, very blue sky, very white clouds, and today a thorough grey cloud cover with some glimpses of sun. I looked for four-leaved clovers, and didn't find one, but instead saw a magpie strutting across a shortly cropped lawn.

Today there was the scent of mown grass, the ordinary whiffs of car exhaust and fuel, cigarette smoke, the racket of the construction beside the Silberlaube at the Fabeckstraße along with the Sahara-like yellow-brown dust, ringing bicycles, fuming sound of the U-Bahn trains at Dahlem Dorf, and besides all kinds of fragrances from the flowers and leaves and then from the different perfumes which people wore as they passed me.

A 'harlequin' ladybug loitered in the grass, an ant scrabbled over my book bag, two fruit flies or some cousin skittered over the book I was reading (Der Ewige Krieg, a translation of a book on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dexter Filkins). Though I didn't see a mouse again (once one saw me coming and, streaking across the cobble path, dove into one of the ring of holes in a manhole cover) I didn't really mind that; and otherwise there is a black cat which slunk across the Otto-von-Simson Straße into the brush at the corner to the Fabeckstraße once or twice in the winter, which I didn't see again either.

As for the classes, they began with a lecture on Iran during the Safavid period, then two hours of reading, then a seminar on the Moorish Science Temple and the beginnings of the Nation of Islam (where I really wished that this was my seminar last semester; because the professor was tactless but also very good at getting thorough background knowledge, detail, and thought out of us), and lastly a glorious hour and a half of Cornelius Nepos, describing the career of Hannibal. Cornelius Nepos is purportedly easy to read; I don't find him so, and the translation of almost every sentence, with the inbuilt challenge of transposing his Latin grammar into logical and fluent and accurate German, has about it the same doomed, untriumphant atmosphere. (The pauses before someone volunteers an answer to the professor's question have been epic throughout the year, also because the course is set up completely unrealistically with regard to how many verb and noun and other tables, and conjunctions, etc., one can cram down one's Strasburg-goose-like gullet without being given the time to understand the moods, tenses, etc. properly. The least justified uncomfortably long pause, which I have turned into a byword in this household, came at the beginning of the year, when the professor asked us for the definition of 'in.')

A Farewell to My Holiday Humour

This morning I set off for the university fairly cheerfully, but realized as soon as I left the U-Bahn station that this was in fact only a superficial mood, and that in fact I was sort of grumpy and that it would be less gruesome and fake if I 'owned' it.

So birds twittered left and right, orange-billed blackbirds hopped on the ground, squills and pink hyacinths and red tulips and Oregon grape flowers and forsythias burst out from the growing green of the lilacs, snowberry bushes, etc., and I noticed it all and felt mildly happily grouchy throughout.

My Greek class is taking place in a new room this semester; fortunately I found it soon enough, acting upon system, and the numbers of classmates seems to be roughly the same. A new classmate and native of Amsterdam joined the group, and we all negotiated the schedule for the coming semester, in which the others evinced a powerfully strange enthusiasm for a Monday class beginning at 8:30 a.m. But the Tuesday time slot which thus drops away was highly inconvenient for me because my History and Society of the Near East (Islamic Studies) lecture takes place at the same time. We read part of a description of the origins of Easter, which I found quite easy actually, and then said what we did during the holidays. Mine had felt quite lively because I had transposed myself into so many situations and places through my heavy news reading, and because I felt that I had somehow progressed; but when I was searching for things to mention very little had happened after all, but my class didn't seem to mind.

After I was let out, I crossed to the auditorium for the Islamic Studies lecture, and heard the tail end of a charting of the rise of the Ottoman Empire. I was surprisingly sad that I'd missed the lecture, but I presume the material will partly be repeated in the weeks to come.

After two hours not very scintillatingly spent reviewing fewer than two pages of Greek in such a way that it took forever (then recollecting that I'd need my textbook and possibly my dictionary for Latin in the evening, and then going home and back to university without even having the drink of water I'd rather wished for), I arrived late at the Islamic studies seminar. I didn't mind since introductions can be awkward; I was surprised, though, that no one in the class was familiar from my seminar last semester. Altogether, at first glance, everyone seemed a contrast to the grittier classmates, and to the classmates who were actually from the Middle East or India and therefore could enlighten the rest of us about Arabic terms and arab history, Muslim observances, etc. — all of whom altogether had an inspiringly serious and kind of impressive and genuine approach to the subject — in the last semester.

But I like the seminar teacher's style. She seemed generally bright and energetic; and, regarding our topic of the Muslim community in the US, she openly declared, for instance, that we would be examining the Nation of Islam alongside more 'orthodox' Islam; and that we would respect the self-identification of people as Muslims, non-Muslims, or whatever they chose. To give us a context she reeled off figures and studies about the numerical composition of the Muslim community; mentioned Dearborn, Michigan; gave an overview of the American civil rights movement, which is kind of relevant through the Nation of Islam; and altogether relayed all sorts of tidbits which I'm sure the reader would be interested in but which I'm too lazy to list. Altogether it seems that my addiction to Americana and exposure to the news and culture will come in quite handy, but it was already evident today that the reality which underlies these things is something else again.

Then I found a way out of the building, which was slightly difficult since some of the doors had been locked for the night, and proceeded to my Latin class. This class contained far fewer people, and my professor seemed to be really happy about it. We plunged back into our textbook and read Cicero for Dummies, thereby being introduced to the various uses of 'cum' (with, since, while, etc.) and to the active and passive forms of the pluperfect (Plusquamperfekt in German). Amavisse and such. Needless to say I was not thrilled with the joys of grammatical discovery, but I did put up my hand and translate a clause of the semi-Ciceronian text to the professor's satisfaction.

I thought that the text made Cicero sound like a pompous prig, inventing a halcyon past which never existed to vituperate the remaining political establishment, etc., very much like a conservative might in the modern US (I'm no historian, but as far as I've observed the historical record tends to leave out peccadilloes which weren't considered so important or sufficiently decorous, which doesn't mean that human nature itself goes through huge fluctuations) but didn't vent this opinion.

Walking back to the U-Bahn station sometime after 7:45 p.m., admiring the magenta wash of sunset colour at the horizon, I may or may not have inhaled a fruit fly.

The Visit of the Easter Bunny

Two or so days ago, the maternal Bunny declared herself quite satisfied to leave the Easter preparations to a consortium of some or all of her children. So I did the remaining planning — an Easter breakfast and a dinner with roast lamb were already a given — and Mama unbent insofar as she did housecleaning and part of the shopping, and Ge. and J. took care of the rest of the purchases. This night I was up and about anyway, having gone to sleep around 3 p.m. and woken up some eleven hours later, and together with Ge. and J. cleared off and set the table.

In case anyone cares, a glass of yellow tulips stands in the middle of the table, on top of a potato-brown, lacy round cloth; underneath there is a tablecloth of white linen, with turquoise and white placemats around. I put plain white bread-and-butter plates at every place, the cutlery, and our plaid napkins.

Besides I made a yeast dough for buns, which should probably be called brioches since they were sweetish, according to a recipe from our big, eye-candy cake book from Dr. Oetker. The dough rose beside the oven (covered in clingwrap which traps condensation and prevents the surface of the dough ball from drying out), and I gave it a second kneading eventually, after which it reassured me by rising far more.

I boiled one batch of three white eggs, which T. and I decorated with aquarell pencils, and then one batch of five or six brown and white eggs with onion skin to dye them a pale or darker brown. By coincidence I had recently read (here) that the 'proper' way to boil an egg so that it is soft and devoid of a olive-green ring around the yolk, is to bring it to a boil in plenty of water with the usual salt (without a lid, but I kept on the lid most of the time because the environmental benefits of heat-saving seemed more important), and then to turn off the heat and leave the egg in the water for fifteen minutes with the lid closed. So I did this with the second batch; it seems to have worked. For reasons of sanitation I still feel inclined to boil eggs for a handful of minutes, then shock them in cold tap water, as I have done for most of my life. During the breakfast I made fresh eggs which were supposed to be 'soft-boiled' . . . I left them in too long.

Then Ge. and J. and I distributed the marzipan (little bars with fig/vodka, apple/calvados, pineapple, etc. flavouring), chocolate eggs, and lots of squares from chocolate bars (white, nougat, marzipan-filled, dark and milk) over the plates, over the tablecloth, and over one of those delightful Tuscan plates with the raspberry and yellow and dark blue patterns and a rooster in the middle.

Mama, once she woke up, went to the bakery for buns and croissants, and at the last moment I made tea and coffee (I forgot the paper filter so water and coffee grounds quietly splattered all over and, as if a soaked chamois cloth and towel weren't enough evidence of the answer, I wondered where the extra four cups of water had gone), and Ge. heated milk for hot chocolate and the coffee. With the freshly baked brioches we had sliced gouda, black currant jam, sliced egg; and a plateful of cold cuts — among them prosciutto di Parma, which I rolled up loosely.

Gi. has Been Abroad for the last couple of days,

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.