Early Renaissance Drawings of Demons

Though it would be nobler to take the trouble to write and think through some sort of commentary, not much has come to mind so I will just post three pieces of this series of very strange drawings as standalone curiosities. I came across them a few weeks ago in connection with the Ashmolean Museum. I will say that the demons look remarkably un-frightening — more comical.
***

Temptation of Faith (c. 1450), by Master E.S. (1420-68)
Copper engraving, 91 x 69 mm, in the Ashmolean Museum (L.175)
From Janez Höfler: Der Meister E.S: Ein Kapitel europäischer Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts via Wikimedia Commons

Ermutigung im Glauben (92 x 70 mm) [via Wikimedia Commons]

Temptation of Despair (89 × 67 cm [sic?]) [via Wikimedia Commons]

A Political Rant, Mostly About the USA Scene

It's a very sunny day and fortunately not as nearly a hot a day as one of two hellish ones in the past week. After deliberating on how to navigate the U-Bahn on the way to university on those days, I ended up merely staying at home. Barack Obama, of course, had no such luck; his visit coincided with the first of these days, so he got to enjoy the 34°-in-the-shade mark as well as the humidity which had mounted for the past week or so beforehand. Since the speech was held before a preselected audience I didn't go hear it, and besides the anticipation was much greater in 2008, so I contented myself with watching the news coverage.

In the past week I read two or three romance novels online, translated from English into the Portuguese. After a while it was clear that they were homemade translations, so the English syntax and idiom was intact and probably confusing for a Portuguese reader. But it seemed more important to learn the vocabulary than any grammatical idiosyncracies, so I copied-and-pasted much of the books into Google Translate and inched through them. This pace was only really a bit disturbing when I encountered a prolonged childbirth scene; in the English original I would have sped through it, but in this particular situation little was left for me to do but to slog through it bit by bit and end up feeling pretty queasy despite holding the general conviction that it is shallow to be bothered by the miracle of existence etc. At the end of the days I almost felt as if I could write in Portuguese mas acho que é melhor não ter muita temeridade and por isso I usei Translate to check, which is a very good idea because my first attempt at a sentence was mostly Spanish with incorrect Italian thrown in.

*

After that preoccupation ended, I finally had the time and inclination to catch up with the American news again, which is even more of a circus than anywhere else so there are always good tidbits to be found. This time what occupied my thoughts most was the news of the iffy racial philosophy of a Food Network television chef, in her deposition for a court case in which she and her brother are accused of creating a terrible work environment.

For one thing, since she made a name for herself as a 'Southern' style cook, and some of her supporters are trying to excuse her peccadilloes on the grounds that she grew up in a time and a place where the 'N' word isn't so uncommon, I'm probably not the only one who sees broader ramifications regarding the centuries-long cross-Dixie squabble. For one thing, in a sense much of the outrage which Southerners expend in internet comments (Gawker and elsewhere) on arguing that Yankees mischaracterize and exaggerate the quantity and quality of racism in the South, is being temporarily forgotten; this tradition of racism — much denied — is suddenly being reclaimed from the historical ether.

Quotidianity on a Rainy Wednesday

This afternoon I decided to cook chicken broth for a separate recipe, and since Ge. bought the few ingredients and Mama had bought three bundles of asparagus yesterday, it all went into a meal.

First I fried the soup chicken in a little oil since it is supposed to improve the flavour, and threw in the celeriac while I was at it. Then I took them out of the pot and put salted water to a boil, and chopped up the remaining 'soup greens' (Suppengrün: e.g. three carrots, a small leek, a willowy parsnip and curly parsley as well as a celeriac fragment), and then threw them into the water gradually after the chicken had already found a home in it. Then it boiled and boiled, I skimmed off a little of the protein? which flocked to the rim, and I added a quartered tomato since one was sitting around and the weather does not conduce to palatable longevity.

Part of the broth then went into a beaker for the sake of the recipe for which it is intended, and I added asparagus stock to the rest on Mama's recommendation. After that came the fun bit of sprinkling in salt for flavour, and then hoisting out the chicken and reducing it to bite-size little pieces of boiled meat with the assistance of a fork and our most enormous carving knife. Which also took a while.

It was a cloudy and mildly tempestuous day today; oak leaves being blasted in the wind and showing their greyish undersides, tropically large drops of rain, etc. Uncle Pu was there for a visit, so in the evening we ended up playing the customary three Haydn trios again. Lately I've been playing mostly Beethoven's late sonatas and bits of Chopin, though not so much today, when I turned to the cembalo and tried out Baroque pieces.

It may be silly or obvious or venom to the soul of a true connoisseur, but one of the best ideas to approach a Baroque piece seems to me to be to consider it carefully and assign a particular method to playing the different values of notes. Sometimes I play all of the eighth notes staccato, sometimes the quarter notes; sometimes I play them detached or play them legato, and often I do something different in the left hand. It sounds quite good once one strikes the right balance, and I think Glenn Gould did something similar. And, frankly, I think it just sounds bad in my case if I don't do it.

Nonsense About Ottoman Cyprus, Etc.

IT'S past 3:40 in the morning and I should really be going to sleep. My schedule for tomorrow looks like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., shower, clean up a bit; go to university; spend 6-8 hours at university depending on whether I'll come home during the 2-hour break; clean up a bit more; and prepare for the weekend since I don't seem to have classes on Fridays yet.

*

THE Latin class may have to be dropped because both tutorials clash with Greek classes, but I finished a worksheet except for two questions this evening, and it was rather a monumental undertaking. First of all, hopping between Wiktionary, a paperback English-Latin dictionary, a German treasury of Latin vocabulary, and a German-Latin website, to search out the mot juste for the German-to-Latin translations and verify the declension or conjugation took a while. Besides I buried myself in the Latin grammar, where it explains when to use an ablativus cum infinitivo construction, which constructions to use to replace nonexistent future conjunctives, etc., and that non dubito pairs with quin instead of quod or ut or ne. It's like trying to learn the rules and 'plays' of chess. I played this little sport every Sunday morning last semester, to submit the worksheet per email as obligatory, so at any rate it's not unaccustomed.

THEN I read a few brief paragraphs which were assigned to us from a history (an introduction to the Ottoman Empire which also stood on last year's Ottoman history lecture reading list) to illustrate the realities of Ottoman rule. For instance in Cyprus, this rule began when it was conquered from the Venetians who had held it since the 15th? century in 1571, despite the victory of the inimical Spanish and Portuguese(?) in the Battle of Lepanto in the same year. (The author wrote that this battle was 1571, but someone crossed out the 1 and wrote a 3 in its place. Perhaps I must consult Wikipedia to decide whom to believe.) Cyprus was muchly interesting to its various occupiers due to its cotton and sugar-based agricultural industry. In the late 16th century (?) the Ottomans began resettling Anatolians to Cyprus. But the Orthodox Church remained on the island, and aside from things like the non-Muslim head tax, the religion was mostly allowed to peacefully coexist with the Empire's Sunni faith. The island was not in the 'core' of the Empire — which was mentioned in this afternoon's Ottoman history lecture, — where the Ottomans felt comfortable ruling completely. (Egypt was, for example, recalcitrant and stood outside of the core.) Since the details are most likely askew, I will copy-edit them tomorrow.

SADLY (?) the second article we were to read for the Cyprus seminar has refused to load itself, at least in timely fashion, so I can't read it. Tomorrow morning I must decide, also, whether to print out 50ish pages of Latin vocabulary. I definitely do not feel like it. (Think of the trees! And the time spent when I would prefer to do something else before the epistemic — if that is a word — onslaught.)

An Incredibly Long Post Which *No* One Could Be Expected To Finish

ON MONDAY we began reading M. Karagatsis's modern revision of the Odyssey. My family has a copy of a volume of the original text, an old-fashioned one, and I tried translating the first page or two. So I still remember that it begins, "Andra moi ennepe, mousa, polytropon" . . . "Tell me of the man, o Muse, who is resourceful" . . . (To translate it a little badly.)

In the modern version, Mr. Karagatsis excises the preamble and plunges into the middle of the matter, explaining that amongst his comrades, Odysseus had the longest journey back from Troy, comprising twenty years [ETA: Actually, it's ten years. The additional ten years refer to the duration of the war at Troy.]. The Ithacan had been privy to a presentiment that he would be landed in such a mess if he went to Troy, when the rest of the kings allied with Menelaus had reminded him of his promise and tried to haul him off to help rescue Helen. (I admit that I was thinking, rather cheerfully, that Tennyson really does seem to have read Odysseus wrong by casting him as an easily bored person, unfond of his home, in "Ulysses," though perhaps the underlying notion is that persons and their aims change in the course of life. But, then, my opinions of that poem are prejudiced, as evidenced by a certain lousy parodic couplet of my manufacture, to this effect: 'It little profits that an idle king / Should be so fond of whining.')

At any rate, Odysseus does his best to pretend to be too crazy to go, by determinedly striding down to the coast with salt in hand, leading a horse and an ox, whom he straps in front of a plough and sends down the sandy shore, following them to sow the salt where they wandered. Which reminded me a bit of Malcolm X's tale in his autobiography of getting out of military service in the 1940s.

MALCOLM X is occupied with his hustling life in Harlem and does his best to evade the informants of sundry branches of the Armed Forces who are doing their best to round up anyone who could be sent off to fight, and personifying the bristling, accusing finger of Uncle Sam. He is caught and summonsesed,* and gets into the spirit of things by acting erratically around his acquaintance a few days beforehand.
(* well, 'summoned,' but I like the supernumerary syllables)

Then on the glorious day, he enters the office to find himself before a psychiatrist, and prepares to be evaluated.

I kept jerking around, backward, as though somebody might be listening. I knew I was going to send him back to the books to figure what kind of a case I was.

Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I'd entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. "Daddy-o, now you and me, we're from up North here, so don't you tell nobody. . . . I want to get sent down South. Organize them ninja* soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill up crackers!"

That psychiatrist's blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake's egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First [the African American receptionist] when he said, "That will be all."

[N.B.: *obviously the word in the book starts with 'ni' but isn't 'ninja.' The passage is from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, pp. 106-107.]

*

ANYWAY,

Grumpy Prognostications Recalling Pope's Dictum

On Monday the first classes of the new university semester will begin, so I have registered for one course and just selected the tutorial, and seen that the rest of them 'carry over' from the winter semester.

I will have:

Greek:
* Oral and Written Language
* Modern Greek Language System
* Conversation
(three classes with the same professor)

* Erotokritos and the Literature of Crete under Venetian Rule
* History of Cyprus and the Cyprus Problem

Latin:
* German-Latin

History and Culture of the Near East:
* Lecture: Literature and Sources
(i.e. surveys of Arabic and Semitic literature)
* Seminar: Genres of Arabic Writerdom

These all sound more impressive than they are. The real description should probably read: Greek: miserably dragging myself through incomprehension in Greek; reading things in the Cretan dialect which I couldn't translate in a million years except when the professor feeds us each word; finding out how much I don't know about Cyprus and never really will. Latin: writing really, really difficult exercises and trying to figure out how long I can hide the fact that I couldn't reproduce a single Latin declension paradigm correctly if I'd have to walk off a plank into a sharky sea for getting it wrong. History and Culture of the Near East: feeling generalities go in one ear and out the other, because if I've ever read a whole page of Arabic literature I'd be greatly surprised and I've no context in which to understand the development of the literary genres; feeling really, really ignorant and trying to gird my loins for the inevitable class presentation what with its necessity of bringing my knowledge on a subject from 0 to the point at which I can write a well-rounded, knowledgeable, and reasonably variably sourced essay which is respectable in the undergraduate university level about it.

The point is that I don't feel unusually stupid or unusually delinquent in attending to what is taught, but all of this makes me really aware that somehow I still couldn't sustain an intelligent conversation about any of my courses because there are so many sinkholes of ignorance strewing the terrain.

Pope's dictum, as mentioned in this blogpost title, is this famous one:

A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring

Die Musik - Mein Leben

Two weeks ago, or thereabouts, my brother Ge. and I went shopping for music scores at a small music antiques shop in Charlottenburg, and as a 'thank you' we received secondhand books: one by Joachim Kaiser, another evidently a philosophical reflection on Bach, and the third a memoir by Daniel Barenboim, which was published in English originally and in German by Ullstein in 2002. Since I feel too hyperactive to sit down and read a book without hopping to the computer now and then, it seems best to write about the process of reading and then nip over to one or two other websites (Pinterest, for instance, which I have finally officially joined since mid-March) intermittently.

1:35 p.m. One thing I've wondered is when Barenboim's family came to Argentina, since it is (after all) a newish country for European references. The book explains that his grandparents on both sides fled there from the Soviet Union in the 1900s.

1:49 p.m. When did he begin to play? — Barenboim has no Arthur-Rubinsteinesque tales of consummate ability at the age of two* with which to bowl over his reader, or perhaps he modestly withholds them. He grew up in a musical family, and his mother taught him piano first, and soon his father took over.

* I don't have his autobiography at hand, but a certain online encyclopaedia provides the details.

2:20 p.m. In Argentina, he writes, musicians visited the house of Ernesto Rosenthal in Buenos Aires. One of the visitors was Sergiu Celibidache, the conductor from Romania who also for instance taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in the USA. (It's where Hilary Hahn went, and from what Papa tells me it seems like a rather hippieish and freewheeling place instead of a musical barracks for the next generation.) He is easy to find on YouTube, for instance in this video with the Dutch National Radio Symphony Orchestra: Ravel's Bolero, in the early 70s.

2:40 p.m. As a seven-year-old, Barenboim gave his first concert in Argentina, where he had already been going to school. He writes that even when he became a teenager school was a priority insofar as he didn't go on long tours, so that he had a 'quite normal school education.' I think 'quite normal' is being stuck in there for the grim duration and not having much during the holidays and after school to take one's mind off of it, but anyway. (c:

2:47 p.m. In the early 1950s his family moved to Israel because his mother, in particular, as well as his grandparents on her side, were highly excited by the formation of the new homeland. His father's piano lessons continued, and Barenboim writes that this was quite convenient insofar as he didn't have to hop back and forth between different teaching and musical philosophies. Also, he was taught to think of music and technique as integrated concepts, so that there wasn't undue emphasis on scales and other technical exercises and undertakings in isolation. An important thing was to be taught what was needed by the scores, let's say of a Mozart piano concerto.

This really rang a chord, but rather because I always mess up scales and do better when they are part of a piece of music. Unlike with Barenboim, I don't know if it can objectively be said to be the only possible philosophy or the best didactic method for me. But at least it keeps me happy and keeps me in good humour with the music. Also, even under these conditions, it is nice to feel that a piece I work on for a while on can send me forth into the world again with a new piece of the technique puzzle, even if I haven't tracked down the relevant finger exercises or scales for repetitive formal drills.

To translate back into the English, Barenboim writes,

"I often meet musicians who begin by trying to solve specific problems in a technical, mechanical way, so that they can wedge in the 'musicality' afterwards — like whipping cream on a cake. But these things — technique and interpretation — should be connected from the outset [...]".

For me, I think it is perhaps rather a failing that (as far as I know) I don't want to resolve technical problems or look at music analytically for its composition, for fear of losing the charm and emotional roundedness of the music. If I were really a musician and weren't a shallow person, shouldn't it make no difference? But perhaps it is the case as with academic work, where I think the worst possible thing is to engage with the subject shallowly and then become convinced that one knows everything because it is too easy — whereas diving into learning and researching, and pushing past mental barriers, produces a degree of thought and emotional development which doesn't make one flippant or cold.

3:22 p.m. Well, I'm only on p. 17, which is the disadvantage of a reading liveblog when I'm the one in charge of writing it; but I think I'll take a break and look at Easter crafts, etc., on a certain pinning website now.

Paschal Pleasures

This morning I was the first to wake up except Papa, having gone to sleep at a seasonably early time and had a rather sound go of it. Europe's 'leap forward' to summer time, viz. the loss of an hour between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., was not really bothersome. It was still greyish weather and single snowflakes of large compass idly footled about in the sky.

This year the Easter bunny duties were for the most part assumed by J., who assembled the table picturesquely, with a great deal of chocolate eggs in brightly coloured foil, the plate whereupon a sugar-dusted cake lamb reposed as a present from a family friend, Maltesers (the confectionery), an orange for everyone, and a belled goldwrapped chocolate bunny on each of our little plates.

While I waited for the others to wake up, I began watching the Easter mass from St. Peter's Square at 10:14, thanks to ZDF's internet livestream. I didn't get very far in, but did hear the reading in English from Corinthians. (Puzzled by the unelevated language of the text, I later lamented that the Catholic church didn't seem to be using the King James Bible any more, whereupon Mama et al. groaned and I remembered that England was Anglican by King James's time.) The German voiceovers were a pain, but some of the commentary was useful. I liked the way that the garb and postures of the deacon, cardinals, etc. resembled those in medieval paintings, as if someone had animated them for my benefit — and I loved the flower arrangements, which were in fine taste in my opinion — it turns out that they are Dutch —, arranged with an eye to the manner in which greenery and blossoms naturally disperse and group themselves.

Then came the Easter breakfast. There I forgot the eggs so that they boiled a good eight or nine minutes despite the loftiest intentions. This year there was no to-do of dye or watercolour paint, though J. has painted his own eggshell in a design which was intended to resemble Islamic art and which I thought (and said, perhaps tactlessly and at any rate to a bemused audience) looked very Celtic. It has a little green but a lot of dark berry red and black and gold, and shapes of hares with a thick band of ornamental pattern as a kind of Greenwich Meridian/(straight) International Date Line. At any rate, we did eat raisin bread and graham bread and freshly baked rolls (dough of industrial provenance) with jam, cheese, egg, or ham. The tea and coffee were also toastily-hot and at the ready.

After that our paths diverged.

Canada Customs and the Pope

Since I am not likely to set much finger to keyboard for the purposes of this blog any time soon, and since although not a hermit I am doing a fairly good impression of a reticent and occasionally growly troll hiding under a bridge — here is a somewhat silly video from a Canadian political/social comedy series which my family and I enjoyed watching when we weren't cringing over 'inappropriate' bits.




As far as things I don't mind talking about are concerned, the news I've been following lately also comprised a great deal about the new Pope. Having been thoroughly disgruntled by his predecessor and prone to speaking very lightly of the Vatican, it sort of bowled me over to find that by a simple choice made over two or three days, I have been basking in a kind of rosy haze at the thought of Pope Franciscus. The novel idea of seeing God's work as going amongst the poor and needy and, heaven forfend, even listening to them — instead of reading up and holding endless speeches on dusty theological disputes; dusting off ceremonious chasubles or other antiquated trappings which had been discarded by less tradition-happy popes; and carefully keeping away from the other religions which are suddenly all evil again since Pope John Paul II died — has been so entrancing that I even thought of attending church again.

As suspected, I didn't act on this impulse, but it feels nice to be in a state of mind where I'd sincerely consider it. On the other hand, Franciscus's vivid acquaintance with The Evil One (to whom he ascribed a role in certain gay marriage legislation in Argentina, and whose name he dropped on the Pontifex Twitter account) seems a little naive to me. Belief in a red man with horns and a forky tail is not really supported by the actual text of the Bible, if I am properly informed, and there is something undignified about it unless you have a true, mature feeling for apocalyptic upheaval and sinisterness like a Hieronymus Bosch. Similarly, I think that fantasizing about satan is an odd activity (and a misdirection of energies) for a man of God.

Another thing that impresses me as human and sensible about the new Pope, though, is that he seems to be trying to lead as ordinary of a life as possible — walking amongst hoi polloi, talking with people he disagrees with, living in quarters which are about what he has been accustomed to, speaking the language of the neighbourhood where he lives instead of Latin, travelling in a vehicle which does not look too silly, making his own arrangements re. newspaper delivery, and (metaphorically speaking) not wearing too many bells and whistles. It seems an excellent way to remain reasonably levelheaded.

*

I would talk about university stuff, but the last semester was the WORST (not so much terrible as pointless and irritating) and I'm grumpy about having to return from the holidays in mid-April.

*

Lastly, for people who are not excessively bored by Twitter and are interested in the issue of gay marriage, here is a link to a lovely though unexpected political statement by the American lifestyle (well, not that kind of lifestyle) magazine Martha Stewart Living. It refers to the 'equals sign'  =  which has been adopted and spread as a pro-gay-marriage symbol by (I think) the Human Rights Campaign. [Link] I found it quite heartwarming — unlike the decision of the US Supreme Court not to decide on 'Prop 8' yet. Someone wrote a comment underneath the photo that the magazine would lose Twitter 'followers'; in fact I have kept track of it and its numbers have gone from 46,429 to 46, 451.

Brief Newsflash of Studies on a Monday

The past three weeks I went to university fairly regularly and ended up grumpy and exhausted, and last week I skipped every class except for one on Friday where I had been asked to do a presentation. So, after skipping another class this morning, I slept in past 10 a.m. and went to Latin in the early afternoon in a kind of relaxed and happy frame of mind — quite alert, too, considering that it was on Monday. It is the last class before the exam next week, which thankfully I needn't write but which I hope to try for the sake of practice. The Latin course has been very difficult. Since the teaching assistant explains everything so precisely, however, (post facto, though, meaning that my embarrassingly flawed worksheets have already been handed in and are beyond hope of correction) the framework of the grammar has gradually become clear. I feel quite pleased with my progress by the end of the semester, and so (judging by the positive murmurs when the teaching assistant asked for commentary today) is the rest of the class.

From Haloes to Hospitality

This week I have been fired by the wish to show up to all of my classes virtuously, at an excellent juncture as it turns out since a great proportion of the students are staying away in a presumable spillover from the holidays, so I feel the beginnings of a halo glimmer around my head whenever I — exquisitely on time — tread into a classroom these days.

Since this semester's schedule combined with the necessary repetition of the prelanguage course demands that I be at university at 10:00 on Mondays and 8:30 every day thereafter, I have been going to sleep before midnight and waking up spontaneously between 3 a.m. and 7, then relaxing as I like to do in the tranquillity of nighttime, and then taking as long or as little time as I like to dress and pack things together, and then going out the door.

Today I had a prelanguage course Greek grammar class preceded by a first-year Greek grammar class, followed by the overview of Turkish literature lecture which has set in since two weeks before the Christmas holidays after all the Persian literature was overviewed by a different professor.

In the first-year grammar we reviewed the present active participle — ταξιδευοντας, etc.— in sentences which were so incredibly depressing that I had no idea what was going on until I realized that the chapter's theme was criminal justice and prison sentences. For the prelanguage course there was a little vocabulary mixed in, and we had to complete small, much more cheerful exercises surrounding the four seasons: ανοιξη, καλοκαιρι, φθινοπωρο, and χειμωνα.

In the Turkish literature class I recognized the letter wāw on the chalkboard from my small discursions into Persian vocabulary and felt tremendously pleased with myself. I should have known the kāf, too.

***

Anyway, I've had little projects at home going on, and one of them was to dabble in modern music again and figure out what I like. I did this in possibly the stodgiest way thinkable, by looking at NPR's 2012 best-of lists and then listening to over a hundred songs on YouTube. In terms of genre I felt quite undiscriminating, but I wasn't especially taken by electropop and nostalgic folk music from urban types (along the Mumford and Sons line, which I — probably unfairly — now think of as 'fauxlk music') and the kind of punk music where pale young women who seem on the verge of passing out sing feebly off-key whilst playing the keyboard, and that while I felt less self-conscious when my parents walked into the room when I was listening to jazz I found most of it incredibly boring, and I really do like rap music because I think it has more substance than most other stuff. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but the real rap like the Wu Tang Clan separately and collectively do intimidate me because they can feel so hard and joyless and genuinely aggressive, but the rest is kind of easier to hear.

'Skyfall' bowled me over, but I only listened to part of it once and I wonder if the reaction was proportionate; at least it is nominated for an Academy Award, so . . . Arvo Pärt was on the list, and much to my surprise because contemporary classical music all falls under unoriginal, neurotic, self-indulgent overintellectualizing minimalist tosh concocted by academic aesthetes in my mind, I liked the song, as it was performed by an Estonian choir.

The musicians I had heard of before were Bonnie Raitt and Neil Young, and perhaps unsurprisingly I also liked them best. Above all, both musicians' voices are like instruments which they have learned how to use, with the twang and the colour and everything beautifully calibrated and mature (like a fine wine, to add another cliché to this paragraph), which less experienced singers seem to try to replace with lovely sincerity but little originality through Bob Dylan- or Dolly Partonesque affectations. Bruce Springsteen, I was surprised to find, seemed anodyne despite the persona.

But the only songs which have stuck in my head this year are "We Are Young" from fun., as well as "Whistle" from Flo Rida and that song from One Direction, which I had already heard because the apprentice in the bookshop and I listened to them together during the summer. I've heard 'Gangnam Style' and 'Call Me Maybe' the requisite number of times, too, but I thought that Gangnam Style was kind of harsh and degenerate — though I think that most people who look at the cheerfully absurd-seeming music video will probably wonder what on earth I mean.

As far as the singers accompanying themselves on the piano went, I considered it best to ignore the offerings in that line, excepting rare cases like Diana Krall's. Because if the piano is to have no tone and no expression at all, and a rather sparse score, one might as well prod around a well-tempered and multicoloured Fisher Price keyboard for noise-loving two-year-olds. But I consider the horrendousness in this area more due to the absence of effort (or of respect for the instrument) than of talent.

In the end, I pruned these 100+ songs into two shortlists — one for fun songs and bands, and one general list which I am planning to revisit:

A Sleep-Deprived Account of the New Year's Concert

The traditional hatchet job, with my apologies for hyperacidity or inaccuracies, follows:

Yesterday morning, as is our wont, we watched the New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic on television; this year it was an unusually large contingent, as Papa, Mama, Ge., J. and I were there, laughing and groaning and minding the music as the moment demanded. I had been up for some twenty hours and was as a result in a vague and grumpy frame of mind.

This year the conductor was Franz Welser-Möst, on his home heath, though rightly or wrongly I felt that his musical terrain was more Wagner than Strauss, just as with Daniel Barenboim I seem to remember that there was a hint of Beethovenishness throughout. The music encompassed not only the Strausses and Josef Hellmesberger Jr., who as the ORF commentator noted was an early conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic and is therefore honoured regularly in the programme, but also Verdi (a charming morsel of Don Carlo) and Wagner (something from Lohengrin) in honour of their impending 200th birthdays. For the Wagner the brass section melted together into an almighty unisono roar which had the subtle heft of, though more harmoniousness than, a sledgehammer. It felt in my view a little ponderous for a classical, rectangular concert hall. In terms of musical bells and whistles, grating boxes came out towards the end of the concert, there was a harp, and the triangle often came into play.

I approved considerably of the flower arrangements, at least insofar as to find them uncommonly tasteful, arranged to give an overall impression of pink rose colour. There were, as customary, roses, anthuriums, orchid-like flowers, and for a change snapdragons, nestled in greens, and though the anthuriums were anthuriums they were so pale pink and beigey-yellow that I barely noticed them, which is as it should be.

For the first half of the concert I was inattentive or out of the room, preferring even to begin translating a Greek text for a course presentation to sticking around in my grouchy mood, but then I arrived for the cinematic pièce de résistance which is the intermission tourist video — an experience much softened by the aforementioned sleepiness.

Light in Winter

From the Book of Hours of Louis XII of France, 1498. Victoria and Albert Museum.
(Wikimedia Commons)

A Christmas Carol in Theatrical Form

About six years ago I thought of writing up Dickens's Christmas Carol in play format so that we could act it at home, and since I didn't have the story immediately at hand I made it up a little as I went along, thinking very much of the film versions (principally of 1938 and 1951) and a little of the characterization of Charles Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons. Here are the first two scenes, of three which I have already written in draft. It's not a very serious thing; among other things, I haven't thought much about what is required for writing a drama as opposed to any other sort of text, and am quite used to reading plays as fiction and not imagining or seeing them as theatre.

***

Scene One
Cratchit sitting at a desk, writing with a quill in a ledger. He is wearing a coat and a scarf, and is evidently cold.

Cratchit: (trying to cheer himself up by singing) "Joy to the world! The Lord is come! . . ."
Scrooge: (throws open the door and stalks in grimly) There's another coal on the fire, I see. I distinctly remember counting five when I left. How often must I tell you to bring two coats with you to work and leave the coal-pile alone?
Cratchit: Please, sir, you only told me once, and I thought that since the pitcher on the window sill is frozen . . .
Scrooge: What is winter if not the season of ice? Practicality is the key, Cratchit. Do you see this padding in my waistcoat?
Cratchit: Yes, sir.
Scrooge: That, Cratchit, is yesterday's Times of London. Several pages, crumpled up and placed judiciously within one's clothing, are as good as a fur coat. (He takes off his hat and hangs it on the clotheshook; crumpled newspapers fall out. He shuffles across the floor, rustling. Cratchit involuntarily looks at Scrooge's feet, wondering what the sound is. Scrooge notices.) Ah! You are wondering what that is in my shoes. Well, Cratchit, I will also tell you that a double sheet of newspaper serves excellently in lieu of socks, and it doesn't need darning.
Cratchit: Most ingenious, sir. (Writes on some moments in perplexity, as Scrooge carefully removes the extra coal from the fire and drops it into the ash pail. At last he has screwed up his courage to make a humble request.) Please, sir, it is the twenty-fourth of December, and I wonder whether I am permitted to take off the last quarter hour in addition to the day off tomorrow.
Scrooge: A quarter hour off?! The day off tomorrow?! But, Cratchit, it is a weekday tomorrow. Business waits for no one!

Horse Chestnut Poems, II

The Horse Chestnut

In May the long and dipping leaves flock
gloriously along the supple branches,
thin and translucent and dark and cool
and veined in lightly threading cords;
and clusters of white pink-specked blossoms
rise in thick and heavy spires on stems
tenderly and freshly green,
beset upon by hordes of bees
who render the magnificent dome
into one great leafy, lovely hive.

In the earth, there sunken lie
the tarnished sombre chestnut hulls
which fell as copper-tinted paeans
to the whorled charm of gleaming wood
and now in death return to dust
or sprout a lingering greyish stem
which a lightless neighbourhood will starve
or which a fortuitous sunlit orifice
will raise and cherish into life.

For now the deep Elysian shadows
spread among the cobblestones
and touch the abandoned windows
high in doors of the archaic stables,
guard from view the burdening growth
of a persistent English ivy
whilst it crowns, as if a laurel,
the crumbling, swallow-harbouring brick.

At a distance and yet in sight,
stranded on the crest of fields
that dive and rise into the hedges
and bathe their feet in unseen rills,
a kindred tree casts far its foliage
in a lonely but grand clump:
a watcher of the meadows
and the shelterer of the horses
when, their loping gambols ended,
and finding the sun's orb too fierce,
they canter flowingly to bask
in the arbour's chilly sanctuary.

***
[Second Version, April 14th, 2009, rev. Oct. 20th and Nov. 25th]

[The other horse chestnut poem is here.]

A Poem from the Archives

Written in Grade 10, a grand effort inspired by a classmate who was being sort of annoying:

Once there was someone
Whose head was not good;
A crayon he broke
On his head, which would
Addle the wits that were left him
quite good.

***

In graveyard fields
I, ***, lie
The cricket's chirp
My lullaby.
For restlessly
[in spirit still]
I wander about
Those who see me
Scream and shout
I died at school
Not long ago
[(of boredom)]
At least I now
French can forego.

St. Nicholas, Part I: Philosophical Abstractions

Yesterday was a wearying day and I went to sleep fairly late (or, er, early), so though I had set the alarm clock, I turned it off once it rang (the first class began at 8:30) and thus slept through to noon and later.

The kitchen was still in a mess, but all the shopping had been done. I had the Byzantinian folk literature course at 6:15, so for the next couple of hours I read books online and copied out (by hand) a few more lines of Homer in the Greek original.

TO round out my Greek studies and to relieve my guilt for not doing more in that language, I have decided to read the Iliad and translate it in my head. Surprisingly enough we do not have an ancient Greek text of the Iliad itself wherefore I had to turn to an electronic text, and I am writing it out by hand so that it's easier to consult. About a week ago I looked into the bookshelves, and by grace of my grandfather's and my father's love for ancient Greek, found:

Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (University of Oklahoma Press), ed. copyright 1963.
Homer, The Iliad (Penguin Classics) Transl. E. V. Rieu, 1966.
Homer, Ilias, Odyssee (dtv weltliteratur) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voß (Iliad: orig. publ. 1793), edition from 1982.
Homer, Ilias und Odyssee (Rheingauer Verlagsgesellschaft) Transl. Johann Heinrich Voss, edited by Hans Rupé and E.R. Weiß, 1980.
William Bishop Owen and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, Homeric Vocabularies (University of Oklahoma Press), revised by Clyde Pharr, ed. copyright 1969.
J.E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Bantam), 1980. [This has a label bearing my grandmother's name and our Victoria address on the title page.]

St. Nicholas, Part II: Eats

Ge. and I prepared the St. Nicholas plates just before I left for university: milk and dark chocolate-covered gingerbread, clementines, domino stones coated in milk and in dark chocolate, tree tips or Baumkuchenspitzen which are tiny pineapple-fragment-shaped pieces of layered sponge cake (the layers being light with dark edges like the growth rings in a tree, or the layers of a French bûche de Noël) once again covered in chocolate, Spekulatius biscuits, and marzipan potatoes which Ge. bought after I'd left because they were manifestly missing. (c:

The rest of the menu was:

Sweepsteak

(Beef roast with onion, recipe from the I Hate to Cook Book)

Boiled potatoes

Coleslaw salad à la döner kebab

Cauliflower

Salad with aceto balsamico and quark dressing

Sugared oranges in brandy

The potatoes were intended to be lemon potatoes, which I had eaten and enjoyed at a Greek restaurant on West Broadway in Vancouver over six years ago, but the time ran out.

As for the coleslaw salad, I julienned red tomatoes by cutting the peel into slabs and deseeding it and then slicing it into strips, then thinly cut up a quarter of a red cabbage, yesterday. I left these in the fridge overnight so that the cabbage would grow milder, and I hoped the acid in the tomatoes would have a similar effect. What was tremendously cool was letting the tomato juice come into contact with the cabbage juice, because obviously the pH (acidity concentration, I guess one could say) of the tomatoes made the cabbage juice turn pink from its lovely aubergine colour. This afternoon I grated in a carrot on the coarsest holes, sliced in half of an oval lettuce, and sprinkled pomegranate seeds on top; then after the Byzantinian literature class I chopped in some parsley and julienned a little cucumber. Except for the quartered tomatoes which I added and the pomegranate seeds, and the relative scarcity of cucumber and lettuce, it was pleasingly like the salad which normally comes with our favourite takeout döner kebabs. Finis.

I sprinkled aceto balsamico over the cauliflower, cut into small chunks, so that it would become less cabbagey; I think it worked, and fortunately nobody minded the dark vinegar watermarks.

The other salad was of leafy lettuce, of which I had arranged intact leaves around the perimeter of the bowl, which looked very festive; I sliced cucumber over it, put chopped parsley in the middle, quartered some of the tomatoes and removed the greeny stem bits, shook over more pomegranate seeds, and then prepared my dressing.

The sugared oranges were a monumental pain in the neck, also because I thought they turned out too sour though everyone else was happy with them. Removing the pith was difficult, slicing them was difficult because the knife didn't like becoming wet or working with a soaked wooden cutting board or who knows what, so I ended up smushing part of the orange rather than slicing it. The clementines which I mixed in also refused for the most part to slice properly, falling into the disarray of their individual segments instead. I sprinkled sugar in between the layers and added some brandy, but I didn't taste the brandy and thought that more sugar would not have come amiss. The thing is that I have sentimental reminiscences of sliced oranges infused with sugar and kirsch which my father made, and have tried to emulate them; only I was too cheap to buy a 10 euro bottle of kirsch from the store and too demanding to buy a cheap bottle.

I have plans to make tzatziki, and two aubergines to use up, tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. (c: My attempt yesterday to make baba ghanoush with a third eggplant was a bit interesting, though not in disastrous wise.

At any rate the beef was excellent and so were the platters full of gingerbread and chocolate, and the rest was fine, so I think it was a good day from the culinary front. We also brought some extra festivity into the evening by singing 'Lasst uns froh und munter sein' and, in Mama's case, tootling out Advent songs on the French horn.

THEN we watched a books television show with Dieter Moor and his guest Franz Müntefering, whom I did not greatly admire as a politician but had to admit is rather charming and not without thoughtfulness and humour as a private individual. I had considered him unoriginal and complacent.

Lastly, Ge. and J. and I watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report together. So now I feel greatly relaxed; the question is whether I will make it to my 8:30 a.m. class tomorrow.

Carrot Cake and Dictionary Extracts

This morning I woke up when the alarm clock went off at around 7:15. I considered it too early, turned it off, and then went back to sleep. A while later I became conscious again and decided to skip my Greek prelanguage course class; then I slept through all the way until 1:50something.

Since then I've opened up the Wikipedia article for Rumi and written down a few more words of Farsi along with their transliteration and German equivalents, for university, and have otherwise been pleasantly not doing much in particular.

Isn't Arabic a fairly lovely script? I imagine that there are many different iterations, like print versus cursive writing in the Latin alphabet, so the kind which I am reading in the Farsi-to-German dictionary may be a more utilitarian specimen. Here is an example in my rudimentary scribbling:

***

J. and Ge. went shopping for Ge.'s birthday and since then I have baked a round tin and a very long rectangular tin of carrot cake for the birthday lad. The recipe may be found here.

It turns out that the ingredients for the frosting were a trifle incomplete; the butter-and-cream-cheese frosting rarely turns out well for me anyway. So I softened a little butter over the stove, mixed it in with a slender tub of cream cheese, and added vanilla sugar and plenty of icing sugar. Then I made a second frosting with icing sugar, a drop or so of lemon extract, the bottle's cap full of brandy, milk and water. Since rosemary has a lemony taste and it was there, I took a dried leaf and crumbled it in. The family came to eat the result and made insulting remarks about ants (well, not really insulting — more funny) at the sight of the nondescript dark bits of rosemary, and then tucked in quite happily.

Besides I've been reading some news and meditating a grand journalistic effort again with a great deal of skepticism

An Excursion on Butterscotch Eggnog

Two cups of whipping cream.
One cup of whiskey.
Half a cup of brandy.
A cup of sugar.
Twelve eggs.
Two cups of milk.
Flavourings.

These things, in Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe (which I already mentioned a year or two ago) make me very happy. The quantity is large enough for my brothers, sister and parents too. (c: